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MY DEAR POOLE,

"GRASMERE, KENDAL, WESTMORELAND. [Postmark, July 1801.]

At present I have taken up the pen solely on Coleridge's account, and must confine my letter to him and his affairs. I know how much you will be concerned to hear that his health cannot be said to be much better, indeed any better at all. He is apparently quite well one day, and the next the fit comes on him again with as much violence as ever. These repeated shocks cannot but greatly weaken his constitution; and he is himself afraid that, as the disease (which is manifestly gout) keeps much about his stomach, he may be carried off by it, with little or no warning. We all here feel deeply persuaded that nothing can do him any effectual good, but a change of climate. And it is on this subject that I have

now written to you.

The place which he thinks of going to is the Azores ; both for the climate and the baths-which are known to be exceedingly salutary in cases of gout and rheumatismand on account of the cheapness of living there, and the little expense in getting thither. But you know well how poor Coleridge is situated with respect to money affairs; indeed, it will be impossible for him to accomplish the journey without some assistance. Further, it seems to me absolutely necessary that this should be procured in a manner the least burthensome to his feelings possible. If the thought of it should hang upon his mind when he is away, it will undo, or rather prevent, all the salutary effects of the climate. . . . I have thought it my duty to mention these circumstances to you, as being a person more interested than perhaps any other in what befalls our common friend. . . . As Coleridge at present does not intend to take his wife or children with him, I should hope that £50 might be enough; if she goes I am sure he will want £100, or

near it. Now it is my opinion, and I dare say will be yours, that this money should be lent to him, in whatever way you think will ultimately hang the least upon his mind. He has mentioned to me a scheme of this sort, viz. : that he would write to Godwin, desiring him to call upon some bookseller, to request him to advance £100 upon some work to be written by Coleridge within a certain time, for the repayment of which £100 Coleridge would request you or some other of his friends to be security, if the work were not forthcoming at the time appointed. This plan, for my own part, though I did not like to say so abruptly to Coleridge, I greatly disapprove. As I am sure it would entangle him in an engagement, which it is ten to one he would be unable to fulfil; and, what is far worse, the engagement, while useless in itself, would prevent him from doing anything else. My dear Poole, you will do what you think proper on this statement of facts.

W. WORDSWORTH."

Another letter from Charles Lamb to Wordsworth should, perhaps, have found a place in an earlier chapter. It illustrates both the doings, and the wants, of the Wordsworth household, better than many of their own letters do; and it shows what books Wordsworth wished to have about him, shortly after taking up his residence at Dove Cottage.

"DEAR WORDSWORTH,*-I have not forgot your commissions. But the truth is-and why should I not confess it? -I am not plethorically abounding in cash at this present. Merit, heaven knows, is very little rewarded; but it does not become me to speak of myself. My motto is, 'Contented with little, yet wishing for more.' Now, the books you

* Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Canon Ainger, vol. i., p. 142.

wish for would require some pounds, which, I am sorry to say, I have not by me; so, I will say at once, if you will give me a draft upon your town banker for any sum you propose to lay out, I will dispose of it to the very best of my skill in choice old books, such as my own soul loveth. In fact, I have been waiting for the liquidation of a debt to enable myself to set about your commission handsomely; for it is a scurvy thing to cry, 'Give me the money first,' and I am the first of the family of the Lambs that have done it for many centuries; but the debt remains as it was, and my old friend that I accommodated has generously forgot it!

The books which you want, I calculate at about £8. Ben Jonson is a guinea book. Beaumont and Fletcher, in folio, the right folio not now to be met with; the octavos are about £3. As to any other dramatists, I do not know where to find them, except what are in Dodsley's old plays, which are about £3 also. Massinger I never saw but at one shop, but it is now gone; but one of the editions of Dodsley contains about a fourth (the best) of his plays. Congreve, and the rest of King Charles' moralists, are cheap and accessible. The works on Ireland I will enquire after, but, I fear, Spenser's is not to be had apart from his poems; I never saw it. But you may depend upon my sparing no pains to furnish you as complete a library of old poets and dramatists as will be prudent to buy; for, I suppose you do not include the £20 edition of Hamlet, single play, which Kemble has. Marlowe's plays and poems are totally vanished; only one edition of Dodsley retains one, and the other two of his plays; but John Ford is the man after Shakespeare. Let me know your will and pleasure soon, for I have observed, next to the pleasure of buying a bargain for one's self, is the pleasure of persuading a friend to buy it. It tickles one with the image of an imprudency, without the penalty usually annexed. C. LAMB."

The following letters from Coleridge-the first to Richard Sharp, the rest to the Wordsworths-which were written before he left England for Sicily, cast much light on the character and the acts of both households, and are an interesting sequel to the Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Richard Sharp-Conversation Sharp, as he used to be called-was a London banker, a friend both of Wordsworth and Coleridge and most of the literary men of the period. To him Coleridge wrote from the King's Arms Hotel, Kendal, January 15th [the year must be 1804].

"MY DEAR SIR,-I had gone to Grasmere to take farewell of William Wordsworth, his wife, and his sister, and thither your letter followed me. I was at Grasmere a whole month, so ill that till the last week I was unable to read your letters. Not that my inner being was disturbed; on the contrary, it seemed more than usually serene and selfsufficing; but the exceeding pain which I suffered every now and then, by the fearful distresses of my sleep, had taken away from me the connecting link of voluntary power, which consciously combines that part of us by which we know ourselves to be, with that outward picture or hieroglyphic, by which we hold communion with our likebetween the vital and the organic, or what Berkeley, I suppose, would call mind and its sensuous language. I had only just strength enough to smile gratefully on my kind nurses, who tended me with a sister's and a mother's love, and often I well know wept for me in their sleep, and watched for me even in their dreams. O dear sir, it does a man's heart good, I will not say to know such a family, but even to know that there is such a family. In spite of Wordsworth's occasional fits of hypochondriacal uncomfortableness, -from which, more or less, and at longer or shorter intervals, he has never been wholly free from his very childhood-in spite of this hypochondriacal graft, as dear Wedgewood

calls it, his is the happiest family I ever saw; and, were it not for too great sympathy with my ill-health-were I in good health, and their neighbour-I verily believe that the cottage in Grasmere Vale would be a proud sight for Philosophy. It is with no idle feeling of vanity that I speak of my importance to them; that it is I, rather than another, is almost an accident; but being so very happy within themselves they are too good, not the more from that very reason, to want a friend and common object of love out of their household. . . . I am half angry with Davy for prostituting and profaning the name of Philosopher, great Philosopher, eminent Philosopher, &c., to every fellow who has made a lucky experiment, though the man be Frenchified to the heart, and though the whole Seine, with all its filth and poison, flows in his veins and actions.

Of our common friends, my dear sir, I flatter myself that you and I would agree in fixing on J. Wedgewood and Xon Wordsworth as genuine Philosophers-for I have often

said (and no wonder, since not a day passes but the conviction of the truth of it is renewed in me, and, with the conviction, the accompanying esteem and love), often have I said that J. Wedgewood's faults impress me with veneration for his moral and intellectual character more than almost any other man's virtues; for, under circumstances like his, to have a fault only in that degree is I doubt not in the eye of God to possess a high virtue. Who does not prize the retreat of Moreau more than all the straw-blaze of Bonaparte's victories ?

W. Wordsworth does not excite that almost painfully profound moral admiration, which the sense of the exceeding difficulty of a given virtue can alone call forth, and which therefore I feel exclusively towards J. Wedgewood; but, on the other hand, he is an object to be contemplated with greater complacency, because he both deserves to be and is