and finally removed by successive increases of salary at the India
House; the introductions of Coleridge and his own growing repute in the
world of letters gathered about him a circle of friends--Southey,
Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Manning, Barton, and the rest--more congenial, and
certainly more profitable, than the vagrant _intimados_, "to the world's
eye a ragged regiment," who had wasted his substance and his leisure in
the early Temple days.

Lamb's earliest avowed appearance as an author was in Coleridge's first
volume of poems, published by Cottle, of Bristol, in 1796. "The
effusions signed C.L.," says Coleridge in the preface, "were written by
Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House. Independently of the signature,
their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them." The
"effusions" were four sonnets, two of them--the most noteworthy--
touching upon the one love-romance of Lamb's life, [9]--his early
attachment to the "fair-haired" Hertfordshire girl, the "Anna" of the
Sonnets, the "Alice W---n" of the Essays. We remember that Ella in
describing the gallery of old family portraits, in the essay,
"Blakesmoor in H---shire," dwells upon "that beauty with the cool, blue,
pastoral drapery, and a lamb, that hung next the great bay window, with
the bright yellow Hertfordshire hair, _so like my Alice_."

In 1797 Cottle issued a second edition of Coleridge's poems, this time
with eleven additional pieces by Lamb,--making fifteen of his in
all,--and containing verses by their friend Charles Lloyd. "It is
unlikely," observes Canon Ainger, "that this little venture brought any
profit to its authors, or that a subsequent volume of blank verse by
Lamb and Lloyd in the following year proved more remunerative." In 1798
Lamb, anxious for his sister's sake to add to his slender income,
composed his "miniature romance," as Talfourd calls it, "Rosamund Gray;"