the essay ‘Dream Children’). Thus far all is certain. The whole pedigree of the Simmons family is in the present writer's possession, but an old inhabitant of Widford (the village adjoining Blakesware), and intimate friend of the Lambs, from whom he obtained it, had never heard of the circumstances attending Lamb's unsuccessful wooing.
In the spring of 1796 Coleridge made his earliest appearance as a poet in a small volume published by Cottle of Bristol, ‘Poems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College, Cambridge,’ and among these were four sonnets by Lamb. ‘The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House. Independently of the signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them.’ Two of these sonnets refer also to Anna with the fair hair and the blue eyes. This was Lamb's first appearance in print. The sonnets are chiefly remarkable as reflecting the diction and the graceful melancholy of William Lisle Bowles [q. v.], whose sonnets had in a singular degree influenced and inspired both Lamb and Coleridge while they were still at Christ's Hospital. A year later, in 1797, Coleridge produced a second edition of his poems, ‘To which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd’ (1775–1839) [q. v.] . Among these were included the ‘Anna’ sonnets, and the lines entitled ‘The Grandame,’ written on his grandmother, Mrs. Field, who had died at Blakesware in 1792. (These latter had already appeared in print, in a handsome quarto, with certain others of Charles Lloyd's.)
In the summer of 1797 Lamb devoted his short holiday (only one week) to a visit to Coleridge at Nether Stowey, where he made the acquaintance of Thomas Poole [q. v.], and met Wordsworth and others (see Mrs. Sandford, Thomas Poole and his Friends; and Lamb's Letters, i. 79). The following year, 1798, saw the publication of a thin volume, ‘Blank Verse, by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd,’ containing the touching verses on the ‘Old Familiar Faces.’ Later appeared Lamb's prose romance, ‘A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret,’ a story of sentiment written under the influence of Mackenzie, and having the scene laid in Lamb's favourite village of Widford in Hertfordshire. During this year Cottle of Bristol had a portrait taken of Lamb by Hancock, an engraving of which appeared many years later in Cottle's ‘Recollections of Coleridge.’ This is the earliest portrait of Lamb we possess. In November 1798 Coleridge, with Wordsworth and his sister, left England for Germany, and for the next eighteen months Lamb was thrown for literary sympathy upon other friends, notably on Southey, with whom he began a frequent correspondence. In these letters Lamb's individuality of style and humour became first markedly apparent.
In the spring of 1799 Lamb's father died, and Mary Lamb returned to live with her brother, from whom she was never again parted, except during occasional returns of her malady. But rumours of this malady followed them wherever they went. They had notice to quit their rooms in Pentonville in the spring of 1799, and they were accepted as tenants for a while by Lamb's old schoolfellow, John Mathew Gutch [q. v.], then a law-stationer in Southampton Buildings, Holborn. Here they remained for nine months, but the old difficulties arose, and the brother and sister were again homeless. Lamb then turned to the familiar precincts of the Temple, and took rooms at the top of King's Bench Walk (Mitre Court Buildings), where he remained with his sister for nearly nine years. They then removed to Inner Temple Lane for a period of another nine years.
Lamb's letters to Thomas Manning [q. v.], the mathematician and orientalist, and to Coleridge on his return from Germany, begin at the date of his settling in the Temple, and continue the story of his life. Manning's acquaintance he had made at Cambridge while visiting Charles Lloyd. Lamb now began to add to his scanty income by writing for the newspapers (see his Elia essay, Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago). He contributed for some three years facetious paragraphs and epigrams to the ‘Morning Post,’ ‘Morning Chronicle,’ and the ‘Albion.’ In 1802 he published his ‘John Woodvil,’ a blank-verse play of the Restoration period, but showing markedly the influence of Massinger and Beaumont and Fletcher, full of felicitous lines, but crude and undramatic. It was reviewed in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ April 1803, not unfairly, but ignorantly. The Elizabethan dramatists were still sealed books save to the antiquary and the specialist. Meantime Charles and Mary Lamb were struggling with poverty, and with worse enemies. Lamb's journalistic and literary associates made demands on his hospitality, and good company brought its temptations. In 1804 Mary Lamb writes that they are ‘very poor,’ and that Charles is trying in various ways to earn money. He was still dreaming of possible dramatic successes, but these were not to be. In 1803 he sends Manning his well-known verses on Hester
