How natural, in a little girl, is this incongruity—­this impossibility!  Richardson would have given his “Clarissa,” and Rousseau his “Heloise” to have imagined it.  A fresh source of the pathetic bursts out before us, and not a bitter one.  If your Germans can show us anything comparable to what I have transcribed, I would almost undergo a year’s gargle of their language for it.  The story is admirable throughout—­incomparable, inimitable....

Landor wrote to Lady Blessington to the same effect.  Praise of this book is so pleasant to read that I quote his second letter too:—­

One of her tales is, with the sole exception of the Bride of Lammermoor, the most beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern.  A young girl has lost her mother, the father marries again, and marries a friend of his former wife.  The child is ill reconciled to it, but being dressed in new clothes for the marriage, she runs up to her mother’s chamber, filled with the idea how happy that dear mother would be at seeing her in all her glory—­not reflecting, poor soul! that it was only by her mother’s death that she appeared in it.  How natural, how novel is all this!  Did you ever imagine that a fresh source of the pathetic would burst forth before us in this trodden and hardened world?  I never did, and when I found myself upon it, I pressed my temples with both hands, and tears ran down to my elbows.

And Coleridge remarked to Allsop:—­

It at once soothes and amuses me to think—­nay, to know—­that the time will come when this little volume of my dear and well-nigh oldest friend, Mary Lamb, will be not only enjoyed but acknowledged as a rich jewel in the treasury of our permanent English literature; and I cannot help running over in my mind the long list of celebrated writers, astonishing geniuses, Novels, Romances, Poems, Histories and dense Political Economy quartos which, compared with Mrs. Leicester’s School, will be remembered as often and prized as highly as Wilkie’s and Glover’s Epics and Lord Bolingbroke’s Philosophies compared with Robinson Crusoe.

I have set up the book from the second edition, 1809, because the Lambs’ final text is probably to be found there.  Although certain additional minor differences were made in the eighth and ninth editions, 1821 and 1825, I think it very unlikely that they were made by Mary or Charles Lamb.  The principal alteration between the second and first editions is page 317, line 6, “your eyes were red with weeping,” for “The traces of tears might still be seen on your cheeks.”  The other differences are very slight, mostly being in punctuation, but there are also a few changes of word.  I leave these, however, to the Bibliographer.

The eighth edition was furnished with the following preface; which, though it is signed “The Author,” is not, I think, from either Mary or Charles Lamb’s pen.  I rather suspect Mrs. Godwin.