“When Coleridge quitted the University and came to town, full of mantling hopes and glorious schemes, Lamb became his admiring disciple. The scene of these happy meetings was a little public-house called the _Salutation and Cat_, in the neighbourhood of Smithfield, where they used to sup, and remain long after they had ‘heard the chimes of midnight.’ There they discoursed of Bowles, who was the god of Coleridge’s poetical idolatry, and of Burns and Cowper, who of recent poets--in that season of comparative barrenness--had made the deepest impression on Lamb; there Coleridge talked of ‘fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,’ to one who desired ‘to find no end’ of the golden maze; and there he recited his early poems with that deep sweetness of intonation which sunk into the heart of his hearers. To these meetings Lamb was accustomed, at all periods of his life, to revert, as the season when his finer intellects were quickened into action. Shortly after they had terminated, with Coleridge’s departure from London, he thus recalled them in a letter:--‘When I read in your little volume your nineteenth effusion, or what you call “The Sigh,” I think I hear _you_ again. I imagine to myself the little smoky room at the _Salutation and Cat_, where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with poesy.’ This was early in 1769, and in 1818, when dedicating his works--then first collected--to his earliest friend, he thus spoke of the same meetings:--’Some of the sonnets, which shall be carelessly turned over by the general reader, may happily awaken in you remembrances which I should be sorry should be ever totally extinct--the memory “of summer days and of delightful years,” even so far back as those old suppers at our old inn--when life was fresh and topics exhaustless--and you first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness.’”