NOTES (continued 3)

Page 273, line 11. His handwriting. In the postscript to his private letter (of apology) to Southey (see above), Lamb took this back.

Page 273, line 18. The "Political Justice." Godwin's Enquiry into Political Justice, 1793, wherein the marriage ceremony meets with little respect.

Page 273, line 28. Sundry harsh things ... against our friend C. Perhaps a reference to The Examiner's criticism of Remorse, in 1813. Coleridge, writing to Southey about it, says:—

They were forced to affect admiration of the Tragedy, but yet abuse me they must, and so comes the old infamous crambe bis millies cocta of the "sentimentalities, puerilities, whinings, and meannesses, both of style and thought" in my former writings....

Page 274, line 3. "Foliage." Leigh Hunt published Foliage in 1818. It contains, among other familiar epistles, one to Charles Lamb, reprinted, as was the poem on his son, from The Examiner. This is one stanza to Thornton Hunt:—

Page 274, line 10. The other gentleman. William Hazlitt. Lamb first met Hazlitt about 1805, and they were intimate, with occasional differences, until Hazlitt's death in 1830. Lamb was with him at the end.

Page 275, line 1. You were pleased (you know where). Lamb had been a Unitarian, as had Coleridge and many others of his friends. Later, indeed, he claimed communion with no sect; while Coleridge became as much against Unitarianism as he had once been for it. Southey was himself converted to Unitarianism by Coleridge, in 1794. Later, however, the Church of England had few stouter supporters. What Lamb means by "You know where" I have not been able to discover—a memory possessed possibly only by Lamb and Southey.

Page 275, line 12. The last time. The only portion of this "Letter" which Lamb preserved began at this point. He rewrote this particular paragraph and included the remainder in Last Essays of Elia, in 1833, under the title, "The Tombs in the Abbey."

Page 276, line 25. Two shillings. The fees cannot have been reduced for at least ten years, for in 1833 Lamb reprinted this passage as it stood in 1823. The Abbey is not yet wholly free on every day of the week; but there is no charge except to view the chapels, and that has been reduced to sixpence. The first reduction after Lamb's protest was made by Dean Ireland, whose term of office lasted from 1816 to 1842. It was he also who appointed official guides. Lamb was not alone in this protest against the fees. One of Hood and Reynolds' Odes and Addresses, 1825, took up the point again.

Page 277, line 20. Major André. John André (1751-1780), a major in the British army in America in the War of Independence. In his capacity as Clinton's Adjutant-General he corresponded with one Arnold, who was plotting to deliver West Point to the British. In the course of his negotiations with Arnold, he crossed into the American lines and was compelled by circumstances to adopt civilian clothes. Being caught in this costume, he was charged as a spy, and, though every effort was made to save him, was, by the necessities of war, shot as such by Washington on October 2, 1780. He died like a hero. The British army donned mourning for his death, and a monument to his memory was erected in Westminster Abbey. Lamb alludes to the mutilation of this monument by the fracture of a nose, but as a matter of fact the whole head of Washington had to be renewed more than once. According to Mrs. Gordon's Life of Dean Buckland, two heads taken from the monument were returned from America to the Dean many years ago, with the request that they might be replaced. They had been appropriated as relics. Lamb's reference to Transatlantic Freedom was another hit at Southey's Pantisocratic tendencies (see note above) and his Joan of Arc rebel days.

In the London Magazine for December, 1823, under "The Lion's Head," is the following:—

We have to thank an unknown correspondent for the following

Sonnet

Occasioned by reading in Elia's Letter to Dr. Southey, that the admirable translator of Dante, the modest and amiable C——, still remained a curate—or, as a waggish friend observed,—after such a Translation should still be without Preferment.[70]

Page 278. Guy Faux.

London Magazine, November, 1823. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This essay is a blend of new and old. The first portion is new; but at the words (page 279, line 3 from foot) "The Gunpowder Treason was the subject," begins a reprint, with very slight modifications, of an article contributed by Lamb to The Reflector, No. II., in 1811, under the title "On the Probable Effects of the Gunpowder Treason in this country if the Conspirators had accomplished their Object." The Reflector essay was signed "Speculator."

Page 278, line 1. Ingenious and subtle writer. This was Hazlitt, whose article on "Guy Faux," from which Lamb quotes, appeared in The Examiner of November 11, 18 and 25, 1821, signed "Z." Lamb seems to have suggested to Hazlitt this whitewashing of Guido. See Hazlitt's essay on "Persons one would wish to have seen" (1826), reprinted in Winterslow, the report of a conversation "twenty years ago," where, after stating that it was Lamb's wish that Guy Faux should be defended, Hazlitt remarks that he supposes he will have to undertake the task himself. Later in the same essay Hazlitt quotes Lamb as mentioning Guy Faux and Judas Iscariot as two persons he would wish to see; adding, of the conspirator:—

I cannot but think that Guy Faux, that poor, fluttering, annual scarecrow of straw and rags, is an ill-used gentleman. I would give something to see him sitting pale and emaciated, surrounded by his matches and his barrels of gunpowder, and expecting the moment that was to transport him to Paradise for his heroic self-devotion.

Again, in the article on "Lamb" in the Spirit of the Age (1825) Hazlitt wrote:—

Whittington and his Cat are a fine hallucination for Mr. Lamb's historic Muse, and we believe he never heartily forgave a certain writer who took the subject of Guy Faux out of his hands.

A few years afterwards Lamb told Carlyle he regretted that the Faux conspiracy had failed—there would have been such a magnificent explosion. Carlyle cites this remark in his diary in evidence of Lamb's imbecility, but I fancy that Lamb had merely taken the measure of his visitor.

Lamb's reference to Hazlitt as an ex-Jesuit with the mention of Douay and M——th (Maynooth, the Irish Roman Catholic College), is, of course, chaff, resulting from Hazlitt's defence of this arch-Romanist.

After "Father of the Church" (page 280, line 7) Lamb had written in The Reflector:—

"The conclusion of his discourse is so pertinent to my subject, that I must beg your patience while I transcribe it. He has been drawing a parallel between the fire which Vaux and his accomplices meditated, and that which James and John were willing to have called down from heaven upon the heads of the Samaritans who would not receive our Saviour into their houses. 'Lastly,' he says, 'it (the powder treason) was a fire so strange that it had no example. The apostles, indeed, pleaded a mistaken precedent for the reasonableness of their demand, they desired leave to do but even as Elias did. The Greeks only retain this clause, it is not in the Bibles of the Church of Rome. And, really," etc.

I have collated the passage quoted by Lamb with the original edition of the sermon. Of the Latin phrases which Taylor does not translate, the first is from Sidonius Apollinaris, Carm., XXII.: "The stall of the Thracian King, the altars of Busiris, the feasts of Antiphates, and the Tauric sovereignty of Thoas." Rex Bistonius was Diomed, King of the Bistones, in Thrace, who fed his horses with human flesh, and was himself thrown to be their food by Hercules. Busiris, King of Egypt, seized and sacrificed all foreigners who visited this country, and he also was slain by Hercules. Antiphates was King of the Læstrygonians in Sicily, man-eating giants, who destroyed eleven of the ships of Ulysses. Thoas was King of Lemnos, and when the Lemnian women killed all the men in the island, his daughter, Hypsipylé, then elected queen, saved him, and he fled to Taurus where he became a king. This is the only legend of cruelty associated with the name of Thoas, and of course he is not the prepetrator; the crime is that of the women.

Concerning Taylor's second quotation, I am informed that the words "ergo quæ ... tuas qui" occur (virtually) in Prudentius, Cathemerinon, V., 81. The Latin is monkish, but means evidently: "But that massacre of princes who fell unavenged, Christ brooked not, lest perchance the house that His Father had built should be overthrown. And so what tongue can unfold Thy praise, O Christ, who dost abase the disloyal people and its treacherous ruler?"

Page 284, line 11 from foot. Bellamy's room. The old refreshment room of the House. There is a description of it in Sketches by Boz—"A Parliamentary Sketch."

Page 284, line 6 from foot. Berenice's curl. After these words came, in The Reflector version of the essay, this passage:—

"—all, in their degrees, glittering somewhere. Sussex misses her member[71] on earth, but is consoled to view him, on a starry night, siding the Great Bear. Cambridge beholds hers[72] next Scorpio. The gentle Castlereagh curdles in the Milky Way."

The member for Sussex at the time this essay was written (1811) was John Fuller, or Jack Fuller, of Rosehill, Sussex, and Devonshire Place, a bluff, eccentric character about town in those days, of huge stature and great wealth, whose house was famous for its musical soirées. Lamb calls him Ursa Major; his friend Jekyll, the wit, and one of Lamb's Old Benchers, called him the Hippopotamus. He once was forcibly removed from the House for refusing to give way and calling the Speaker "the insignificant little person in a wig." Fuller did not sit after 1812. He died in 1834. The member for Cambridge University was Sir Vicary Gibbs, then Attorney General, who in that capacity was a fierce opponent of the press, amongst those prosecuted by him being John and Leigh Hunt. From his caustic tongue he was known as Vinegar Gibbs—hence the reference to Scorpio. Castlereagh was, in 1823, no more; he had committed suicide in 1821.

Page 285. On a Passage in "The Tempest."

London Magazine, November 1823. Not reprinted by Lamb.

In the Magazine it was entitled "Nugæ Criticæ. By the author of Elia. II. On a Passage in 'The Tempest,'" the first contribution under this general title being the essay on Sir Philip Sidney's sonnets in the London Magazine, September, 1823, reprinted in the Last Essays of Elia. Lamb did not continue the series. The present paper was signed "L."

