g of _your advice_. Continue to remember us, and to show us you do
remember us; we will take as lively an interest in what concerns you and
yours. All I can add to your happiness will be sympathy. You can add to
mine _more_; you can teach me wisdom. I am indeed an unreasonable
correspondent: but I was unwilling to let my last night's letter go off
without this qualifier: you will perceive by this my mind is easier, and
you will rejoice. I do not expect or wish you to write till you are
moved; and of course shall not, till you announce to me that event,
think of writing myself. Love to Mrs. Coleridge and David Hartley, and
my kind remembrance to Lloyd, if he is with you.

C. LAMB.

[1] See preceding letter.

[2] Epistle to Arbuthnot:--

"Poor Cornus sees his frantic wife elope,
And curses wit, and poetry, and Pope."

[3] The lines on him which Coleridge had sent to Lamb, and which the
latter had burned.

XI.

TO COLERIDGE.

_January_ 5, 1797.

_Sunday Morning_.--You cannot surely mean to degrade the Joan of Arc
into a pot-girl. [1] You are not going, I hope, to annex to that most
splendid ornament of Southey's poem all this cock-and-a-bull story of
Joan, the publican's daughter of Neufchatel, with the lamentable episode
of a wagoner, his wife, and six children. The texture will be most
lamentably disproportionate. The first forty or fifty lines of these
addenda are no doubt in their way admirable too; but many would prefer
the Joan of Southey.

[1] Coleridge, in later years, indorsed Lamb's opinion of this
portion of his contribution to "Joan of Arc." "I was really astonished,"
he said, "(1) at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; (2) at
the transmogrification of the fanatic virago into a modern novel-pawing
proselyte of the "Age of Reason,"--a Tom Paine in petticoats; (3) at the
utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down
of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the
single lines."

"On mightiest deeds to brood
Of shadowy vastness, such as made my heart
Throb fast; anon I paused, and in a state
Of half expectance listened to the wind."

"They wondered at me, who had known me once
A cheerful, careless damsel."

"The eye,
That of the circling throng and of the visible world,
Unseeing, saw the shapes of holy phantasy."

I see nothing in your description of the Maid equal to t