507. *_Elegiac Musings in the Grounds of Coleorton Hall_.[XIII.]

These verses were in fact composed on horseback during a storm, whilst I was on my way from Coleorton to Cambridge.  They are alluded to elsewhere. [Intercalated by Mrs. Quillinan—­My father was on my pony, which he rode all the way from Rydal to Cambridge that I might have the comfort and pleasure of a horse at Cambridge.  The storm of wind and rain on this day was so violent that the coach in which my mother and I travelled, the same coach, was all but blown over, and had the coachman drawn up as he attempted to do at one of his halting-places, we must have been upset.  My father and his pony were several times actually blown out of the road.  D.Q.]

508. Charles Lamb. [XIV.]

    From the most gentle creature nursed in fields.

This way of indicating the name of my lamented friend has been found fault with; perhaps rightly so; but I may say in justification of the double sense of the word, that similar allusions are not uncommon in epitaphs.  One of the best in our language in verse I ever read, was upon a person who bore the name of Palmer; and the course of the thought, throughout, turned upon the Life of the Departed, considered as a pilgrimage.  Nor can I think that the objection in the present case will have much force with any one who remembers Charles Lamb’s beautiful sonnet addressed to his own name, and ending—­

    ‘No deed of mine shall shame thee, gentle name!’

509. *_Ibid._

Light will be thrown upon the tragic circumstance alluded to in this Poem when, after the death of Charles Lamb’s sister, his biographer, Mr. Serjeant Talfourd, shall be at liberty to relate particulars which could not, at the time when his Memoir was written, be given to the public.  Mary Lamb was ten years older than her brother, and has survived him as long a time.  Were I to give way to my own feelings, I should dwell not only on her genius and intellectual powers, but upon the delicacy and refinement of manner which she maintained inviolable under most trying circumstances.  She was loved and honoured by all her brother’s friends, and others, some of them strange characters whom his philanthropic peculiarities induced him to countenance.  The death of C. Lamb himself was doubtless hastened by his sorrow for that of Coleridge, to whom he had been attached from the time of their being schoolfellows at Christ’s Hospital.  Lamb was a good Latin scholar, and probably would have gone to college upon one of the School foundations but for the impediment in his speech.  Had such been his lot, he would have probably been preserved from the indulgences of social humours and fancies which were often injurious to himself and causes of severe regret to his friends, without really benefiting the object of his misapplied kindness.

510. *_Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg_. [XV.]