[Footnote 6: High Life Below Stairs.]



THE OLD ACTORS

(London Magazine, April, 1822)

The artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional licence of dialogue? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw every thing up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point of strict morality) and take it all for truth. We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis personae, his peers. We have been spoiled with—not sentimental comedy—but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all-devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is everything; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy) we recognise ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies,—the same as in life,—with an interest in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment. What is there transacting, by no modification is made to affect us in any other manner than the same events or characters would do in our relationships of life. We carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither, like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral ground of character which stood between vice and virtue; or which, in fact, was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in question—that happy breathing-place from the burden of a perpetual moral questioning—the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry—is broken up and disfranchised as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images or names of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder; and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and sunshine.

I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience,—not to live always in the precincts of the law courts,—but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions—to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me—

—Secret shades Of woody Ida's inmost grove, While yet there was no fear of Jove—

I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's—nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's—comedies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as a fairyland. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of right and wrong, and the standard of police is the measure of poetical justice. The atmosphere will blight it. It cannot thrive here. It is got into a moral world where it has no business; from which it must needs fall head-long; as dizzy and incapable of keeping its stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares within the sphere of one of his good men or angels. But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad?

The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants, and Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere do not offend my moral sense—or, in fact, appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws, or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land—what shall I call it?—of cuckoldry—the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays—the few exceptions only are mistakes—is alike essentially vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes,—some little generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps excepted,—not only any thing like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy, as the design (if design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which his Way of the World in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing—for you neither hate nor love his personages—and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we think them none.

Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets,—the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognised; principles which universally acted upon must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced in their world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings,—for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated,—for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained,—for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted,—no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder,—for affection's depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong,—gratitude or its opposite,—claim or duty,—paternity or sonship. Of what consequence is it to virtue, or how is she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon, or Dapperwit, steal away Miss Martha; or who is the father of Lord Froth's, or Sir Paul Pliant's children?

The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and mice. But like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams.

Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. This comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays of the sentimental comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now acted, though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice—to express it in a word—the downright acted villany of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness,—the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy,—which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are passages,—like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation,—incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other—but over these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities; the gaity upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements.

A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other, as the death-beds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which I am sorry to see have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Churchyard memory—(an exhibition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former,—and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting fork is not to be despised,—so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of the rod,—taking it in like honey and butter,—with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower?—John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips. His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to you if that half-reality, the husband, was over-reached by the puppetry—or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage—in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The fidgety pleasant old Teazle King too is gone in good time. His manner would scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or hate—acquit or condemn—censure or pity—exert our detestable coxcombry of moral judgment upon every thing. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain—no compromise—his first appearance must shock and give horror—his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or was meant to come of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the scene—for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother's professions of a good heart centre in down-right self-satisfaction) must be loved, and Joseph hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teazings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to concern any body on the stage,—he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury—a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged—the genuine crim-con antagonist of the villainous seducer, Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life—must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbour or old friend. The delicious scenes which give the play its name and zest, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of a dear female friend attacked in your real presence. Crabtree, and Sir Benjamin—those poor snakes that lived but in the sunshine of your mirth—must be ripened by this hot-bed process of realization into asps or amphisbaenas; and Mrs. Candour—O frightful! become a hooded serpent. Oh who that remembers Parsons and Dodd—the wasp and butterfly of the School for Scandal—in those two characters; and charming natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentlewoman as distinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in this latter part—would forego the true scenic delight—the escape from life—the oblivion of consequences—the holiday barring out of the pedant Reflection—those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world—to sit instead at one of our modern plays—to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals—dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be—and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectators' risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author nothing?

