In the first feeling of his horror after his mother’s death, and with a sense of all the responsibility that had fallen upon his shoulders Lamb had disclaimed any further interest in literature, had asked Coleridge not to mention it, not to include his name in a projected volume.  Yet he was to find in reading and in writing—­and in the friendship of those who cared for reading and writing—­at once a solace and a joy in his own life and a passport to the affections of generations of readers.  In 1797 there was published a new edition of Coleridge’s Poems, “to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd.”  In the summer of the same year he spent a week at Nether Stowey with Coleridge,[2] and in the autumn he and Lloyd passed a fortnight with Southey in Hampshire.  He was consolidating the friendships which were to bind him ever closer to letters.  With Coleridge, as we have seen, he was on terms of intimacy, and when that poet went abroad for a while Southey became Lamb’s most intimate correspondent.  The keenly sensitive young man later resented being dubbed “gentle-hearted,” and an apparent assumption of lofty superiority on the part of his friend, stung him to a memorable retort.  We may take the story from one of Lamb’s own letters to Southey: 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the eternal regret of his native Devonshire, emigrates to Westphalia:  “poor Lamb” (these were his last words), if he wants any knowledge, he may apply to me.  In ordinary cases I thank him.  I have an “Encyclopaedia” at hand; but on such an occasion as going over to a German University, I could not refrain from sending him the following proposition to be by him defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Gottingen.

[Footnote 2:  Coleridge, disabled by some slight accident, was unable to accompany his friends on their walks during this visit of the Lambs, and once when they had left him he wrote the beautiful poem, “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison,” which he “addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London.”  In it that friend was referred to in this passage: 

                  Yes! they wander on
    In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
    My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
    And hungered after Nature, many a year,
    In the great City pent, winning thy way
    With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
    And strange calamity!
]

The Theses, as given in the letter to Coleridge, are as follows: 

     Theses Quaedam Theologicae.

     First, Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true
     man?

     Second, Whether the Archangel Uriel could affirm an untruth?
     and if he could, whether he would?

     Third, Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather
     to be reckoned among those qualities which the school men
     term virtutes minus splendidae?