clearly to the reader Lamb's mature selection, in 1818, of the poetry by
which he wished to be known, I have indicated the position in his
_Works_ of those poems that have already been printed on earlier pages.

Page 32. _Hester_.

Lamb sent this poem to Manning in March, 1803--"I send you some verses I
have made on the death of a young Quaker you may have heard me speak of
as being in love with for some years while I lived at Pentonville,
though I had never spoken to her in my life. She died about a month
since."

Hester Savory was the daughter of Joseph Savory, a goldsmith in the
Strand. She was born in 1777 and was thus by two years Lamb's junior.
She married, in July, 1802, Charles Stoke Dudley, a merchant, and she
died in February of the following year, and was buried at Bunhill
Fields. Lamb was living in Pentonville from the end of 1796 until 1799.

* * * * *

Page 33. _Dialogue between a Mother and Child._ By Mary Lamb.

Charles Lamb, writing to Dorothy Wordsworth on June 2, 1804, says: "I
send you two little copies of verses by Mary L--b." Then follow this
"Dialogue" and the "Lady Blanch" verses on page 41. Lamb adds at the
end: "I wish they may please you: we in these parts are not a little
proud of them."

* * * * *

Page 34. _A Farewell to Tobacco._

First printed in _The Reflector_, No. IV., 1811.

Lamb had begun to think poetically of tobacco as early as 1803. Writing
to Coleridge in April 13 of that year, he says:--"What do you think of
smoking? I want your sober, _average, noon opinion_ of it. I generally
am eating my dinner about the time I should determine it. Morning is a
girl, and can't smoke--she's no evidence one way or the other; and Night
is so [? evidently] _bought over_, that he can't be a very upright
judge. May be the truth is, that _one_ pipe is wholesome; _two_ pipes
toothsome; _three_ pipes noisome; _four_ pipes fulsome; _five_ pipes
quarrelsome; and that's the _sum_ on't. But that is deciding rather upon
rhyme than reason."

Writing to William and Dorothy Wordsworth on September 28, 1805, Lamb
remarked regarding his literary plans:--"Sometimes I think of a
farce--but hitherto all schemes have gone off,--an idle brag or two of
an evening vaporing out of a pipe, and going off in the morning--but now
I have bid farewell to my 'Sweet Enemy' Tobacco, as you will see in my
next page, I perhaps shall set soberl