His sense of fun bubbled up at most inapt times. He had been asked once to stand as godfather for a friend’s child, and feared he would disgrace himself at the very font. “I was at Hazlitt’s wedding and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh; I misbehaved once at a funeral.” In all this wayward whimsicality, one can detect that same depth and intensity of feeling which moved Abraham Lincoln to tell trivial stories at the most solemn crises; which suggests a sob beneath the maddest mirth of Sterne, Molière, Cervantes; which drove Charles Lamb to seize the kettle from the hob and hold it on his sister’s head-dress, like the clown in a pantomime, to hide the breaking of his great heart at the signs of the coming mania he had detected in her. He accounted it an excellent thing to play the buffoon sometimes, and was willing to seem supremely silly, that he might save his own sanity. Acting conversely, this trembling sensibility set the tears trickling down his cheeks, while he was writing a playful paper; and made him even “shed tears in the motley Strand, for fulness of joy of so much life.” His largeness of soul was never shown in a grander way than in his letter to, and his whole conduct toward, Robert Southey, when the latter attacked, in the _Quarterly Review_, the first collected “Essays of Elia”--“a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it is original.” In the same paper, he spoke arrogantly and offensively of Leigh Hunt, his own political enemy, and Lamb’s most dear and most unjustly persecuted friend. From so close a companion as Southey had been, and one who knew him so thoroughly, this hurt Lamb deeply, and he wrote to Bernard Barton: “But I love and respect Southey, and will not retort. I hate his review and his being a reviewer.” And in the _London Magazine_ he put forth the manly “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esq.;” of which the latter said that “no resentful letter was ever written less offensively.” Then Southey--an exemplary if over-righteous mortal--sent Lamb a line of regret and affection, and Lamb wrote generously back, and the mists were melted away, and their friendship shone more steadfastly than ever. Indeed, it seems to me that Southey eclipsed Lamb in the spirit he showed in this reconciliation, forasmuch as he proved himself fine enough to forgive the man whom he had outraged. We may commend his conduct; “For right, too rigid, hardens into wrong.”