It is to the professions what pastoral occupations are to the trades.  Politics and religion both have something to do with institutions.  A mechanical man can play a part in them not very well, but passably well.  But the literary man is sheer humanity, with nothing to help him but his thoughtfulness and sensibility.  He is the unfelled tree, not the timber framed into the ship of state or carved into ecclesiastic grace.  He lives as Nature lives, putting on the splendor of green when the air is sunny, and of crystal when the blasts sweep by; and while his roots reach down into the earth, there rises nothing above him but the heavens.  Past experience shows that he may be harsh, prejudiced, and unhappy; but it shows also that the richest human juices are within him, and that not only the most peculiar and most sensitive, but also the most highly-endowed characters are named in the list of authors.  The central and most admirable figure in this particular group of literary men is Charles Lamb; and as each of the other groups clustered around an organ, so at a later period Lamb and his associates supported the “London Magazine,” in which the “Essays of Elia” first appeared.

If it be asked what gave that strong coherence to these associates which constituted them groups, a wise man would answer,—­congeniality of character.  A wiser man, however, would not overlook the element of suppers.  The “Edinburgh Review” seems to have been first suggested over a quiet bottle of wine; and at a later day the Edinburgh reviewers, increased in number by the accession of Mackintosh and one or two others, formed an honored clique by themselves in the splendid society of Holland House.  The “Noctes Ambrosianae” is the enduring monument of the way in which the Blackwood men passed their nights, and not the less so from the fact that they were for the most part written out by Wilson in sober solitude.  Charles Lamb began his career of suppers with Coleridge, as the latter came up to London from the University to visit him, and the famous Wednesday-evening parties given by him and his sister Mary would occupy a large space in the literary history of this epoch.  It is a true proverb, that people are but distant acquaintances till they have eaten salt together.

The sketches which we have thus given will indicate the leading tendencies that were operating in English literature, though the groups themselves did not include all the eminent literary men.  Campbell, Shelley, and Byron were single lights, and did not form constellations,—­unless, perhaps, Shelley and Byron may be regarded as a wayward and quickly-disappearing Gemini.  Sir Walter Scott, and, in their later years, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, were of a cosmopolitan character, and served as links between different parties.  And it may be added, that diplomatic relations and frequent intercommunication existed between all the groups.

Passing from the general schedule to the characters and careers of Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith, it will be our aim to show how these two most witty men were also intensely serious and dutiful,—­how they were both disciplined by a great sorrow, and obedient to a noble purpose,—­and thus to relieve wit from the charge of having any natural alliance with frivolity.