NOTES
Page 1. DEDICATION TO S.T. COLERIDGE, ESQ.
In 1818, when Lamb wrote these words, he was forty-three and Coleridge forty-six. The Works, in the first volume of which this dedication appeared, were divided into two volumes, the second, containing prose, being dedicated to Martin Burney, in the sonnet which I have placed on page 45. The publishers of the Works were Charles and James Ollier, who, starting business about 1816, had already published for Leigh Hunt, Keats, and Shelley.
For the allusion to the threefold cord, in the second paragraph, see the note on page 313.
The ****** Inn was the Salutation and Cat, in Newgate Street, since rebuilt, where Coleridge used to stay on his London visits when he was at Cambridge, and where the landlord is said to have asked him to continue as a free guest—if only he would talk and talk. Writing to Coleridge in 1796 Lamb recalls "the little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat, where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with Poesy;" and again, "I have been drinking egg-hot and smoking Oronooko (associated circumstances, which ever forcibly recall to my mind our evenings and nights at the Salutation)." Later he added to these concomitants of a Salutation evening, "Egg-hot, Welsh-rabbit, and metaphysics," and gave as his highest idea of heaven, listening to Coleridge "repeating one of Bowles's sweetest sonnets, in your sweet manner, while we two were indulging sympathy, a solitary luxury, by the fire side at the Salutation."
The line—
Of summer days and of delightful years
is from Bowles—"Sonnet written at Ostend."
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Page 3. Lamb's Earliest Poem. Mille Vice Mortis.
In a MS. book that had belonged to James Boyer of Christ's Hospital, in which his best scholars inscribed compositions, are these lines signed Charles Lamb, 1789. All Lamb's Grecians are there too. The book was described by the late Dykes Campbell, Lamb's most accomplished and enthusiastic student, in the Illustrated London News, December 26, 1891.
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Page 4. POEMS IN COLERIDGE'S POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, 1796.
This book was published by Cottle, of Bristol, in 1796. Lamb contributed four poems, which were thus referred to by Coleridge in the Preface: "The Effusions signed C.L. were written by Mr. CHARLES LAMB, of the India House—independently of the signature their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them." Lamb reprinted the first only once, in 1797, in the second edition of Coleridge's Poems, the remaining three again in his Works in 1818. I have followed in the body of this volume the text of these later appearances, the original form of the sonnets being relegated to the notes.
Page 4. As when a child on some long winter's night.
Some mystery attaches to the authorship of this sonnet. On December 1, 1794, Coleridge wrote to the editor of the Morning Chronicle saying that he proposed to send a series of sonnets ("as it is the fashion to call them") addressed to eminent contemporaries; and he enclosed one to Mr. Erskine. The editor, with almost Chinese politeness, inserted beneath the sonnet this note: "Our elegant Correspondent will highly gratify every reader of taste by the continuance of his exquisitely beautiful productions." The series continued with Burke, Priestley, Lafayette, Kosciusko, Chatham, Bowles, and, on December 29, 1794, Mrs. Siddons—the sonnet here printed—all signed S.T.C.
But the next appearance of the sonnet was as an effusion by Lamb in Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects, 1796, signed C.L.; and its next in the Poems, 1797, among Lamb's contributions. In 1803, however, we find it in Coleridge's Poems, third edition, with no reference to Lamb whatever. This probably means that Lamb and Coleridge had written it together, that Coleridge's original share had been the greater, and that Lamb and he had come to an arrangement by which Coleridge was to be considered the sole author; for Lamb did not reprint it in 1818 with his other early verse. Writing in 1796 to Coleridge concerning his treatment of other of Lamb's sonnets, Lamb says: "That to Mrs. Siddons, now, you were welcome to improve, if it had been worth it; but I say unto you again, Coleridge, spare my ewe lambs." Such a distinction drawn between the sonnet to Mrs. Siddons and the others supports the belief that Lamb had not for it a deeply parental feeling.
This was not the only occasion on which Lamb and Coleridge wrote a sonnet in partnership. Writing to Southey in December, 1794, Coleridge says: "Of the following sonnet, the four last lines were written by Lamb, a man of uncommon genius…."