Page 6. The Grandame.

Lamb sent these lines in their first state to Coleridge in June, 1796, at, which time they were, I conjecture, part of a long blank-verse poem which he was then meditating, and of which “Childhood,” “Fancy Employed on Divine Subjects,” and “The Sabbath Bells” (see pages 9 and 10) were probably other portions.  The poem was never finished.  On June 13, 1796, he writes to Coleridge:—­

“Of the blank verses I spoke of, the following lines are the only tolerably complete ones I have writ out of not more than one hundred and fifty.  That I get on slowly you may fairly impute to want of practice in composition, when I declare to you that (the few verses which you have seen excepted) I have not writ fifty lines since I left school.  It may not be amiss to remark that my grandmother (on whom the verses are written) lived housekeeper in a family the fifty or sixty last years of her life—­that she was a woman of exemplary piety and goodness—­and for many years before her death was terribly afflicted with a cancer in her breast, which she bore with true Christian patience.  You may think that I have not kept enough apart the ideas of her heavenly and her earthly master; but recollect I have designedly given into her own way of feeling; and if she had a failing ’twas that she respected her master’s family too much, not reverenced her Maker too little.  The lines begin imperfectly, as I may probably connect ’em if I finish at all:  and if I do, Biggs shall print ’em (in a more economical way than you yours), for, Sonnets and all, they won’t make a thousand lines as I propose completing ’em, and the substance must be wire-drawn.”

When Charles Lloyd joined Coleridge later in the year, and was preparing his Poems in Memory of Priscilla Farmer, Coleridge obtained Lamb’s permission for “The Grandame” to be included with them.  The lines were introduced by Lloyd in these words:  “The following beautiful fragment was written by CHARLES LAMB, of the India-House.—­Its subject being the same with that of my Poems, I was solicitous to have it printed with them:  and I am indebted to a Friend of the Author’s for the permission.”

The poem differed then very slightly from its present form.  When the book was sent to Lamb he remarked (in December, 1796) on “the odd coincidence of two young men, in one age, carolling their grandmothers....  I cannot but smile to see my Granny so gayly deck’d forth [the book was expensively produced by Lloyd], tho’, I think, whoever altered ‘thy’ praises to ‘her’ praises—­’thy’ honoured memory to ‘her’ honoured memory [lines 27 and 28], did wrong—­they best exprest my feelings.  There is a pensive state of recollection, in which the mind is disposed to apostrophise the departed objects of its attachment; and, breaking loose from grammatical precision, changes from the 1st to the 3rd, and from the 3rd to the 1st person, just as the random fancy or feeling directs.”