An ingenious commentary upon Lamb's theory was contributed by "Lælius" to the December London Magazine. After detailing his objections to Ogilby's narrative as a final solution, he put forward a theory of his own which is interesting enough to be reprinted here. Lælius wrote:—

The sense which I always attributed to the passage is this: uno verbo, the Witch Sycorax was pregnant;—and that humanity which teaches us to spare the guilty mother for the sake of her embryo innocent, was imputed by Shakespeare to the Algerines on this occasion.... The "one thing she did" is evidently what Shakespeare in his "Merchant of Venice" with great delicacy calls "the deed of kind;" and this sense, though by no means obvious, is justly inferrible from the context. Why then should it not be preferred? I have not been able to discover any thing in the rest of the piece inconsistent with the meaning here attributed to these lines; you, perhaps, may be more successful. A friend objected to me, that the law is,—to spare the mother only till the birth of her child, and therefore that the Witch, instead of being exiled at once, would have been kept till she was delivered, and then punished with death for her "manifold mischiefs." But poets are not expected to dispense justice with such nice and legal discrimination,—not to speak of what might have been the immediate necessity of expelling Sycorax from the Algerine community, either by death or banishment; the former of which was forbidden by the existing circumstances of her situation.

In connection with this theory it may be remarked that it was an old belief that during pregnancy a woman's eyes became blue. Webster, in the "Duchess of Malfi," makes Bosola say of the Duchess:—

I do not know of any editor of Shakespeare who has adopted Lamb's suggestion.

Page 288. Original Letter of James Thomson.

London Magazine, November, 1824. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This letter of James Thomson is printed in this edition, because Lamb was sufficiently interested in it to copy it out; but it is believed to be a genuine work of the author of the Seasons, and not, as has been stated, a hoax of Lamb's. In the memoir of Thomson by Sir Harris Nicolas (revised by Peter Cunningham), prefixed to the Aldine edition of Thomson's poems, the letter will be found in its right place. It is addressed to Dr. Cramston, September, 1725.

Page 292. Biographical Memoir of Mr. Liston.

London Magazine, January, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This article was not signed, but we know it to be Lamb's from a reference in a letter to Miss Hutchinson, of January 20, 1825:—

"But did you read the 'Memoir of Liston'? and did you guess whose it was? Of all the Lies I ever put off, I value this most. It is from top to toe, every paragraph, Pure Invention; and has passed for Gospel, has been republished in newspapers, and in the penny play-bills of the Night, as an authentic Account. I shall certainly go to the Naughty Man some day for my Fibbings."

Writing to Barton on February 10, 1825, Lamb alludes to it again, remarking, "A life more improbable for him [Liston] to have lived would not be easily invented."

To come from Lamb to facts—according to the best accounts that we have, the father of John Liston (1776?-1846) was either a watchmaker, or a subordinate official in the Custom House. He went to Soho School, afterwards became an usher at Dr. Burney's school at Gosport, and in 1799 was a master at the Grammar School of St. Martin's in Castle Street, Leicester Square. His first appearance on the stage proper was at Weymouth, where he failed utterly. Later he joined a touring company in the north of England as a serious actor, and again failed. At last, however, a manager induced him to take up comic old men's and bumpkins' parts, and his real talents were at once discovered. Thereafter he succeeded steadily, until his salary was larger than that paid to any other comedian of his time. His greatest part was Paul Pry in John Poole's play of that name, which was produced in September in the year of Lamb's essay. Liston left the stage in 1837. He married a Miss Tyrer, a favourite actress in burlesque. Liston's own tendency to punning and practical jokes must have led him to look upon this spurious biography with much favour.

Mrs. Cowden Clarke in her autobiography, My Long Life, says that she often met Mr. and Mrs. Liston in the Lambs' rooms in Great Russell Street.

It is interesting, in connection with Lamb's joke, to know that Liston's library contained a number of works of biblical criticism.

Page 299. A Vision of Horns.

London Magazine, January, 1825. Signed "Elia." Not reprinted by Lamb.

I had some little doubt as to whether or no to include in the present edition this fantasia on a theme no longer acceptable, since Lamb himself says he did not care to be associated with it. "The Horns is in poor taste [he wrote to Miss Hutchinson], resembling the most laboured papers in the Spectator. I had sign'd it 'Jack Horner:' but Taylor and Hessey said, it would be thought an offensive article, unless I put my known signature to it; and wrung from me my slow consent." And again, to Barton: "I am vexed that ugly paper should have offended. I kept it as clear from objectionable phrases as possible, and it was Hessey's fault, and my weakness, that it did not appear anonymous. No more of it, for God's sake."

Lamb's objections being, however, lodged rather against the publicity of the essay's paternity than the essay itself, and the aim of the present edition being to be as complete as possible, the essay stands. Moreover it has a peculiar interest as being to a large extent an experiment in what we might call Congrevism: forming a whimsical appendix to the Elia essay on the "Artificial Comedy," wherein Lamb urges upon the readers of the old licentious plays the value of dissociating them in their minds altogether from real life; looking upon them purely as fanciful dramas of an impossible society; and thus being able to enjoy their wit and high spirits without shock to the moral sensibilities. In his "Vision of Horns" Lamb seems to me to be himself dramatising this genial and reasonable view. He has carried out Congreve's method to a still higher power, and imagined a land peopled wholly by cuckolds—a reductio ad absurdum of the old English and modern French comedy theory of society. Rightly the essay should follow that on the "Artificial Comedy" as an ironical postscript.

Page 304. The Illustrious Defunct.

New Monthly Magazine, January, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.

The footnote with which the article properly begins refers to the last effort, then in preparation, which was made to add to the life of the State Lottery. Actually, the last State Lottery in England was held on October 18, 1826.

Page 305, line 4. Devout Chancellors of the Exchequer. The lottery produced between £250,000 and £300,000 per annum. Its death was decreed by a Parliamentary Committee which had inquired into its merits and demerits as a means of replenishing the national coffers.

Page 305, line 9. Sorrowing contractors. It was customary to apportion the sale of lottery tickets among speculators, who sold them again, if possible at a profit. The most prominent of these at the last was T. Bish (see below).

Page 305, line 28. The Blue-coat Boy. It was the habit, which began about 1694, for a dozen boys from Christ's Hospital to be requisitioned by the lottery controllers, from whom two were selected to draw the tickets from the wheels in Coopers' Hall. An old print, given in the Rev. E. H. Pearce's Annals of Christ's Hospital, 1901, shows them at their work.

Page 309, line 3. The art and mystery of puffing. An interesting collection of lottery puffs will be found in Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. II., November 15. The arch-professor of puffery in the lottery's later days was T. Bish, of Cornhill and Charing Cross, whose blandishments to the public were often presented in ingenious verse. We know from one of Mary Lamb's letters that Lamb (in addition to speculating in lottery tickets) had himself written lottery puffs twenty years earlier than this essay; but I have not been able confidently to trace any to his hand.

Page 310. Unitarian Protests.

London Magazine, February, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.

The marriages of Unitarian and other Dissenters had to be solemnised in English established churches until the end of 1836. Lord Hardwicke's Act of 1753, in force, with certain modifications, at the time of Lamb's essay, provided that all marriages not performed in church, with due publication of banns and licence duly granted, were null and void. It was customary, after the ceremony in an established church, to lodge a protest against the terms of the service. Hence Lamb's scathing strictures. Lamb was himself nominally a Unitarian, as were many of his friends. In 1796, as he told Coleridge, he adored Priestley almost to the point of sin. But in later life Lamb dropped away from all sects, although he says, in a late letter, that he is as old a "one-goddite" as George Dyer himself. Hood, who knew Lamb well, and wrote of him as lovingly as any one, remarked in his "Literary Reminiscences" in Hood's Own, probably with truth:—

As regards his Unitarianism, it strikes me as more probable that he was what the unco' guid people call "Nothing at all," which means that he was every thing but a Bigot. As he was in spirit an Old Author, so was he in faith an Ancient Christian, too ancient to belong to any of the modern sub-hubbub divisions of—Ists,—Arians, and—Inians.

And it is told of Lamb that he once complained that the Unitarians had robbed him of two-thirds of his God.

I do not identify M——, the friend to whom this letter was written.

Page 314. Autobiography of Mr. Munden.

London Magazine, February, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This skit followed "The Biography of Mr. Liston" (page 292) which was printed in the preceding month's issue. Leigh Hunt, referring in his own Autobiography to this exercise of invention, says: "Munden he [Lamb] made born at 'Stoke Pogis;' the very sound of which was like the actor speaking and digging his words."

To come to fact, Joseph Shepherd Munden (b. 1758) was the son of a poulterer in Leather Lane, Holborn, where he was born. At the age of twelve he was errand boy to an apothecary and afterwards was apprenticed to a law stationer. More than once—incited by admiration of Garrick—he ran away to join strolling companies, and at last he took to the stage altogether. Of his powers as an actor Lamb's other descriptions of him (see page 397 of this volume and the famous Elia essay) say enough. Munden's last appearance was on May 31, 1824. He died in 1832. His son was Thomas Shepherd Munden, who died, aged fifty, in 1850. He wrote his father's life.

In Raymond's Memoirs of Elliston is an account of an excursion which Lamb once made with Elliston and Munden. I quote it in the notes in Vol. II.

Page 317. The "Lepus" Papers.

These papers appeared in The New Times at various dates in 1825. We know them to be Lamb's from internal evidence and from the following allusion in Crabb Robinson's MS. Diary preserved at Dr. Williams' Library:—

"January 7, 1825. Called on Lamb and chatted. He has written in The New Times an article against visitors. He means to express his feelings towards young Godwin, for it is chiefly against the children of old friends that he humorously vents his spleen." The article in question, No. I. of the series, is No. X. of a series called Variorum. Lamb's signature, Lepus (a hare), is appended to all that are here included.