No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this manager's comedy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abingdon in Lady Teazle; and Smith, the original Charles, had retired, when I first saw it. The rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith; but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite a tendency. But as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good humour. He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue—the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley—because none understood it—half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love, was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him—the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet—the sportive relief, which he threw into the darker shades of Richard—disappeared with him. Tragedy is become a uniform dead weight. They have fastened lead to her buskins. She never pulls them off for the ease of a moment. To invert a commonplace from Niobe, she never forgets herself to liquefaction. John had his sluggish moods, his torpors—but they were the halting stones and resting places of his tragedy—politic savings, and fetches of the breath—husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist—rather, I think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than the eternal tormenting unappeasable vigilance, the "lidless dragon eyes," of present fashionable tragedy. The story of his swallowing opium pills to keep him lively upon the first night of a certain tragedy, we may presume to be a piece of retaliatory pleasantry on the part of the suffering author. But, indeed, John had the art of diffusing a complacent equable dulness (which you knew not where to quarrel with) over a piece which he did not like, beyond any of his contemporaries. John Kemble had made up his mind early, that all the good tragedies, which could be written, had been written; and he resented any new attempt. His shelves were full. The old standards were scope enough for his ambition. He ranged in them absolute—and "fair in Otway, full in Shakspeare shone." He succeeded to the old lawful thrones, and did not care to adventure bottomry with a Sir Edward Mortimer, or any casual speculator that offered. I remember, too acutely for my peace, the deadly extinguisher which he put upon my friend G.'s "Antonio." G., satiate with visions of political justice (possibly not to be realized in our time), or willing to let the sceptical worldlings see, that his anticipations of the future did not preclude a warm sympathy for men as they are and have been—wrote a tragedy. He chose a story, affecting, romantic, Spanish—the plot simple, without being naked—the incidents uncommon, without being overstrained. Antonio, who gives the name to the piece, is a sensitive young Castilian, who, in a fit of his country honour, immolates his sister—

But I must not anticipate the catastrophe—the play, reader, is extant in choice English—and you will employ a spare half crown not injudiciously in the quest of it.

The conception was bold, and the denouement—the time and place in which the hero of it existed, considered—not much out of keeping; yet it must be confessed, that it required a delicacy of handling both from the author and the performer, so as not much to shock the prejudices of a modern English audience. G., in my opinion, had done his part.

John, who was in familiar habits with the philosopher, had undertaken to play Antonio. Great expectations were formed. A philosopher's first play was a new era. The night arrived. I was favoured with a seat in an advantageous box, between the author and his friend M——. G. sate cheerful and confident. In his friend M.'s looks, who had perused the manuscript, I read some terror. Antonio in the person of John Philip Kemble at length appeared, starched out in a ruff which no one could dispute, and in most irreproachable mustachios. John always dressed most provokingly correct on these occasions. The first act swept by, solemn and silent. It went off, as G. assured M., exactly as the opening act of a piece—the protasis—should do. The cue of the spectators was to be mute. The characters were but in their introduction. The passions and the incidents would be developed hereafter. Applause hitherto would be impertinent. Silent attention was the effect all-desirable. Poor M. acquiesced—but in his honest friendly face I could discern a working which told how much more acceptable the plaudit of a single hand (however misplaced) would have been than all this reasoning. The second act (as in duty bound) rose a little in interest; but still John kept his forces under—in policy, as G. would have it—and the audience were most complacently attentive. The protasis, in fact, was scarcely unfolded. The interest would warm in the next act, against which a special incident was provided. M. wiped his cheek, flushed with a friendly perspiration—'tis M.'s way of showing his zeal—"from every pore of him a perfume falls—." I honour it above Alexander's. He had once or twice during this act joined his palms in a feeble endeavour to elicit a sound—they emitted a solitary noise without an echo—there was no deep to answer to his deep. G. repeatedly begged him to be quiet. The third act at length brought on the scene which was to warm the piece progressively to the final flaming forth of the catastrophe. A philosophic calm settled upon the clear brow of G. as it approached. The lips of M. quivered. A challenge was held forth upon the stage, and there was promise of a fight. The pit roused themselves on this extraordinary occasion, and, as their manner is, seemed disposed to make a ring,—when suddenly Antonio, who was the challenged, turning the tables upon the hot challenger, Don Gusman (who by the way should have had his sister) baulks his humour, and the pit's reasonable expectation at the same time, with some speeches out of the new philosophy against duelling. The audience were here fairly caught—their courage was up, and on the alert—a few blows, ding dong, as R——s the dramatist afterwards expressed it to me, might have done the business—when their most exquisite moral sense was suddenly called in to assist in the mortifying negation of their own pleasure. They could not applaud, for disappointment; they would not condemn, for morality's sake. The interest stood stone still; and John's manner was not at all calculated to unpetrify it. It was Christmas time, and the atmosphere furnished some pretext for asthmatic affections. One began to cough—his neighbour sympathised with him—till a cough became epidemical. But when, from being half-artificial in the pit, the cough got frightfully naturalised among the fictitious persons of the drama; and Antonio himself (albeit it was not set down in the stage directions) seemed more intent upon relieving his own lungs than the distresses of the author and his friends,—then G. "first knew fear;" and mildly turning to M., intimated that he had not been aware that Mr. K. laboured under a cold; and that the performance might possibly have been postponed with advantage for some nights further—still keeping the same serene countenance, while M. sweat like a bull. It would be invidious to pursue the fates of this ill-starred evening. In vain did the plot thicken in the scenes that followed, in vain the dialogue wax more passionate and stirring, and the progress of the sentiment point more and more clearly to the arduous developement which impended. In vain the action was accelerated, while the acting stood still. From the beginning, John had taken his stand; had wound himself up to an even tenor of stately declamation, from which no exigence of dialogue or person could make him swerve for an instant. To dream of his rising with the scene (the common trick of tragedians) was preposterous; for from the onset he had planted himself, as upon a terrace, on an eminence vastly above the audience, and he kept that sublime level to the end. He looked from his throne of elevated sentiment upon the under-world of spectators with a most sovran and becoming contempt. There was excellent pathos delivered out to them: an they would receive it, so; an they would not receive it, so. There was no offence against decorum in all this; nothing to condemn, to damn. Not an irreverent symptom of a sound was to be heard. The procession of verbiage stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing to predict what would come of it, when towards the winding up of the latter, Antonio, with an irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself—for she had been coolly arguing the point of honour with him—suddenly whips out a poniard, and stabs his sister to the heart. The effect was, as if a murder had been committed in cold blood. The whole house rose up in clamorous indignation demanding justice. The feeling rose far above hisses. I believe at that instant, if they could have got him, they would have torn the unfortunate author to pieces. Not that the act itself was so exorbitant, or of a complexion different from what they themselves would have applauded upon another occasion in a Brutus, or an Appius—but for want of attending to Antonio's words, which palpably led to the expectation of no less dire an event, instead of being seduced by his manner, which seemed to promise a sleep of a less alarming nature than it was his cue to inflict upon Elvira, they found themselves betrayed into an accompliceship of murder, a perfect misprision of parricide, while they dreamed of nothing less. M., I believe, was the only person who suffered acutely from the failure; for G. thenceforward, with a serenity unattainable but by the true philosophy, abandoning a precarious popularity, retired into his fast hold of speculation,—the drama in which the world was to be his tiring room, and remote posterity his applauding spectators at once, and actors.

