You use Lloyd very ill, never writing to him. I tell you again that his is not a mind with which you should play tricks. He deserves more tenderness from you.
For myself, I must spoil a little passage of Beaumont and Fletcher to adapt it to my feelings:—
"I am prouder
That I was once your friend, tho' now forgot,
Than to have had another true to me."
If you don't write to me now, as I told Lloyd, I shall get angry, and call you hard names—Manchineel and I don't know what else. I wish you would send me my great-coat. The snow and the rain season is at hand, and I have but a wretched old coat, once my father's, to keep 'em off, and that is transitory.
"When time drives flocks from field to fold,
When ways grow foul and blood gets cold,"
I shall remember where I left my coat. Meet emblem wilt thou be, old Winter, of a friend's neglect—cold, cold, cold! Remembrance where remembrance is due.
C. LAMB.
[The two poems included in this letter were printed in Blank Verse, a volume which Lamb and Lloyd issued in 1798.
Coleridge had written to Lloyd, we know, as late as July, because he sent him a version of the poem "This Lime-tree Bower, my Prison;" but a coolness that was to ripen into positive hostility had already begun. Of this we shall see more later.
The passage from Beaumont and Fletcher is in "The Maid's Tragedy" (Act
II., Scene I), where Aspatia says to Amintor:—