ter. She was still in the asylum at Hoxton, and it was his earnest desire that she might return to live with him. By certain conditions and arrangements between him and the proper authorities, her release from confinement was ultimately brought about, and the brother's guardianship was accepted as sufficient for the future. She returned to share his solitude for the remainder of his life. The mania which had once attacked Charles, never in his case returned. Either the shock of calamity, or the controlling power of the vow he had laid on himself, overmastered the inherited tendency. But in the case of Mary Lamb it returned at frequent intervals through life, never again, happily, with any disastrous result. The attacks seem to have been generally attended with forewarnings, which enabled the brother and sister to take the necessary measures, and a friend of the Lambs has related how on one occasion he met the brother and sister, at such a season, walking hand in hand across the fields to the old asylum, both bathed in tears. CHAPTER III. FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE. [1796-1800.] EARLY in 1797 Charles Lamb and his sister began their life of "dual loneliness." But during these first years the brother's loneliness was often unshared. Much of Mary Lamb's life was passed in visits to the asylum, and the mention of her successive attacks is of melancholy recurrence in Charles' letters. Happily for the brother's sanity of mind, he was beginning to find friends and sympathies in new directions. What books had been to him all his life, and what education he had been finding in them, is evident from his earliest extant letters. His published correspondence begins in 1796, with a letter to Coleridge, then at Bristol, and from this and other letters. of the same year we see the first signs of that variety of literary taste so noteworthy in a young man of twentyone. The letters of this year are mainly on critical subjects. He encloses his own sonnets, and points out the passages in elder writers, Parnell or Cowley, to which he has been indebted. Or he acknowledges poems of Coleridge, sent for his criticism, and proceeds to express his opinion on them with frankness. He had been introduced to Southey, by Coleridge, some time in 1795, and he writes to the latter, "With Joan of Arc I have been delighted, amazed; I had not presumed to expect any thing of such excellence from Southey. Why, the poem is alone sufficient to redeem the character of the age we live in from the imputation of degenerating in poetry, were there no such beings extant as Burns, Bowles, and Cowper, and; fill up the blank how you please." It is noticeable also how prompt the young man was to discover the real significance of the poetic revival of the latter years of the eighteenth century. Burns he elsewhere mentions at this time to Coleridge in stronger terms of enthusiasm as having been the "God of my idolatry, as Bowles was of yours," nor was he less capable of appreciating the "divine chit-chat" of Cowper. The real greatness of Wordsworth he was one of the earliest to discover and to proclaim. And at the same time his imagination was being stirred by the romantic impulse that was coming from Germany. "Have you read," he asks Coleridge, "the ballad called 'Leonora' in the second number of the Monthly Magazine? If you have!!! There is another fine song, from the same author (Bürger) in the third number, of scarce inferior merit." But still more remarkable in the intellectual history of so young a man is the acquaintance he shows with the earlier English authors, at a time when the revival of Shakspearian study was comparatively recent, and when the other Elizabethan dramatists were all but unknown save to the archæologist. We must suppose that the library of Samuel Salt was more than usually rich in old folios, for certainly Lamb had not only "browsed" (to use his own expression), but had read and criticized deeply, as well as discursively. In a letter to Coleridge of this same year, 1796, he quotes with enthusiasm the rather artificial lines of Massinger in A very Woman, pointing out the "fine effect of the double endings:" "Not far from where my father lives, a lady, In all the bravery my friends could show me, Beaumont and Fletcher he quotes with no less delight, "in which authors I can't help thinking there is a greater richness of poetical fancy than in any one, Shakspeare excepted." Again, he asks the same inseparable friend, "Among all your quaint readings did you ever light upon Walton's Complete Angler? I asked you the question once before; it breathes the very spirit of innocence, purity, and simplicity of heart; there are many choice old. verses interspersed in it: it would sweeten a man's temper at any time to read it: it would Christianize every discordant angry passion." And while thus discursive in his older reading, he was hardly less so in the literature of his own century. He had been fascinated by the Confes sions of Rousseau, and was for a time at least under the influence of the sentimental school of novelists, the followers of Richardson and Sterne in England. So varied was 1 These lines are interesting as having been chosen by Lamb for a "motto" to his first published poems. As so used, they clearly bore a reference to his own patient wooing at that time. the field of authors and subjects on which his style was being formed and his fancy nourished. Long afterwards, in his essay on Books and Reading, he boasted that he could read anything which he called a book. "I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low." But this versatility of sympathy, which was at the root of so large a part of both matter and manner when he at length discovered where his real strength lay, had the effect of delaying that discovery for some time. His first essays in literature were mainly imitative, and though there is not one of them that is without his peculiar charm, or that a lover of Charles Lamb would willingly let die, they are more interesting from the fact of their authorship, and from the light they throw on the growth of Lamb's mind, than for their intrinsic value. Meantime, his life in the lonely Queen Street lodging was cheered by the acquisition of some new friends, chiefly introduced by Coleridge. He had known Southey since 1795, and some time in the following year, or early in 1797, he had formed a closer bond of sympathy with Charles Lloyd, son of a banker of Birmingham, a young man of poetic taste and melancholy temperament, who had taken up his abode, for the sake of intellectual companionship, with Coleridge at Bristol. One of the first results of this companionship was a second literary venture in which the new friend took a share. A second edition of Poems by S. T. Coleridge, to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd, appeared at Bristol, in the summer of 1797, published by Coleridge's devoted admirer, Joseph Cottle. "There were inserted in my former edition," writes Coleridge in the preface, "a few sonnets of my friend and |