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 took with him to town in October.  I wish they had been more, and wish, also, that I had more to tell you concerning him, and what I have told were of more value.  But it is from such fragments of recollection, and such imperfect notices, that the materials for biography must, for the most part, be collected.

=CHARLES LAMB=

1775-1834

TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Temporary frenzy

27 May, 1796.

...  Coleridge!  I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol.  My life has been somewhat diversified of late.  The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton.  I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite anyone.  But mad I was!  And many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were told.  My sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will some day communicate to you.  I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which, if I finish, I publish....  Coleridge! it may convince you of my regards for you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.

TO THE SAME

A friend in need

Thursday, 11 June, 1796.

...  After all, you cannot, nor ever will, write anything with which I shall be so delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat.  You came to town, and I saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding with recent wounds.  Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed hope.  You had