The Variorum series lasted flaggingly until April, one of the last articles in it being Lamb's review of the Odes and Addresses (see page 335), which, however, was not signed Lepus. It then died. In August a new series, entitled "Sketches Original and Select," was begun, with an article—"A Character"—by Lepus, but this also soon flagged. Lamb does not seem to have contributed to it again.

Page 317. I.—Many Friends.

The New Times, January 8, 1825. Signed "Lepus."

Another proof of Lamb's authorship of this essay will be found in a letter from him to Walter Savage Landor on October 9, 1832, where he writes:—

"Next, I forgot to tell you I knew all your Welsh annoyancers, the measureless B.'s. I knew a quarter of a mile of them. Seventeen brothers and sixteen sisters, as they appear to me in memory. There was one of them that used to fix his long legs on my fender, and tell a tale of a shark every night, endless, immortal. How have I grudged the salt-sea ravener not having had his gorge of him! The shortest of the daughters measured five foot eleven without her shoes. Well, some day we may confer about them. But they were tall. Truly, I have discover'd the longitude."

Lamb also returned to the charge a little later in the Popular Fallacy "That Home is Home." The first idea for both this essay and the Fallacy we find in the letter to Mrs. Wordsworth dated February 18, 1818. Lamb also utilised a portion of this essay in his Popular Fallacy "That You must Love Me, and Love My Dog," published in February, 1826.

Page 318, last line. Captain Beacham. From the letter to Landor we know this name to have disguised that of a brother of the Lambs' friend, Matilda Betham, the author of The Lay of Marie.

Page 319. II.—Readers against the Grain.

The New Times, January 13, 1825. Signed "Lepus."

Page 322. III.—Mortifications of an Author.

The New Times, January 31, 1825. Signed "Lepus."

Page 322, line 7 from foot. A——n C——m. Allan Cunningham.

Page 324. IV.—Tom Pry.

The New Times, February 8, 1825. Signed "Lepus."

The original of this character sketch was probably Thomas Hill, the drysalter, whom Lamb knew well. S. C. Hall's Book of Memories, p. 157, says: "His peculiar faculty was to find out what everybody did, from a minister of state to a stable-boy," etc. etc. John Poole's famous play "Paul Pry," in which Liston played so admirably, was not produced until September of this year, 1825. Lamb and Poole had a slight acquaintance through the London Magazine, to which Poole contributed dramatic burlesques. Lamb had given to the landlord in "Mr. H.," in 1806, the name and character of Pry.

Page 324, line 5 of essay. Like the man in the play. Chremes, in the opening scene of the Heauton Timoroumenos by Terence (line 77), says: "Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto". I am a man and to nothing that concerns mankind am I indifferent.

Page 325, line 8. "Usque recurrit." Horace's Epist., L, x., lines 24-25:—

(You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, yet she will persistently return, and will stealthily break through depraved fancies, and be winner.)

Page 326. V.—Tom Pry's Wife.

The New Times, February 28, 1825. Signed "Lepus."

In a letter from Lamb to the Kenneys, of which the date is uncertain, we get an inkling as to the identity of Mrs. Pry:—

"I suppose you know we've left the Temple pro tempore. By the way, this conduct has caused many strange surmises in a good lady of our acquaintance. She lately sent for a young gentleman of the India House, who lives opposite her at Monroe's the flute shop in Skinner Street, Snowhill,—I mention no names. You shall never get out of me what lady I mean,—on purpose to ask all he knew about us. I had previously introduced him to her whist table. Her inquiries embraced every possible thing that could be known of me—how I stood in the India House, what was the amount of my salary, what it was likely to be hereafter, whether I was thought clever in business, why I had taken country lodgings, why at Kingsland in particular, had I friends in that road, was anybody expected to visit me, did I wish for visitors, would an unexpected call be gratifying or not, would it be better that she sent beforehand, did any body come to see me, was not there a gentleman of the name of Morgan, did he know him, didn't he come to see me, did he know how Mr. Morgan lived, she could never make out how they were maintained, was it true he lived out of the profits of a linen draper's shop in Bishopsgate Street?"

Mrs. Godwin's address was 41 Skinner Street.

Again, Mary Lamb tells Sarah Hazlitt on November 7, 1809: "Charles told Mrs. Godwin Hazlitt had found a well in his garden which, water being scarce in your country, would bring him in two hundred a year; and she came in great haste the next morning to ask me if it were true."

Page 327. VI.—A Character.

The New Times, August 25, 1825. Signed "Lepus."

This differed from the five papers that have preceded it in inaugurating a new series entitled "Sketches Original and Select." Lepus, however, contributed no more. I have no idea who the original Egomet was, possibly an India House clerk. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the Janus Weathercock of the London Magazine, had occasionally used the pseudonym Egomet Bonmot, and Lamb may have borrowed it.

Page 328, line 26. "There is no reciprocity." Lamb may have been remembering a story in Joe Miller about the reciprocity being "all on one side."

Page 328, line 6 from foot. "Nimium vicini." In allusion to Virgil's (Ecl., IX., 28) "Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremonæ"—"Mantua alas, too near ill-starred Cremona" (for it shared the fate of Cremona, which had rebelled against Augustus and suffered confiscation). Lamb comments in his "Popular Fallacies" upon Swift's punning use of the phrase.

Page 329. Reflections in the Pillory.

London Magazine, March, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.

The editor's note is undoubtedly Lamb's, as is, of course, the whole imaginary story. It must have been about this time that Lamb was writing his "Ode to the Treadmill" which appeared in The New Times in October, 1825.

The pillory, which has not been used in this country since 1837, was latterly kept principally for seditious and libellous offenders. In May, 1812, for instance, Eaton, the publisher of Tom Paine's Age of Reason, stood in the pillory. The time was usually one hour, as in the case of Lamb's hero, the victim being a quarter turned at each fifteen minutes, in order that every member of the crowd might witness the disgrace. The offender's neck and wrists were fixed in holes cut for the purpose in a plank fastened crosswise to an upright pole. The London pillories were erected in different spots—at Charing Cross, in the Haymarket, in St. Martin's Lane, opposite the Royal Exchange, and elsewhere.

Page 331, line 1. My friends from over the water. Referring to the prisoners in the King's Bench Prison at Southwark, who would be allowed out during the day—hence "ephemeral Romans," or freemen, and "flies of a day": being obliged to return at night. (Shakespeare uses flies in this sense. "The slaves of chance and flies of every wind that blows," he says in "The Winter's Tale.") Lamb's friend, William Hone, was imprisoned in the King's Bench for a while from 1826, editing in confinement the end of his Every-Day Book and the whole of the Table Book.

Page 332, lines 16 and 17. Bastwick ... Prynne ... Defoe ... Shebbeare. John Bastwick (1593-1654) was condemned to lose his ears in the pillory for writing the Letanie of Dr. John Bastwicke, an attack on the bishops.—William Prynne (1600-1669) was pilloried twice, the first time for his Histrio-Mastix (referred to by Lamb in the biography of Liston on page 292), and the second time for his support of Bastwick against the bishops, particularly Laud. He also lost his ears.—John Shebbeare (1709-1788) was pilloried for satirising the House of Hanover. An Irishman held an umbrella over his head the while.—Concerning Defoe and the pillory see Lamb's "Ode to the Treadmill" and note in the volume devoted to his poems and plays.

Page 332, line 28. Charles closed the Exchequer. This was in 1671. In Green's Short History of the English People we read: "So great was the national opposition to his schemes that Charles was driven to plunge hastily into hostilities. The attack on a Dutch convoy was at once followed by a declaration of war, and fresh supplies were obtained for the coming struggle by closing the Exchequer, and suspending under Clifford's advice the payment of either principal or interest on loans advanced to the public Treasury." The present Royal Exchange was begun in 1842.

Page 333. The Last Peach.

London Magazine, April, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.

Lamb's letter to Bernard Barton of December 1, 1824, warning him against peculation, probably suggested this essay, which contains yet another glimpse of Blakesware house and Lamb's boyhood there.

Page 333, line 8. That unfortunate man. Henry Fauntleroy (1785-1824) was partner in the bank of Marsh, Sibbald & Co., of Berners Street. In 1815 he began a series of forgeries of trustees' signatures—as he affirmed, entirely in the interests of the credit of the house, and in no way for his own gratification—which culminated in the failure of the bank in 1824. His trial caused intense excitement in the country. On November 2, 1824, sentence of death was passed, and on the 30th Fauntleroy was hanged. Many attempts were made to obtain a reprieve, and an Italian twice offered to suffer death in his place. The story was long current that Fauntleroy had secreted a silver tube in his windpipe, had thereby escaped strangulation, and was living abroad. This would appeal peculiarly to Lamb, since his essay on "The Inconveniences of Being Hanged" and his farce "The Pawnbroker's Daughter," alike bear on that subject.

Page 335. "Odes and Addresses to Great People."

The New Times, April 12, 1825. Now reprinted for the first time.

We know this review to be by Lamb from the evidence of a letter to Coleridge on July 2, 1825, in reply to one in which Coleridge taxed Lamb with the authorship of the book. Coleridge wrote:—

But my dear Charles, it was certainly written by you, or under you, or una cum you. I know none of your frequent visitors capacious and assimilative enough of your converse to have reproduced you so honestly, supposing you had left yourself in pledge in his lockup house.... [Added later] No! Charles, it is you. I have read them over again, and I understand why you have an'on'd the book. The puns are nine in ten good, many excellent, the Newgatory transcendent!... Then moreover and besides, to speak with becoming modesty, excepting my own self, who is there but you who could write the musical lines and stanzas that are intermixed [with the personalities and puns]?

