“_Stat magni nominis umbra_” is Lucan’s stately phrase, to be aptly applied, in its best and original sense, to almost every one of this illustrious group. Yet, lofty as they loom in the distance, far above our power as well as our desire to belittle them, it may be not beyond belief that too close and too constant contact with some of them might have brought at the last a certain satiety. It may even be breathed, without irreverence and therefore without offence, that we might have been just a bit bored if allowed to listen without rest to Coleridge, with his rhetorical preachments and his melancholy, both born of rheumatism, rum, and opium; or to Hazlitt, with his ingrained selfishness, his petulance, his tea-inspired turgidity; or to Wordsworth, solemnly weighted with the colossal conviction of his own mission, and tireless in his tenacity to attest the truth thereof to all listeners. These, and all those lesser ones, seem to me petty and tiresome beside this spare, silent, stammering little fellow, who loved them all and laughed at them all; who gave them fitting reverence, and yet, with affectionate adroitness, found fun in their foibles! How direct and delicate was his gibe when Coleridge had been longer even than usual in his endless endeavours to spin serviceable ropes with his metaphysical sands: “Oh, you mustn’t mind what Coleridge says; he’s _so_ full of his fun.” I can see his twinkling eyes--those wonderfully sparkling eyes--as he answered Coleridge’s question, “Charles, did you ever hear me preach?” “I never heard you do anything else!” Coleridge was, indeed, quite capable, in Hazlitt’s sarcastic phrase, of taking up the deep pauses of conversation between seraphs and cardinals; and could have argued--with the same ready confidence with which, according to mocking Sydney Smith, Lord John Russell would have assumed command, at half an hour’s notice, of the channel fleet--on either side of the theses sent him by Lamb just before he went to Germany. These questions--“to be defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Göttingen,” by Coleridge--are deliciously sly and sharp in their stab at the complacent superiority over lesser gifted mortals felt and shown by that “archangel a little damaged.” I can hear the falsetto tone of his moralities growing shriller before these two questions, especially, among the others: “Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?” “Whether the higher order of seraphim illuminati ever _sneer_?”