The noise made by Mr. Lambkin’s famous advice to Archdeacon Burfle will be remembered by all my readers. He did not, however, publish the letter (as is erroneously presumed in _Great Dead Men of the Period_),[72] without due discussion and reflection. I did not personally urge him to make it public--I thought it unwise. But Mr. Large may almost be said to have insisted upon it in the long Conversation which he and Josiah had upon the matter. When Lambkin had left Large’s room I took the liberty of going up to see him again, but the fatal missive had been posted, and appeared next day in _The Times_, the _Echo_, and other journals, not to mention the _Englishman’s Anchor_. I do not wish to accuse Mr. Large of any malicious purpose or deliberately misleading intention, but I fear that (as he was not an impulsive man) his advice can only have proceeded from a woeful and calculated lack of judgment. There is no doubt that (from Lambkin’s own point of view), the publication of this letter was a very serious error. It bitterly offended Arthur Bundleton, and alienated all the “Pimlico” group (as they were then called). At the same time it did not satisfy the small but eager and cultured body who followed Tamworthy. It gave a moderate pleasure to the poorer clergy in the country parishes, but I doubt very much whether these are the men from whom social advantage or ecclesiastical preferment is to be expected. I often told Lambkin that the complexity of our English Polity was a dangerous thing to meddle with. “A man,” I would say to him, “who expresses an opinion is like one who plunges a knife into some sensitive part of the human frame. The former may offend unwittingly by the mere impact of his creed or prejudice, much as the latter may give pain by happening upon some hidden nerve.” Now Lambkin was essentially a wise man. He felt the obligation--the duty (to give it a nobler name)--which is imposed on all of us of studying our fellows. He did not, perhaps, say where his mind lay in any matter more than half a dozen times in his life, for fear of opposing by such an expression the wider experience or keener emotion of the society around him. He felt himself a part of a great stream, which it was the business of a just man to follow, and if he spoke strongly (as he often did) it was in some matter upon which the vast bulk of his countrymen were agreed; indeed he rightly gave to public opinion, and to the governing classes of the nation, an overwhelming weight in his system of morals; and even at twenty-one he had a wholesome contempt for the doctrinaire enthusiast who neglects his newspaper and hatches an ethical system out of mere blind tradition or (what is worse) his inner conscience.