ELIA.



THE OLD ACTORS

(London Magazine, October, 1822)

I do not know a more mortifying thing than to be conscious of a foregone delight, with a total oblivion of the person and manner which conveyed it. In dreams I often stretch and strain after the countenance of Edwin, whom I once saw in Peeping Tom. I cannot catch a feature of him. He is no more to me than Nokes or Pinkethman. Parsons, and still more Dodd, were near being lost to me, till I was refreshed with their portraits (fine treat) the other day at Mr. Mathews's gallery at Highgate; which, with the exception of the Hogarth pictures, a few years since exhibited in Pall Mall, was the most delightful collection I ever gained admission to. There hang the players, in their single persons, and in grouped scenes, from the Restoration—Bettertons, Booths, Garricks, justifying the prejudices which we entertain for them—the Bracegirdles, the Mountforts, and the Oldfields, fresh as Cibber has described them—the Woffington (a true Hogarth) upon a couch, dallying and dangerous—the Screen Scene in Brinsley's famous comedy, with Smith and Mrs. Abingdon, whom I have not seen, and the rest, whom having seen, I see still there. There is Henderson, unrivalled in Comus, whom I saw at second hand in the elder Harley—Harley, the rival of Holman, in Horatio—Holman, with the bright glittering teeth in Lothario, and the deep paviour's sighs in Romeo—the jolliest person ("our son is fat") of any Hamlet I have yet seen, with the most laudable attempts (for a personable man) at looking melancholy—and Pope, the abdicated monarch of tragedy and comedy, in Harry the Eighth and Lord Townley. There hang the two Aickins, brethren in mediocrity—Wroughton, who in Kitely seemed to have forgotten that in prouder days he had personated Alexander—the specious form of John Palmer, with the special effrontery of Bobby—Bensley, with the trumpet-tongue, and little Quick (the retired Dioclesian of Islington) with his squeak like a Bart'lemew fiddle. There are fixed, cold as in life, the immovable features of Moody, who, afraid of o'erstepping nature, sometimes stopped short of her—and the restless fidgetiness of Lewis, who, with no such fears, not seldom leaped o' the other side. There hang Farren and Whitfield, and Burton and Phillimore, names of small account in those times, but which, remembered now, or casually recalled by the sight of an old play-bill, with their associated recordations, can "drown an eye unused to flow." There too hangs (not far removed from them in death) the graceful plainness of the first Mrs. Pope, with a voice unstrung by age, but which, in her better days, must have competed with the silver tones of Barry himself, so enchanting in decay do I remember it—of all her lady parts exceeding herself in the Lady Quakeress (there earth touched heaven!) of O'Keefe, when she played it to the "merry cousin" of Lewis—and Mrs. Mattocks, the sensiblest of viragos—and Miss Pope, a gentlewoman ever, to the verge of ungentility, with Churchill's compliment still burnishing upon her gay Honeycomb lips. There are the two Bannisters, and Sedgwick, and Kelly, and Dignum (Diggy), and the bygone features of Mrs. Ward, matchless in Lady Loverule; and the collective majesty of the whole Kemble family, and (Shakspeare's woman) Dora Jordan; and, by her, two Antics, who in former and in latter days have chiefly beguiled us of our griefs; whose portraits we shall strive to recall, for the sympathy of those who may not have had the benefit of viewing the matchless Highgate Collection.

