CHARLES LAMB (AGE 23)

From the Drawing by Robert Hancock, now in the National Portrait
Gallery.




DEDICATION (1818) TO S.T. COLERIDGE, ESQ.


My Dear Coleridge,

You will smile to see the slender labors of your friend designated by
the title of _Works_; but such was the wish of the gentlemen who have
kindly undertaken the trouble of collecting them, and from their
judgment could be no appeal.

It would be a kind of disloyalty to offer to any one but yourself a
volume containing the _early pieces_, which were first published among
your poems, and were fairly derivatives from you and them. My friend
Lloyd and myself came into our first battle (authorship is a sort of
warfare) under cover of the greater Ajax. How this association, which
shall always be a dear and proud recollection to me, came to be broken,
--who snapped the three-fold cord,--whether yourself (but I know that
was not the case) grew ashamed of your former companions,--or whether
(which is by much the more probable) some ungracious bookseller was
author of the separation,--I cannot tell;--but wanting the support of
your friendly elm, (I speak for myself,) my vine has, since that time,
put forth few or no fruits; the sap (if ever it had any) has become, in