Godwin!  Hazlitt!  Coleridge!  Where now are their “novel philosophies and systems”?  Bottled moonshine, which does not improve by keeping.

     “Only the actions of the just
     Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”

Were we disposed to admit that Lamb would in all probability have been as good a man as every one agrees he was—­as kind to his father, as full of self-sacrifice for the sake of his sister, as loving and ready a friend—­even though he had paid more heed to current speculations, it is yet not without use in a time like this, when so much stress is laid upon anxious inquiry into the mysteries of soul and body, to point out how this man attained to a moral excellence denied to his speculative contemporaries; performed duties from which they, good men as they were, would one and all have shrunk:  how, in short, he contrived to achieve what no one of his friends, not even the immaculate Wordsworth or the precise Southey, achieved—­the living of a life the records of which are inspiriting to read, and are indeed “the presence of a good diffused”; and managed to do it all without either “wrangling with or accepting” the opinions that “hurtled in the air” about him.

BENVENUTO CELLINI

From ‘Obiter Dicta’

What a liar was Benvenuto Cellini!—­who can believe a word he says?  To hang a dog on his oath would be a judicial murder.  Yet when we lay down his Memoirs and let our thoughts travel back to those far-off days he tells us of, there we see him standing, in bold relief, against the black sky of the past, the very man he was.  Not more surely did he, with that rare skill of his, stamp the image of Clement VII. on the papal currency, than he did the impress of his own singular personality upon every word he spoke and every sentence he wrote.

We ought, of course, to hate him, but do we?  A murderer he has written himself down.  A liar he stands self-convicted of being.  Were any one in the nether world bold enough to call him thief, it may be doubted whether Rhadamanthus would award him the damages for which we may be certain he would loudly clamor.  Why do we not hate him?  Listen to him:—­

“Upon my uttering these words, there was a general outcry, the noblemen affirming that I promised too much.  But one of them, who was a great philosopher, said in my favor, ’From the admirable symmetry of shape and happy physiognomy of this young man, I venture to engage that he will perform all he promises, and more.’  The Pope replied, ’I am of the same opinion;’ then calling Trajano, his gentleman of the bedchamber, he ordered him to fetch me five hundred ducats.”

And so it always ended:  suspicions, aroused most reasonably, allayed most unreasonably, and then—­ducats.  He deserved hanging, but he died in his bed.  He wrote his own memoirs after a fashion that ought to have brought posthumous justice upon him, and made them a literary gibbet, on which he should swing, a creaking horror, for all time; but nothing of the sort has happened.  The rascal is so symmetrical, and his physiognomy, as it gleams upon us through the centuries, so happy, that we cannot withhold our ducats, though we may accompany the gift with a shower of abuse.