Mr. Henry Crabb Robinson, one of the earliest and most
devoted of Goethe's English admirers (he had made the great poet's acquaintance early in the century, at Weimar), one of the coterie of Coleridge, the attached friend of Lamb—(it was Mr. Robinson's first brief that Lamb apostrophized as "thou great first cause, least understood")—died in his ninety-second year, at his residence, 30 Russell Square, on Tuesday last. He was a man of great force of purpose and general vigour of character. We have heard him say that he was the special correspondent of one of our morning papers for the battle of Coranna, and that he got the news of the battle of Eylau to the Times two days before the Government received it. Called to the Bar not ranch under the age of forty, he yet soon led the Norfolk Circuit, notwithstanding that he always asserted that he never knew anything of law, though much of juries. When he had made a competence, which he did in a comparatively short time, he had the strength of purpose to get out of the professional groove as easily as he got into it, and devoted the rest of his life to literary leisure. His Sunday breakfast parties and his bachelor dinners will long be remembered by those who enjoyed his hospitality, as filling some of the most amusing hours of their lives. He was grandly intolerant of any literary slight put upon his own great literary friends, resenting a depreciation of Lamb as a symptom of moral disease, and ridicule of Wordsworth, even from a lady, as the fruit of natural depravity. No one stood up for his friends more ably, generously, and constantly, or assailed what he thought worthy of censure with more open and cordial blows. In literature and art the value of his judgment was chiefly this,—that he brought a character of much more than the usual strength, of considerable humour, and of absolute naturalness, to bear upon subjects which are too often treated with the mannerism and the finesse of sensi- bility.
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