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　　LETTERS 78 AND 79

　　CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING

　　[Middle December.]

　　I send you all of Coleridge's letters to me, which I have preserved: some of them are upon the subject of my play. I also send you Kemble's two letters, and the prompter's courteous epistle, with a curious critique on "Pride's Cure," by a young physician from EDINBRO, who modestly suggests quite another kind of a plot. These are monuments of my disappointment which I like to preserve.

　　In Coleridge's letters you will find a good deal of amusement, to see genuine talent struggling against a pompous display of it. I also send you the Professor's letter to me (careful Professor! to conceal his name even from his correspondent), ere yet the Professor's pride was cured. Oh monstrous and almost satanical pride!

　　You will carefully keep all (except the Scotch Doctor's, which burn in status quo), till I come to claim mine own.

　　C. LAMB.

　　For Mister Manning, Teacher of Mathematics and the Black Arts. There is another letter in the inside cover of the book opposite the blank leaf that was.

　　Mind this goes for a letter. (Acknowledge it directly, if only in ten words.)

　　DEAR MANNING—(I shall want to hear this comes safe.) I have scratched out a good deal, as you will see. Generally, what I have rejected was either false in feeling, or a violation of character—mostly of the first sort. I will here just instance in the concluding few lines of the "Dying Lover's Story," which completely contradicted his character of silent and unreproachful. I hesitated a good deal what copy to send you, and at last resolved to send the worst, because you are familiar with it, and can make it out; and a stranger would find so much difficulty in doing it, that it would give him more pain than pleasure.

　　This is compounded precisely of the two persons' hands you requested it should be.—Yours sincerely,

　　C. LAMB.

　　[These were the letters accompanying the copy of "Pride's Cure" (or "John Woodvil") which Charles and Mary Lamb together made for Manning, as requested in the note on page 197.

　　All the letters mentioned by Lamb have vanished; unless by an unlikely chance the bundle contained Coleridge's letters on Mrs. Lamb's death and on the quarrel with Lamb and Lloyd.

　　Manning's reply, dated December, 1800, gives a little information concerning the Edinburgh physician's letter—"that gentleman whose fertile brain can, at a moment's warning, furnish you with 10 Thousand models of a plot—'The greatest variety of Rapes, Murders, Deathsheads, &c., &c., sold here.'" Manning thinks that the Scotch doctor understands Lamb's tragedy better than Coleridge does. He adds: "P.S.—My verdict upon the Poet's epitaph is 'genuine.'" This probably applies to a question asked by Lamb concerning Wordsworth's poem of that name.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 5