self to a younger brother she had, in the same way that she had attended to her own brother Charles in his infancy, as the wholesomest and surest means of all for cure."
Allsop, Coleridge's friend, speaks in the same strain of how when a young man overwhelmed with what then seemed the hopeless ruin of his prospects, he found Charles and Mary Lamb not wanting in the hour of need. "I have a clear recollection," says he, "of Miss Lamb's addressing me in a tone which acted at once as a solace and support, and after as a stimulus, to which I owe more perhaps than to the more extended arguments of all others."
On the whole Mary was a silent woman. It was her forte rather to enable others to talk their best by the charm of an earnest, speaking countenance and a responsive manner; and there are but few instances in which any of her words have been preserved. In that memorable conversation at Lamb's table on "Persons one would like to have seen," reported by Hazlitt, when it was a question of women, "I should like vastly to have seen Ninon de L'Enclos," said Mary. When Queen Caroline's trial was pending and her character and conduct the topic in every mouth, Mary said she did not see that it made much difference whether the Queen was what they called guilty or not—meaning, probably, that the stream was so plainly muddy at the fountain-head it was idle to enquire what ill places it had passed through in its course. Or else, perhaps, that, either way, the King's conduct was equally odious.
The last observation of hers I can find recorded, is at first sight, unlike herself:—"How stupid old people are!" It was that unimaginative incapacity to sympathise
