vicarious substitute be wanting, sacrifice (and 'twill be a piece of self-denial too), the "Epitaph on an Infant," of which its author seems so proud, so tenacious. Or, if your heart be set on perpetuating the four-line wonder, I'll tell you what do; sell the copyright of it at once to a country statuary. Commence in this manner Death's prime poet-laureate ; and let your verses be adopted in every village round, instead of those hitherto famous ones :

"Afflictions sore long time I bore ;

Physicians were in vain."

I have seen your last very beautiful poem in the Monthly Magazine: write thus, and you most generally have written thus, and I shall never quarrel with you about simplicity. With regard to my lines

"Laugh all that weep," &c.,

I would willingly sacrifice them; but my portion of the volume is so ridiculously little, that, in honest truth, I can't spare 'em. As things are, I have very slight pretensions to participate in the title - page. White's book is at length reviewed in the Monthly; was it your doing, or Dyer's, to whom I sent him?-or, rather, do you not write in the Critical?-for I observed, in an article of this month's, a line quoted out of that Sonnet on Mrs Siddons,

"With eager wondering, and perturb'd delight."

two

And a line from that Sonnet would not readily have occurred to a stranger. That That sonnet, Coleridge, brings afresh to my mind the time when you wrote those on Bowles, Priestley, Burke ;-'twas Christmases ago, and in that nice little smoky room at the Salutation, which is even now continually presenting itself to my recollection, with all its associated train of pipes, tobacco, egg-hot, welsh-rabbit, metaphysics, and poetry.-Are we never to meet again?

How differently I am circumstanced now! I have never met with any one-never shall meet with any one-who could or can compensate me for the loss of your society. I have no one to talk all these matters about to; I lack friends. I lack books to supply their absence: but these complaints ill become me. Let me compare my present situation, prospects, and state of mind, with what they were but two months back-but two months! O my friend, I am in danger of forgetting the awful lessons then presented to me! Remind me of them; remind me of my duty! Talk seriously with me when you do write! do write! I thank I thank you, from my heart I thank you, for your solicitude about my sister. She is quite well, but must not, I fear, come to live with us yet a good while. In the first place, because, at present, it would hurt her, and hurt my father, for them to be together: secondly, from a regard to the world's good report; for, I fear, tongues will be busy whenever that event takes place. Some have hinted, one man has pressed it on me, that she should be in perpetual confinement: what she hath done to deserve, or the necessity of such an hardship, I see not; do you ? I am starving at the India House, -near seven o'clock without my dinner; and so it has been, and will be, almost all the week. I get home at night o'erwearied, quite faint, and then to cards with my father, who will not let me enjoy a meal in peace; but I must conform to my situation ; and I hope I am, for the most part, not unthankful.

I am got home at last, and, after repeated games at cribbage, have got my father's leave to write awhile; with difficulty got it, for when I expostulated about playing any more, he very aptly replied, "If you won't play with me, you might as well not come home at all." The argument was unanswerable, and I set to afresh. I told you I do not approve of your omissions; neither do I quite coincide with you in your arrangements. I have not time to point out a better,

and I suppose some self-associations of your own have determined their place as they now stand. Your beginning, indeed, with the Joan of Arc lines I coincide entirely with. I love a splendid outset-a magnificent portico; and the diapason is grand. When I read the Religious Musings, I think how poor, how unelevated, unoriginal, my blank verse is "Laugh all that weep," especially, where the subject demanded a grandeur of conception; and I ask what business they have among yours? but friendship covereth a multitude of defects. I want some loppings made in the "Chatterton it wants but a little to make it rank among the finest irregular lyrics I ever read. Have you time and inclination to go to work upon it?

-or is it too late?—or do you think it needs none ? Don't reject those verses in your Watchman, "Dear native brook," &c. ; nor I think those last lines you sent me, in which "all effortless is without doubt to be preferred to "inactive." If I am writing more than ordinarily dully, 'tis that I am stupified with a tooth-ache. Hang it! do not omit 48, 52, and 53: what you do retain, though, call Sonnets, for heaven's sake, and not Effusions. Spite of your ingenious anticipation of ridicule in your Preface, the last five lines of 50 are too good to be lost; the rest are not much worth. My tooth becomes importunate: I must finish. Pray, pray, write to me: if you knew with what an anxiety of joy I open such a long packet as you last sent me, you would not grudge giving a few minutes now and then to this intercourse (the only intercourse I fear we two shall ever have) -this conversation with your friend: such I boast to be called. God love you and yours! Write to me when you move, lest I should direct wrong. Has Sara no poems to publish? Those lines, 129, are probably too light for the volume where the Religious Musings are; but I remember some very beautiful lines, addressed by somebody at Bristol to somebody

in London. God bless you once more-Thursday

Night.

C. LAMB.

XV.

TO THE SAME

[Fragment.]

Dec. 5, 1796.

At length I have done with verse-making; not that I relish other people's poetry less; their's comes from 'em without effort; mine is the difficult operation of a brain scanty of ideas, made more difficult by disuse. I have been reading "The Task" with fresh delight. I am glad you love Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton; but I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the "divine chit-chat of Cowper." Write to me, God love you and yours! C. L.

XVI.

TO THE SAME

Dec. 9th, 1796.

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. In truth, Coleridge, I am perplexed, and at times almost cast down. I am beset with perplexities. The old hag of a wealthy relation, who took my aunt off our hands in the beginning of trouble, has found out that she is "indolent and mulish "-I quote her own words, and that her attachment to us is so strong, that she can never be happy apart. The Lady, with delicate Irony, remarks that, if I am not an Hypocrite, I shall rejoyce to receive her again, and that it will be a means of making me more fond of home to have so dear a friend to come home to! The fact is she is jealous of my aunt's bestowing any kind recollections on us while she enjoys the patronage of her roof. She says she finds it inconsistent with her own "ease and tranquillity," to keep her any longer, and in fine summons me to fetch her home. Now, much as I should rejoyce to transplant the poor old

creature from the chilling air of such patronage, yet I know how straitened we are already, how unable already to answer any demand, which sickness or any extraordinary expence may make. I know this, and all unused as I am to struggle with perplexities, I am somewhat nonplussed, to say no worse. This prevents me from a thorough relish of what Lloyd's kindness and yours have furnished me with. I thank you though from my heart, and feel myself not quite alone in the earth.

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[loyd] calls the "feverish and romantic tye," hath too long domineered over all the charities of home: the dear domestic tyes of father, brother, husband. 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 Cowper's lines some of them are—

wrote.

"How gladly would the man recall to life
The boy's neglected sire; a mother, too,
That softer name, perhaps more gladly still,
Might he demand them at the gates of death."

I cannot but wish 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 wrongthey best expressed my feelings. There is a pensive state of recollection in which the mind is disposed to apostrophise 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, the 6th,