As already stated, the mania that had once attacked Charles never returned; but from the side of Mary Lamb this grimmest of spectres never departed. "Mary A is again _from home_;" "Mary is _fallen ill_ again:" how often do such tear-fraught phrases--tenderly veiled, lest! some chance might bring them to the eye of the blameless sufferer--recur in the Letters! Brother and sister were ever on the watch for the symptoms premonitory of the return of this "their sorrow's crown of sorrows." Upon their little holiday excursions, says Talfourd, a strait-waistcoat, carefully packed by Miss Lamb herself, was their constant companion. Charles Lloyd relates that he once met them slowly pacing together a little footpath in Hoxton fields, both weeping bitterly, and found on joining them that they were taking their solemn way to the old asylum. Thus, upon this guiltless pair were visited the sins of their fathers. With the tragical events just narrated, the storm of calamity seemed to have spent its force, and there were thenceforth plenty of days of calm and of sunshine for Charles Lamb. The stress of poverty was lightened and finally removed by successive increases of salary at the India House; the introductions of Coleridge and his own growing repute in the world of letters gathered about him a circle of friends--Southey, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Manning, Barton, and the rest--more congenial, and certainly more profitable, than the vagrant _intimados_, "to the world's eye a ragged regiment," who had wasted his substance and his leisure in the early Temple days. Lamb's earliest avowed appearance as an author was in Coleridge's first volume of poems, published by Cottle, of Bristol, in 1796. "The effusions signed C.L.," says Coleridge in the preface, "were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House. Independently of the signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them." The "effusions" were four sonnets, two of them--the most noteworthy-- touching upon the one love-romance of Lamb's life, [9]--his early attachment to the "fair-haired" Hertfordshire girl, the "Anna" of the Sonnets, the "Alice W---n" of the Essays. We remember that Ella in describing the gallery of old family portraits, in the essay, "Blakesmoor in H---shire," dwells upon "that beauty with the cool, blue, pastoral drapery, and a lamb, that hung next the great bay window, with the bright yellow Hertfordshire hair, _so like my Alice_."