probe deep mysteries, and were constantly asking, 'What is Truth?'
_He_ sipped his glass, shuffled his cards, and was content with
the humbler inquiry, 'What are Trumps?' But to us, looking back upon
that little group, and knowing what we now do about each member of it,
no such mistake is possible. To us it is plain beyond all question
that, judged by whatever standard of excellence it is possible for any
reasonable human being to take, Lamb stands head and shoulders a
better man than any of them. No need to stop to compare him with
Godwin, or Hazlitt, or Lloyd; let us boldly put him in the scales with
one whose fame is in all the churches--with Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
'logician, metaphysician, bard.'

There are some men whom to abuse is pleasant. Coleridge is not one of
them. How gladly we would love the author of 'Christabel' if we could!
But the thing is flatly impossible. His was an unlovely character. The
sentence passed upon him by Mr. Matthew Arnold (parenthetically, in
one of the 'Essays in Criticism')--'Coleridge had no morals'--is no
less just than pitiless. As we gather information about him from
numerous quarters, we find it impossible to resist the conclusion that
he was a man neglectful of restraint, irresponsive to the claims of
those who had every claim upon him, willing to receive, slow to give.

In early manhood Coleridge planned a Pantisocracy where all the
virtues were to thrive. Lamb did something far more difficult: he
played cribbage every night with his imbecile father, whose constant
stream of querulous talk and fault-finding might well have goaded a
far stronger man into practising and justifying neglect.

That Lamb, with all his admiration for Coleridge, was well aware of
dangerous tendencies in his character, is made apparent by many