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humbling; perhaps, as tending to self-mortification, not unfavourable to the spiritual state. Still, as you meant to confer no benefit on the soul of your friend, you do not stand quite clear from the imputation of unkindliness (a word, by which I mean the diminutive of unkindness). And then David Hartley was unwell; and how is the small philosopher, the minute philosopher? and David's mother? Coleridge, I am not trifling, nor are these matter-of-fact questions only. You are all very dear and precious to me; do what you will, Col., you may hurt me and vex me by your silence, but you cannot estrange my heart from you all. I cannot scatter friendships like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand like hour-glass sand. I have but two or three people in the world to whom I am more than indifferent, and I can't afford to whistle them off to the winds.

quaking and trembling. In the midst of his and in the way to oblivion, is a feeling rather inspiration, and the effects of it were most noisy, was handed into the midst of the meeting a most terrible blackguard Wapping sailor; the poor man, I believe, had rather have been in the hottest part of an engagement, for the congregation of broad-brims, together with the ravings of the prophet, were too much for his gravity, though I saw even he had delicacy enough, not to laugh out. And the inspired gentleman, though his manner was so supernatural, yet neither talked nor professed to talk anything more than good sober sense, common morality, with now and then a declaration of not speaking from himself. Among other things, looking back to his childhood and early youth, he told the meeting what a graceless young dog he had been, that in his youth he had a good share of wit: reader, if thou hadst seen the gentleman, thou wouldst have sworn that it must indeed have been many years ago, for his rueful physiognomy would have scared away the playful goddess from the meeting, where he presided, for ever. A wit! a wit! what could he mean? Lloyd, it minded me of Falkland in the Rivals, 'Am I full of wit and humour? No, indeed you are not. Am I the life and soul of every company I come into? No, it cannot be said you are.' That hard-faced gentleman, a wit! Why, nature wrote on his fanatic forehead fifty years ago, 'Wit never comes, that comes to all.' I should be as scandalised at a bon mot issuing from his oracle-looking mouth, as to see Cato go down a country-dance. God love you all. You are very good to submit to be pleased with reading my nothings. 'Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.-Yours ever,

"C. LAMB."

"My sister has recovered from her illness. May that merciful God make tender my heart, and make me as thankful, as in my distress I was earnest, in my prayers. Congratulate me on an ever-present and neveralienable friend like her. And do, do insert, if you have not lost, my dedication. It will have lost half its value by coming so late. If you really are going on with that volume, I shall be enabled in a day or two to send you a short poem to insert. Now, do answer this. Friendship, and acts of friendship, should be reciprocal, and free as the air; a friend should never be reduced to beg an alms of his fellow. Yet I will beg an alms; I entreat you to write, and tell me all about poor Lloyd, and all of you. God love and preserve you all. "C. LAMB."

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

"June 13th, 1797. "I stared with wild wonderment to see "April 7th, 1797. thy well-known hand again. It revived "Your last letter was dated the 10th many a pleasing recollection of an epistolary February; in it you promised to write again intercourse, of late strangely suspended, once the next day. At least, I did not expect so the pride of my life. Before I even opened long, so unfriend-like a silence. There was thy letter, I figured to myself a sort of a time, Col., when a remissness of this sort in complacency which my little hoard at home a dear friend would have lain very heavy on would feel at receiving the new-comer into my mind, but latterly I have been too familiar the little drawer where I keep my treasures of with neglect to feel much from the semblance this kind. You have done well in writing to of it. Yet, to suspect one's self overlooked, me. The little room (was it not a little one?)

at the Salutation was already in the way of at riding behind in the basket, though, I becoming a fading idea! it had begun to be confess, in pretty good company. Your classed in my memory with those 'wanderings picture of idiocy, with the sugar-loaf head, with a fair hair'd maid,' in the recollection is exquisite; but are you not too severe upon of which I feel I have no property. You our more favoured brethren in fatuity? I press me, very kindly do you press me, to send you a trifling letter; but you have come to Stowey; obstacles, strong as death, only to think that I have been skimming the prevent me at present; maybe I may be able superficies of my mind, and found it only to come before the year is out; believe me, froth. Now, do write again; you cannot I will come as soon as I can, but I dread believe how I long and love always to hear naming a probable time. It depends on fifty about you. Yours, most affectionately, things, besides the expense, which is not nothing. As to Richardson, caprice may grant what caprice only refused, and it is no more hardship, rightly considered, to be dependent on him for pleasure, than to lie at the mercy of the rain and sunshine for the enjoyment of a holiday in either case we are not to look for a suspension of the laws of nature. 'Grill will be grill.' Vide Spenser.

