prospering in the South Sea House, had presumably set up his bachelor
home elsewhere. Salt bequeathed to his clerk and factotum a pension of
£10 a year, and various legacies amounting to about £700. The old
home in the Temple had to be given up, but whither the family first
removed is not known. Four years later they were living in Little
Queen Street--now a portion of Kingsway--off Holborn, in a house on
the west side, 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