[Of Coleridge:] An archangel a little damaged.

Lamb’s remark is a character-sketch of his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, offered in private correspondence rather than as a public aphorism. It belongs to the circle of early nineteenth‑century English writers (the “Lake” and London literary worlds) who knew Coleridge intimately and witnessed both his extraordinary conversational brilliance and his chronic instability—ill health, financial disorder, and especially his long struggle with opium dependence. The phrase captures Lamb’s affectionate, rueful assessment of Coleridge as someone of near‑sublime intellectual and spiritual gifts whose powers were nonetheless impaired by personal and physical damage.

Calling Coleridge “an archangel” elevates him to a being of rare radiance: a mind of visionary reach, moral sensitivity, and imaginative genius. The qualifying “a little damaged” sharply undercuts the idealization, suggesting impairment rather than outright corruption—something bent, wounded, or malfunctioning in the instrument. Lamb’s genius here is tonal: the phrase is simultaneously admiring and tenderly critical, implying that Coleridge’s failings are tragic diminutions of greatness rather than mere vice. It has endured because it compresses a complex judgment—genius plus fragility—into a single, memorable image.