Page 92. On seeing Mrs. K—— B——.
The late Mr. Dykes Campbell thought it very likely that these charming verses were Lamb's. I think they may be, although it is odd that he should not have reprinted anything so pretty. Mr. Thomas Hutchinson's belief that they are Lamb's, added to that of their discoverer, leads me to include them confidently here. Here and there it seems impossible that the poem could come from any other hand: line 11 for example, and the idea in lines 13 to 16, and the statement in lines 27 and 28. None the less it must be borne in mind that one does but conjecture. The lines are in The Tickler Magazine for 1821.
* * * * *
Page 93. To Emma, Learning Latin, and Desponding.
First printed in Blackwood's Magazine, June, 1829.
Mary Lamb had other pupils in her time, among them Miss Kelly, the actress, Mary Victoria Novello (afterwards Mrs. Cowden Clarke), and William Hazlitt, the essayist's son. Emma was, of course, Emma Isola. Sara Coleridge's translation of Martin Dobrizhoffer's Historia de Abiponibus under the title Account of the Abipones was published in 1822, when she was only twenty.
"To think [Lamb wrote to Barton, on February 17, 1823, of Sara Coleridge] that she should have had to toil thro' five octavos of that cursed (I forget I write to a Quaker) Abbey pony History, and then to abridge them to 3, and all for £113. At her years, to be doing stupid Jesuits' Latin into English, when she should be reading or writing Romances." Sara Coleridge's romance-writing came later, in 1837, when her fairy tale, Phantasmion, appeared.
In its original form this sonnet in its fifth line ran thus:—
(In new tasks hardest still the first appears).
Derwent Coleridge read the sonnet in 1853 in Mrs. Moxon's album, and copying it out, sent it to his wife, saying that he wished Sissy (his daughter Christabel) to get it by heart. He added this note: "Charles Lamb having discovered that this Sonnet consisted but of thirteen lines, Miss Lamb inserted the 5th, which interrupts the flow and repeats a rhime." Derwent Coleridge goes on to suggest two alternative lines:—