he alluded to one Person, whose name, however, he did not utter.  Discussions on religious subjects he never tolerated in anybody but Coleridge.  One evening, after he and Leigh Hunt had returned from a visit to Coleridge, Hunt began to express his surprise that a man of so much genius as the Highgate sage should entertain such religious opinions as he did, and mentioned one of his doctrines for especial reprobation.  Lamb, who was preparing the second bowl of punch, answered, hesitatingly, with a gentle smile,—­“Never mind what Coleridge believes; he is full of fun.”  He was an humble, sinful worshipper, and while he bowed his head tremblingly before Heaven, he poured out the stream of his affections to his sister and his friends.

The religious character of Sydney Smith was less peculiar than that of Elia.  An earnest Christian, with a will too resolute to allow the aid of the punch-bowl in vanquishing trouble, professionally wielding the religious and moral ideas, and habitually obeying them, he stood erect and looked at the life to come with a firm eye.  “The beauty of the Christian religion,” he says, “is that it carries the order and discipline of heaven into our very fancies and conceptions, and, by hallowing the first shadowy notions of our minds, from which actions spring, makes our actions themselves good and holy.”  This central and vital beauty he had cultivated in a very diversified life, and he looked with confidence for the prize which is laid up for the well-doer.

Probably, if any successful life were examined, it would be found to consist of a series of hairbreadth escapes.  Every movement would be the crossing of the Rubicon.  That man is of little account who at every step that he has taken has not been weighing matters as nicely as if he were matching diamonds.  How narrowly did Coleridge escape being the greatest preacher, philosopher, poet, or author of his time!  Almost everything was possible to him; and one can but marvel how he went through life avoiding in turn each of his highest possibilities.  It is the glory of Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith, that, as far as it can be said of any men, they did the best that was possible with their circumstances and endowments.  The old fancy which says of every person, that there is an ideal character which he can attain, in which he shall be peculiar and unsurpassed, was in their cases realized.

Their characters were projected into literature, where they remain as permanent blessings.  The style of writing of both of them approaches to the simplest way of saying things.  Elia employed the choicest language of the seventeenth century, and the divine used the plainest English of the day.  The perpetual danger of literature is of becoming rhetorical; and hardly fares vigor of thought when long words and periods are preferred to short ones, and when the native shape and properties of ideas are less cared for than the abundant drapery.  The style of the “Essays