* * *

Page 92. _On seeing Mrs. K---- B----_.

The late Mr. Dykes Campbell thought it very likely that these charming
verses were Lamb's. I think they may be, although it is odd that he
should not have reprinted anything so pretty. Mr. Thomas Hutchinson's
belief that they are Lamb's, added to that of their discoverer, leads me
to include them confidently here. Here and there it seems impossible
that the poem could come from any other hand: line 11 for example, and
the idea in lines 13 to 16, and the statement in lines 27 and 28. None
the less it must be borne in mind that one does but conjecture. The
lines are in _The Tickler Magazine_ for 1821.

* * * * *

Page 93. _To Emma, Learning Latin, and Desponding_.

First printed in _Blackwood's Magazine_, June, 1829.

Mary Lamb had other pupils in her time, among them Miss Kelly, the
actress, Mary Victoria Novello (afterwards Mrs. Cowden Clarke), and
William Hazlitt, the essayist's son. Emma was, of course, Emma Isola.
Sara Coleridge's translation of Martin Dobrizhoffer's _Historia de
Abiponibus_ under the title _Account of the Abipones_ was published in
1822, when she was only twenty.

"To think [Lamb wrote to Barton, on February 17, 1823, of Sara
Coleridge] that she should have had to toil thro' five octavos of that
cursed (I forget I write to a Quaker) Abbey pony History, and then to
abridge them to 3, and all for L113. At her years, to be doing stupid
Jesuits' Latin into English, when she should be reading or writing
Romances." Sara Coleridge's romance-writing came later, in 1837, when
her fairy tale, _Phantasmion_, appeared.

In its original form this sonnet in its fifth line ran thus:--

(In new tasks hardest still the first appears).

Derwent Coleridge read the sonnet in 1853 in Mrs. Moxon's album, and
copying it out, sent it to his wife, saying that he wished Sissy (his
daughter Christabel) to get it by heart. He added this note: "Charles
Lamb having discovered that this Sonnet consisted but of thirteen lines,
Miss Lamb inserted the 5th, which interrupts the flow and repeats a
rhime." Derwent Coleridge goes on to suggest two alternative lines:--

And hope may surely chase desponding fears

or

Let hope encouraged chase desponding fears.

Lamb, however, had already amended the fifth line (as in _Blackwood's
Magazine_) to--

To young beginnings natural are these fears.

Pa