There is so little doubt in my own mind that this is Lamb's review that I have placed it in the body of this book and not in the Appendix. The internal evidence is very strong, particularly at the end, and in the use of such phrases as "joint strengths" and "younger impressibilities." But there is external evidence too. Leigh Hunt, writing of Keats, in his Lord Byron and his Contemporaries, 1828, says:—
I remember Charles Lamb's delight and admiration on reading this work [Lamia]; how pleased he was with the designation of Mercury as the "star of Lethe" (rising, as it were, and glittering, as he came upon that pale region); with the fine daring anticipation in that passage of the second poem,—
"So the two brothers and their murdered man,
Rode past fair Florence;"
and with the description, at once delicate and gorgeous, of Agnes [i.e., Madeline], praying beneath the painted window.
Lamb did not know Keats well. He had met him only a few times, the historic occasion being the dinner at Haydon's, in December, 1817, when the Comptroller of Stamps was present. But he admired his work (he told Crabb Robinson he considered it next to Wordsworth's), and he hated the treatment that Keats received from certain critics. Keats, by the way, mentions meeting Lamb at Novello's and having to endure some wretched puns.
[Page 239.] Sir Thomas More.
The Indicator, December 20, 1820. Signed ****. Leigh Hunt introduced the article in these words:—
The author of the Table-Talk in our last [see note on p. 466] has obliged us with the following pungent morsels of Sir Thomas More,—devils, we may call them. Brantome, noticing the oaths of some eminent Christian manslayers, and informing us that "the good man, Monsieur de la Roche du Maine, swore by 'God's head full of relics,'" adds in a parenthesis,—"Where the devil did he get that?"—"Ou diable avoit-il trouvè celuy-la?" We may apply this vivacious mode of questioning, with a more critical propriety, to those eminent Christian opposers of reformation, past, present, and to come, and ask them, where the devil they get a notion that they are on the side of charity? It is possible to hate for the sake of a loving theory; but it is a dangerous piece of self-flattery, and more likely to spring up in hating than loving minds. If it partakes of the reverent privileges of sorrow in those who are unsuccessful or oppressed, it is odious in those who are flourishing, and we are afraid is nothing but sheer dogmatism and tyranny even in men as great as Sir Thomas More.
Further proof of Lamb's authorship is contained in the circumstance that the passages here quoted are copied in one of his Commonplace Books.