Poor dear Lloyd! I had a letter from him yesterday; his state of mind is truly alarming. He has, by his own confession, kept a letter of mine unopened three weeks, afraid, he says, to open it, lest I should speak upbraidingly to him; and yet this very letter of mine was in answer to one, wherein he informed me that an alarming illness had alone prevented him from writing. You will pray with me, I know, for his recovery; for surely, Coleridge, an exquisiteness of feeling like this must border on derangement. But I love him more and more, and will not give up the hope of his speedy recovery, as he tells me he is under Dr. Darwin's regimen.
God bless us all, and shield us from insanity, which is "the sorest malady of all."
My kind love to your wife and child.
C. LAMB.
Pray write, now.
[I have placed the poem at the head from the text of Coleridge's Poems, 1797; but the version of the letter very likely differed (see next letter for at least one alteration).
Fairfax's Godfrey of Bullen was his translation of Tasso, which is mentioned above.
Lloyd, who was undergoing one of those attacks of acute melancholia to which he was subject all his life, had been sent to Lichfield where Erasmus Darwin had established a sanatorium.
"The sorest malady of all." From Lamb's lines to Cowper.]