was to have much effect upon his intellectual life, etc., etc. The receipt of a letter from Poole dissuading him from burying himself, an intellectual missionary, beyond the reach of human intercourse and libraries, fairly tore his being up by the roots, and made him very ill. But I do not know that Coleridge ever (p. 49) "dedicated his poems to Bowles," albeit he avowed Bowles to be "the bard of his idolatry."

LETTERS XIV.-XV. p. 51-55).-Continues the criticism of the proof sheets. The sonnet on Mrs Siddons will be found in vol. v. of this edition. In the next letter he sends the remainder of his own verses-The Tomb of Douglas and To a Young Lady going out to India—to Coleridge.

LETTER XVI. (p. 55).-The poetical present was evidently a batch of books, one of them being, "Poems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer, by her Grandson, Charles Lloyd," 1796. This book, a handsomely produced tome, contained also Lamb's lines The Grandame. Hence the remark (p. 56) about "the odd coincidence of too young men, in one age, carolling their grandmothers.' Another of the books would be Cottle's small volume containing his "Monody on Henderson." Dermody's poems were published in 1792.

LETTER XX. (p. 68).-Charles Lloyd was a member of a wealthy Quaker family, residing in Birmingham. The number of his brothers and sisters seems to have been anything between twelve and twenty-four, the head of this household (Charles Lloyd, senior) being also head of Lloyd's Bank. The father was in all senses a man of antique strength: of body, and mind and character: and a strong man in grappling with books no less than with business. His children, such of them as we hear of, were of another time and another type. Charles Lloyd the younger was a neurotic young man, in whom lack of humour was the beginning of evil: it may even have induced the epileptic tendency and the melancholy mania which he presently developed. For Robert Lloyd it is difficult to have much respect, though he seems to have

been a nice young man enough. Neither of these was satisfied with the paternal Quakerism; and the dissidence of dissent dissent from the social and theological fashion of their father-was leading other members of that family in all directions. As to Charles Lloyd, he had early abandoned the office-stool, as a poet needs must, and devoted himself to things which pleased him better: poetry, and metaphysics, for instance-or what he took to be metaphysics. Making the acquaintance of Coleridge in 1796, he received his father's consent to an arrangement by which he should go to reside with S. T. C. and his wife, as a boarder and pupil. The end, in the course of about a year, was disillusionment (as he doubtless called it) and certainly disagreement. When this stage came, he influenced the mind of Lamb against his friend, with consequences that might have been permanent. Lamb had by this time made the acquaintance of the whole family, and was greatly taken with them all at first. It was to him a new great initiation, knowing such a family—he was carried away by the strangeness, the strength, the charm. For Robert Lloyd especially he seems to have conceived a sort of romantic attachment; but he soon felt that Robert Lloyd, and all the younger Lloyds, were making themselves unhappy through sheer easy ignorance of the real troubles of life. There must have been an extensive correspondence to the Lloyds, to Charles Lloyd especially, and to Robert, and perhaps to some others of the family. But it seems all to have been destroyed, except those few letters to Robert, and some which were written to Mr Lloyd at a later date, but which consisted merely of comments upon some exercises in translation which he had submitted to Lamb for criticism.

LETTERS XXIII.-XXVII. (pp. 81-87).-David Hartley (Coleridge), and the small philosopher, the minute philosopher, are one and the same. He was at this time" "my favourite child" to Lamb, as the little Thornton Leigh Hunt (see "Poems") was about twenty years later. He is also frequently referred to under the name of "Pi-Pos,” that being the little boy's pronunciation of "Striped Opposum," one of his picture-book acquaintances. The verses

sent on April 15 are A Vision of Repentance. This is the "little gentleman "; condemned to "ride behind in the basket." Coleridge consigned it to an Appendix of the 1797 book. Mr May (p. 87) is not the tailor, but a friend of Southey's, whom we shall hear of again.

"