:

"I could not but smile at the compromise you make with me for printing Lloyd's poems first; but there is in nature, I fear, too many tendencies to envy and jealousy not to justify you in your apology. Yet, if any one is welcome to pre-eminence from me, it is Lloyd, for he would be the last to desire it. So pray, let his name uniformly precede mine, for it would be treating me like a child to suppose it could give me pain. Yet, alas! I am not insusceptible of the bad passions. Thank God, I have the ingenuousness to be ashamed of them. I am dearly fond of Charles Lloyd; he is all goodness, and I have too much of the world in my composition to feel myself thoroughly deserving of his friendship.

"CHARLES LAMB."

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

"June 24th, 1797.

"Did you seize the grand opportunity of seeing Kosciusko while he was at Bristol ? I never saw a hero; I wonder how they look. I have been reading a most curious romance-like work, called the Life of John Buncle, Esq. 'Tis very interesting, and an extraordinary compound of all manner of subjects, from the depth of the ludicrous to the heights of sublime religious truth. There is much abstruse science in it above my cut, and an infinite fund of pleasantry. John Buncle is a famous fine man, formed in nature's most eccentric hour. I am ashamed of what I write. But I have no topic to talk of. I see nobody; and sit, and read, or walk alone, and hear nothing. I am quite lost to conversation from disuse; and out of the sphere of my little family, who, I am thankful, are dearer and dearer to me every day, I see no face that brightens up at my approach. My friends are at a distance (meaning Birmingham and Stowey); worldly hopes are at a low ebb with me, and unworldly thoughts are not yet familiarised to me, though I occasionally indulge in them. Still I feel a calm not unlike content. I fear it is sometimes more akin to physical stupidity than to a heaven-flowing serenity and peace. What right have I to obtrude all this upon you? and what is such a letter to you? and if I come to Stowey, what conversation can I furnish to compensate my friend for those stores of knowledge and of fancy; those delightful treasures of wisdom, "To adopt your own expression, I call which, I know, he will open to me? But it this a 'rich' line, a fine full line. And some is better to give than to receive; and I was others I thought even beautiful. Believe me, a very patient hearer, and docile scholar, in my little gentleman will feel some repugnance our winter evening meetings at Mr. May's ;

"Lloyd tells me that Sheridan put you upon writing your tragedy. I hope you are only Coleridgeizing when you talk of finishing it in a few days. Shakspeare was a more modest man, but you best know your own power.

"Of my last poem you speak slightingly; surely the longer stanzas were pretty tolerable; at least there was one good line in it,

Thick-shaded trees, with dark green leaf rich clad.'

was I not, Col. ? What I have owed to deceased parents: and Hayley's sweet lines thee, my heart can ne'er forget. to his mother are notoriously the best things "God love you and yours. "C. L." he ever wrote. Cowper's lines, some of them

At length the small volume containing the poems of Coleridge, Lloyd, and Lamb, was published by Mr. Cottle at Bristol. It excited little attention; but Lamb had the pleasure of seeing his dedication to his sister printed in good set form, after his own fashion, and of witnessing the delight and pride with which she received it. This little book, now very scarce, had the following motto expressive of Coleridge's feeling towards his associates:-Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiæ et similium junctarumque Camanarum; quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas. Lamb's share of the work consists of eight sonnets; four short fragments of blank verse, of which the Grandame is the principal; a poem, called the Tomb of Douglas; some verses to Charles Lloyd; and a vision of Repentance; which are all published in the last edition of his poetical works, except one of the sonnets, which was addressed to Mrs. Siddons, and the Tomb of Douglas, which was justly omitted as common-place and vapid. They only occupy twenty-eight duodecimo pages, within which space was comprised all that Lamb at this time had written which he deemed worth preserving.

The following letter from Lamb to Coleridge seems to have been written on receiving the first copy of the work.

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

"Dec. 10th, 1797.

"I am sorry I cannot now relish your poetical present so thoroughly as I feel it deserves; but I do not the less thank Lloyd and you for it.

