["Little drawer where I keep …" Lamb soon lost the habit of keeping any letters, except Manning's.
"Wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid." Lamb's own line. See sonnet quoted above.
Lamb's visit to Stowey was made in July, as we shall see.
"Grill will be Grill." See the Faerie Queene, Book II., Canto 12,
Stanzas 86 and 87. "Let Gryll be Gryll" is the right text.
Lloyd had joined the poetical partnership, and his poems were to precede Lamb's in the 1797 volume. "Lloyd's connections," Coleridge had written to Cottle, "will take off a great many [copies], more than a hundred."
Coleridge's tragedy was "Osorio," of which we hear first in March, 1797, when Coleridge tells Cottle that Sheridan has asked him to write a play for Drury Lane. It was finished in October, and rejected. In 1813, much altered, it was performed under its new title, "Remorse," and published in book form. Lamb wrote the Prologue.
The "last poem" of which Lamb speaks was "The Vision of Repentance." The good line was altered to—
"Wide branching trees, with dark green leaf rich clad,"
when the poem appeared in the Appendix ("the basket," as Lamb calls it) of the 1797 volume.
"Your picture of idiocy." Compare S. T. Coleridge to Thomas Poole, dated "Greta Hall, Oct. 5, 1801" (Thomas Poole and His Friends): "We passed a poor ideot boy, who exactly answered my description; he