the 11th, 12th and 13th. All were signed C. L. Coleridge had permitted himself to make various alterations. The following parallel will show the kind of treatment to which Lamb objected:

In Effusion 12 Lamb had written :

Or we might sit and tell some tender tale
Of faithful vows repaid by cruel scorn,

A tale of true love, or of friend forgot;
And I would teach thee, lady, how to rail
In gentle sort, on those who practise not
Or Love or pity, though of woman born.

But ah! sweet scenes of fancied bliss, adieu !
On rose-leaf beds amid your faery bowers
I all too long have lost the dreamy hours!
Beseems it now the sterner Muse to woo,
If haply she her golden meed impart
To realize the vision of the heart.

Again in the 13th Effusion, "Written at Midnight, by the Seaside, after a Voyage," Lamb had dotted out the last two lines. Coleridge substituted the couplet :

How Reason reel'd! What gloomy transports rose!

Till the rude dashings rock'd them to repose.

1796

WILLIAM EVANS

"Thinking on divers things foredone."

25

Adapted from Burton's

"Author's Abstract of Melancholy," prefixed to the Anatomy:

When I go musing all alone,

Thinking of divers things fore-known.

"Ask my friend the aiding verse."

"To a Friend" (Lamb), line 4:—

66

From Coleridge's lines

I ask not now, my friend! the aiding verse.

Propino tibi alterandum . . . "I pass it on to you for alteration," etc. Probably a modification of Terence (Eun., V., 9, 57), "hunc comedendum et deridendum vobis propino."

Effusion 2, which Lamb would omit, was the sonnet "To Burke;" Effusion 3, "To Mercy" (on Pitt); Effusion 5, "To Erskine;" Effusion 7, Lamb and Coleridge's joint sonnet "To Mrs. Siddons; " and Effusion 8, "To Koskiusko." The "Lines Written in Early Youth were afterwards called "Lines on an Autumnal Evening." The The poem called "Recollection," in The Watchman,

was reborn as "Sonnet to the River Otter." The lines on the early blossom were praised by Lamb in a previous letter (see page 8). The 10th Effusion was the sonnet to Earl Stanhope.

Godwin was William Godwin, the philosopher. We shall later see much of him. It was Allen's wife, not Stoddart's, who had a grown-up daughter.

I have not identified the prosodist, but Ned Evans was a novel in four volumes, published in 1796, an imitation of Tom Jones, which presumably Coleridge was reviewing for the Critical Review. A notice, a very short one, appeared in the November number.

Young W. Evans is said by Mr. Dykes Campbell to have been the only son of the Mrs. Evans who befriended Coleridge when he was at Christ's Hospital, the mother of his first love, Mary Evans. Evans was at school with Coleridge and Lamb. We shall meet with him again.

"On life's wide plain, friendless.” Oxford, 1786":

From Bowles' sonnet "At

Yet on life's wide plain

Left fatherless, where many a wanderer sighs
Hourly, and oft our road is lone and long.

William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), the sonneteer, who had exerted so powerful a poetical influence on Coleridge's mind, was at this time rector of Cricklade in Wiltshire (1792-1797), but had been ill at Bath. The elegy in question was "Elegiac Stanzas written during sickness at Bath, December, 1795." The lines quoted by Lamb are respectively in the 6th, 4th, 5th and 19th Stanzas. This was Lamb's sonnet to Innocence :

We were two pretty babes, the youngest she,
The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween,
And INNOCENCE her name. The time has been,
We two did love each other's company;
Time was, we two had wept to have been apart.
But when by show of seeming good beguiled,
I left the garb and manners of a child,
And my first love for man's society,
Defiling with the world my virgin heart-
My loved companion dropped a tear, and fled,
And hid in deepest shades her awful head.
Beloved, who shall tell me where thou art-
In what delicious Eden to be found-

That I may seek thee the wide world around?

Coleridge's strictures upon it no longer exist. In a footnote to the pamphlet of sonnets which he compiled during this year (see page 69) he praised it.

Sophia Pringle. Probably the subject of a Catnach or other popular broadside. I have not found it.

Izaak Walton. Lamb returns to praises of The Compleat Angler in his letter to Robert Lloyd referred to on page 212.

The reference to the Unitarian chapel bears probably upon an offer of a pulpit to Coleridge, who at that time occasionally preached. The tutorship was probably that offered to Coleridge by Mrs. Evans of Darley Hall (no relation to Mary Evans) who wished him to teach her sons. Neither project was carried through.]

LETTER 4

(Apparently a continuation of a letter the first part of which is missing)

CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE

UNFURNISHED

[Begun] Monday Night [June 13, 1796].