"Before I offer, what alone I have to offer, a few obvious remarks, on the poems you sent me, I can but notice the odd coincidence of two young men, in one age, carolling their grandmothers. Love, what L. calls the 'feverish and romantic tie,' hath too long domineered over all the charities of home the dear domestic ties of father, brother, husband. The amiable and benevolent Cowper has a beautiful passage in his 'Task,' -some natural and painful reflections on his

are

'How gladly would the man recall to life
The boy's neglected sire; a mother, too!
That softer name, perhaps more gladly still,
Might he demand them at the gates of death.'

"I cannot but smile to see my granny so gaily decked forth: though, I think, whoever altered 'thy' praises to 'her' praises—'thy' honoured memory to 'her' honoured memory, did wrong-they best exprest my feelings. There is a pensive state of recollection, in which the mind is disposed to apostrophise the departed objects of its attachment; and, breaking loose from grammatical precision, changes from the first to the third, and from the third to the first person, just as the random fancy or the feeling directs. Among Lloyd's sonnets, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 11th, are eminently beautiful. I think him too lavish of his expletives; the do's and did's, when they occur too often, bring a quaintness with them along with their simplicity, or rather air of antiquity, which the patrons of them seem desirous of conveying.

"Another time, I may notice more particularly Lloyd's, Southey's, Dermody's Sonnets. I shrink from them now: my teasing lot makes me too confused for a clear judgment of things, too selfish for sympathy; and these ill-digested, meaningless remarks, I have imposed on myself as a task, to lull reflection, as well as to show you I did not neglect reading your valuable present. Return my ackowledgments to Lloyd; you two seem to be about realising an Elysium upon earth, and, no doubt, I shall be happier. Take my best wishes. Remember me most affectionately to Mrs. C, and give little David Hartley-God bless its little heart!—a kiss for me. Bring him up to know the meaning of his Christian name, and what that name (imposed upon him) will demand of him. "God love you! "C. LAMB.

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strive to fancy that this world is not all by their genius, were usually named to be barrenness."

dismissed with a sneer. After a contemptuous notice of "The Mournful Muse" of After several disappointments, occasioned Lloyd, Lamb receives his quietus in a line :— by the state of business in the India House," Mr. Lamb, the joint author of this little Lamb achieved his long-checked wish of volume, seems to be very properly associated visiting Coleridge at Stowey, in company with his plaintive companion." with his sister, without whom he felt it almost a sin to enjoy anything. Coleridge, shortly after, abandoned his scheme of a cottage-life; and, in the following year, left England for Germany. Lamb, however, was not now so lonely as when he wrote to Coleridge imploring his correspondence as the only comfort of his sorrows and labours; for, through the instrumentality of Coleridge, he was now rich in friends. Among them he marked George Dyer, the guileless and simplehearted, whose love of learning was a passion, and who found, even in the forms of verse, objects of worship; Southey, in the young vigour of his genius; and Wordsworth, the great regenerator of English poetry, preparing for his long contest with the glittering forms of inane phraseology which had usurped the dominion of the public mind, and with the cold mockeries of scorn with which their supremacy was defended. By those the beauty of his character was felt; the original cast of his powers was appreciated; and his peculiar humour was detected and kindled into fitful life.

CHAPTER IV.
[1798.]

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In this year Lamb composed his prose tale, “Rosamund Gray," and published it in a volume of the same size and price with the last, under the title of " A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret," which, having a semblance of story, sold much better than his poems, and added a few pounds to his slender income. This miniature romance is unique in English literature. It bears the impress of a recent perusal of "The Man of Feeling," and "Julia de Roubigné ; and while on the one hand it wants the graphic force and delicate touches of Mackenzie, it is informed with deeper feeling and breathes a diviner morality than the most charming of his tales. Lamb never possessed the faculty of constructing a plot either for drama or novel; and while he luxuriated in the humour of Smollett, the wit of Fielding, or the solemn pathos of Richardson, he was not amused, but perplexed, by the attempt to thread the windings of story which conduct to their most exquisite passages through the maze of adventure. In this tale, nothing is made out with distinctness, except the rustic piety and grace of the lovely girl and her venerable grandmother, which are pictured with such earnestness and simplicity as might beseem a fragment of the book of Ruth. The villain who lays waste their humble joys is a murky phantom without individuality; the events are obscured by

LAMB'S LITERARY EFFORTS AND CORRESPONDENCE WITH the haze of sentiment which hovers over them;

SOUTHEY.