The

LETTERS XXVIII.-XXXI. (pp. 88-96).-The visit to Stowey had taken place, and Lamb had met not only Coleridge, but Coleridge's friend Poole, and Wordsworth, and his sister Dorothy, to say nothing of the minute philosopher. The true literary monument of the occasion, however, is to be found in Coleridge's poem This Lime-tree Bower, my Prison. "The Patriot (p. 88) is John Thelwall, long afterwards editor of the Champion. latter part of this holiday was spent with Lloyd (at Burton, near Christchurch), by whom Lamb was brought acquainted with Southey. Hence the allusion on p. 90. Manchineel, on p. 91, involves a reference to a poem of Coleridge's in which he had compared a false friend to the treacherous manchineel-tree, "which mixes its own venom with the rain and poisons him who rests beneath its shade." The letter which next follows affords a curious presage to the last of this early Coleridge series. The quarrel with his best friend was not so much a quarrel as an expression of morbidity, due in part to exhaustion and impatience. But mainly, however, it was due to the influence of the Lloyd people-Charles Lloyd, if not already some other members of that pestilential family-who so engaged the sympathies of Lamb, and so talked over all the foibles and all the faults of Coleridge, until they had substituted a half-sinister moral mirage of their own projecting in place of the aboundingand in many little things erring and childish-humanity of a very great man. This was the one moment in Lamb's life in which he was absolutely a fool; for he ought to have comprehended, when all had been said, that one Coleridge was worth a ship-load of Lloyds, to him and to the world. But he had lived a solitary life, was in many things extraordinarily young for his age, and his very virtues, of seriousness and sensibility, were just the things to make him liable to be hypnotised by voices that seemed to speak of wrongs, and that maintained an endless parable about the hatefulness

of insincerity, the sad corruption of intellectual pride. It was a fault, and it was repented in tears; and, as we shall see, it was forgiven as though it had never been. And this is well worth considering, as it marks the great consistency of Coleridge's feeling towards Lamb, which made resentment towards him impossible. Shadows came between Coleridge and Wordsworth, and they never quite cleared away again; between Coleridge and Southey there was a period of explicit and diffuse recrimination, and we cannot say that they ever liked or respected each other afterwards; and Southey could not even speak a magnanimous word when his old friend was lying newly dead. But, upon Charles Lamb, at the utter end of days, Coleridge's comment was-upon Charles Lamb and his sister, whom he saw in a retrospect of his life, moving together, parallel with him and never far off, down the spaces of the world through which he had travelled-upon them his comment was: "Dear to my heart, yea, as it were my heart."

LETTERS XXXII.-XXXIX. (pp. 97-111)." The Poetical Calendar," or some such combination, would seem to have been the first title fixed upon for the “Annual Anthology." Mystery of God is the poem afterwards entitled Living without God in the World. It appeared in the "Annual Anthology," 1799. The Dying Lover is a passage, discarded, from "John Woodvil."

LETTERS XLIV.-XLVI. (pp. 121-124).- "Returned from Herts" refers to a visit to Blakesware. "Gebor" is "Gebir "-Landor's poem.

Thomas Manning was a mathematical tutor at Cambridge, and so much of a pundit in other directions that a certain atmosphere of Oriental mystery seems to have hung about him. He was sometimes spoken of by Lamb, and by others, in a way that would seem almost to credit him with thaumaturgic attributes. He learned Chinese, later, and made a journey to Thibet, which, to be sure, is the very geographical expression of mystery. He was a friend of the Lloyds, and it was while on a visit to Charles Lloyd at Cambridge that Lamb made his acquaintance-in December 1799. He ranks among the select band of very interesting

men who have written very uninteresting letters. The Play is, of course, "John Woodvil"; and its first title was "Pride's Cure."

LETTERS XLVII.-L. (pp. 125-130).-The late Mr Dykes Campbell has pointed out that the true date of the first letter must be rather January 23-27. Coleridge had come to London again, and was writing political leaders for the Morning Post. Olivia was another member of the innumerable Lloyd family, a younger sister (see p. 130) of Charles. Mary Hayes was a literary woman, at once sentimental and "advanced." Writing to Southey on January 25th of this year, Coleridge says: "Miss Hayes I have seen. Charles Lloyd's conduct has been atrocious beyond what you stated. Lamb himself confessed to me that during the time in which he kept up his ranting, sentimental correspondence with Miss Hayes, he frequently read her letters in company, as a subject for laughter, and then sate down and answered them quite à la Rousseau." The exclamation at p. 130, "Huzza boys! and down with the Atheists! seems to indicate that Manning had expostulated with Lamb on account of the passage on p. 127, which, rollickingly humorous and impudent as it was meant to be, might have got Manning into difficulties in those days of reaction, repression, and espionage. So this "Huzza!" etc., was intended for the letter-openers.

my

LETTERS LI.-LII. (pp. 130-134).-Hetty (p. 130) was the old maidservant of the Lambs. "I send you Play"-i. e. "John Woodvil" in MS. Coleridge was at this time at Grasmere with the Wordsworths. The Miss Benje or Benjay who is so misnamed on p. 132 was a Miss Benger, author of a Life of Tobin, the dramatist. Of the Miss Porters, one was named Jane, and wrote "The Scottish Chiefs,' "Thaddeus of Warsaw," and other books that have counted their readers by the million.

LETTERS LV.-LXIV. (pp. 137-158).-Gutch had been a Christ's Hospital boy. Godwin's visit was to Curran, not to Grattan. The imitation of "the Old and Young Courtier " was the Ballad of Rich and Poor. The occasion