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His young chimney-sweepers, "from their little pulpits (the tops of
chimneys) in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of
patience to mankind."
His saying to Martin Burney has been often repeated--"O Martin, if dirt
were trumps, what a hand you would hold!"
To Coleridge: "Bless you, old sophist, who next to human nature taught me
all the corruption I was capable of knowing."
To Mr. Gilman, a surgeon ("query Kill-man?"), he writes, "Coleridge is
very bad, but he wonderfully picks up, and his face, when he repeats his
verses, hath its ancient glory--an archangel a little damaged."
To Wordsworth (who was superfluously solemn) he writes, "Some d-d people
have come in, and I must finish abruptly. By d--d, I only mean deuced."
The second son of George the Second, it was said, had a very cold and
ungenial manner. Lamb stammered out in his defence that "this was very
natural in the Duke of Cu-Cum-ber-land."
To Bernard Barton, of a person of repute: "There must be something in him.
Such great names imply greatness. Which of us has seen Michael Angelo's
things? yet which of us disbelieves his greatness?"
To Mrs. H., of a person eccentric: "Why does not his guardian angel look
to him? He deserves one--may be he has tired him out.
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