"Is it possible that Shakspeare should never have read Homer, in Chapman's version at least? If he had read it, could he mean to _travesty_ it in the parts of those big boobies, Ajax and Achilles? Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon are true to their parts in the 'Iliad '; they are gentlemen at least. Thersites, though unamusing, is fairly deducible from it. Troilus and Cressida are a fine graft upon it. But those two big bulks"-- * * * * * Disraeli wrote a book on the Quarrels of Authors. Somebody should write one on the Friendships of Literary Men. If such a work is ever written, Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be honorably mentioned therein. For among all the friendships celebrated in tale or history there is none more admirable than that which existed between these two eminent men. The "golden thread that tied their hearts together" was never broken. Their friendship was never "chipt or diminished"; but the longer they lived, the stronger it grew. Death could not destroy it. Lamb, after Coleridge's death, as if weary of "this green earth," as if not caring if "sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself," went out with life, willingly sought "Lavinian shores." "Lamb," as Mr. John Foster says, in his beautiful tribute to his memory, "never fairly recovered the death of Coleridge. He thought of little else (his sister was but another portion of himself) until his own great spirit joined his friend. He had a habit of venting his melancholy in a sort of mirth. He would, with nothing graver than a pun, 'cleanse his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighed' upon it. In a jest, or a few light phrases, he would lay open the last recesses of his heart. So in respect of the death of Coleridge. Some old friends of his saw him two or three weeks ago and remarked the constant turning and reference of his mind. He interrupted-himself and them almost every instant with some play of affected wonder, or astonishment, or humorous melancholy, on the words, '_Coleridge is dead_.' Nothing could divert him from that, for the thought of it never left him. About the same time, we had written to him to request a few lines for the literary album of a gentleman who entertained a fitting admiration of his genius. It was the last request we were destined to make, the last kindness we were allowed to receive. He wrote in Mr. Keymer's volume,--and wrote of Coleridge." And this is what he said of his friend: it would be, as Mr. Foster says, impertinence to offer one remark on it:--