Charles Lloyd shared with Southey the pains and pleasures of criticising Lamb’s verses, for Lamb asks the latter if he agrees with Lloyd in disliking something in “The Witch.”

[Thus:  “Lloyd objects to ‘shutting up the womb of his purse’ in my curse (which, for a Christian witch in a Christian country, is not too mild, I hope).  Do you object?  I think there is a strangeness in the idea, as well as ‘shaking the poor little snakes from his door,’ which suits the speaker.  Witches illustrate, as fine ladies do, from their own familiar objects, and snakes and the shutting up of wombs are in their way.  I don’t know that this last charge has been before brought against ’em nor either the sour milk or the mandrake babe; but I affirm these be things a witch would do if she could.”]

Lamb proposes also to adopt an emendation of Southey’s in the “Dying Lover”—­“though I do not feel the objection against ‘Silent Prayer,’” and in the event he did very sensibly stick to his own opinion, for in the London Magazine the line runs, as first written:—­

      He put a silent prayer up for the bride.

One wonders what harm Southey can have seen in it.  At this time Southey was collecting verses for the first volume of his Annual Anthology (provisionally called the Kalendar), and inviting contributions from Lamb.  In writing before November 28, 1798, “This [’The Witch’] and the ‘Dying Lover’ I gave you are the only extracts I can give without mutilation,” Lamb may have meant that Southey was at liberty to print them in the Anthology.  A year later, October 31, 1799, when the second volume was in preparation, Lamb wrote:—­“I shall have nothing to communicate, I fear, to the Anthology.  You shall have some fragments of my play if you desire them; but I think I would rather print it whole.”

As a matter of fact, Lamb contributed nothing to the collection except the lines “Living without God in the World,” printed in the first volume [see page 19.  To Recreations in Agriculture, Natural History, etc., 1801, edited by Dr. James Anderson, a friend of George Dyer, Lamb, however, sent “Description of a Forest Life,” “The General Lover” (What is it you love?) and the “Dying Lover,” called “Fragment in Dialogue.”  There are slight differences in the text, the chief alteration being in line 3 of the “Description of a Forest Life":—­

      Bursting the lubbar bonds of sleep that bound him.]

Reverting to the letter of November 28, one learns Lamb’s intentions as to the play:—­“My Tragedy will be a medley (as I intend it to be a medley) of laughter and tears, prose and verse, and in some places rhyme, songs, wit, pathos, humour, and, if possible, sublimity; at least it is not a fault in my intention if it does not comprehend most of these discordant atoms.  Heaven send they dance not the ’Dance of Death’!”