read a penitence
In this dejected brow; and in this shame
Your fault is buried. You shall in with us,
And, if it please you, taste our nuptial fare:
For, till this moment, I can joyful say,
Was never truly Selby's Wedding Day.

FINIS.

NOTES

Page 1. DEDICATION TO S.T. COLERIDGE, ESQ.

In 1818, when Lamb wrote these words, he was forty-three and Coleridge
forty-six. The _Works_, in the first volume of which this dedication
appeared, were divided into two volumes, the second, containing prose,
being dedicated to Martin Burney, in the sonnet which I have placed on
page 45. The publishers of the _Works_ were Charles and James Ollier,
who, starting business about 1816, had already published for Leigh Hunt,
Keats, and Shelley.

For the allusion to the threefold cord, in the second paragraph, see the
note on page 313.

The ****** Inn was the Salutation and Cat, in Newgate
Street, since rebuilt, where Coleridge used to stay on his London
visits when he was at Cambridge, and where the landlord is said
to have asked him to continue as a free guest--if only he would
talk and talk. Writing to Coleridge in 1796 Lamb recalls "the
little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat, where we have sat
together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with
Poesy;" and again, "I have been drinking egg-hot and smoking
Oronooko (associated circumstances, which ever forcibly recall to
my mind our evenings and nights at the Salutation)." Later he
added to these concomitants of a Salutation evening, "Egg-hot,
Welsh-rabbit, and metaphysics," and gave as his highest idea of
heaven, listening to Coleridge "repeating one of Bowles's sweetest
sonnets, in your sweet manner, while we two were indulging
sympathy, a solitary luxury, by the fire side at the Salutation."

The line--

Of summer days and of delightful years

is from Bowles--"Sonnet written at Ostend."

* * * * *

Page 3. Lamb's Earliest Poem. _Mille Vice Mortis._

In a MS. book that had belonged to James Boyer of Christ's Hospital, in
which his best scholars inscribed compositions, are these lines signed
Charles Lamb, 1789. All Lamb's Grecians are there too. The book was
described by the late Dykes Campbell, Lamb's most accomplished and
enthusiastic student, in the _Illustrated London News_, December 26,
1891.

* * * * *

Page 4. POEMS IN C