LETTER 176

CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. HAZLITT

(_Added to same letter_)

Saturday.

There came this morning a printed prospectus from S.T. Coleridge, Grasmere, of a weekly paper, to be called The Friend--a flaming prospectus--I have no time to give the heads of it--to commence first Saturday in January. There came also a notice of a Turkey from Mr. Clarkson, which I am more sanguine in expecting the accomplishment of than I am of Coleridge's prophecy.

C. LAMB.

["The Skeffington." Referring probably to some dramatic scheme in which Sir Lumley Skeffington, an amateur playwright, had tried to engage Lamb's pen. Lamb's share of the speaking pantomime for the Sheridans has vanished. We do not even know if it were ever accepted.

The late Mr. Charles Kent, in his Centenary Edition of Lamb's works, printed a comic opera, said, on the authority of P.G. Patmore, to be Lamb's, and identified it with the experiment mentioned by Mary Lamb. But an examination of the manuscript, which is in the British Museum, convinces me that the writing is not Lamb's, while the matter has nothing characteristic in it. Tom Sheridan, by the way, was just a month younger than Lamb.

Noales was probably James Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862), the dramatist, a protégé of Hazlitt's father. We shall meet him again in the correspondence. After serving as a soldier and practising medicine he had gone on the stage. Several years later he became one of Lamb's friends.

_The Friend_, which probably had been in Coleridge's thoughts for some time, was announced to begin on the first Saturday in January. Lamb's scepticism was justified; the first number came out on June 1.]