So, when upon me you pass sentence of speedy death, I assure you that I shall live a thousand years, and there is nobody in the world who can demonstrate that I am in the wrong.  Even if after a while I disappear, it proves nothing; you cannot tell whether I am really submerged, or only lying in the trough of the sea to mount the crest of the coming wave.  Till the thousandth year proves me moribund, I shall stoutly maintain that I am immortal.

Concerning Charles Lamb the less you say the better.  It is easy to build up a reputation for sagacity by offering incense to the gods who are already shrined.  Of course there is a difference between us.  A pretty rout you would make, if there were not.  But, for all your adoration of Charles Lamb, I dare say he would have liked me a great deal better than he would you.  Would?  Why should I intrench myself in hypothesis? Does he not?  When I knock at the door of the Inner Temple, does he not fling it wide open, and does not his face welcome me?  When the red fire glows on the hearth, have I not sat far into the night, Bridget sitting beside me with heaven’s own light shining in her beautiful eyes, and above her dear head the white gleam of guardian angels hovering tenderly?  And when Elia arches his brows, and lowers at me his storm-clouds, which I do not mind for the sunshine that will not be hidden behind them,—­when in the sweet, play of June lights and shadows, and the golden haze of Indian-summer, I forget even the kingly words that go ringing through the land, waking the mountain-echo,—­when I look out upon this gray afternoon, and see no leaden skies, no pinched and sullen fields, but green paths, gem-bestrewn from autumn’s jewelled hand, and warm light glinting through the apple-trees under which he stood that soft October day, till

    “Conscious seems the frozen sod
    And beechen slope whereon he trod,”—­

O Alexander, get out of my sunshine with your bugbear of a Charles Lamb!  “I have heard you for some time with patience.  I have been cool,—­quite cool; but don’t put me in a frenzy!”

Well, friend, when you have satisfied yourself with the limiting, you begin on the descriptive adjectives, and pronounce me egotistical.  Certainly.  I should be unlike all others of my race, if I were not.  It is a wise and merciful arrangement of Providence, that every one is to himself the centre of the universe.  What a fatal world would this be, if it were otherwise!  When one thinks what a collection of insignificances we are, how dispensable the most useful of us is to everybody, how little there is in any of us to make any one care about us, and of how small importance it is to others what becomes of us,—­when one thinks that even this round earth is so small, that, if it should fall into the arms of the sun, the sun would just open his mouth and swallow it whole, and nobody ever suspect it, (vide Tyndall on Heat,) one must see that this self-love, self-care, and self-interest play a most