want from T. Poole."

There is a suspicious regularity about this schedule. Lamb wrote from
London in January: "Is it a farm that you have got? And what does your
worship know about farming?" His agricultural activity, in the month of
February, must have been chiefly prospective; and we may safely assume
that Poole supplied other things besides milk, and that the poet spent
more time reading, dreaming, and talking than he did raising potatoes. A
good deal of time must have been spent in the actual composition of his
poetry, including his play "Osorio," which was written in 1797, and in
studying the landscape beauties of the Quantocks. After the coming of
the Wordsworths to Alfoxden he spent much of the time walking between
Alfoxden and Stowey, or further afield with Wordsworth and his sister.
"My walks," he wrote afterwards, "were almost daily on the top of
Quantock, and among its sloping coombs. With my pencil and
memorandum-book in my hand, I was making studies, as the artists call
them, and often moulding them into verse with the objects and imagery
immediately before my eyes." This does not sound much like "raising corn
with the spade."

On Sundays he would sometimes preach before such Unitarian
congregations, within walking distance, as cared to hear him. But as he
would take no pay for his services his preaching contributed nothing
toward the support of his family. Lloyd, who was epileptic and subject
to moody variation in his attachments, was but an irregular housemate
after the first few months, and his contribution to the household
expenses was correspondingly uncertain. The future looked so dark in
October, 1797, that in spite of misgivings and former scruples he had
concluded that he "must become a Unitarian minister, as a less evil than
starvation." Accordingly he was in Shrewsbury in January, 1798,
preaching in the Unitarian church and on the point of accepting the
pastorate at a salary of L150 a year, when the sky brightened in another
quarter. Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood, sons of the famous potter and
friends of Thomas Poole, offered him an equal sum annually as a free
gift. They were wealthy men, well able to afford it; they attached no
condition to the gift except that he should devote himself entirely to
the study of poetry and philosophy, which was precisely what he wanted
to do; and he was not long in determining to accept the offer. "I
accepted it," he wrote to Wordsworth while still at Shrewsbury,