How deftly he punctured Wordsworth’s sublime conceit, on his hinting that other poets might have equalled Shakespeare if they cared. “Oh, here’s Wordsworth says he could have written ‘Hamlet’ _if he’d had the mind_. It is clear that nothing is wanting but the mind!” Even the Infallible One not only tolerated, but valued, the acute criticisms with which Lamb leavened his discerning praise of all his friends’ work; but when he, with kindly frankness, rated a little lower than did their author the “Lyrical Ballads,” that author got into quite a state of mind. He “wrote four sweating pages” to inspire Lamb with a “greater range of sensibility;” and the tormented critic bursts out: “After one’s been reading Shakespeare for twenty of the best years of one’s life, to have a fellow start up and prate about some unknown quality possessed by Shakespeare less than by Milton and William Wordsworth!... What am I to do with such people? I shall certainly write ’em a very merry letter.” I wish that letter had been saved for our delectation. Then there was Manning, with his slight sense of humour, and to him--then in China, to his friend’s loss--Lamb loved to write the maddest inventions, and let loose his wildest whims about their friends. To Coventry Patmore, on his way to Paris, he wrote, in an amazing letter: “If you go through Boulogne, inquire if old Godfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now.” Good, honest barrister Martin Burney--of the “If dirt were trumps” story--gave infinite fun to Lamb by his oddities. Once he read aloud, in their rooms, the whole Gospel of St. John, because biblical quotations are very emphatic in a court of justice. At another time he insisted on carving the fowl--and did it most ill-favouredly--because it was indispensable for a barrister to do all such things well. “Those little things were of more consequence than we thought!” Burney quite approved of Shakespeare, “because he was so much of a gentleman;” and he said and did so many queer things that Lamb wrote: “Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one; _maybe he has tired him out_!”