Fourth, Whether the higher order of Seraphim illuminati ever
     sneer?

     Fifth, Whether pure intelligences can love?

     Sixth, Whether the Seraphim ardentes do not manifest their
     virtues by the way of vision and theory; and whether
     practice be not a sub-celestial and merely human virtue?

Seventh, Whether the vision beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual re-presentment to each individual angel of his own present attainments and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and self-satisfaction?

     Eighth, and last.  Whether an immortal and amenable soul may
     not come to be condemned at last, and the man never suspect
     it before hand?

The poet did not reply, and the misunderstanding between the two was happily not long continued.  I have sometimes doubted whether Coleridge ever knew Lamb so well as Lamb knew Coleridge, though of his affection for the brother and sister there can be no doubt; of them he wrote at the end of his life: 

    Dear to my heart, yea as it were my heart.

In his “Sidelights on Charles Lamb,” too, Mr. Bertram Dobell rescued a remarkably interesting testimony “minuted down from the lips of Coleridge,” which shows that the poet came to know Lamb better than when he sent his provocative message: 

Charles Lamb has more totality and individuality of character than any other man I know, or have ever known in all my life.  In most men we distinguish between the different powers of their intellect as one being predominant over the other.  The genius of Wordsworth is greater than his talent, though considerable.  The talent of Southey is greater than his genius, though respectable; and so on.  But in Charles Lamb it is altogether one; his genius is talent, and his talent is genius, and his heart is as whole and one as his head.  The wild words that come from him sometimes on religious subjects would shock you from the mouth of any other man, but from him they seem mere flashes of fireworks.  If an argument seem to his reason not fully true, he bursts out in that odd desecrating way; yet his will, the inward man, is, I well know, profoundly religious.  Watch him, when alone, and you will find him with either a Bible or an old divine, or an old English poet; in such is his pleasure.

In 1798 was published “A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Poor Blind Margaret,” a story of which Lamb wrote in the following year:  “Rosamund sells well in London, malgre the non-reviewal of it,” and in 1798 also, Lloyd and Lamb published a joint volume of “Blank Verse.”

It was in the spring of 1801—­a pleasant beginning of the new century for them—­that the Lambs, after having had all too frequently to change their lodgings owing to the “rarity of Christian charity,” which objected to housing a quiet couple because of their affliction, at length found pleasant residence in 16, Mitre Court Buildings.  Writing to his friend, Thomas Manning—­one of the correspondents with whom he was ever in the happiest vein—­Lamb expatiated upon the moving very much in the style of his later essays: