Charles Lamb, too, visited Paris, and though it is not recorded that he went into the Louvre, yet we can hardly be mistaken in conjecturing that he did, and the thoughts with which he went. He would have entered those galleries with timid ecstasy. He would at first have shrunk away from the full splendor, and made acquaintance with some modest painting in a corner. Happy would some friend near him be to hear the half-tender, half-witty, yet most appreciative conceit which should first come stammering from his lips. He would have advanced slowly, and only after much delay would have ventured to stand before the great masters, and to look up eye to eye at the spirit of the Louvre. After taking his departure, he would never have thought familiarly of the scene, but it would have remained in his mind as terrible and sacred an episode as was the descent into Hades to Virgil's hero. Not only in the Louvre, but in the world, Charles Lamb was the more timid worshipper. The whole character of his mind, the intensity of his thought within a narrow sphere, made him reverent of the Infinite. The thought of departure from the life which he now lived was to him a very solemn one. Religious ideas were so sacred to him that he never referred to them lightly, and seldom at all. When he did mention them, it was with peculiar impressiveness. No one can read the account of his share in a conversation on "persons one would like to have seen," without admiring the energy and pathos with which he alluded to one Person, whose name, however, he did not utter. Discussions on religious subjects he never tolerated in anybody but Coleridge. One evening, after he and Leigh Hunt had returned from a visit to Coleridge, Hunt began to express his surprise that a man of so much genius as the Highgate sage should entertain such religious opinions as he did, and mentioned one of his doctrines for especial reprobation. Lamb, who was preparing the second bowl of punch, answered, hesitatingly, with a gentle smile,--"Never mind what Coleridge believes; he is full of fun." He was an humble, sinful worshipper, and while he bowed his head tremblingly before Heaven, he poured out the stream of his affections to his sister and his friends. The religious character of Sydney Smith was less peculiar than that of Elia. An earnest Christian, with a will too resolute to allow the aid of the punch-bowl in vanquishing trouble, professionally wielding the religious and moral ideas, and habitually obeying them, he stood erect and looked at the life to come with a firm eye. "The beauty of the Christian religion," he says, "is that it carries the order and discipline of heaven into our very fancies and conceptions, and, by hallowing the first shadowy notions of our minds, from which actions spring, makes our actions themselves good and holy." This central and vital beauty he had cultivated in a very diversified life, and he looked with confidence for the prize which is laid up for the well-doer.