NFURNISHED at present with any sheet-filling subject, I shall continue my letter gradually and journal-wise. My second thoughts entirely coincide with your comments on "Joan of Arc," and I can only wonder at my childish judgment which overlooked the 1st book and could prefer the 9th: not that I was insensible to the soberer beauties of the former, but the latter caught me with its glare of magic,—the former, however, left a more pleasing general recollection in my mind. Let me add, the 1st book was the favourite of my sister-and I now, with Joan, often "think on Domremi and the fields of Arc." I must not pass over without acknowledging my obligations to your full and satisfactory account

1796

MRS. FIELD

27

of personifications. I have read it again and again, and it will be a guide to my future taste. Perhaps I had estimated Southey's merits too much by number, weight, and measure. I now agree completely and entirely in your opinion of the genius of Southey. Your own image of melancholy is illustrative of what you teach, and in itself masterly. I conjecture it is "disbranched" from one of your embryo "hymns." When they are mature of birth (were I you) I should print 'em in one separate volume, with "Religious Musings" and your part of the "Joan of Arc." Birds of the same soaring wing should hold on their flight in company. Once for all (and by renewing the subject you will only renew in me the condemnation of Tantalus), I hope to be able to pay you a visit (if you are then at Bristol) some time in the latter end of August or beginning of September for a week or fortnight; before that time, office business puts an absolute veto on my coming.

"And if a sigh that speaks regret of happier times appear,

A glimpse of joy that we have met shall shine and dry the tear."

Of the blank verses I spoke of, the following lines are the only tolerably complete ones I have writ out of not more than one hundred and fifty. That I get on so slowly you may fairly impute to want of practice in composition, when I declare to you that (the few verses which you have seen excepted) I have not writ fifty lines since I left school. It may not be amiss to remark that my grandmother (on whom the verses are written) lived housekeeper in a family the fifty or sixty last years of her life—that she was a woman of exemplary piety and goodness-and for many years before her death was terribly afflicted with a cancer in her breast which she bore with true Christian patience. You may think that I have not kept enough apart the ideas of her heavenly and her earthly master but recollect I have designedly given in to her own way of feelingand if she had a failing, 'twas that she respected her master's family too much, not reverenced her Maker too little. The lines begin imperfectly, as I may probably connect 'em if I finish at all,—and if I do, Biggs shall print 'em in a more economical way than you yours, for (Sonnets and all) they won't make a thousand lines as I propose completing 'em, and the substance must be wire-drawn.

Tuesday Evening, June 14, 1796.

I am not quite satisfied now with the Chatterton, and with your leave will try my hand at it again. A master joiner, you know, may leave a cabinet to be finished, when his own hands are full. To your list of illustrative personifications, into which a fine imagination enters, I will take leave to add the following from

Beaumont and Fletcher's "Wife for a Month; " 'tis the conclusion of a description of a sea-fight ;-"The game of death was never played so nobly; the meagre thief grew wanton in his mischiefs, and his shrunk hollow eyes smiled on his ruins." There is fancy in these of a lower order from "Bonduca ; "-"Then did I see these valiant men of Britain, like boding owls creep into tods of ivy, and hoot their fears to one another nightly." Not that it is a personification; only it just caught my eye in a little extract book I keep, which is full of quotations from B. and F. in particular, in which authors I can't help thinking there is a greater richness of poetical fancy than in any one, Shakspeare excepted. Are you acquainted with Massinger? At a hazard I will trouble you with a passage from a play of his called "A Very Woman." The lines are spoken by a lover (disguised) to his faithless mistress. You will remark the fine effect of the double endings. You will by your ear distinguish the lines, for I write 'em as prose. "Not far from where my father lives, a lady, a neighbour by, blest with as great a beauty as nature durst bestow without undoing, dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then, and blest the house a thousand times she dwelt in. This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, when my first fire knew no adulterate incense, nor I no way to flatter but my fondness; in all the bravery my friends could show me, in all the faith my innocence could give me, in the best language my true tongue could tell me, and all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me, I sued and served; long did I serve this lady, long was my travail, long my trade to win her; with all the duty of my soul I SERVED HER." "Then she must love." "She did, but never me : she could not love me; she would not love, she hated,―more, she

scorn'd me; and in so poor and base a way abused me for all my

services, for all my bounties, so bold neglects flung on me "—" What out of love, and worthy love, I gave her (shame to her most unworthy mind,) to fools, to girls, to fiddlers and her boys she flung, all in disdain of me." One more passage strikes my eye from B. and F.'s "Palamon and Arcite." One of 'em complains in prison: "This is all our world; we shall know nothing here but one another, hear nothing but the clock that tells our woes; the vine shall grow, but we shall never see it," &c. Is not the last circumstance exquisite? I mean not to lay myself open by saying they exceed Milton, and perhaps Collins, in sublimity. But don't you conceive all poets after Shakspeare yield to 'em in variety of genius? Massinger treads close on their heels; but you are most probably as well acquainted with his writings as your humble servant. My quotations, in that case, will only serve to expose my barrenness of matter. Southey in simplicity and tenderness, is excelled decidedly only, I think, by Beaumont and F. in his [their]