[61]. Toto carere possum. Cf. Martial, Epig. XI, 56.
[61]. Camoëns. The author of the Portuguese Lusiad (1572) which narrates the adventures of Vasco da Gama.
[62]. Milton. Quoted from Sonnet XI.—On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises.
[63]. Snatching a grace, etc. Pope's Essay on Criticism, l. 153.
Charles Lamb
Most of Lamb's earlier poetical productions appeared in conjunction with the work of other poets. Four of his sonnets were printed with Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects (1796), and he was more fully represented in Poems by S.T. Coleridge. Second Edition. To which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd (1797). In the following year appeared Blank Verse, by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb. For new and interesting material concerning the three poets, see E.V. Lucas' Charles Lamb and the Lloyds (1899). Lloyd (1775-1839) wrote melancholy verses and a sentimental, epistolary novel Edmund Oliver, but nothing of permanent value. However, in 1798, he was almost as well known as Coleridge, and was hailed in some quarters as a promising poet.
The Monthly Rev., XXVII, n.s. (104-105), in September, 1798, published the critique of Blank Verse which is here reprinted. Its principal interest lies in the scant attention shown to Lamb, although the volume contained his best poem—the tender Old Familiar Faces. Dr. Johnson's characterization of blank-verse as "poetry to the eye" will be found at the end of his Life of Milton as a quotation from "an ingenious critic."
Lamb's drama, John Woodvil (1802), written in imitation of later Elizabethan models, was a failure. It was unfavorably noticed in the Monthly Rev., XL, n.s., p. 442 and at greater length in the Edinburgh Rev., II, p. 90 ff.
Many years later (1830) Lamb prepared his collection of Album-Verses at the request of his friend Edward Moxon, who had achieved some fame as a poet and was enabled (by the generous aid of Samuel Rogers) to begin his more lucrative career as a publisher. Three years after the appearance of Album-Verses, he married Lamb's adopted daughter, Emma Isola. The Album-Verses, like most of their kind, were a collection of small value; the Literary Gazette, 1830 (441-442), consequently lost no time in assailing them. The Athenæum, 1830, p. 435, at that time the bitter rival of the Gazette, published a more favorable review, and a few weeks later (p. 491) printed Southey's verses, To Charles Lamb, on the Reviewal of his Album-Verses in the Literary Gazette, together with a sharp commentary on the methods of the Gazette. Several times during that year the Athenæum assailed the system of private puffery which was followed by the Gazette and eventually caused its downfall. There is a reply to the Athenæum in the Literary Gazette, 1833, p. 772.