In 1798 appeared “A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret,” as its original title ran. It is the best known of his works after his essays, and we all echo Shelley’s words to Leigh Hunt: “What a lovely thing is ‘Rosamund Gray’! How much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest part of our nature in it!” And yet this “miniature romance,” as Talfourd well named it, surely seems somewhat unreal and artificial, for all its charm! Lamb found constant comfort, too, during these dark years, in his only two intimate friends: Coleridge, with whom he had renewed his companionship, broken by Coleridge’s visit to Germany, and by his six months’ service in the Light Dragoons; and Southey, whose healthy and wholesome common-sense was just then a timely tonic for Lamb. These three youthful dreamers used to sit and smoke and speculate of nights in a little den at the back of the _Salutation and Cat_--a tavern at No. 17 Newgate Street, nearly opposite the old School. Two of them may haply have learned their way there while still scholars! “I image to myself that little smoky room at the _Salutation and Cat_, where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with poesy,” Lamb wrote, later; and he refers more than once to “that nice little smoky room at the _Salutation_, which is even now continually presenting itself to my recollection, with all its associated train of pipes, tobacco, egg-hot, welsh-rabbit, metaphysics, and poetry.” They say that the wary landlord, to whom Coleridge’s rhapsodies were quite unintelligible, yet who fully understood their value in drawing a knot of thirsty listeners, offered the Talker free quarters for life, if he would stay and talk! The men who sit and smoke and soak in tap-rooms, and who never know when they are full in any sense, are just the sort to find copious refreshment in such eternal monologue. Carlyle’s concise dictum thereanent would have fallen flat on their pendulous ears: “To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether one like it or not, can in the end be exhilarating to no creature!” The old tavern--so old, that within its walls Sir Christopher Wren used to sit often with his pipe, coming in tired from the rebuilding of St. Paul’s, just around the corner--has itself been rebuilt, the little smoky room is wiped out, the _Cat_ has vanished, and the _Salutation_ greets us as a slap-bang City eating-house and bar. Before the destruction of the original inn, an old fellow, who had been a Grecian in Lamb’s time, used to hobble up the entrance-way, once a year, when he came to some great function of the Blue-Coats, and look longingly into that once “murmurous haunt” through the glass door. Invited to enter one day, he stood in the smoking-room for a while, his eyes wet and his voice husky; then he went away, never to reappear. Doubtless he had drunk and smoked through many of those “O noctes cœnœque Deûm! Anglice--Welsh rabbit, punch, and poesy,” in Lamb’s words.