(The "Newgatory" pun was in the Friendly Epistle to Mrs. Elizabeth Fry:—

Lamb replied:—

"The Odes are four-fifths done by Hood, a silentish young man you met at Islington one day, an invalid. The rest are Reynolds's, whose sister H. has recently married. I have not had a broken finger in them. They are hearty, good-natured things, and I would put my name to 'em cheerfully, if I could as honestly. I complimented 'em in a newspaper, with an abatement for those puns you laud so. They are generally an excess. A Pun is a thing of too much consequence to be thrown in as a make-weight. You shall read one of the 'Addresses' over and miss the puns, and it shall be quite as good, and better, than when you discover 'em. A Pun is a noble thing per se: O never lug it in as an accessory. A Pun is a sole object for Reflection (vide my 'Aids' to that recessment from a savage state)—it is entire, it fills the mind; it is perfect as a sonnet, better. It limps ashamed in the train and retinue of Humour: it knows it should have an establishment of its own. The one, for instance, I made the other day,——I forget what it was.

"Hood will be gratified, as much as I am, by your mistake. I liked 'Grimaldi' the best; it is true painting of abstract clowning, and that precious concrete of a clown: and the rich succession of images, and words almost such, in the first half of the 'Magnum Ignotum.'"

Other evidence is supplied by the Forster collection at South Kensington, which contains a copy of the review with a message for Lamb scribbled on it.

Thomas Hood (1799-1845), whom Lamb first met in connection with the London Magazine, of which Hood acted as sub-editor, married Jane Reynolds in 1824. John Hamilton Reynolds (1796-1852), her brother, wrote for the London Magazine over the signature "Edward Herbert." The Odes and Addresses appeared anonymously in the spring of 1825. Coleridge's attribution of the work to Lamb was not very happy; its amazing agility was quite out of his power. But Coleridge occasionally nodded in these matters, or he would not have been equally positive a few years earlier that Lamb was the author of Reynolds' Peter Bell.

In at least two of the odes and addresses the authors followed in Lamb's own footsteps and adapted to their own use some of his thunder. In the address to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster the argument for free admission, as expressed in Lamb's "Letter to Southey" in 1823 (see pages 275-277), is extended, with additional levity; and again in the ode to Mr. Bodkin, the Hon. Secretary to the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, Lamb's Elia essay on "The Decay of Beggars" is emphasised. According to a copy of the book marked by Hood, now in the possession of Mr. Buxton Forman, Reynolds wrote only the odes to M'Adam, Dymoke, Sylvanus Urban, Elliston and the Dean and Chapter.

Compare Lamb's other remarks on punning in "Popular Fallacies" and "Distant Correspondents."

Page 335, line 9. Peter Pindar ... Colman. Peter Pindar was the name assumed by Dr. John Wolcot (1738-1819) when he lashed and satirised his contemporaries in his very numerous odes. Colman was George Colman the younger (1762-1836), the dramatist, and author of Broad Grins, 1802, a collection of free and easy comic verse.

Page 335, foot. The immortal Grimaldi. Joseph Grimaldi (1779-1837), the clown. He did not actually leave the stage until 1828, but his appearances had been only occasional for several years.

Page 336, second stanza. "Berkeley's Foote." This was Maria Foote (1797?-1867), the actress, afterwards Countess of Harrington, who was abandoned by Colonel Berkeley after the birth of two children, and whose woes were made public through a breach-of-promise action brought by her against "Pea Green" Hayes a little later.

Page 337. The Religion of Actors.

New Monthly Magazine, April, 1826. Not reprinted by Lamb; but known to be his by a sentence in a letter to Bernard Barton. This paper is of course as nonsensical as that on Liston.

Page 337, line 4 of essay. A celebrated tragic actor. Referring to the action for criminal conversation brought by Alderman Cox against Edmund Kean, in 1824, in which Kean was cast in £800 damages, and which led during the following seasons to hostile demonstrations against him both in England and America. For many performances he played only to men.

Page 337, line 11 of essay. Miss Pope. See note on page 465.

Page 338, line 1. The present licenser. George Colman the younger, whose pedantic severity was out of all proportion to the freedom which in his earlier play-writing and verse-writing days he had allowed himself. In his evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, in an inquiry into the state of the drama in 1832, he admitted having refused to pass the term "angel," addressed by a lover to his lady, on the ground that "an angel was a heavenly body."

Page 338, line 3. Fawcett. This would be John Fawcett (1768-1837), famous in bluff parts. He was treasurer and trustee of the Covent Garden Theatrical Fund for many years.

Page 338, line 3. The five points. The Five Points of Doctrine, maintained by the Calvinists, were Original Sin, Predestination, Irresistible Grace, Particular Redemption and the Final Perseverance of the Saints.

Page 338, line 4. Dicky Suett. Richard Suett (1755-1805), the comedian of whom Lamb wrote so enthusiastically in "The Old Actors."

Page 338, line 7. Br——'s "Religio Dramatici." I imagine that John Braham, the tenor (1774?-1856), né Abraham, had put forth a manifesto stating that he had embraced the Christian faith; but I can get no information on the subject. See Lamb's other references to Braham in the Elia essay "Imperfect Sympathies."

Page 338, line 8 from foot. Dr. Watts. Dr. Isaac Watts' version of the Psalms, 1719, takes great liberties with the originals, evangelising them, omitting much, and even substituting "Britain" for "Israel."

Page 338, foot. St. Martin's ... St. Paul's, Covent Garden. The two parishes in which the chief theatres were situated.

Page 339, line 3. Two great bodies. The Covent Garden Company and the Drury Lane Company.

Page 339, line 7. Mr. Bengough ... Mr. Powell. Two useful actors in their day.

Page 339, line 18. Notorious education of the manager. Charles Kemble (1775-1854), then manager of Covent Garden, had been educated at the English Jesuit College at Douay, where his brother, John Philip Kemble, had preceded him.

Page 339, line 20. Mr. T——y. This would probably be Daniel Terry (1780-1829), then manager, with Yates, of the Adelphi. The allusion to him as a member of the Kirk of Scotland probably refers to his well-known adoration and imitation of Sir Walter Scott, whom he closely resembled.

Page 339, line 25. Mr. Fletcher. The Rev. Alexander Fletcher, minister of the Albion Chapel in Moorfields, who was suspended by the Synod of the Presbyterian Church in 1824 for his share in a breach-of-promise case.

Page 339, lines 29 and 30. Miss F——e and Madame V——s. Miss F——e would probably be Miss Foote (see note on page 521). Madame Vestris (1797-1856), the comedienne and wife of Charles James Mathews. It might not be out of place to state that Sublapsarians consider the election of grace as a remedy for an existing evil, and Supralapsarians view it as a part of God's original purpose in regard to men.

Page 339, lines 32 and 33. Mr. Pope ... Mr. Sinclair. Alexander Pope (1752-1835), the comedian. John Sinclair (1791-1857), the singer.

Page 339, line 33. Mr. Grimaldi. See the note on page 521. Grimaldi's son Joseph S. Grimaldi made his début as Man Friday in 1814 and died in 1832. The Jumpers were a Welsh sect of Calvinist Methodists.

Page 340, line 7. Mr. Elliston. Robert William Elliston (1774-1831), the comedian, who had been manager of Drury Lane, 1821-1826. Lamb's Elia essays on this character lend point to his suggestion that Elliston leaned towards the Muggletonians, a sect which by that time was almost extinct, after two centuries' existence.

Page 340. A Popular Fallacy.

New Monthly Magazine, June, 1826, where it formed part of the series of "Popular Fallacies," of which all the others were reprinted in the Last Essays of Elia. Lamb did not reprint it.

The unnamed works referred to are The Register of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, 1724, by John Anstis (not Anstey), Garter King-at-Arms, and Elias Ashmole's Institutions, Laws and Ceremonies of the Order of the Garter, 1672. In the passage quoted from William Hay's Deformity, an Essay, 1754, the author is speaking of his experiences when in a mob.

Page 342. Reminiscences of Juke Judkins, Esq.

New Monthly Magazine, June, 1826. Signed "Elia." Not reprinted by Lamb.

Lamb seems to have intended to write a story of some length, for the promise "To be continued" was appended to the first instalment. But he did not return to it.

Page 349. Contributions To Hone's "Every-Day Book" and "Table Book."

I have arranged together all Lamb's prose contributions (except "A Death-Bed" and the Garrick Extracts) to William Hone's volumes—the Every-Day Book, both series, and the Table Book—in order to give them unity. It seemed better to do this than to interrupt the series for the sake of a chronological order which at this period of Lamb's life (1825-1827) was of very little importance. Three not absolutely certain pieces will be found in the Appendix.

William Hone (1780-1842) was a man of independent mind and chequered career. He started life in an attorney's office, but in 1800 exchanged the law for book-and-print selling, and began to exercise his thoughts upon public questions, always siding with the unpopular minority. He examined into what he considered public scandals with curiosity and persistence, undiscouraged by such private calamities as bankruptcy, and in many ways showed himself an "Enemy of the People." Some squibs against the Government, in the form of parodies of the Litany, the Church Catechism and the Athanasian Creed, led to a famous trial on December 17-19, 1817, in which, after a prolonged sitting—Hone's speech in his own defence lasting seven hours—he was acquitted, in spite of the adverse summing up of Lord Ellenborough. The verdict is said to have hastened Ellenborough's death. A public subscription for Hone realised upwards of £3,000, and he thereupon entered upon a more materially successful period of his career. He became more of a publisher and author, and less of a firebrand. He issued a number of cheap but worthy books, and in 1823 his own first important work, Ancient Mysteries.

