, the site of which is now covered by a church.

At the end of 1794--though his first known verses are dated five years
earlier--Charles Lamb had, so far as we are aware, the pleasure of
seeing himself for the first time "in print," and curiously enough
here at the earliest beginning of his life as author he was intimately
associated with Coleridge; indeed, his "effusion," a sonnet addressed
to Mrs. Siddons, appeared in "The Morning Chronicle" on 29th December,
with the signature "S. T. C." Coleridge, we learn from Lamb's letters,
altered the sonnet and was welcome to do so, and the poem properly
appears in both of their collected works; the recension is certainly
not an improvement on the original. In the spring of 1796 a small
volume of Coleridge's poems was published, four sonnets by Lamb being
included in it; and in May, 1796, was written the earliest of the rich
collection of Lamb's letters which have come down to us. In this
letter we have the first mention of the shadow which overhung the Lamb
family.

My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks
that finished last year and began this, your very humble
servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am
got somewhat rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I
was; and many a vagary my imagination played with me,
enough to make a volume, if all were told.... Coleridge, it
may convince you of my regard for you when I tell you my
head ran on you in my madness as much almost as on another
person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate
cause of my temporary frenzy.

It is assumed that the closing reference here is to Lamb's romantic
love for A---- W----; the "Anna" of some of his sonnets written about
this time, the "Alice W----" of the later "Dream Children," and other
of the essays, and that it was to the unhappy course of a deep love
that Charles Lamb owed his brief period of mental aberration. This
year, 1796, which was to close in tragic gloom, was indeed marked
almost throughout by unhappiness, lightened only by the close and
friendly correspondence with Coleridge. From these letters we learn
that besides his own mental trouble, his sister had been very ill, his
brother was laid up and demanded constant attention, having a leg so
bad that for a time the necessity of amputation appeared to be
probable.[1] Through it all Charles Lamb was conscious of being "sore
galled with