been forming between Coleridge and Lamb ever since their school-days at
Christ's Hospital. But they interchanged ideas on poetical and humorous
topics, and did not perplex themselves with anything speculative or
transcendental.

The first letter to Southey, which has been preserved (July, 1798),
announces that Lamb is ready to enter into any jocose contest. It includes
a list of queries to be defended by Coleridge at Leipsic or Gottingen; the
first of which was, "Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true
man?" Some of these queries, in all probability, had relation to
Coleridge's own infirmities: at all events, they were sent over to him in
reply to the benediction which he had thought proper to bequeath to
Charles on leaving England. "Poor Lamb, if he wants _any knowledge_ he may
apply to _me_." I must believe that this message was jocose, otherwise it
would have been insolent in the extreme degree. Coleridge's answers to the
queries above adverted to are not known; I believe that the proffered
knowledge was not afforded so readily as it was demanded.

It has been surmised that there was some interruption of the good feeling
between Coleridge and Lamb about this period of their lives; but I cannot
discern this in the letters that occurred between the two schoolfellows.
The message of Coleridge, and the questions in reply, occur in 1798; and
in May, 1800, there is a letter from Lamb to Coleridge, and subsequently
two others, in the same year, all couched in the old customary, friendly
tone. In addition to this, Charles Lamb, many years afterwards, said that
there had been an uninterrupted friendship of fifty years between them. In
one letter of Lamb's, indeed (17th March, 1800), it appears that his early
notions of Coleridge being a "very good man" had been traversed by some
doubts; but these "foolish impressions" were short-lived, and did not
apparently form any check to the continuance of their life-long