Hone's title to fame, however, rests upon his discovery of George Cruikshank's genius and his Every-Day Book (Vol. I. running through 1825 and published in 1826; Vol. II. running through 1826 and published in 1827), his Table Talk, 1827, and his Year Book, 1831. These are admirable collections of old English lore, legends and curiosities, brought together by a kind-hearted, simple-minded man, to whom thousands of readers and hundreds of makers of books are indebted.

William Hone and financial complexity were unhappily never strangers, and in 1826 he was in prison for debt; indeed he finished the Every-Day Book and edited the Table Book there. A few years later, largely by Lamb's instrumentality, he was placed by his friends in a coffee-house—the Grasshopper, in Gracechurch Street—but he did not make it succeed. He died in 1842.

Lamb and Hone first met probably in 1823. In May of that year Lamb acknowledges Hone's gift of a copy of Ancient Mysteries and asks him to call. In 1825 Lamb is contributing to the Every-Day Book, and in July he lends Hone his house at Islington, while Mary and himself are at Enfield. The Every-Day Book, July 14, 1825, has a humorous letter from Hone to Lamb, written from Islington, entitled "A Hot Letter," which Lamb acknowledges in a reply to Hone on the 25th. This letter was addressed to Captain Lion—Hone's joke upon Lamb's name. In the answers to correspondents on the wrapper of one of the periodical parts of the Every-Day Book Mr. Bertram Dobell has found quoted one of Lion's good things: "'J. M.' is a wag. His 'derivation' reminds the Editor of an observation the other day by his witty friend Mr. LION. Being pressed to take some rhubarb pie, Mr. L. declined because it was physic; to the reply that it was pleasant and innocent, he rejoined, 'So is a daisy, but I don't therefore like daisy pie.' 'Daisy pie! who ever heard of daisy pies?' 'My authority is Shakespeare; he expressly mentions daisies pied.'"

It was in the number of the London Magazine for July, 1825, that Lamb's signed verses to the editor of the Every-Day Book appeared, beginning:—

(still too often printed "ingenious"); a testimonial which must have meant much to Hone at that time. Hone copied them into the Every-Day Book for July 9, 1825, with a rhymed reply.

Hone had for Lamb's genius and character an intense enthusiasm. The Every-Day Book is enriched by many quotations from Lamb's writings, with occasional bursts of eulogy. For example, on December 31, of Vol. I., when quoting from "New Year's Eve," he remarks:—

among the other delightful essays of his volume entitled "Elia"—a little book, whereof to say that it is of more gracious feeling and truer beauty than any of our century is poor praise ...

And on September 23, of Vol. II., when quoting "My First Play":—

After the robbery of "Elia," my conscience forces me to declare that I wish every reader would save me from the shame of further temptation to transgress, by ordering "Elia" into his collection. There is no volume in our language so full of beauty, truth and feeling, as the volume of "Elia." I am convinced that every person who has not seen it, and may take the hint, will thank me for acquainting him with a work which we cannot look into without pleasure, nor lay down without regret. It is a delicious book.

The Every-Day Book appeared periodically through 1825 and 1826. The first volume was published as a book in May, 1826, with the following dedication:—

To Charles Lamb, Esq.

Dear L——

Your letter to me, within the first two months from the commencement of the present work, approving my notice of St. Chad's Well, and your afterwards daring to publish me your "friend," with your "proper name" annexed, I shall never forget. Nor can I forget your and Miss Lamb's sympathy and kindness when glooms outmastered me; and that your pen spontaneously sparkled in the book, when my mind was in clouds and darkness. These "trifles," as each of you would call them, are benefits scored upon my heart; and

May 5, 1826.

It has been held that the inference that Mary Lamb also contributed to Vol. I. of the Every-Day Book is a fair one to draw from these words. But beyond her recollections in the paper on "Starkey" nothing from her pen has been identified. Her brother's certain contributions to Vol. I. are, the "Remarkable Correspondent," "Captain Starkey," the "Twelfth of August," "The Ass," and "Squirrels." To Vol. II. he sent "An Appearance of the Season," "The Months," and "Reminiscences of Jeffery Dunstan."

My impression is that Lamb's hand is to be seen far oftener than this: but we have no definite proof. I feel convinced that many of Hone's quotations from old plays and old books were supplied to him by his more leisured friend.

In column 857 of The Table Book, 1827, Vol. II., for example, is the following letter to Hone, which is very likely to be from Lamb's pen. Waltham Abbey was a favourite objective of his in his long Essex and Hertfordshire rambles:—

Waltham, Essex

To the Editor

Sir,—The following epitaph is upon a plain gravestone in the churchyard of Waltham Abbey. Having some point, it may perhaps be acceptable for the Table Book. I was told that the memory of the worthy curate is still held in great esteem by the inhabitants of that place.

Rev. Isaac Colnett,

Surely common decency, if they are deficient in antiquarian feeling, should induce the inhabitants of Waltham Cross to take some measures, if not to restore, at least to preserve from further decay and dilapidation the remains of that beautiful monument of conjugal affection, the cross erected by Edward I. It is now in a sad disgraceful state.

I am, &c.,

Z.

Lamb's first contribution to the Table Book, always excepting his regular supply of Garrick Play extracts was "A Death-Bed," an account of the last moments of his friend, Randal Norris, which he included in the Last Essays of Elia. His other original prose was the letter about Mrs. Gilpin at Edmonton, and "The Defeat of Time." A few pages after "A Death-Bed," there is an extract from an article from Blackwood's Magazine for April, 1827, entitled "Le Revenant"—the story of a man who survived hanging. Lamb suggested to Hone that he should print this.—"There is in Blackwood this month [he wrote in a private letter] an article most affecting indeed, called Le Revenant, and would do more towards abolishing capital punishment, than 40,000 Romillies or Montagues. I beg you to read it and see if you can extract any of it—the trial scene in particular." This is another instance of the fascination that resuscitation after hanging exerted upon Lamb.

We know also, as is stated in the note to "The Good Clerk" (page 455), that Lamb supplied Hone with the extracts from Defoe and Mandeville in columns 567-569 and 626-628 of the Table Book, Vol. I. He probably sent many others.

In columns 773-774 of the Table Book, Vol. I., are Lamb's verses "Going or Gone."

In column 55 of the Table Book, Vol. II., is Lamb's sonnet to Miss Kelly, and in column 68 his explanation that Moxon probably sent it.

To Hone's Year Book, 1831, Lamb contributed no original prose that is identifiable. On April 30, however, was printed Sir T. Overbury's character of a "Free and Happy Milkmaid," of which we know Lamb to have been fond—he copied it into one of his Extract Books—together with two passages from Jeremy Taylor, all probably sent to Hone by Lamb. It was on this day that FitzGerald's "Meadows in Spring" was printed in the Year Book, and afterwards copied in The Athenæum, where it was attributed by suggestion to Lamb.

Page 349. I.—Remarkable Correspondent.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. I., May 1, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.

Hone's Every-Day Book, which purported to take account of every day in the year, had passed without a word from February 28 to March 1. Hence this protest.

Page 350, line 13. An antique scroll. On February 28 Hone printed these lines:—

FOR THE MEMORY

Old Memorandum of the Months

The omitted couplet runs:—

To Lamb's protests Hone replied as follows, on May 1:—

To this correspondent it may be demurred and given in proof, that neither in February, nor at any other time in the year 1825, had he, or could he, have had existence; and that whenever he is seen, he is only an impertinence and an interpolation upon his betters. To his "floral honours" he is welcome; in the year 992, he slew St. Oswald, archbishop of York, in the midst of his monks, to whom the greater periwinkle, Vinca Major, is dedicated. For this honour our correspondent should have waited till his turn arrived for distinction. His ignorant impatience of notoriety is a mark of weakness, and indeed it is only in compassion to his infirmity that he has been condescended to; his brothers have seen more of the world, and he should have been satisfied by having been allowed to be in their company at stated times, and like all little ones, he ought to have kept respectful silence. Besides, he forgets his origin; he is illegitimate; and as a burthen to "the family," and an upstart, it has been long in contemplation to disown him, and then what will become of him? If he has done any good in the world he may have some claim upon it, but whenever he appears, he seems to throw things into confusion. His desire to alter the title of this work excites a smile—however, when he calls upon the editor he shall have justice, and be compelled to own that it is calumny to call this the Every-Day—but—one—Book.

In Vol. II. of the Every-Day Book February 29 was again omitted. He did not come to his own until the Year Book in 1831.

Page 351. II.—Captain Starkey.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. I., July 21, 1825. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb.

On July 9 Hone gave extracts from a small pamphlet entitled Memoirs of the Life of Benj. Starkey, late of London, but now an inmate of the Freemen's Hospital, in Newcastle. Written by himself. With a portrait of the Author and a Facsimile of his handwriting. William Hall, Newcastle, 1818. This pamphlet is not interesting, except in calling forth Lamb's reminiscences.

Page 351, line 9. My sister. Mary Lamb, who was born in 1764, would probably have been at Bird's school at the time of her brother's birth. Her period there may have been 1774-1778.

Page 351, line 25. Fetter Lane. In a directory for 1773 I find William Bird, Academy, 3 Bond Stables, Fetter Lane. Bond Stables have now disappeared, although there is still the passage joining Fetter Lane and Bartlett's Buildings.

Page 354. III.—Twelfth of August.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. I., August 12, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.

While George IV., who was born on August 12, 1762, was Prince of Wales, a very long period, his birthday was kept on its true date. But after his accession to the throne in 1820 his birthday was kept on April 23, St. George's Day. Hence Lamb's protest. This is probably the only kind reference to George IV. in all Lamb's writings.