MR. SUETT

O for a "slip-shod muse," to celebrate in numbers, loose and shambling as himself, the merits and the person of Mr. Richard Suett, comedian!

Richard, or rather Dicky Suett—for so in his lifetime he was best pleased to be called, and time hath ratified the appellation—lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender years were set apart and dedicated. There are who do yet remember him at that period—his pipe clear and harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was "cherub Dicky."

What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange the holy for the profane state; whether he had lost his good voice (his best recommendation to that office), like Sir John, "with hallooing and singing of anthems;" or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to "commerce with the skies"—I could never rightly learn; but we find him, after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, and become one of us.

I think he was not altogether of that timber, out of which cathedral seats and sounding boards are hewed. But if a glad heart—kind and therefore glad—be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he invested himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted for a surplice—his white stole, and albe.

The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any true sense himself imitable.

He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the matter. He was known, like Puck, by his note—Ha! Ha! Ha!—sometimes deepening to Ho! Ho! Ho! with an irresistible accession, derived perhaps remotely from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype, of—O La! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the chuckling O La! of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews's mimicry. The "force of nature could no further go." He drolled upon the stock of these two syllables richer than the cuckoo.

Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition. Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have supported himself upon those two spider's strings, which served him (in the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down; the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with Robin Good-Fellow, "thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet.

Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest; in words light as air, venting truths deep as the centre; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery hatch.

Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal favourites with the town than any actors before or after. The difference, I take it, was this:—Jack was more beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral, pretensions. Dicky was more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole conscience stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the Children in the Wood—how dearly beautiful it was!—but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He put us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before him—not as from Jack, as from an antagonist,—but because it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the burthen of that death; and, when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph—O La!—O La! Bobby!

MR. MUNDEN

Not many nights ago we had come home from seeing this extraordinary performer in Cockletop; and when we retired to our pillow, his whimsical image still stuck by us, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain we tried to divest ourselves of it by conjuring up the most opposite associations. We resolved to be serious. We raised up the gravest topics of life; private misery, public calamity. All would not do.

—There the antic sate Mocking our state—

his queer visnomy—his bewildering costume—all the strange things which he had raked together—his serpentine rod swagging about in his pocket—Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics—O'Keefe's wild farce, and his wilder commentary—till the passion of laughter, like grief in excess, relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first instance it had driven away.

But we were not to escape so easily. No sooner did we fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed us in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before us, like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opium—all the strange combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the town for the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when we awoke! A season or two since there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. We do not see why there should not be a Munden gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall far short of the former.

There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one face (but what a one it is!) of Liston; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down, and call his. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, in unaccountable warfare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion. Not so much a comedian, as a company. If his name could be multiplied like his countenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone, literally makes faces: applied to any other person, the phrase is a mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human countenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. We should not be surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river horse; or come forth a pewit, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis.