In the year 1798, the blank verse of Lloyd and Lamb, which had been contained in the volume published in conjunction with Coleridge, was, with some additions by Lloyd, published in a thin duodecimo, price 2s. 6d., under the title of "Blank Verse, by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb." This unpretending book was honoured by a brief and scornful notice in the catalogue of "The Monthly Review," in the small print of which the works of the poets who are now recognised as the greatest ornaments of their age, and who have impressed it most deeply

and the narrative gives way to the reflections of the author, who is mingled with the persons of the tale in visionary confusion, and gives to it the character of a sweet but disturbed dream. It has an interest now beyond that of fiction; for in it we may trace, "as in a glass darkly," the characteristics of the mind and heart of the author, at a time when a change was coming upon them. There are the dainty sense of beauty just weaned from its palpable object, and quivering over its lost images; feeling grown

Monthly Review, Sept. 1798.

retrospective before its time, and tinging all Southey as early as the year 1795; but no things with a strange solemnity; hints of intimacy ensued until he accompanied Lloyd that craving after immediate appliances in the summer of 1797 to the little village of which might give impulse to a harassed Burton, near Christchurch, in Hampshire, frame, and confidence to struggling fancy, where Southey was then residing, and where and of that escape from the pressure of they spent a fortnight as the poet's guests. agony into fantastic mirth, which in after After Coleridge's departure for Germany, in life made Lamb a problem to a stranger, 1798, a correspondence began between Lamb while they endeared him a thousand-fold to and Southey, which continued through that those who really knew him. While the and part of the following year;-Southey fulness of the religious sentiments, and the communicates to Lamb his Eclogues, which scriptural cast of the language, still partake he was then preparing for the press, and of his early manhood, the visit of the narrator Lamb repaying the confidence by submitting of the tale to the churchyard where his the products of his own leisure hours to his parents lie buried, after his nerves had been genial critic. If Southey did not, in all strung for the endeavour by wine at the respects, compensate Lamb for the absence village inn, and the half-frantic jollity of his of his earlier friend, he excited in him a old heart-broken friend (the lover of the more entire and active intellectual sympathy; tale), whom he met there, with the exquisite as the character of Southey's mind bore benignity of thought breathing through the more resemblance to his own than that of whole, prophesy the delightful peculiarities Coleridge. In purity of thought; in the and genial frailties of an after day. The love of the minutest vestige of antiquity; in reflections he makes on the eulogistic cha- a certain primness of style bounding in the racter of all the inscriptions, are drawn from rich humour which threatened to overflow his own childhood; for when a very little it; they were nearly akin: both alike boy, walking with his sister in a churchyard, reverenced childhood, and both had prehe suddenly asked her, "Mary, where do the served its best attributes unspotted from the naughty people lie?" world. If Lamb bowed to the genius of Coleridge with a fonder reverence, he felt more at home with Southey; and although he did not pour out the inmost secrets of his soul in his letters to him as to Coleridge, he gave more scope to the "first sprightly runnings" of his humorous fancy. Here is the first of his freaks :

TO MR. SOUTHEY.

"Rosamund Gray" remained unreviewed till August, 1800, when it received the following notice in "The Monthly Review's " catalogue, the manufacturer of which was probably more tolerant of heterodox composition in prose than verse :-"In the perusal of this pathetic and interesting story, the reader who has a mind capable of enjoying rational and moral sentiment will feel much gratification. Mr. Lamb has here proved himself skilful in touching the nicest "My tailor has brought me home a new feelings of the heart, and in affording great coat lapelled, with a velvet collar. He pleasure to the imagination, by exhibiting assures me everybody wears velvet collars events and situations which, in the hands of now. Some are born fashionable, some a writer less conversant with the springs and achieve fashion, and others, like your humble energies of the moral sense, would make a servant, have fashion thrust upon them. very 'sorry figure."" While we acknowledge The rogue has been making inroads hitherto this scanty praise as a redeeming trait in the by modest degrees, foisting upon me an long series of critical absurdities, we cannot additional button, recommending gaiters, but help observing how curiously misplaced all to come upon me thus in a full tide of luxury, the laudatory epithets are; the sentiment neither becomes him as a tailor or the ninth being profound and true, but not “rational," of a man. My meek gentleman was robbed and the "springs and energies of the moral sense" being substituted for a weakness which had a power of its own!

the other day, coming with his wife and family in a one-horse shay from Hampstead; the villains rifled him of four guineas, some Lamb was introduced by Coleridge to shillings and half-pence, and a bundle of

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