Haydon, the painter, has told of one memorable evening in his own studio, when Lamb was in marvellous vein, and met that immortal Comptroller of Stamps who had begged to be introduced to Wordsworth, and who insisted on having the latter’s opinion as to whether Milton and Newton were not great geniuses. Lamb took a candle and walked over to the poor man, saying, “Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?” Haydon and Keats got him away, but he persisted in bursting into the room, shouting, “Do let me have another look at that gentleman’s organs.” Edgar Poe’s Imp of the Perverse took entire possession of Lamb when thrown with uncongenial men, and forced him to give the impression of “something between an imbecile, a brute, and a buffoon.” Writing of himself after the imaginary death of Elia, he says, truly: “He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalized (and offences were sure to arise) he could not help it.” No, nor did he try to help it, and we love him all the more for this antic disposition he was so fond of showing unshamed. And I think that we need not grieve greatly because his vagaries were not kept always “within the limits of becoming mirth,” when he had to deal with prigs, pedants, or poseurs. Tom Moore, tiptoe with toadyism, tried to look down on Lamb, doubtless feeling that he had accurately sounded the shoals of his shallow insincerity. The portentous Macready has left on record his unfavourable impression of the irreverent creature who stood in no awe of superior persons on pasteboard pedestals. That impression pains us no more than does the ungentle judgment of Thomas Carlyle. _He_ found Lamb’s talk to be but “a ghastly make-believe of wit,” “contemptibly small;” and in all that was said and done he saw, from his own humane point of view, nothing but “diluted insanity.” Curtly and cruelly he labelled this brother and sister, “two very sorry phenomena.”