otested (June 10, 1796),
describing them as good lines, but adding that they "must spoil
the whole with me who know it is only a fiction of yours and that
the rude dashings did in fact not rock me to repose."

When reprinted in 1797, the final couplet was omitted, asterisks
standing instead. The present sonnet was probably the earliest of Lamb's
printed poems. In the Elia essay "The Old Margate Hoy," Lamb states that
the first time he saw the sea was on a visit to Margate as a boy, by
water--probably the voyage that suggested this sonnet. Lamb printed the
sonnet three times--in 1796, 1797 and 1818.

* * * * *

Page 6. LLOYD'S _POEMS ON THE DEATH OF PRISCILLA FARMER_, 1796.

Charles Lloyd (1775-1839), the son of Charles Lloyd, of Birmingham (a
cultured and philanthropical Quaker banker), joined Coleridge at Bristol
late in 1796 as his private pupil, and moved with the family to Nether
Stowey. Priscilla Farmer was Lloyd's maternal grandmother, to whom he
was much attached, and on her death he composed the sonnets that form
this costly quarto, published for Lloyd by Coleridge's friend, Joseph
Cottle, of Bristol, in the winter of 1796.

Page 6. _The Grandame._

Lamb sent these lines in their first state to Coleridge in June, 1796,
at, which time they were, I conjecture, part of a long blank-verse poem
which he was then meditating, and of which "Childhood," "Fancy Employed
on Divine Subjects," and "The Sabbath Bells" (see pages 9 and 10) were
probably other portions. The poem was never finished. On June 13, 1796,
he writes to Coleridge:--

"Of the blank verses I spoke of, the following lines are the only
tolerably complete ones I have writ out of not more than one hundred and
fifty. That I get on slowly you may fairly impute to want of practice in
composition, when I declare to you that (the few verses which you have
seen excepted) I have not writ fifty lines since I left school. It may
not be amiss to remark that my grandmother (on whom the verses are
written) lived housekeeper in a family the fifty or sixty last years of
her life--that she was a woman of exemplary piety and goodness--and for
many years before her death was terribly afflicted with a cancer in her
breast, which she bore with true Christian patience. You may think that
I have not kept enough apart the ideas of her heavenly and her earthly
master; but recollect I have designedly given into her own way of
feeling; an