ild's conceptions. Coleridge at
sixteen was already a poet, his ear attuned to the subtlest melody of
verse, and his hand rivalling, in preluding fragments, the efforts of
his maturer years; he was already a philosopher, rapt in Utopian,
schemes and mantling hopes as enchanting--and as chimerical--as the
pleasure-domes and caves of ice decreed by Kubla Khan; and the younger
lad became his ardent disciple.

Lamb quitted Christ's Hospital, prematurely, in November, 1787, and the
companionship of the two friends was for a time interrupted. To part
with Coleridge, to exchange the ease and congenial scholastic atmosphere
of the Hospital for the _res angusta domi_, for the intellectual
starvation of a life of counting-house drudgery, must have been a bitter
trial for him. But the shadow of poverty was upon the little household
in the Temple; on the horizon of the future the blackening clouds of
anxieties still graver were gathering; and the youngest child was called
home to share the common burden.

Charles Lamb was first employed in the South Sea House, where his
brother John [3]--a cheerful optimist, a _dilettante_ in art, genial,
prosperous, thoroughly selfish, in so far as the family fortunes were
concerned an outsider--already held a lucrative post. It was not long
before Charles obtained promotion in the form of a clerkship with the
East India Company,--one of the last kind services of Samuel Salt, who
died in the same year, 1792,--and with the East India Company he
remained for the rest of his working life.

Upon the death of their generous patron the Lambs removed from the
Temple and took lodgings in Little Queen Street, Holborn; and for
Charles the battle of life may be said to have fairly begun. His work as
a junior clerk absorbed, of course, the greater part of his day and of
his year. Yet there were breathing-spaces: there were the long evenings
with the poets; with Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and
Cowley,--"the sweetest names, which carry a perfume in the mention;"
there were the visits to the play, the yearly vacation jaunts to sunny
Hertfordshire. The intercourse with Coleridge, too, was now occasionally
renewed. The latter had gone up to Cambridge early in 1791, there to
remain--except the period of his six months' dragooning--for the nest
four years. During his visits to London it was the habit of the two
schoolfellows to meet at a tavern near Smithfield, the "Salutation and
Cat" to discuss t