We have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry—in Old Dornton—diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. We have seen some faint approaches to this sort of excellence in other players. But in what has been truly denominated "the sublime of farce," Munden stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers. The school of Munden began, and must end, with himself.

Can any man wonder, like him? can any man see ghosts, like him? or fight with his own shadow—sessa—as he does in that strangely-neglected thing, the Cobler of Preston—where his alternations from the Cobler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to the Cobler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him, or as if Thalaba were no tale! Who like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a supernatural interest over the commonest daily-life objects? A table, or a joint stool, in his conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It is invested with constellatory importance. You could not speak of it with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace materials of life, like primaeval man, with the sun and stars about him.

ELIA.



NOTES

ELIA

Lamb took the name of Elia, which should, he said, be pronounced Ellia, from an old clerk, an Italian, at the South-Sea House in Lamb's time: that is, in 1791-1792. Writing to John Taylor in July, 1821, just after he had taken over the magazine (see below), Lamb says, referring to the South-Sea House essay, "having a brother now there, and doubting how he might relish certain descriptions in it, I clapt down the name of Elia to it, which passed off pretty well, for Elia himself added the function of an author to that of a scrivener, like myself. I went the other day (not having seen him [Elia] for a year) to laugh over with him at my usurpation of his name, and found him, alas! no more than a name, for he died of consumption eleven months ago, and I knew not of it. So the name has fairly devolved to me, I think; and 'tis all he has left me."

In the library at Welbeck is a copy of a pamphlet, in French, entitled Considerations sur l'etat actuel de la France au mois de Juin 1815, par un Anglais, which was presented to the Duke of Portland by the author, F.A. Elia. This was probably Lamb's Elia. The pamphlet is reprinted, together with other interesting matter remotely connected with Lamb, in Letters from the Originals at Welbeck Abbey, privately printed, 1909.

Elia. Essays which have appeared under that signature in the London Magazine, was published early in 1823. Lamb's original intention was to furnish the book with a whimsical preface, as we learn from the following letter to John Taylor, dated December 7, 1822:—

"DEAR SIR,—I should like the enclosed Dedication to be printed, unless you dislike it. I like it. It is in the olden style. But if you object to it, put forth the book as it is; only pray don't let the printer mistake the word curt for curst.

"C.L.

"DEDICATION.

"TO THE FRIENDLY AND JUDICIOUS READER, who will take these Papers, as they were meant; not understanding every thing perversely in its absolute and literal sense, but giving fair construction, as to an after-dinner conversation; allowing for the rashness and necessary incompleteness of first thoughts; and not remembering, for the purpose of an after taunt, words spoken peradventure after the fourth glass, the Author wishes (what he would will for himself) plenty of good friends to stand by him, good books to solace him, prosperous events to all his honest undertakings, and a candid interpretation to his most hasty words and actions. The other sort (and he hopes many of them will purchase his book too) he greets with the curt invitation of Timon, 'Uncover, dogs, and lap:' or he dismisses them with the confident security of the philosopher,—'you beat but on the case of Elia.'

"On better consideration, pray omit that Dedication. The Essays want no Preface: they are all Preface. A Preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they do nothing else. Pray omit it.

"There will be a sort of Preface in the next Magazine, which may act as an advertisement, but not proper for the volume.

"Let ELIA come forth bare as he was born.

"C.L.

"N.B.—No Preface."

The "sort of Preface in the next number" was the character sketch of the late Elia on page 171.

Elia did not reach a second edition in Lamb's lifetime—that is to say, during a period of twelve years—although the editions into which it has passed between his death and the present day are legion. Why, considering the popularity of the essays as they appeared in the London Magazine, the book should have found so few purchasers is a problem difficult of solution. Lamb himself seems to have attributed some of the cause to Southey's objection, in the Quarterly Review, that Elia "wanted a sounder religious feeling;" but more probably the book was too dear: it was published at 9s. 6d.

Ordinary reviewers do not seem to have perceived at all that a rare humorist, humanist and master of prose had arisen, although among the finer intellects who had any inclination to search for excellence for excellence's sake Lamb made his way. William Hazlitt, for example, drew attention to the rich quality of Elia; as also did Leigh Hunt; and William Hone, who cannot, however, as a critic be mentioned with these, was tireless in advocating the book. Among strangers to Lamb who from the first extolled his genius was Miss Mitford. But Elia did not sell.

