would mean the relegation of Lamb’s final text to the Notes, or to print them, at the expense of a slight infringement upon the chronological scheme, in their final 1818 state, and relegate all earlier readings to the Notes.  After much deliberation I decided that to print them in their final 1818 state was best, and this therefore I did in the large edition of 1903, to which the student is referred for all variorum readings, fuller notes and many illustrations, and have repeated here.  In order, however, that the scheme of Lamb’s 1818 edition of his Works might be preserved, I have indicated in the text the position in the Works occupied by all the poems that in the present volume have been printed earlier.

The chronological order, in so far as it has been followed, emphasises the dividing line between Lamb’s poetry and his verse.  As he grew older his poetry, for the most part, passed into his prose.  His best and truest poems, with few exceptions, belong to the years before, say, 1805, when he was thirty.  After this, following a long interval of silence, came the brief satirical outburst of 1812, in The Examiner, and the longer one, in 1820, in The Champion; then, after another interval, during which he was busy as Elia, came the period of album verses, which lasted to the end.  The impulse to write personal prose, which was quickened in Lamb by the London Magazine in 1820, seems to have taken the place of his old ambition to be a poet.  In his later and more mechanical period there were, however, occasional inspirations, as when he wrote the sonnet on “Work,” in 1819; on “Leisure,” in 1821; the lines in his own Album, in 1827, and, pre-eminently, the poem “On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born,” in 1827.

This volume contains, with the exception of the verse for children, which will be found in Vol.  III. of this edition, all the accessible poetical work of Charles and Mary Lamb that is known to exist and several poems not to be found in the large edition.  There are probably still many copies of album verses which have not yet seen the light.  In the London Magazine, April, 1824, is a story entitled “The Bride of Modern Italy,” which has for motto the following couplet:—­

My heart is fixt: 
This is the sixt.—­Elia.

but the rest of what seems to be a pleasant catalogue is missing.  In a letter to Coleridge, December 2, 1796, Lamb refers to a poem which has apparently perished, beginning, “Laugh, all that weep.”  I have left in the correspondence the rhyming letters to Ayrton and Dibdin, and an epigram on “Coelebs in Search of a Wife.”  I have placed the dedication to Coleridge at the beginning of this volume, although it belongs properly only to those poems that are reprinted from the Works of 1818, the prose of which Lamb offered to Martin Burney.  But it is too fine to be put among the Notes, and it may easily, by a pardonable stretch, be made to refer to the whole body of Lamb’s poetical and dramatic work, although Album Verses, 1830, was dedicated separately to Edward Moxon.