which had been printed in Coleridge's Poems, 1796. The second, third and fourth of the sonnets that are copied in this letter were printed in the second edition of Coleridge's Poems, 1797. Anna is generally supposed to be Ann Simmons, referred to in the previous note.
Concerning "Flocci-nauci-what-d'ye-call-'em-ists," Canon Ainger has the following interesting note: "'Flocci, nauci' is the beginning of a rule in the old Latin grammars, containing a list of words signifying 'of no account,' floccus being a lock of wool, and naucus a trifle. Lamb was recalling a sentence in one of Shenstone's Letters:—'I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money.'" But "Pantisocratists" was, of course, the word that Lamb was shadowing. Pantisocracy, however—the new order of common living and high thinking, to be established on the banks of the Susquehanna by Coleridge, Southey, Favell, Burnett and others—was already dead.
William Cumberland Cruikshank, the anatomist, who attended Lamb's brother, had attended Dr. Johnson in his last illness.
Le Grice's pamphlet was A General Theorem for A******* Coll.
Declamation, by Gronovius, 1796.
Southey and Coleridge had been on somewhat strained terms for some time; possibly, as I have said in the previous note, owing to Southey's abandonment of Pantisocratic fervour, which anticipated Coleridge's by some months. Also, to marry sisters does not always lead to serenity. The spiriting away of Coleridge had been effected by Southey in January, 1795, when he found Coleridge at the Angel in Butcher Hall Street (vice the Salutation in Newgate Street) and bore him back to Bristol and the forlorn Sara Fricker, and away from Lamb, journalism and egg-hot.
Moschus was, as we have seen, Robert Lovell. No. V. of The Watchman contained sonnets by him.
The review of Burke's Letter to a Noble Lord was in No. I. of The Watchman.—The passage from "Religious Musings," under the title "The Present State of Society," was in No. II.—extending from line 260 to 357. [These lines were 279-378 1st ed.; 264-363 2nd ed.] The capital line in No. VI. is in the poem, "Lines on Observing a Blossom on the First of February, 1796."—Poor dead Parsons would be William Parsons (1736-1795), the original Sir Fretful Plagiary in Sheridan's "Critic." Lamb praises him in his essay on the Artificial Comedy.—In No. IX. of The Watchman were prose paraphrases of three Sclavonian songs, the first being "Song of a Female Orphan," and the second, "Song of the Haymakers."—John Logan's "Braes of Yarrow" had been quoted in No. III. as "the most exquisite performance in our language."—The invective against "the barterers" refers to the denunciation of the slave trade in No. IV. of The Watchman.
Cowper's recovery was only partial; and he was never rightly himself after 1793. The edition of Milton had been begun about 1790. It was never finished as originally intended; but Fuseli completed forty pictures, which were exhibited in 1799. An edition of Cowper's translations, with designs by Flaxman, was published in 1808, and of Cowper's complete Milton in 1810.
Wordsworth's poem would be "Guilt and Sorrow," of which a portion was printed in Lyrical Ballads, 1798, and the whole published in 1842.
Coleridge's "Monody on Chatterton," the first poem in his Poems on
Various Subjects, 1796, had been written originally at Christ's
Hospital, 1790: it continued to be much altered before the final
version.