Lamb already (Morning Post, 1802, see page 44, and London Magazine, 1823) had rehearsed the theme both of this letter and of that on the "Twenty-ninth of February." In his "Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age" the forlorn condition of February 29 is more than once mentioned, while the grievance of August 12 against April 23 is thus described:—

"The King's health being called for after this, a notable dispute arose between the Twelfth of August (a jealous old Whig gentlewoman) and the Twenty-Third of April (a new-fangled lady of the Tory stamp) as to which of them should have the honour to propose it. August grew hot upon the matter, affirming time out of mind the prescriptive right to have lain with her, till her rival had basely supplanted her; whom she represented as little better than a kept mistress, who went about in fine clothes, while she (the legitimate Birthday) had scarcely a rag, &c."

Page 354, line 4 of letter. Poor relative of ours. February 29 (see page 349).

Page 355, line 11. George of Cappadocia, etc. George of Cappadocia was a Bishop of Alexandria in the fourth century, murdered by the populace. There was once a tendency to confuse him with St. George of England. George of Leyden was probably a slip of the pen for John of Leyden, the Anabaptist of Münster. George-a-Green, the hero of the History of George-a-Green, the Pindar of Wakefield, the stoutest opponent that Robin Hood ever met. The story was dramatised in a play attributed to Robert Green. George Dyer was Lamb's friend.

Page 355, line 15. Dismission of a set of men. Referring to the King's overthrow of the Whigs in the Caroline of Brunswick ferment.

To Lamb's letter Hone printed a clever reply.

Page 356. IV.—The Ass.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. I., October 5, 1825. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb.

The germ of this paper is found in a letter from Lamb to John Payne Collier in 1821 thanking him for the gift of his Poetical Decameron. After quoting the three lines also quoted in this essay, Lamb remarks, in the letter, "Cervantes, Sterne, and Coleridge, have said positively nothing for asses compared with this."

The immediate cause of the communication to the Every-Day Book was a previous article in praise of asses. Hone prefixed to Lamb's paper the following remarks: "The cantering of Tim Tims [who had written of asses on September 19] startles him who told of his 'youthful days,' at the school wherein poor 'Starkey' cyphered part of his little life. C. L., 'getting well, but weak' from painful and severe indisposition, is 'off and away' for a short discursion. Better health to him, and good be to him all his life. Here he is."

Lamb wrote to Hone in humorous protest against the implication of the phrase "Here he is," immediately above the title "The Ass." "My friends are fairly surprised [he said] that you should set me down so unequivocally for an ass.... Call you that friendship?"

Page 356, foot. "Between the years 1790 and 1800." This passage refers to an article in a previous issue of the Every-Day Book (see Vol. I., September 19) on cruelty to animals, where we read:—

Legislative discussion and interference have raised a feeling of kindness towards the brute creation which slumbered and slept in our forefathers. Formerly, the costermonger was accustomed to make wounds for the express purpose of producing torture. He prepared to drive an ass, that had not been driven, with his knife. On each side of the back bone, at the lower end, just above the tail, he made an incision of two or three inches in length through the skin, and beat into these incisions with his stick till they became open wounds, and so remained, while the ass lived to be driven to and from market, or through the streets of the metropolis. A costermonger, now, would shrink from this, which was a common practice between the years 1790 and 1800.

Page 357, line 9. "Lay on," etc. Anaxarchus, the philosopher, having offended Alexander the Great, was pounded in a stone mortar. During the process he exclaimed: "Pound the body of Anaxarchus; thou dost not pound the soul." Lamb proposed to use the phrase "You beat but on the case of Elia" in the preface to the Essays of Elia as a monition to adverse critics, but he changed his mind.

Page 358, foot. Jem Boyer. See the Elia essay on "Christ's Hospital" in Vol. II. (page 22), and notes to same. "As in præsenti perfectum format in avi"—"as in the present tense makes avi in the perfect"—was the first of the mnemonic rules for the formation of verbs in the old Latin primer (see the old Eton Latin Grammar). Lamb himself makes the pun in a letter to Mrs. Shelley in 1827.

Page 359. V.—In Re Squirrels.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. I., October 18, 1825. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb.

On October 7 Hone had reprinted a letter on squirrels from the Gentleman's Magazine. Lamb's postscript to that letter, as this little communication may be called, was thus introduced:—

"Be it remembered, that C. L. comes here and represents his relations, that is to say, on behalf of the recollections, being the next of kin, of him, the said C. L., and of sundry persons who are 'aye treading' in the manner of squirrels aforesaid; and thus he saith:—"

Page 359, line 12. Mr. Urban's correspondent. Mr. Urban—Sylvanus Urban—the dynastic name of the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine. "I know not," says the correspondent, "whether any naturalist has observed that their [squirrels'] teeth are of a deep orange colour."

Page 359, line 22. The author of the "Task" somewhere ...

Page 359, foot. As for their "six quavers," etc. The writer in the Gentleman's Magazine describes his squirrels as dancing in their cages to exact time.

Page 359, foot. Along with the "melodious," etc. Referring to the preceding essay, "The Ass."

Page 360. VI.—An Appearance of the Season.

Every-Day Book, Vol. II., January 28, 1826. /a>Not reprinted by Lamb.

We know this to be Lamb's because the original copy was preserved at Rowfant, together with that of many other of Lamb's contributions to Hone's books.

The article in the London Magazine for December, 1822, to which Lamb refers, is entitled "A Few Words about Christmas." It is one of the best of the imitations of Lamb, of which there are many in that periodical, and was possibly from Hood's pen. A full description of Hood's "Progress of Cant" follows Lamb's little paper in the Every-Day Book, probably written by Hone. See page 431.

The motto under the Beadle's picture is from "Lear," Act IV., Scene 6, line 162.

Page 360, line 6 of essay. Within the bills. Within the bills of mortality. Geographically speaking, the phrase "within the bills" was the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth century counterpart of our phrase "within the radius." But the associations of the two terms are very different. The bills were the Bills of Mortality, or lists of deaths (also births) drawn up by the Parish Clerks of London and published by them on Thursdays. Devised as a means of publishing the increase or decrease of the ever-recurrent Plague, the bills were begun in 1592, were resumed during a visitation in 1603, and from that year, except for some interruption at the time of the Great Fire, they appeared week by week, until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Page 361. VII.—The Months.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. II., April 16, 1826. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb. I have collated the extracts with Lamb's edition of The Queene-like Closet.

Hone's prefixed note runs: "C. L., whose papers under these initials on 'Captain Starkey,' 'The Ass, No. 2,' and 'Squirrels,' besides other communications, are in the first volume, drops the following pleasant article 'in an hour of need.'"

Mrs. Hannah Woolley, afterwards Mrs. Challinor, was born about 1623. The first edition of The Queene-like Closet was 1672; she wrote also, or is supposed to have written, The Ladies' Directory, or Choice Experiments of Preserving and Candying, 1661; The Cook's Guide, 1664; The Ladies' Delight, 1672; The Gentlewoman's Companion, 1675.

Page 365, line 3. I remember Bacon ... This possibly is the passage referred to:—

Neither let us be thought to sacrifice to our mother the earth, though we advise, that in digging or ploughing the earth for health, a quantity of claret wine be poured thereon (History of Life and Death, Operation 5, No. 33).

Page 365, last line of essay. Surely Swift must have seen ... Swift's Directions to Servants was published in 1745, after the author's death.

Page 366. VIII.—Reminiscence of Sir Jeffery Dunstan.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. II., June 22, 1826. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb.

The following account of the Garrat election was given in Sir Richard Phillips' A Morning's Walk from London to Kew, 1817, quoted by Hone:—

Southward of Wandsworth, a road extends nearly two miles to the village of Lower Tooting, and nearly midway are a few houses, or hamlet, by the side of a small common, called Garrat, from which the road itself is called Garrat Lane. Various encroachments on this common led to an association of the neighbours about three-score years since, when they chose a president, or mayor, to protect their rights; and the time of their first election being the period of a new parliament, it was agreed that the mayor should be re-chosen after every general election. Some facetious members of the club gave, in a few years, local notoriety to this election; and, when party spirit ran high in the days of Wilkes and Liberty, it was easy to create an appetite for a burlesque election among the lower orders of the Metropolis. The publicans at Wandsworth, Tooting, Battersea, Clapham, and Vauxhall, made a purse to give it character; and Mr. Foote rendered its interest universal, by calling one of his inimitable farces "The Mayor of Garrat."

In 1826, the year of Hone's literary outburst on the subject, which should be referred to by any one curious in the matter, an attempt was made to revive the Garrat humours; but it was too late for success; the joke was dead.

Dunstan was a stunted, quick-witted and quick-tongued dealer in old wigs—a well-known street and tavern figure in his day. He contested Garrat in 1781 against "Sir" John Harper ("who made an oath against work in his youth and was never known to break it"). Sir John then won. Dunstan's speech is quoted in full by Hone from an old broadside. "Gentlemen," he said, "as I am not an orator or personable man, be assured I am an honest member." When Harper died in 1785 Sir Jeffery was returned, as many as 50,000 people attending the election. Dunstan used to recite his speeches in public-houses, where collections were made for him; but this means of livelihood was impaired by the loss of his teeth, which he sold one night for ten shillings and a sufficiency of liquor to some merry London Hospital students. He died in 1797 when Lamb was twenty-two.

Page 366, line 5 of essay. About 1790 or 1791. Lamb was at the South-Sea House.

Page 367, line 27. Dr. Last. In Samuel Foote's play, "The Devil on Two Sticks," 1778.

Page 367, foot. My Lord Foppington. Lord Foppington in "The Relapse," by Congreve. Foppington remarks: "To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own." Lamb uses the same speech for the motto of his "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading."

Page 368. IX.—Mrs. Gilpin Riding To Edmonton.

