* * * * *

“It is the praise of Shakspeare, with reference to the playwriters, his contemporaries, that he has so few revolting characters.  Yet be has one that is singularly mean and disagreeable,—­the King in ‘Hamlet.’  Neither has he characters of insignificance, unless the phantom that stalks over the stage as Julius Caesar, in the play of that name, may be accounted one.  Neither has he envious characters, excepting the short part of Don John, in ‘Much Ado about Nothing.’  Neither has he unentertaining characters, if we except Parolles, and the little that there is of the Clown, in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well.’”

* * * * *

“It would settle the dispute as to whether Shakspeare intended Othello for a jealous character, to consider how differently we are affected towards him, and for Leontes in the ‘Winter’s Tale.’  Leontes is that character.  Othello’s fault was simply credulity.”

* * * * *

“Is it possible that Shakspeare should never have read Homer, in Chapman’s version at least?  If he had read it, could he mean to travesty it in the parts of those big boobies, Ajax and Achilles?  Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon are true to their parts in the ’Iliad ’; they are gentlemen at least.  Thersites, though unamusing, is fairly deducible from it.  Troilus and Cressida are a fine graft upon it.  But those two big bulks”—­

* * * * *

Disraeli wrote a book on the Quarrels of Authors.  Somebody should write one on the Friendships of Literary Men.  If such a work is ever written, Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be honorably mentioned therein.  For among all the friendships celebrated in tale or history there is none more admirable than that which existed between these two eminent men.  The “golden thread that tied their hearts together” was never broken.  Their friendship was never “chipt or diminished”; but the longer they lived, the stronger it grew.  Death could not destroy it.

Lamb, after Coleridge’s death, as if weary of “this green earth,” as if not caring if “sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself,” went out with life, willingly sought “Lavinian shores.”

“Lamb,” as Mr. John Foster says, in his beautiful tribute to his memory, “never fairly recovered the death of Coleridge.  He thought of little else (his sister was but another portion of himself) until his own great spirit joined his friend.  He had a habit of venting his melancholy in a sort of mirth.  He would, with nothing graver than a pun, ’cleanse his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighed’ upon it.  In a jest, or a few light phrases, he would lay open the last recesses