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 familiarized to me, though I occasionally indulge in them. Still I feel a calm not unlike content. I think 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, which, I know, he will open to me? But it is better to give than to receive; and I was a very patient hearer and docile scholar in our winter evenings at Mr. May's; was I not, Col.? What I have owed to thee, my heart can ne'er forget. "God love you and yours. "Saturday." "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 beholding 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 Camænarum; 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 commonplace 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. "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, busband. The amiable and benevolent Cowper has a beautiful passage in his 'Task'-some natural and painful reflections on his deceased parents; and Hayley's sweet lines to his mother are notoriously the best things he ever wrote. Cowper's lines, some of them are "How gladly would the man recall to life "I cannot but smile to see my granny so gayly decked forth; though I think whoever altered 'thy' praises to 'her' praises, thy honoured memory to 'her' honoured memory, did wrong-they best expressed my feelings. There is a pensive state of recollection, in which the mind is disposed to apostrophize 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 dos and dids, 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 teazing 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, too, seem to be about realizing 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 VOL. I.-5 C 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 move. you are so soon to "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 barrenness.' After several disappointments, occasioned by the state of business at the India House, 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 cottagelife, 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 simple-hearted, 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.] Lamb's Literary Efforts and Correspondence with 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 by their genius, were usually named to be dismissed with a sneer. After a contemptuous notice of "The Mournful Muse" of Lloyd, Lamb receives his quietus in a line :— "Mr. Lamb, the joint author of this little volume, seems to be very properly associated with his plaintive companion."* In this year Lamb composed his prose tale, "Rosamund Gray," and published it in à 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 fales. 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 tread the windings of story which conducts 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 quivering over its lost images; feeling grown retrospective before its time, and tinging all things with a strange solemnity; hints of that craving after immediate appliances which might give impulse to a harassed frame, and confidence to struggling fancy, and of that escape from the pressure of agony into fantastic mirth which, in after life, made Lamb a problem to a stranger, while they endeared him a thousand-fold to those who really knew him. While the fulness of the religious sentiments and the scriptural cast of the language still partake 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 and genial frailties of an after day. The reflections he makes on the eulogistic character of all the inscriptions are drawn from his own childhood; for, when a very little boy, walking with his sister in a churchyard, he suddenly asked her, "Mary, where do the naughty people lie?" "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 feelings of the heart, and in affording great pleasure to the imagination, by exhibiting events and situations which, in the hands of a writer less conversant with the springs and energies of the moral sense, would make a very sorry figure."" While we acknowledge this scanty praise as a redeeming trait in the long series of critical absurdities, we cannot help observing how curiously misplaced all the laudatory epithets are; the sentiment being |