Notwithstanding Lamb's somewhat humble description of his friends and
familiars, some of them were men well known in literature.
Amongst others, I met there Messrs. Coleridge, Manning, Hazlitt, Haydon,
Wordsworth, Barron Field, Leigh Hunt, Clarkson, Sheridan Knowles,
Talfourd, Kenney, Godwin, the Burneys, Payne Collier, and others whose
names I need not chronicle. I met there, also, on one or two occasions,
Liston, and Miss Kelly, and, I believe, Rickman. Politics were rarely
discussed amongst them. Anecdotes, characteristic, showing the strong and
weak points of human nature, were frequent enough. But politics
(especially party politics) were seldom admitted. Lamb disliked them as a
theme for evening talk; he perhaps did not understand the subject
scientifically. And when Hazlitt's impetuosity drove him, as it sometimes
did, into fierce expressions on public affairs, these were usually
received in silence; and the matter thus raised up for assent or
controversy was allowed to drop.
Lamb's old associates are now dead. "They that lived so long," as he says,
"and flourished so steadily, are all crumbled away." The beauty of these
evenings was, that every one was placed upon an easy level.
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