As he once owned to me, he was fond of antagonising. Indeed in the sketch of himself, prefacing the Last Essays of Elia--a sketch for its truth to have delighted Mason the Self-Knowledge man--he says, “with the Religionist I pass for a Free-thinker, while the other faction set me down for a Bigot.” In fact, no politician ever laboured more to preserve the Balance of Power in Europe, than he did to correct any temporary preponderances. He was always _trimming_ in the nautical, not in the political, sense. Thus in his “magnanimous letter,” as Hazlitt called it, to High Church Southey, he professed himself a Unitarian[9]. With a Catholic he would probably have called himself a Jew; as amongst Quakers, by way of a set-off against their own formality, he would indulge in a little extra levity. I well remember his chuckling at having spirited on his correspondent Bernard Barton, to commit some little enormities, such as addressing him as C. Lamb, _Esquire_. My visits at Lamb’s were shortly interrupted by a sojourn to unrheumatize myself at Hastings; but in default of other intercourse I received a letter in a well-known hand, quaint as the sentences it conveyed. “And what dost thou at the Priory? Cucullus non facit Monachum. English me that, and challenge old Lignum Janua to make a better. “My old New River has presented no extraordinary novelties lately. But there hope sits day after day speculating upon traditionary gudgeons. I think she has taken the fisheries. I now know the reason why our forefathers were denominated East and West Angles. Yet is there no lack of spawn, for I wash my hands in fishets that come through the pump every morning, thick as motelings--little things that perish untimely, and never taste the brook. You do not tell me of those romantic Land Bays that be as thou goest to Lovers’ Seat, neither of that little Churchling in the midst of a wood (in the opposite direction nine furlongs from the town), that seems dropt by the Angel that was tired of carrying two packages; marry, with the other he made shift to pick his flight to Loretto. Inquire out and see my little Protestant Loretto. It stands apart from trace of human habitation, yet hath it pulpit, reading-desk, and trim front of massiest marble, as if Robinson Crusoe had reared it to soothe himself with old church-going images. I forget its Xtian name, and what She Saint was its gossip.