Yours sincerely,
C. LAMB.
[The eclogue was "The Ruined Cottage," in which Joanna and her widowed mother are at first as happy as Rosamund Gray and old blind Margaret. As in Lamb's story so in Southey's poem, this state of felicity is overturned by a seducer.
"An old woman clothed in gray." This ballad still eludes research. Lamb says that the first line put him upon writing Rosamund Gray, but he is generally supposed to have taken his heroine's name from a song by Charles Lloyd, entitled "Rosamund Gray," published among his Poems in 1795. At the end of the novel Matravis, the seducer, in his ravings, sings the ballad.
The "something" upon which Lamb was then at work was his play "John
Woodvil," in those early days known as "Pride's Cure."
"Your old description of cruelty in hell." In "Joan of Arc." See Letter 3.
"If I do not put up those eclogues." Lamb does not return to this subject.
Lloyd had just gone to Cambridge, to Caius College.]
LETTER 37
CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
Nov. 3, 1798.