Hone's Table Book, Vol. II., columns 79-81, 1827. Not reprinted by Lamb.

We know Lamb to have written this, from the evidence of an unpublished letter and the original "copy" and picture, once preserved at Rowfant. Lamb's letter to Hone, enclosing Hood's drawing, runs thus:—

[No date: early July, 1827.]

"Dear H.,

"This is Hood's, done from the life, of Mary getting over a style here. Mary, out of a pleasant revenge, wants you to get it engrav'd in Table Book to surprise H., who I know will be amus'd with you so doing.

"Append some observations about the awkwardness of country styles about Edmonton, and the difficulty of elderly Ladies getting over 'em.——

"That is to say, if you think the sketch good enough.

"I take on myself the warranty.

"Can you slip down here some day and go a Green-dragoning?

"C. L.

"Enfield (Mrs. Leishman's, Chase).

"If you do, send Hood the number, No. 2 Robert St., Adelphi, and keep the sketch for me."

Lamb subsequently appended the observations himself. The text of his little article, changing Mary Lamb into Mrs. Gilpin, followed in Mr. Locker-Lampson's album. The postmark is July 17, 1827.

Lamb was fond of jokes about styles. Writing to Dodwell, of the India House, from Calne, in the summer of 1816, he said, after dating his letter old style: "No new style here, all the styles are old, and some of the gates too for that matter."

Page 369. X.—The Defeat of Time.

Hone's Table Book, Vol. II., columns 335-340, 1827. Not reprinted by Lamb.

In 1827 was published Thomas Hood's poem, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, with the following dedication to Lamb:—

To Charles Lamb

My Dear Friend,

I thank my literary fortune that I am not reduced, like many better wits, to barter dedications, for the hope or promise of patronage, with some nominally great man; but that where true affection points, and honest respect, I am free to gratify my head and heart by a sincere inscription. An intimacy and dearness, worthy of a much earlier date than our acquaintance can refer to, direct me at once to your name: and with this acknowledgment of your ever kind feeling towards me, I desire to record a respect and admiration for you as a writer, which no one acquainted with our literature, save Elia himself, will think disproportionate or misplaced. If I had not these better reasons to govern me, I should be guided to the same selection by your intense yet critical relish for the works of our great Dramatist, and for that favourite play in particular which has furnished the subject of my verses.

It is my design, in the following Poem, to celebrate an allegory, that immortality which Shakespeare has conferred on the Fairy mythology by his Midsummer Night's Dream. But for him, those pretty children of our childhood would leave barely their names to our maturer years; they belong, as the mites upon the plum, to the bloom of fancy, a thing generally too frail and beautiful to withstand the rude handling of Time: but the Poet has made this most perishable part of the mind's creation equal to the most enduring; he has so intertwined the Elfins with human sympathies, and linked them by so many delightful associations with the productions of nature, that they are as real to the mind's eye, as their green magical circles to the outer sense.

It would have been a pity for such a race to go extinct, even though they were but as the butterflies that hover about the leaves and blossoms of the visible world.

I am, My dear Friend, Yours most truly, T. Hood.

Lamb's "Defeat of Time" is a paraphrase of the first part of Hood's poem.

Page 371, line 10. "In the flowery spring," etc. From Chapman's Translation of Homer's "Hymn to Pan," 31-33.

Page 373, line 15 from foot. Sir Thomas Gresham. It is told of Sir Thomas Gresham (1519?-1579), the founder of the Royal Exchange, that as a baby his life was saved by the chirping of a grasshopper, as related here. But cold veracity says not. The legend seems to have had its origin in the grasshopper crest of the Greshams, but it has been found that this crest was worn by an ancestor of Sir Thomas's who lived a hundred years earlier.

Page 375. An Autobiographical Sketch.

Lamb wrote this little sketch for William Upcott (1779-1845), the autograph collector and assistant librarian of the London Institution. Upcott permitted John Forster to quote it in the New Monthly Magazine for April, 1835, shortly after Lamb's death. It is here printed from the original MS. in the possession of Mr. B. B. MacGeorge, of Glasgow, contained in a MS. volume entitled "Reliques of my Contemporaries. William Upcott." Whether or no Lamb ever caught a swallow flying is not known; but everything else in the autobiography is true. The reference to Mr. Upcott's book may be to the album in which this sketch was written, or to a new edition of the Biographical Dictionary of Living Authors, published in 1816, in which Upcott is supposed to have had a hand. I cannot discover whether a second edition of this work was published. There is none at the British Museum, nor at the London Institution, of which Upcott was librarian. In the first edition, A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland ... 1816, Lamb figures thus:—

"Lamb, Charles, was born in London, in 1775, and educated at Christ's Hospital. He is at present a clerk in the India House, and has published [a list of six books follows] ..."

"Lamb, Miss, sister of the preceding, has published Mrs. Leicester's School, 12mo, 1808; Poetry for Children, 2 vs., 12mo, 1809."

Upcott is not considered to have done more than to collect some of the materials for the Dictionary, which was the work of John Watkins and Frederick Shoberl.

Lamb's sense of time was never good: the Elia essays were published in 1823 and the Specimens in 1808, fully four years and nineteen years before the date of this autobiography. The joke about the Works will be found also in the original version of the "Character of the Late Elia."

Page 376. Shakespeare's Improvers.

The Spectator, November 22, 1828. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This letter was drawn forth by some remarks on the spurious version of "King Lear," which was then being played; or, as The Spectator phrased it, "Shakespeare murdered by Nahum Tate—Covent Garden aiding and abetting." See page 383 for another letter to the same paper. See also the essay on "Shakespeare's Tragedies," 1810, for a first idea of the indictment now more fully drawn up.

Page 376, line 2 of letter. Tate's "King Lear." Nahum Tate (1652-1715), Poet Laureate, was the author, with Nicholas Brady (1659-1726), of the rhymed version of the Psalms which bears their names, 1696, a rival of the version of 1549 by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. He also wrote verses and plays, original and doctored. His version of "King Lear"—"The History of King Lear"—was produced in 1681. Therein Cordelia and Edgar are at the outset shown to be in love. After the usual frustrations they are united at the close, and Lear, who does not die, pronounces his blessing over them. Cordelia thus addresses Edgar in the first act:—

Tate also rewrote "Richard II." and Webster's "White Devil."

Page 376, foot. "Coriolanus." Lamb refers to Tate's play, "The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth," produced in 1682. Aufidius threatens to violate only Virgilia:—

She stabs herself rather than be dishonoured; and it is Nigridius who mangles, gashes, racks and distorts the little son of Coriolanus.

Page 377, line 3. Shadwell. The version of "Timon of Athens," by Thomas Shadwell (1642?-1692), Poet Laureate, is "The History of Timon of Athens, the Man Hater," produced at the Dorset Garden Theatre in 1678. Timon's last words are:—

Timon. I charge thee live, Evandra. Thou lov'st me not if thou wilt not obey me; Thou only! Dearest! Kind! Constant thing on earth, Farewell.

Dies.

Evandra. He's gone! he's gone! would all the world were so. I must make haste, or I shall not o'ertake Him in his flight. Timon, I come, stay for me, Farewell, base world.

Stabs herself. Dies.

Evandra was played not only by Mrs. Betterton, but also by Mrs. Bracegirdle.

Page 377, foot. "Macbeth." The new version of "Macbeth" was probably by Sir William Davenant (1606-1668). There is an edition as early as 1673.

Macduff's chariot is greatly insisted upon. His servant remarks in the same scene:—

and a little later, to Macduff's question, "Where are our children?" Lady Macduff replies:—

Lady Macbeth's final repentance leads her to address her husband thus:—

Page 379. Saturday Night.

The Gem, 1830. Signed "Nepos." Not reprinted by Lamb.

This little essay was written to accompany an engraving of Wilkie's picture with the same title. Whether Lamb's grandmother was as he has recorded we cannot know; his reminiscences of her in "Dream Children" and "The Grandam" are very different. That was Mrs. Field; Lamb, I think, never knew a paternal grandmother. The recollection of the fly in the eye seems to have an authentic air.

Page 380, line 9. Burking. After Burke and Hare, who suffocated their victims and sold them to the hospitals for dissection. Burke was executed in January, 1829.

Page 381. Estimate of De Foe's Secondary Novels.

This criticism was written for Wilson's Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel de Foe, 1830. It will be found on page 636 of the third of Wilson's volumes. Lamb never reprinted it.

Walter Wilson (1781-1847) had been a bookseller, and a fellow-clerk of Lamb's at the India House. Later he entered at the Inner Temple. In addition to his work on De Foe, he wrote The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches in London, Westminster and Southwark, including the Lives of their Ministers, a work in four volumes. Lamb, as his Letters tell us, helped Wilson with advice concerning De Foe. He also seems to have wished the "Ode to the Treadmill" to be included; but it was not.