Ten years passed before Lamb collected his essays again, and then in 1833 was published The Last Essays of Elia, with Edward Moxon's imprint. The mass of minor essays in the London Magazine and elsewhere, which Lamb disregarded when he compiled his two collections, will be found in Vol. I. of the present edition. The Last Essays of Elia had little, if any, better reception than the first; and Lamb had the mortification of being asked by the Norris family to suppress the exquisite and kindly little memoir of Randal Norris, entitled "A Death-Bed" (see page 279), which was held to be too personal. When, in 1835, after Lamb's death, a new edition of Elia and The Last Essays of Elia was issued, the "Confessions of a Drunkard" took its place (see Vol. I.).

Meanwhile a Philadelphian firm had been beforehand with Lamb, and had issued in 1828 a second series of Elia. The American edition of Elia had been the same as the English except for a slightly different arrangement of the essays. But when in 1828 the American second series was issued, it was found to contain three pieces not by Lamb at all. A trick of writing superficially like Lamb had been growing in the London Magazine ever since the beginning; hence the confusion of the American editor. The three articles not by Lamb, as he pointed out to N.P. Willis (see Pencillings by the Way), are "Twelfth Night," "The Nuns and Ale of Caverswell," and "Valentine's Day." Of these Allan Cunningham wrote the second, and B.W. Procter (Barry Cornwall) the other two. The volume contained only eleven essays which Lamb himself selected for The Last Essays of Elia: it was eked out with the three spurious pieces above referred to, with several pieces never collected by Lamb, and with four of the humorous articles in the Works, 1818. Bernard Barton's sonnet "To Elia" stood as introduction. Altogether it was a very interesting book, as books lacking authority often are.

In the notes that follow reference is often made to Lamb's Key. This is a paper explaining certain initials and blanks in Elia, which Lamb drew up for R.B. Pitman, a fellow clerk at the East India House. I give it here in full, merely remarking that the first numerals refer to the pages of the original edition of Elia and those in brackets to the present volume:—

M. . . . Page 13 [7] Maynard, hang'd himself.

G.D. . . " 21 [11] George Dyer, Poet.

H. . . . " 32 [16] Hodges.

W. . . . " 45 [23]

Dr. T——e . " 46 [24] Dr. Trollope.

Th. . . " 47 [24] Thornton.

S. . . " 47 [24] Scott, died in Bedlam.

M. . . " 47 [24] Maunde, dismiss'd school.

C.V. le G. . " 48 [25] Chs. Valentine le Grice.

F. . . . " 49 [25] Favell; left Camb'rg because he was asham'd of his father, who was a house-painter there.

Fr. . . " 50 [26] Franklin, Gramr. Mast., Hertford.

T. . . " 50 [26] Marmaduke Thompson.

K. . . " 59 [30] Kenney, Dramatist. Author of Raising Wind, &c.

S.T.C. . . " 60 [31] Samuel Taylor Coleridge. [Not in Lamb's autograph.]

Alice W——n . " 63 [32] Feigned (Winterton).

*** . . " 64 [32] No Meaning.

**** . . " 64 [32] No Meaning.

*** . . " 64 [32] No Meaning.

Mrs. S. . . " 87 [44] Mrs. Spinkes.

R. . . . " 98 [50] Ramsay, London Library, Ludg. St.; now extinct.

Granville S. . " 98 [50] Granville Sharp. [Not in Lamb's autograph.]

E.B. . . " 130 [65] Edward Burney, half-brother of Miss Burney.

B. . . . " 141 [71] Braham, now a Xtian.

*********** . " 170 [85] Distrest Sailors.

J——ll. . " 195 [97] Jekyll.

Susan P. . " 198 [99] Susan Peirson.

R.N. . . " 206 [103] Randal Norris, Subtreasr, Inner Temple.

C. . . . " 216 [108] Coleridge.

F. . . . " 222 [111] Field.

B.F. . . " 238 [118] Baron Field, brother of Frank.

Lord C. . " 243 [121] Lord Camelford.

Sally W——r . " 248 [123] Sally Winter.

J.W. . . " 248 [123] Jas. White, author of Falstaff's Letters.

St. L. . . " 268 [133] No meaning.

B., Rector of —— " 268 [133] No meaning.

The London Magazine, with John Scott (1783-1821) as its editor was founded in 1820 by Baldwin, Cradock & Joy. Its first number was dated January, 1820, and Lamb's first contribution was in the number for August, 1820. