Martin Burney likes it." Lamb was very much attached to Martin, who was a
sincere and able man, although with a very unprepossessing physiognomy.
His face was warped by paralysis, which affected one eye and one side of
his mouth. He was plain and unaffected in manner, very diffident and
retiring, yet pronouncing his opinions, when asked to do so, without
apology or hesitation. He was a barrister, and travelled the western
circuit at the same time as Sir Thomas Wild (afterwards Lord Truro), whose
briefs he used to read before the other considered them, marking out the
principal facts and points for attention. Martin Burney had excellent
taste in books; eschewed the showy and artificial, and looked into the
sterling qualities of writing. He frequently accompanied Lamb in his
visits to friends, and although very familiar with Charles, he always
spoke of him, with respect, as _Mr_. Lamb. "He is on the top scale of my
friendship ladder," Lamb says, "on which an angel or two is still
climbing, and some, alas! descending." The last time I saw Burney was at
the corner of a street in London, when he was overflowing on the subject
of Raffaelle and Hogarth. After a great and prolonged struggle, he said,
he had arrived at the conclusion that Raffaelle was the greater man of the
two.

Notwithstanding Lamb's somewhat humble description of his friends and
familiars, some of them were men well known in literature.

Amongst others, I met there Messrs. Coleridge, Manning, Hazlitt, Haydon,
Wordsworth, Barron Field, Leigh Hunt, Clarkson, Sheridan Knowles,
Talfourd, Kenney, Godwin, the Burneys, Payne Collier, and others whose
names I need not chronicle. I met there, also, on one or two occasions,
Liston, and Miss Kelly, and, I believe, Rickman. Politics were rarely
discussed amongst them. Anecdotes, characteristic, showing the strong and
weak points of human nature, were frequent enough. But politics