This criticism of the Secondary Novels is usually preceded in the editions of Lamb's works by the following remarks contained in Lamb's letter to Wilson of December 16, 1822, which Wilson printed as page 428 of Vol. III., but they do not rightly form part of the article, which Lamb wrote seven years later, in 1829. I quote from the original MS. in the Bodleian:—

"In the appearance of truth, in all the incidents and conversations that occur in them, they exceed any works of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. The Author never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather Autobiographies) but the Narrator chains us down to an implicit belief in every thing he says. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully pressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot chuse but believe them. It is like reading Evidence given in a Court of Justice. So anxious the storyteller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has told us a matter of fact, or a motive, in a line or two farther down he repeats it, with his favourite figure of speech, 'I say,' so and so—though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is in imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something upon their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers. Indeed it is to such principally that he writes. His style is elsewhere beautiful, but plain and homely. Robinson Crusoe is delightful to all ranks and classes, but it is easy to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly adapted to the lower conditions of readers; hence it is an especial favourite with sea-faring men, poor boys, servant-maids, &c. His novels are capital kitchen-reading, while they are worthy from their deep interest to find a shelf in the Libraries of the wealthiest, and the most learned. His passion for matter-of-fact narrative, sometimes betrayed him into a long relation of common incidents which might happen to any man, and have no interest but the intense appearance of truth in them, to recommend them. The whole latter half, or two thirds, of Colonel Jack is of this description. The beginning of Colonel Jack is the most affecting natural picture of a young thief that was ever drawn. His losing the stolen money in the hollow of a tree, and finding it again when in despair, and then being in equal distress at not knowing how to dispose of it, and several similar touches in the early history of the Colonel, evince a deep knowledge of human nature; and, putting out of question the superior romantic interest of the latter, in my mind very much exceed Crusoe. Roxana (1st edition) is the next in Interest, though he left out the best part of it [in] subsequent Editions, from a foolish hyper criticism of his friend Southerne. But Moll Flanders, the account of the Plague, &c. &c. are all of one family, and have the same stamp of character."

One point in this 1822 criticism requires notice—that touching the first edition of Roxana. According to a letter from Lamb to Wilson, Lamb considered the curiosity of Roxana's daughter to be the best part of Roxana. But the episode of the daughter does not come into the first edition of the book (1724) at all, and is thought by some critics not to be De Foe's. Mr. Aitken, De Foe's latest editor, doubts the Southerne story altogether. In any case, Lamb was wrong in recommending the first edition for its completeness, for the later ones are fuller. It was upon the episode of Susannah that Godwin based his play, "Faulkener," for which Lamb wrote a prologue in praise of De Foe. Godwin's preface stated that the only edition of Roxana then available—in 1807—in which to find the full story of Roxana's daughter, was that of 1745. Godwin turned the avenging daughter into a son.

Writing to Wilson on the publication of his Memoirs of De Foe, Lamb says: "The two papers of mine will puzzle the reader, being so akin. Odd, that never keeping a scrap of my own letters, with some fifteen years' interval I should have nearly said the same things." (According to the dating of the letters the interval was not fifteen years, but seven.) Lamb also remarks, "De Foe was always my darling."

For a further criticism of De Foe see "The Good Clerk," page 148 of the present volume, and the notes to the same.

In introducing the criticism of the Secondary Novels, Wilson wrote:—

It may call for some surprise that De Foe should be so little known as a novelist, beyond the range of "Robinson Crusoe." To recall the attention of the public to his other fictions, the present writer is happy to enrich his work with some original remarks upon his secondary novels by his early friend, Charles Lamb, whose competency to form an accurate judgment upon the subject, no one will doubt who is acquainted with his genius.

Page 382, foot. Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us.... Referring to Coleridge's remarks, see the Biographia Literaria, Vol. II., chapter iv.

Page 383, line 8. An ingenious critic. Lamb himself, in the 1822 criticism quoted above.

Page 383. Clarence Songs.

The Spectator, July 24, 1830.

Concerning Lamb's theory that "Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill" was written upon Prince William, the editor of The Spectator remarks that it had reference to George IV.—a monarch upon whom Lamb himself had done his share of rhyming. Lamb was at Christ's Hospital from 1782-1789. Prince William, who was born in 1765, became a midshipman in 1779. His promotion to lieutenant came in 1785, and to captain in the following year. The ballad to which Lamb refers is called "Duke William's Frolic." It relates how Duke William and a nobleman, dressing themselves like sailors, repaired to an inn to drink. While there the Press gang came; the Duke was said to have been impudent to the lieutenant and was condemned to be flogged. The ballad (as given in Mr. John Ashton's Modern Street Ballads, 1888) ends:—

Tom Sheridan, the dramatist's son, was born in 1775, and died in 1817, so that in 1783 he was only eight years old.

Page 385. Recollections of a Late Royal Academician.

The Englishman's Magazine, September, 1831. Not reprinted by Lamb.

In the magazine the title ran:—

"PETER'S NET

"'All is fish that comes to my net'

"No. 1.—Recollections of a Late Royal Academician"

Moxon had taken over The Englishman's Magazine, started in April, 1831, in time to control the August number, in which had appeared a notice stating, of Elia, that "in succeeding months he promiseth to grace" the pages of the magazine "with a series of essays, under the quaint appellation of 'Peter's Net.'" The magazine, however, lived only until the October number. Writing to Moxon at the time that he sent the MS. of this essay, Lamb remarked:—

"The R. A. here memorised was George Dawe, whom I knew well, and heard many anecdotes of, from Daniels and Westall, at H. Rogers's; to each of them it will be well to send a magazine in my name. It will fly like wildfire among the Royal Academicians and artists.... The 'Peter's Net' does not intend funny things only. All is fish. And leave out the sickening 'Elia' at the end. Then it may comprise letters and characters addressed to Peter; but a signature forces it to be all characteristic of the one man, Elia, or the one man, Peter, which cramped me formerly."

George Dawe was born in 1781, the son of Philip Dawe, a mezzotint engraver. At first he engraved too, but after a course of study in the Royal Academy schools he took to portrait-painting, among his early sitters being William Godwin. Throughout his career he painted portraits, varied at first with figure subjects of the kind described by Lamb. He was made an Associate in 1809 and an R.A. in 1814. His introduction to royal circles came with the marriage of the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold in 1816. After her death he went to Brussels in the suite of the Duke of Kent, and painted the Duke of Wellington. It was in 1819 that he visited St. Petersburg, remaining nine years, and painting nearly four hundred portraits, first of the officers who fought against Napoleon, and afterwards of other personages. He left in 1828, but returned in 1829 after a visit to England, and a short but profitable sojourn in Berlin. He died in 1829, and was buried in the crypt of St. Paul's. A passage in his will shows Dawe to have been a rather more interesting character than Lamb suggests, and his Life of George Morland, 1807, has considerable merit.

Coleridge also knew Dawe well. Dawe painted a picture on a subject in "Love," drew Coleridge's portrait and took a cast of his face; and in 1812 Coleridge thus recommends him to Mrs. Coleridge's hospitality:—

He is a very modest man, his manners not over polished, and his worst point is that he is (at least, I have found him so) a fearful questionist, whenever he thinks he can pick up any information, or ideas, poetical, historical, topographical, or artistical, that he can make bear on his own profession. But he is sincere, friendly, strictly moral in every respect, I firmly believe even to innocence, and in point of cheerful indefatigableness of industry, in regularity, and temperance—in short, in a glad, yet quiet, devotion of his whole being to the art he has made choice of, he is the only man I ever knew who goes near to rival Southey—gentlemanly address, person, physiognomy, knowledge, learning and genius being of course wholly excluded from the comparison.

Many years later, however, Coleridge endorsed Dawe's funeral card in the following terms, "The Grub" being the nickname by which Dawe was known:—

I really would have attended the Grub's Canonization in St. Paul's, under the impression that it would gratify his sister, Mrs. Wright; but Mr. G. interposed a conditional but sufficiently decorous negative. "No! Unless you wish to follow his Grubship still further down." So I pleaded ill health. But the very Thursday morning I went to Town to see my daughter, for the first time, as Mrs. Henry Coleridge, in Gower Street, and, odd enough, the stage was stopped by the Pompous Funeral of the unchangeable and predestinated Grub, and I extemporised:—

S. T. Coleridge.

Page 385, line 2 of essay. To the Russian. Among Dawe's court paintings was an equestrian portrait of Alexander I., twenty feet high. His collection of portraits painted during his residence in Russia was lodged in a gallery built for it in the Winter Palace.

Page 385, line 11 of essay. "Timon" as it was last acted. Referring to the performance of "Timon of Athens," given exactly as in Shakespeare's day, with no women in the cast, at Drury Lane on October 28, 1816.

Page 385, line 9 from foot. The Haytian. I can find no authority for Lamb's suggestion that Dawe might have gone to Hayti to paint the court of Christophe. Probably Lamb based the theory, as a joke, upon a story of Dawe which Sir Anthony Carlisle, the surgeon, and a friend of Lamb's, used to tell. The story is told in The Library of the Fine Arts, 1831, in the following terms:—

In a conversation with Sir A. Carlisle, that eminent surgeon told Dawe that he had lately sent to Bartholemew's Hospital a negro of prodigious power and fine form, such as he had never before seen, and the sight of whom had given him better conceptions of the beauty of Grecian sculpture than he had previously possessed. Struck with this account Dawe went to the Hospital where he found the man had been discharged. Any other person would here have given up the pursuit, but Dawe was not to be baffled in a favourite object; he accordingly commenced a strict search through all those parts of the town where such a person was likely to be found; and at length, after much inquiry, found him on board a ship about to sail for the West Indies. Dawe, though his means at that time were not so great as they afterwards became, induced the man to go home with him, where he maintained him some time; and the Negro having among other instances of his strength, told him of his once seizing a buffalo by the nostrils and bearing it down to the ground, Dawe was so struck by the fact as suited for the composition of a powerful picture, that he placed the man in the posture he described, and drew him in that attitude. When the picture was sent for the premium of the British Institution, several of the governors objected to it as being a portrait and not an historical picture; notwithstanding this, however, the better judgment of the majority awarded it the prize.

Page 386, line 2. Widow H. This was probably Mrs. Hope, wife of Thomas Hope, the famous virtuoso and patron, who had just died—in February, 1831. Dawe was one of his less capable protégés. It was Mr. and Mrs. Hope whom Dubost, the French painter, out of pique, caricatured as "Beauty and the Beast." On the exhibition of the picture in public, the incident caused some notoriety, and George Dyer's friend Jekyll was engaged in the subsequent law-suit.