love, and all the hopes which youth blends with the passion which disturbs
and ennobles it; not even that he did all this cheerfully, and without
pluming himself upon his brotherly nobleness as a virtue, or seeking to
repay himself (as some uneasy martyrs do) by small instalments of long
repining,--but that he carried the spirit of the hour in which he first
knew and took his course, to his last. So far from thinking that his
sacrifice of youth and love to his sister gave him a license to follow his
own caprice at the expense of her feelings, even in the lightest matters,
he always wrote and spoke of her as his wiser self, his generous
benefactress, of whose protecting care he was scarcely worthy. How his pen
almost grew wanton in her praise, even when she was a prisoner in the
Asylum after the fatal attack of lunacy, his letters of the time to
Coleridge show; but that might have been a mere temporary exaltation--the
attendant fervor of a great exigency and a great resolution. It was not
so.

Nervous, tremulous, as he seemed--so light of frame that he looked only
fit for the most placid fortune--when the dismal emergencies which
checkered his life arose, he acted with as much promptitude and vigor as
if he had never penned a stanza nor taken a glass too much, or was strung
with herculean sinews. None of those temptations, in which misery is the
most potent, to hazard a lavish expenditure for an enjoyment to be secured
against fate and fortune, ever tempted him to exceed his income, when
scantiest, by a shilling. He had always a reserve for poor Mary's periods
of seclusion, and something in hand besides for a friend in need; and on
his retirement from the India House, he had amassed, by annual savings, a
sufficient sum (invested, after the prudent and classical taste of Lord
Stowell, in "the elegant simplicity of the Three per Cents.") to secure
comfort to Miss Lamb, when his pension should cease with him, even if the
India Company, his great employers, had not acted nobly by the memory of