in preference to the 'Religious Musings,' I cannot help conceiving of you, and of the author of that, as two different persons, and I think you a very vain man.

London porter confers. The versification is, throughout, to my ears unexceptionable, with no disparagement to the measure of the 'Religious Musings,' which is exactly fitted to the thoughts.

"You were building your house on a rock, when you rested your fame on that poem. I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the licence of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton. Now, this is delicate flattery, indirect flattery. Go on with your 'Maid of Orleans,' and be content to be second to yourself. I shall become a convert to it, when 'tis finished.

"I have been re-reading your letter; much of it I could dispute, but with the latter part of it, in which you compare the two Joans with respect to their predispositions for fanaticism, I, toto corde, coincide; only I think that Southey's strength rather lies in the description of the emotions of the Maid under the weight of inspiration,-these (I see no mighty difference between her describing them or you describing them), these if you only equal, the previous admirers of his poem, as is natural, will prefer his, if you "This afternoon I attend the funeral of my surpass, prejudice will scarcely allow it, and poor old aunt, who died on Thursday. I own I scarce think you will surpass, though your I am thankful that the good creature has specimen at the conclusion, I am in earnest, ended all her days of suffering and infirmity. I think very nigh equals them. And in an She was to me the 'cherisher of infancy,' and account of a fanatic or of a prophet, the one must fall on those occasions into reflecdescription of her emotions is expected to be tions, which it would be common-place to most highly finished. By the way, I spoke enumerate, concerning death, 'of chance and far too disparagingly of your lines, and, I am change, and fate in human life.' Good God, ashamed to say, purposely. I should like you who could have foreseen all this but four to specify or particularise; the story of the months back! I had reckoned, in particular, 'Tottering Eld,' of 'his eventful years all on my aunt's living many years; she was a come and gone,' is too general; why not very hearty old woman. But she was a mere make him a soldier, or some character, skeleton before she died, looked more like a however, in which he has been witness to corpse that had lain weeks in the grave, frequency of cruel wrong and strange than one fresh dead. Truly the light is distress!' I think I should. When I sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes laughed at the 'miserable man crawling to behold the sun; but let a man live many from beneath the coverture,' I wonder I days and rejoice in them all, yet let him did not perceive that it was a laugh of remember the days of darkness, for they horror-such as I have laughed at Dante's shall be many. Coleridge, why are we to picture of the famished Ugolino. Without live on after all the strength and beauty of falsehood, I perceive an hundred beauties in existence are gone, when all the life of life is your narrative. Yet I wonder you do not fled, as poor Burns expresses it? Tell Lloyd perceive something out-of-the-way, something I have had thoughts of turning Quaker, and unsimple and artificial, in the expression have been reading, or am rather just begin' voiced a sad tale.' I hate made-dishes at ning to read, a most capital book, good the muses' banquet. I believe I was wrong thoughts in good language, William Penn's in most of my other objections. But surely 'No Cross, no Crown,' I like it immensely. 'hailed him immortal,' adds nothing to the Unluckily I went to one of his meetings, terror of the man's death, which it was your tell him, in St. John-street, yesterday, and business to heighten, not diminish by a saw a man under all the agitations and phrase, which takes away all terror from it. workings of a fanatic, who believed himself I like that line, 'They closed their eyes in under the influence of some 'inevitable sleep, nor knew 'twas death.' Indeed there presence.' This cured me of Quakerism; is scarce a line I do not like. Turbid I love it in the books of Penn and Woolman, ecstacy' is surely not so good as what you but I detest the vanity of a man thinking he had written, 'troublous.' Turbid rather speaks by the Spirit, when what he says an suits the muddy kind of inspiration which ordinary man might say without all that

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"June 18th, 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?)

our more favoured brethren in fatuity? I send you a trifling letter; but you have only to think that I have been skimming the superficies of my mind, and found it only froth. Now, do write again; you cannot believe how I long and love always to hear about you. Yours, most affectionately,

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 press me, very kindly do you press me, to come to Stowey; obstacles, strong as death, prevent me at present; maybe I may be able to come before the year is out; believe me, I will come as soon as I can, but I dread naming a probable time. It depends on fifty 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.

"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.'

"To adopt your own expression, I call this a 'rich' line, a fine full line. And some others I thought even beautiful. Believe me, my little gentleman will feel some repugnance

"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, 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 evening meetings at Mr. May's:

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. he ever wrote. Cowper's lines, some of them

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.]

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.

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

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

* Monthly Review, Sept. 1798.