had. She wore a neat cap, of the fashion of her youth; an old-fashioned
dress. Her face was pale and somewhat square, but very placid, with gray,
intelligent eyes. She was very mild in her manner to strangers, and to her
brother gentle and tender always. She had often an upward look, of
peculiar meaning, when directed towards him, as though to give him
assurance that all was then well with her. His affection for her was
somewhat less on the surface, but always present. There was great
gratitude intermingled with it. "In the days of weakling infancy," he
writes, "I was her tender charge, as I have been her care in foolish
manhood since." Then he adds, pathetically, "I wish I could throw into a
heap the remainder of our joint existences, that we might share them in
equal division."

Lamb himself was always dressed in black. "I take it," he says, "to be the
proper costume of an author." When this was once objected to, at a
wedding, he pleaded the raven's apology in the fable, that "he had no
other." His clothes were entirely black; and he wore long black gaiters,
up to the knees. His head was bent a little forward, like one who had been
reading; and, if not standing or walking, he generally had in his hand an
old book, a pinch of snuff, or, later in the evening, a pipe. He stammered
a little, pleasantly, just enough to prevent his making speeches; just
enough to make you listen eagerly for his words, always full of meaning,
or charged with a jest; or referring (but this was rare) to some line or
passage from one of the old Elizabethan writers, which was always ushered
in with a smile of tender reverence. When he read aloud it was with a
slight tone, which I used to think he had caught from Coleridge;
Coleridge's recitation, however, rising to a chant. Lamb's reading was not
generally in books of verse, but in the old lay writers, whose tendency
was towards religious thoughts. He liked, however, religious verse. "I can
read," he writes to Bernard Barton, "the homely old version of the Psalms