It might be said of Lamb, as of Abraham Lincoln, “laughter
was his vent”; if he had not laughed, he would have died of a
frenzied brain or of a broken heart. With Lamb the maddest mood
of frolic was a rebound from the blackest mood of melancholia;
a fact which Carlyle, who did know Lamb’s history, might have
remembered before he used the phrase “diluted insanity,”
which, in view of that sad history, is nothing less than
brutal.--W. J. DAWSON, “The Makers of English Prose.”
(1758)