And there was solace for all his privations to be found in his beloved books, and he “browsed” in many a field. “I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I call _a book_. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.” He had a spiritual kinship with the Elizabethans, and was worthy, in his own words, of listening to Shakespeare read aloud one of his scenes hot from his brain. Yet he was fond of the writers of the last century, and wished that he might be able to forget Fielding and Swift and the rest for the sake of reading them anew. For modern literature, save for a few favourite poems and for the works of his personal friends, he cared but little. For modern affairs he cared nothing, and knew nearly nothing about them. There is hardly a hint in his letters of the grim Napoleonic drama which was enacted during the younger years of the century; he only grieved that War and Nature and Mr. Pitt should have conspired to increase the cost of coals and bread and beer! He once heard a butcher in the market-place of Enfield say something about a change of ministry; and it struck him that he neither knew nor cared who was in and who was out. Indeed, he could not make these present times present to himself, and lived in the past, so that the so-called realities of life seemed its mockeries to him. “Hang the age! I will write for antiquity,” he told the able editor who criticised his style as not in keeping with the taste of the age. In truth, he was a walking anachronism, and beneath his nineteenth-century waistcoat pulsated a heart of the seventeenth century--that of Sir Thomas Browne, perchance. Lamb’s first appearance in print was made anonymously during these dreary days, in the _Morning Chronicle_, and consisted of a sonnet to Mrs. Siddons, whom he had seen for the first time, and who had profoundly impressed him. This sonnet and three others formed his share of a small volume of “Poems on Various Subjects,” mainly by Coleridge, issued under the latter’s name in the spring of 1796. His preface says: “The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House. Independently of the signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them.” In the summer of 1797 appeared a second edition, “to which are now added poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd”--the former contributing about fifteen short poems. This Lloyd was the son of a Birmingham banker, a morbid young man addicted to rhyme and to melancholy--a recent acquaintance of Lamb’s, and one who could not have been a cheerful comrade for him, just then.