These
always relate to English authors. Lamb, although a good Latinist, had not
much of that which ordinarily passes under the name of Learning. He had
little knowledge of languages, living or dead. Of French, German, Italian,
&c., he knew nothing; and in Greek his acquirements were very moderate.
These children of the tongues were never adopted by him; but in his own
Saxon English he was a competent scholar, a lover, nice, discriminative,
and critical.
The most graphic account of Lamb at a somewhat later period of his life
appears in Mr. N. P. Willis's "Pencillings by the Way." He had been
invited by a gentleman in the Temple, Mr. R---- (Robinson?), to meet
Charles Lamb and his sister at breakfast. The Lambs lived at that time "a
little way out of London, and were not quite punctual. At last they enter
--"the gentleman in black small-clothes and gaiters, short and very slight
in person, his head set on his shoulders with a thoughtful forward bent,
his hair just sprinkled with gray, a beautiful deep-set eye, an aquiline
nose, and a very indescribable mouth. Whether it expressed most humor or
feeling, good nature or a kind of whimsical peevishness, or twenty other
things which passed over it by turns, I cannot in the least be certain.
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