[[Sub-footnote b:

"Thou wert a scorner of the field, my Friend,
But more in show than truth."

From Mr. W.'s poem "To a good man of most dear memory", quoted in p.
323.]]

Mr. Coleridge's expression, recorded in the "Table Talk", that he
"looked on the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a
dunghill, that shines and takes no pollution," partly alludes to that
tolerance of moral evil, both in men and books, which was so much
remarked in Charles Lamb, and was, in so good a man, really remarkable.
His toleration of it in books is conspicuous in the view he takes of the
writings of Congreve and Wycherley, in his essay on the artificial
comedy of the last century ("Works", vol. ii, p. 322), and in many of
his other literary criticisms. His toleration of it in men--at least his
faculty of merging some kinds and degrees of it in concomitant good, or
even beholding certain errors rather as objects of interest, or of a
meditative pity and tenderness, than of pure aversion and condemnation,
Mr. Talfourd has feelingly described in his "Memoir" (vol. ii, p.
326-9), "Not only to opposite opinions," he says, "and devious habits of
thought was Lamb indulgent; he discovered the soul of goodness in things
evil so vividly, that the surrounding evil disappeared from his mental
vision." This characteristic of his mind is not to be identified with
the idolizing propensity common to many ardent and imaginative spirits.
He "not only loved his friends in spite of their errors," as Mr.
Talfourd observes, "but loved them, "errors and all";" which implies
that he was not unconscious of their existence. He saw the failings as