was I not, Col.? What I have owed to deceased parents: and Hayley's sweet lines to his mother are notoriously the best things he ever wrote. Cowper's lines, some of them thee, my heart can ne'er forget. "God love you and yours. "C. L." 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 Camœnarum; 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 "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 particu larly 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 acknowledgments 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. "I write, for one thing to say, that I shall write no more till you send me word where you are, for you are so soon to move. "My sister is pretty well, thank God. We think of you very often. God bless you: continue to be my correspondent, and I will 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 Lloyd, Lamb receives his quietus in a line :— volume, seems to be very properly associated with his plaintive companion." * After several disappointments, occasioned by the state of business in the India House," Mr. Lamb, the joint author of this little Lamb achieved his long-checked wish of visiting Coleridge at Stowey, in company 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 usurpsd 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. www CHAPTER IV. LAMB'S LITERARY EFFORTS AND CORRESPONDENCE In the year 1798, the blank verse of Lloyd and Lamb, which had been contained in the 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 the haze of sentiment which hovers over them; 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 quiver 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 ing over its lost images; feeling grown age, and who have impressed it most deeply *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 of the tale to the churchyard where his parents lie buried, after his nerves had been strung for the endeavour by wine at the village inn, and the half-frantic jollity of his old heart-broken friend (the lover of the tale), whom he met there, with the exquisite benignity of thought breathing through the 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 his own childhood; for when a very little boy, walking with his sister in a churchyard, be suddenly asked her, "Mary, where do the naughty people lie?" Lamb repaying the confidence by submitting the products of his own leisure hours to his genial critic. If Southey did not, in all respects, compensate Lamb for the absence of his earlier friend, he excited in him a more entire and active intellectual sympathy; as the character of Southey's mind bore more resemblance to his own than that of rich humour which threatened to overflow it; they were nearly akin: both alike reverenced childhood, and both had preserved its best attributes unspotted from the 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 customers' measures, which they swore were but I have forgot what church), attesting bank-notes. They did not shoot him, and that enormous legend of as many children as The following letter-yet richer in funbears date Saturday, July 28th, 1798. In order to make its allusions intelligible, it is only necessary to mention that Southey was then contemplating a calendar illustrative of the remarkable days of the year. TO MR. SOUTHEY. "July 28th, 1798. "I am ashamed that I have not thanked you before this for the Joan of Arc,' but I did not know your address, and it did not occur to me to write through Cottle. The poem delighted me, and the notes amused me, but methinks she of Neufchatel, in the print, holds her sword too like a dancer.' I sent your notice to Philips, particularly requesting an immediate insertion, but I suppose it came too late. I am sometimes curious to know what progress you make in that same 'Calendar:' whether you insert the nine worthies and Whittington? what you do or how you can manage when two Saints meet and quarrel for precedency? Martlemas, and Candlemas, and Christmas, are glorious themes for a writer like you, antiquity-bitten, Ismit with the love of boars' heads and rosemary; but how you can ennoble the 1st of April I know not. By the way I had a thing to say, but a certain false modesty has hitherto prevented me: perhaps I can best communicate my wish by a hint, — my birth-day is on the 10th of February, New Style, but if it interferes with any remarkable event, why rather than my country should lose her fame, I care not if I put my nativity back eleven days. Fine family patronage for your Calendar,' if that old lady of prolific memory were living, who lies (or lyes) in some church in London (saints forgive me, ་ "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the eternal regret of his native Devonshire, emigrates to Westphalia-Poor Lamb (these were his last words) if he wants any knowledge, he may apply to me,'-in ordinary cases I thanked him, I have an Encyclopedia' at hand, but on such an occasion as going over to a German university, I could not refrain from sending him the following propositions, to be by him defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Göttingen. thing in the manner of mortal looking- accept of her bed, which she offered him, and glasses?" offered herself to sleep in the kitchen; and that, in consequence of that severe cold, he is labouring under a bilious disorder, besides a depression of spirits, which incapacitates him from exertion when he most needs it. For God's sake, Southey, if it does not go against you to ask favours, do it now; ask it as for me; but do not do a violence to your feelings, because he does not know of this application, and will suffer no disappointment. What I meant to say was this,there are in the India House what are called extra clerks, not on the establishment, like me, but employed in extra business, by-jobs; these get about 50l. a year, or rather more, but never rise; a director can put in at any time a young man in this office, and it is by no means considered so great a favour as making an established clerk. He would think himself as rich as an emperor if he could get such a certain situation, and be relieved from those disquietudes which, I do fear, may one day bring back his distemper. "You know John May better than I do, but I know enough to believe that he is a good man; he did make me that offer I have mentioned, but you will perceive that such an offer cannot authorise me in applying for another person. "But I cannot help writing to you on the subject, for the young man is perpetually before my eyes, and I shall feel it a crime not to strain all my petty interest to do him service, though I put my own delicacy to the question by so doing. I have made one other unsuccessful attempt already; at all events I will thank you to write, for I am tormented with anxiety. "C. LAMB." "DEAR SOUTHEY, "Dear Southey, — Your friend John May has formerly made kind offers to Floyd of serving me in the India House, by the interest of his friend Sir Francis Baring. It is not likely that I shall ever put his goodness to the test on my own account, for my prospects are very comfortable. But I know a man, a young man, whom he could serve through the same channel, and, I think, would be disposed to serve if he were acquainted with his case. This poor fellow (whom I know "Poor Sam. Le Grice! I am afraid the just enough of to vouch for his strict integrity world, and the camp, and the university, have and worth) has lost two or three employments spoilt him among them. 'Tis certain he had from illness, which he cannot regain: he at one time a strong capacity of turning out was once insane, and, from the distressful something better. I knew him and that not uncertainty of his livelihood, has reason to long since, when he had a most warm heart. apprehend a return of that malady. He has I am ashamed of the indifference I have been for some time dependent on a woman sometimes felt towards him. I think the whose lodger he formerly was, but who can devil is in one's heart. I am under obligations ill afford to maintain him: and I know that to that man for the warmest friendship, and on Christmas night last he actually walked heartiest sympathy, even for an agony of about the streets all night, rather than sympathy exprest both by word, and deed, |