The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol 5 | Page 8

and Mary Lamb (born December 3, 1764) was occupied as a mantua-maker.
At this time Coleridge was twenty-three; he would be twenty-four on October 21. His military experiences over, he had married Sara Fricker on October 4, 1795 (a month before Southey married her sister Edith), and was living at Bristol, on Redcliffe Hill. The first number of The Watchman was dated on March 1, 1796; on May 13, 1796, it came to an end. On April 16, 1796, Cottle had issued Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects, containing also four "effusions" by Charles Lamb (Nos. VII., XI., XII. and XIII.), and the "Religious Musings." Southey, on bad terms with Coleridge, partly on account of Southey's abandonment of Pantisocracy, was in Lisbon. His Joan of Arc had just been published by Cottle in quarto at a guinea. Previously he had collaborated in The Fall of Robespierre, 1794, with Coleridge and Robert Lovell. Each, one evening, had set forth to write an act by the next. Southey and Lovell did so, but Coleridge brought only a part of his. Lovell's being useless, Southey rewrote his act, Coleridge finished his at leisure, and the result was published. Robert Lovell (1770?-1796) had also been associated with Coleridge and Southey in Pantisocracy and was their brother-in-law, having married Mary Fricker, another of the sisters. When, in 1795, Southey and Lovell had published a joint volume of Poems, Southey took the pseudonym of Bion and Lovell of Moschus.
May was probably the landlord of the Salutation and Cat. The London Directory for 1808 has "William May, Salutation Coffee House, 17 Newgate Street." We must suppose that when Coleridge quitted the Salutation and Cat in January, 1795, he was unable to pay his bill, and therefore had to leave his luggage behind. Cottle's story of Coleridge being offered free lodging by a London inn-keeper, if he would only talk and talk, must then either be a pretty invention or apply to another landlord, possibly the host of the Angel in Butcher Hall Street.
Allen was Robert Allen, a schoolfellow of Lamb and Coleridge, and Coleridge's first friend. He was born on October 18, 1772. Both Lamb and Leigh Hunt tell good stories of him at Christ's Hospital, Lamb in Elia and Hunt in his Autobiography. From Christ's Hospital he went to University College, Oxford, and it was he who introduced Coleridge and Hucks to Southey in 1794. Probably, says Mr. E. H. Coleridge, it was he who brought Coleridge and John Stoddart (afterwards Sir John, and Hazlitt's brother-in-law) together. On leaving Oxford he seems to have gone to Westminster to learn surgery, and in 1797 he was appointed Deputy-Surgeon to the 2nd Royals, then in Portugal. He married a widow with children; at some time later took to journalism, as Lamb's reference in the Elia essay on "Newspapers" tells us; and he died of apoplexy in 1805.
Coleridge's employment on the Evidences of Religion, whatever it may have been, did not reach print.
Le Grice was Charles Valentine Le Grice (1773-1858), an old Christ's Hospitaller and Grecian (see Lamb's Elia essays on "Christ's Hospital" and "Grace before Meat"). Le Grice passed to Trinity College, Cambridge. He left in 1796 and became tutor to William John Godolphin Nicholls of Trereife, near Penzance, the only son of a widowed mother. Le Grice was ordained in 1798 and married Mrs. Nicholls in 1799. Young Nicholls died in 1815 and Mrs. Le Grice in 1821, when Le Grice became sole owner of the Trereife property. He was incumbent of St. Mary's, Penzance, for some years. Le Grice was a witty, rebellious character, but he never fulfilled the promise of his early days. It has been conjectured that his skill in punning awakened Lamb's ambition in that direction. Le Grice saw Lamb next in 1834, at the Bell at Edmonton. His recollections of Lamb were included by Talfourd in the Memorials, and his recollections of Coleridge were printed in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, December, 1834. I know nothing of Miss Hunt.
Of Lamb's confinement in a madhouse we know no more than is here told. It is conjectured that the "other person" to whom Lamb refers a few lines later was Ann Simmons, a girl at Widford for whom he had an attachment that had been discouraged, if not forbidden, by her friends. This is the only attack of the kind that Lamb is known to have suffered. He once told Coleridge that during his illness he had sometimes believed himself to be Young Norval in Home's "Douglas."
The poem in blank verse was, we learn in a subsequent letter, "The Grandame," or possibly an autobiographical work of which "The Grandame" is the only portion that survived.
White was James White (1775-1820), an old Christ's Hospitaller and a friend and almost exact contemporary of Lamb. Lamb, who first kindled his enthusiasm