It was George Dyer, above all, in whom Lamb revelled, and who was meat and drink to him. Dyer was the son of a Wapping watchman and butcher, had been a charity-school boy at Christ’s, and had become a publisher’s harmless drudge. He was a true bookworm, eating his way through thick tomes, but digesting little. He seemed to find all the nourishment he needed in the husks of knowledge, while Lamb, in radical contrast, bit to the kernel with his incisive teeth. As to Dyer’s heart, however, his friend was sure that God never put a kinder into the flesh of man; and his was a simple, unsuspecting soul. He was so absent-minded that he would sometimes empty his snuff-box into his teapot, when making tea for his guests; and so near-sighted that he once walked placidly into the river, as I shall hereafter relate. He used to keep his “neat library” in the seat of his easy-chair. Mary Lamb and Mrs. Hazlitt, going to his chambers one day in his absence, “tidied-up” the rooms and sewed fast that out-of-repair easy-chair, with his books within it: whereat, to use his own violent language, he was greatly disconcerted! Lamb gives a ludicrous description of his visit to these same chambers in Clifford’s Inn, where he found Dyer, “in _mid-winter_, wearing _nankeen_ pantaloons four times too big for him, which the said heathen did pertinaciously affirm to be new. These were absolutely ingrained with the accumulated dirt of ages, but he affirmed ’em to be clean. He was going to visit a lady who was nice about those things, and that’s the reason he wore nankeen that day!” It was to this credulous creature that Lamb confided that the secret author of “Waverley” was Lord Castlereagh! And once he sent the guileless one to Primrose Hill at sunrise, to see the Persian Ambassador perform his orisons! No one but Dyer could have said that the assassin of the Ratcliffe Highway--painted so luridly by De Quincey in his “Three Memorable Murders”--“must have been rather an eccentric character!”