C. LAMB (as you may guess).
[Lamb refers in his opening sentences to a letter from himself to Manning which no longer exists. In Manning's last letter, dated February 24, he complains that he found on returning to Cambridge three copies of a letter from Lamb suggesting that he was offended because he had not answered.
The passage in George Dyer's Poems between pages 291 and 296 is long, but it is so quaint and so illustrative of its author's mind that I give it in full, footnotes and all, in the Appendix to this volume.
Stoddart we have already met. He had translated, with Georg Heinrich
Noehden, Schiller's Fiesco, 1796, and Don Carlos, 1798. The copy of
Dyer's Poems annotated by Lamb and Stoddart I have not seen.
"So, you don't think there's a Word's-worth…" Manning had written, on February 24, 1801, of the second volume of Lyrical Ballads: "I think 'tis utterly absurd from one end to the other. You tell me 'tis good poetry—if you mean that there is nothing puerile, nothing bombast or conceited, everything else that is so often found to disfigure poetry, I agree, but will you read it over and over again? Answer me that, Master Lamb." The three letters containing the northern castigation are unhappily lost.
"My back tingles." "Back" is not Lamb's word.
"I am going to change my lodgings." The Lambs were still at 34 Southampton Buildings; they moved to 16 Mitre Court Buildings just before Lady Day, 1801.
"James, Walter, and the parson." In Wordsworth's poem "The Brothers."
Exeter Change, which stood where Burleigh Street now is, was a great building, with bookstalls and miscellaneous stalls on the ground floor and a menagerie above. It was demolished in 1829.]