But the clouds gathered up again between the friends, generated partly by a kind of intellectual arrogance whereof Coleridge afterwards accused himself (he was often but too self-depreciatory in after life) which, in spite of Lamb's generous and unbounded admiration for his friend, did at last both irritate and hurt him; still more by the influence of Lloyd who, himself slighted as he fancied, and full of a morbid sensitiveness "bordering on derangement," sometimes indeed overleaping that border, worked upon Lamb's soreness of feeling till a brief estrangement ensued. Lamb had not yet learned to be on his guard with Lloyd. Years afterwards he wrote of him to Coleridge: "He is a sad tattler; but this is under the rose. Twenty years ago he estranged one friend from me quite, whom I have been regretting, but never could regain since. He almost alienated you also from me or me from you, I don't know which: but that breach is closed. The 'dreary sea' is filled up. He has lately been at work 'telling again,' as they call it, a most gratuitous piece of mischief, and has caused a coolness betwixt me and (not a friend but) an intimate acquaintance. I suspect, also, he saps Manning's faith in me who am to Manning more than an acquaintance."
The breach was closed, indeed, almost as soon as opened. But Coleridge went away to Germany for fourteen months and the correspondence was meanwhile suspended. When it was resumed Lamb was, in some respects, an altered man; he was passing from youth to maturity, enlarging the circle of his acquaintance and entering on more or less continuous literary work; whilst, on the other hand, the weaknesses which accompanied the splendid endowments of his friend were becoming but too plainly apparent; and though they never for a moment lessened Lamb's affection, nay, with his fine humanity seemed to give rather an added tenderness to it, there was inevitably a less deferential, a more humorous and playful tone on his side in their intercourse. "Bless you, old sophist who, next to human nature, taught me all the corruption I was capable of knowing," says he to the poet-philosopher by-and-by. And the weak side of his friend's style, too, received an occasional sly thrust; as for instance when on forwarding him some books he writes in 1800 "I detained _Statius_ wilfully, out of a reverent regard to your style. _Statius_ they tell me is turgid."