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NOTES TO "LETTERS"

Ar the time when the correspondence begins, the Lambs were living in lodgings at No. 7 Little Queen Street, Holborn, the site of the house being now occupied by Holy Trinity Church, which is contiguous to the Holborn Restaurant. The street is at this moment (Autumn 1903) in the act of disappearing, under the operations of the Holborn-to-Strand improvement scheme. The household consisted of the father and mother, Charles and Mary, and Sarah Lamb, who is always referred to as Aunt Hetty. John Lamb, junior, who had a good position in the South Sea House, lived elsewhere. Charles had been seven years from school and some five years at the India House, and seems to have made few friendships in the interval save among his former schoolfellows. The correspondence with Coleridge had not long begun. It seems probable that Coleridge had, from the time of his going up to Cambridge, rather forgotten his old schoolfellow, or allowed him to be lost sight of, for a few years; and that their re-union, and the true beginning of their literary friendship, dates from that Christmastide of 1794-5 which Coleridge spent in London, putting up at the Salutation and Cat in Newgate Street. It was at this time, I fancy, that Lamb first received a valid literary impulse from his friend, and not only an impulse, but some amount of new direction for his guidance in the world of books. I conceive him to have been, up to that point, a very docile pupil, in the main, of eighteenth-century models. How many letters had been exchanged in the interval between January 1795 and May 1796 we cannot well guess, but I fancy not many. Seven letters Coleridge had beside him (these he had been careful of, because they were full of literary criticisms) when there came to him the eighth letter that of 27th September 1796-which at once

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reflected something of its tragic interest upon all that had gone before it. He preserved it, therefore, and those seven which were still extant, because his imagination now set his friend before his eyes as one invested with the sublimity of tragic fates, with the consecration of mysterious and divine dealings. “I look upon you,” he said, “as a man called, by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes, into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God." These words are the key to all Coleridge's references to Lamb in all his earlier poems they are a key to his way of regarding him throughout his life.

LETTER I. (p. 1).—Mr May seems to have been a tailor. Robert Lovell was one of the Pantisocrats of 1794. He, Coleridge, and Southey married three sisters, the Misses Fricker-" Milliners of Bath "-as an incidental arrangement towards the carrying out of that social scheme.

The Watchman. This organ, representing S. T. Coleridge and the future of the world—was planned at the Rummer Tavern in Bristol at the end of 1795. Its history should be read in Biographia Literaria. It was preceded by Conciones ad Populum, or Addresses to the People (1795), pamphlet harangues containing such titles as this: "The Plot discovered; or, An Address to the People against Ministerial Treason," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

LETTER II. (p. 4)." Moschus" was Lovell's pseudonym. For James White, see "Essays of Elia" (pp. 225-7), and "Critical Essays" (pp. 179-84), and Notes

thereon.

P.

LETTER III. (p. 11).—Joan of Arc was Southey's Epic, to which, however, Coleridge contributed a few hundred lines of philosophical matter. 14, line 4 from foot: "The Monody on H[artley]" is somebody's error—not mine-detected too late. The H is, of course, for Henderson, a friend of Coleridge's friend (and early Mæcenas) Joseph Cottle, by whom the Monody in question was written. An account of him will be found at the end of Cottle's "Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey." The other Monody, mentioned on p. 16, is Coleridge's on

Chatterton. It ought to be understood that in these letters Lamb is discussing the proof sheets of the second edition of Coleridge's Poems-"To which are added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd"-published in 1797. The protest which follows (p. 19) refers to emendations attempted by the greater Ajax upon C. L.'s contributions to the volume.

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LETTERS IVA. and VI. (pp. 24-33).— "His" at p. 26, line 5, should evidently be "their"; and possibly "Southey was originally a slip of the pen for "Massinger." Perry (p. 29) was editor of the Morning Chronicle. The Allen mentioned at p. 31 and earlier as going to the bad is apparently the winsome youth described in "Essays of Elia" P. 43. Madame Mara (p. 32) was not, of course, named, nor intended, in the "Lines Composed in Concert Room" in which this occurs:

"Not cold, nor stern, my soul ! yet I detest

Those scented Rooms, where, to a gaudy throng,
Heaves the proud Harlot her distended breast
In intricacies of laborious song."

Mrs Reynolds was the lady who had taught Lamb his letters, and she was a pensioner of his all the later part of her life.

LETTER VII. (p. 33).—Coleridge's response to this heartrending message cannot be omitted:

[September 28, 1796.] "YOUR letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon me and stupefied my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter. I am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other consolation. Heaven knows that in the easiest fortunes, there is much dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit; much that calls for the exercise of patience and resignation; but in storms like these, that shake the dwelling and make the heart tremble, there is no middle way between despair and the yielding up of the whole spirit unto the guidance of faith. And surely it is a matter of joy that your faith in

Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with wormwood, I conjure you to have recourse in frequent prayer to his God and your God'; the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven. It is sweet to be roused from a frightful dream by the song of birds, and the gladsome rays of the morning. Ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the blackness and amazement of a sudden horror by the glories of God manifest and the hallelujahs of angels.

"As to what regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man called by sorrow and anguish, and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God! We e cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss without in some measure imitating Christ; and they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts of his character, and, bowed down and crushed underfoot, cry in fulness of faith, Father, thy will be done.'

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"I wish above measure to have you for a little while here; no visitants shall blow on the nakedness of your feelings; you shall be quiet, and your spirit may be healed. I see no possible objection, unless your father's helplessness prevent you, and unless you are necessary to him. If this be not the case, I charge you write me that you will come.

"I charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or despair. You are a temporary sharer in human miseries that you may be an eternal partaker of the Divine nature. I charge you, if by any means it is possible, come

to me.

"I remain your affectionate,

"S. T. COLERIDGE."

LETTERS IX.-XIII. (pp. 40-51).—Coleridge was at this time intent upon going to live in a cottage at Nether Stowey, near his friend Poole. Of course this, like all migrations,

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