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one but yourself, a volume containing the early pieces which were first published among your poems, and were fairly derivatives from you and them. My friend Lloyd and myself came into our first battle (authorship is a sort of warfare) under cover of the greater Ajax. How this association, which shall always be a dear and proud recollection to me, came to be broken,— who snapped the three-fold cord,-whether yourself (but I know that was not the case,) grew ashamed of your former companions,—or whether (which is by much the more probable) some ungracious bookseller was author of the separation, 1 cannot tell;-but wanting the support of your friendly elm, (I speak for myself,) my vine has, since that time, put forth few or no fruits; the sap (if ever it had any) has become in a manner dried up and extinct and you will find your old associate in his second volume, dwindled into prose and criticism. Am I right in assuming this as the cause? or is it that, as years come upon us, (except with some more healthy-happy spirits,) life itself loses much of its poetry for us? we transcribe but what we read in the great volume of Nature: and, as the characters grow dim, we turn off and look another way. You, yourself, write no Christabels, nor Ancient Marriners, now. Some of the Sonnets, which shall be carelessly turned over by the general reader,

may happily awaken in you remembrances,

which I should be sorry should be ever totally extinct--the memory

Of summer days and of delightful years.

Even so far back as to those old suppers at our old Inn, when life was fresh, and topics exhaustless, and you first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty and kindliness,

What words have I heard

Spoke at the Mermaid?

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The world has given you many a shrewd nip and gird since that time, but either my eyes are grown dimmer, or my old friend is the same, who stood before me three-and-twenty years ago

his hair a little confessing the hand of time, but still shrouding the same capacious brain,—his heart not altered, scarcely where it "alteration finds."

One piece, Coleridge, I have ventured to publish in its original form, though I have heard you complain of a certain over-imitation of the antique in the style. If I could see any way of getting rid of the objection, without re-writing it entirely, I would make some sacrifices. But when I wrote John Woodville, I never proposed to myself any distinct deviation from common English. I had been newly initiated in the writings of our elder dramatists; Beaumont, and Fletcher, and Massinger, were then a first love; and from what

I was so freshly conversant in, what wonder if my language imperceptibly took a tinge? The very time, which I had chosen for my story, that which immediately followed the Restoration, seemed to require in an English play, that the English should be of rather an older cast, than that of the precise year in which it happened to be written. I wish it had not some faults which I can less vindicate than the language.

I remain, my dear Coleridge,

Yours, with unabated esteem,

C. LAMB.

In Feb. 1819, application was made to Mr. Coleridge to give a course of lectures at the Russell Institution, to which he sent the following reply, addressed to Mr. Britton :-

DEAR SIR,

Highgate, 28th Feb., 1819.

First permit me to remove a very natural, "indeed almost inevitable, mistake, relative to

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my lectures; namely, that I have them, or that the lectures of one place or season are in any

way repeated in another. So far from it, that "on any point that I had ever studied (and on "no other should I dare discourse-I mean, that "I would not lecture on any subject for which "I had to acquire the main knowledge, even though a month's or three months' previous

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"time were allowed me; on no subject that "had not employed my thoughts for a large por"tion of my life since earliest manhood, free of "all outward and particular purpose)-on any

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point within my habit of thought, I should "greatly prefer a subject I had never lectured "on, to one which I had repeatedly given; and "those who have attended me for any two sea"sons successively will bear witness, that the "lecture given at the London Philosophical Society, on the Romeo and Juliet, for instance,

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was as different from that given at the Crown " and Anchor, as if they had been by two indi"viduals who, without any communication with "each other, had only mastered the same principles of philosophical criticism. This was most strikingly evidenced in the coincidence be "tween my lectures and those of Schlegel; such, " and so close, that it was fortunate for my moral "reputation that I had not only from five to "seven hundred ear witnesses that the passages

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had been given by me at the Royal Institution "two years before Schlegel commenced his lec"tures at Vienna, but that notes had been taken "of these by several men and ladies of high "rank. The fact is this; during a course of "lectures, I faithfully employ all the intervening

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days in collecting and digesting the materials, "whether I have or have not lectured on the same subject before, making no difference.

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The day of the lecture, till the hour of com"mencement, I devote to the consideration, what "of the mass before me is best fitted to answer the purposes of a lecture, that is, to keep the "audience awake and interested during the delivery, and to leave a sting behind, that is, a disposition to study the subject anew, under the light of a new principle. Several times, however, partly from apprehension respecting my health and animal spirits, partly from the "wish to possess copies that might afterwards “be marketable among the publishers, I have previously written the lecture; but before I had proceeded twenty minutes, I have been obliged to push the MS. away, and give the subject a new turn. Nay, this was so noto"rious, that many of my auditors used to threaten "me, when they saw any number of written papers on my desk, to steal them away; declaring they never felt so secure of a good lecture as when they perceived that I had not a single scrap of writing before me. I take far, far more pains than would go to the set composition of a lecture, both by varied reading and by meditation; but for the words, illustrations, &c., I know almost as little as any "one of the audience (that is, those of anything "like the same education with myself) what they "will be five minutes before the lecture begins. Such is my way, for such is my nature; and

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