Compare Lamb’s humorous reproach in a letter to Coleridge, September, 1797: “For myself I must spoil a little passage of Beaumont and Fletcher’s 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.”
Letters of Charles Lamb, i. 83.
[163] Charles Lamb’s visit to the cottage of Nether Stowey lasted from Friday, July 7, to Friday, July 14, 1797.
[164] According to local tradition, the lime-tree bower was at the back of the cottage, but according to this letter it was in Poole’s garden. From either spot the green ramparts of Stowey Castle and the “airy ridge” of Dowseborough are full in view.
[165] “He [Le Grice] and Favell ... wrote to the Duke of York, when they were at college, for commissions in the army. The Duke good-naturedly sent them.” Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, p. 72.
[166] Possibly he alludes to his appointment as deputy-surgeon to the Second Royals, then stationed in Portugal.
His farewell letter to Coleridge (undated) has been preserved and will be read with interest.
Portsmouth.