It must have been shortly after this first visit (for Lamb went again to Stowey, and met Wordsworth there in 1801) that Coleridge undertook the office of minister to a Unitarian congregation at Shrewsbury, and preached there, as detailed by Hazlitt in the manner already set forth. In 1798 he took his departure for Germany, and this led to a familiar correspondence between Lamb and Southey. The opening of Lamb's humor may probably be referred to this friendship with a congenial humorist, and one, like himself, taking a strong interest in worldly matters. Coleridge, between whom and Lamb there was not much similarity of feeling, beyond their common love for poetry and religious writings, was absent, and Lamb was enticed by the kindred spirit of Southey into the accessible regions of humor. These two friends never arrived at that close friendship which had been forming between Coleridge and Lamb ever since their school-days at Christ's Hospital. But they interchanged ideas on poetical and humorous topics, and did not perplex themselves with anything speculative or transcendental. The first letter to Southey, which has been preserved (July, 1798), announces that Lamb is ready to enter into any jocose contest. It includes a list of queries to be defended by Coleridge at Leipsic or Gottingen; the first of which was, "Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?" Some of these queries, in all probability, had relation to Coleridge's own infirmities: at all events, they were sent over to him in reply to the benediction which he had thought proper to bequeath to Charles on leaving England. "Poor Lamb, if he wants _any knowledge_ he may apply to _me_." I must believe that this message was jocose, otherwise it would have been insolent in the extreme degree. Coleridge's answers to the queries above adverted to are not known; I believe that the proffered knowledge was not afforded so readily as it was demanded. It has been surmised that there was some interruption of the good feeling between Coleridge and Lamb about this period of their lives; but I cannot discern this in the letters that occurred between the two schoolfellows. The message of Coleridge, and the questions in reply, occur in 1798; and in May, 1800, there is a letter from Lamb to Coleridge, and subsequently two others, in the same year, all couched in the old customary, friendly tone. In addition to this, Charles Lamb, many years afterwards, said that there had been an uninterrupted friendship of fifty years between them. In one letter of Lamb's, indeed (17th March, 1800), it appears that his early notions of Coleridge being a "very good man" had been traversed by some doubts; but these "foolish impressions" were short-lived, and did not apparently form any check to the continuance of their life-long friendship.