Sunday Evening. C. LAMB.

[It is interesting to notice that with these letters Lamb suddenly
assumes a gravity, independence and sense of authority that hitherto his
correspondence has lacked. The responsibility of the household seems to
have awakened his extraordinary common sense and fine understanding
sense of justice. Previously he had ventured to criticise only
Coleridge's literary exercises; he places his finger now on conduct too.

Coleridge's "last letter" has not been preserved; but the "first fine
consolatory epistle" is printed above.

This letter contains the first mention of Charles Lloyd (1775-1839), who
was afterwards to be for a while so intimately associated with Lamb.
Charles Lloyd was the son of a Quaker banker of Birmingham. He had
published a volume of poems the year before and had met Coleridge when
that magnetic visionary had visited Birmingham to solicit subscribers
for _The Watchman_ early in 1796. The proposition that Lloyd should live
with Coleridge and become in a way his pupil was agreed to by his
parents, and in September he accompanied the philosopher to Nether
Stowey a day or so after David Hartley's birth, all eager to begin
domestication and tutelage. Lloyd was a sensitive, delicate youth, with
an acute power of analysis and considerable grasp of metaphysical ideas.
No connection ever began more amiably. He was, I might add, by only two
days Lamb's junior.]