imagination" with which nature had endowed him drooped languidly, save in fitful moments of fervid talk; that "fertile, subtle, expansive understanding" could not fasten with the long-sustained intensity needful to grapple victoriously with the great problems that filled his mind. The look of "timid earnestness" which Carlyle noted in his eyes expressed a mental attitude—a mixture of boldness and fear, a desire to seek truth at all hazards, yet also to drag Authority with him, as a safe and comfortable prop to rest on. But his eloquence had lost none of its richness and charm, his voice none of its sweetness. "His face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory, an archangel a little damaged," says Lamb to Wordsworth. "He is absent but four miles, and the neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons. 'Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet."
Besides the renewed proximity of these two oldest and dearest of friends, two new ones, both very young, both future biographers of Lamb, were in these years added to the number of his intimates,—Talfourd in 1815, Proctor in 1817. Leigh Hunt had become one probably as early as 1812; Crabb Robinson in 1806; Thomas Hood, who stood in the front rank of his younger friends, and Bernard Barton, the Quaker Poet, Lamb's chief correspondent during the last ten years of his life, not until 1822-3.
The years did not pass without each bringing a recurrence of one, sometimes of two severe attacks of Mary's disorder. In the autumn of 1815 Charles repeats again the sad story to Miss Hutchinson:—
"I am forced to be the replier to your letter, for
