y humble cottage. This was in the summer of 1797, and then, or
in the following year, my correspondence with Lamb began. I saw more
of him in 1802 than at any other time, for I was then six months
resident in London. His visit to this county was before I came to it;
it must have been either in that or in the following year: it was to
Lloyd and to Coleridge.

I had forgotten one of his schoolfellows, who is still living--C.V.
Le Grice, a clergyman at or near Penzance. From him you might learn
something of his boyhood.

Cottle has a good likeness of Lamb, in chalk, taken by an artist named
Robert Hancock, about the year 1798. It looks older than Lamb was at
that time; but he was old-looking.

Coleridge introduced him to Godwin, shortly after the first number
of the _Anti-Jacobin Magazine and Review_ was published, with a
caricature of Gillray's, in which Coleridge and I were introduced with
asses' heads, and Lloyd and Lamb as toad and frog. Lamb got warmed
with whatever was on the table, became disputatious, and said things
to Godwin which made him quietly say, 'Pray, Mr. Lamb, are you toad
or frog?' Mrs. Coleridge will remember the scene, which was to her
sufficiently uncomfortable. But the next morning S.T.C. called on
Lamb, and found Godwin breakfasting with him, from which time their
intimacy began.

His angry letter to me in the _Magazine_ arose out of a notion that
an expression of mine in the _Quarterly Review_ would hurt the sale of
_Elia_; some one, no doubt, had said that it would. I meant to serve
the book, and very well remember how the offence happened. I had
written that it wanted nothing to render it altogether delightful but
a _saner_ religious feeling. _This_ would have been the proper word if
any other person had written the book. Feeling its extreme unfitness
as soon as it was written, I altered it immediately for the first word
which came into my head, intending to remodel the sentence when it
should come to me in the proof; and that proof never came. There can
be no objection to your printing all that passed upon the occasion,
beginning with the passage in the _Quarterly Review_, and giving his
letter.

I have heard Coleridge say that, in a fit of derangement, Lamb fancied
himself to be young Norval. He told me this in relation to one of his
poems.

If you will print my lines to him upon his _Album Verses_, I will
send you a corrected copy. You received his letters, I trust, which
Cuthbert to