“For nine years the portrait of Kingsley, close to that of John Parker, has looked down from the wall of the room in which I write. It is a large photograph, taken, while he was on a visit to the house, by an amateur of extraordinary ability, the late Dr. Adamson of St. Andrews. It is the best and most lifelike portrait of Kingsley known to me. It has the stern expression, which came partly of the effort, never quite ceasing, to express himself through that characteristic stammer which quite left him in public speaking, and which in private added to the effect of his wonderful talk. Photography caught him easily. Those who look at the portrait prefixed to Volume I. of the _Life_ see the man as he lived. Mr. Woolner’s bust, shown at the beginning of Volume II., shows him aged and shrunken, not more than he was but more than he ought to have been; and the removal of all hair from the face is a marked difference from the fact in life; yet the likeness is perfect too. That somewhat severe face belied one of the kindest hearts that ever beat: yet the handsome and chivalrous features unworthily expressed one of the truest, bravest, and noblest of souls. Kingsley could not have done a mean or false thing: by his make it was as impossible as that water should run uphill.” CHARLES LAMB 1775-1834 [Sidenote: de Quincey’s _Life and Writings_.] “Lamb, at this period of his life, then passed regularly, after taking wine, under a brief eclipse of sleep. It descended upon him as soft as a shadow. In a gross person laden with superfluous flesh, and sleeping heavily, this would have been disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and wiry as an Arab of the desert, or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a net-work of aerial gossamer than of earthly cobweb,--more like a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely to seem entirely alive, he presented the image of repose midway between life and death like the repose of sculpture, and to one who knew his history, a repose contrasting with the calamities and internal storms of his life. I have heard more persons than I can now distinctly recall, observe of Lamb when sleeping, that his countenance in that state assumed an expression almost seraphic, from its intellectual beauty of outline, its childlike simplicity, and its benignity. It could not be called a transfiguration that sleep worked in his face; for the features wore essentially the same expression when waking; but sleep spiritualised that expression, exalted it, and also harmonised it. Much of the change lay in that last process. The eyes it was that disturbed the unity of effect in Lamb’s waking face. They gave a restlessness to the character of his intellect, shifting, like northern lights, through every mode of