ABSTRACT
Charles Lamb (1775–1834), essayist and intimate of the Coleridge circle—extract from a letter written to Robert Southey, 8 November 1798: ‘If you wrote that review in “Crit. Rev.” [No. 26], I am sorry you are so sparing of praise to the “Ancient Marinere”;—so far from calling it, as you do, with some wit, but more severity, “A Dutch Attempt,” &c., I call it a right English attempt, and a successful one, to dethrone German sublimity. You have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles, but have passed by fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they celebrate. I never felt so deeply the pathetic as in that part, A spring of love gush’d from my heart, And I bless’d them unaware—
