It is unnecessary
to inflict upon the reader all the points of the obvious moral that
obtrudes itself at this period of Charles Lamb's history. It is clear that
the Otiosa Eternitas was pressing upon his days, and he did not know how
to find relief. Although a good Latin scholar,--indeed, fond of writing
letters in Latin,--he did not at this period resort to classical
literature. I heard him indeed once (and once only) quote the well-known
Latin verse from the Georgics, "O Fortunatos," &c., but generally he
showed himself careless about Greeks and Romans; and when (as Mr. Moxon
states) "a traveller brought him some acorns from an ilex that grew over
the tomb of Virgil, he valued them so little that he threw them at the
hackney coachmen as they passed by his window."
I have been much impressed by Lamb's letters to Bernard Barton, which are
numerous, and which, taken altogether, are equal to any which he has
written. The letters to Coleridge do not exhibit so much care or thought;
nor those to Wordsworth or Manning, nor to any others of his intellectual
equals. These correspondents could think and speculate for themselves, and
they were accordingly left to their own resources.
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