It is assumed that the closing reference here is to Lamb’s romantic love for A——­ W——­; the “Anna” of some of his sonnets written about this time, the “Alice W——­” of the later “Dream Children,” and other of the essays, and that it was to the unhappy course of a deep love that Charles Lamb owed his brief period of mental aberration.  This year, 1796, which was to close in tragic gloom, was indeed marked almost throughout by unhappiness, lightened only by the close and friendly correspondence with Coleridge.  From these letters we learn that besides his own mental trouble, his sister had been very ill, his brother was laid up and demanded constant attention, having a leg so bad that for a time the necessity of amputation appeared to be probable.[1] Through it all Charles Lamb was conscious of being “sore galled with disappointed hope,” and felt something of enforced loneliness, consequent upon his being, as he described himself, “slow of speech and reserved of manners”; he went nowhere, as he put it, had no acquaintance, and but one friend—­Coleridge.  It is difficult, in reading much in these letters, to realize that the writer was but just come of age in the previous February.  The first twenty or so of the letters of Lamb which have come down to us are addressed to Coleridge (1796-1798).  Between the seventh of the series (5th July, 1796) and the eighth (27th September, 1796) there is a gap of time at the close of which happened the tragedy that coloured the whole of Charles Lamb’s subsequent life and caused him to give himself up to a life of devotion to which it would not be easy to find a parallel.

[Footnote 1:  It is curious that a quarter of a century later, when writing of his brother in “Dream Children,” Lamb speaks of his being lame-footed, and of having his limb actually taken off.]

The story is best told in the poignant simplicity of Lamb’s first letter to Coleridge after the calamity: 

     My dearest friend,

White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family.  I will only give you the outlines:  My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother.  I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp.  She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I hear she must be moved to an hospital.  God has preserved to me my senses, I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound.  My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.  Mr. Norris of the Blue-Coat School, has been very kind to us, and we have no other friends; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do.  Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with.  With me “the former things are passed away,” and I have something more to do than to feel.

     God Almighty have us all in His keeping!