He reverently followed the discourses of Coleridge,
admiring, perhaps, "the beauty of the words, but not the words
themselves"; but when the Opium-Eater also began to take speculative
flights before Lamb, the latter stopped him at once by jangling his
metaphysics into jokes. It was in conversation with Coleridge, begun at
school and continued afterward at frequent meetings, that Lamb first
ventured to try his own powers and was prompted to literary activity.
But for a slight defect in his speech, he would probably have followed
Coleridge to the University with the intention of going into the Church.
A delightful clergyman he would have been, if he had duly undertaken the
office, and one would have walked far to see him in the priestly robe,
to hear him chant the service, to receive pastoral advice from him; yet
we fear the "Essays of Elia" would have been less admirable than now. He
was roused by Coleridge; and though he could not put the aureole of the
latter about his own head, he began to do the best he could in his own
way.
Life is a play between accident and purpose.
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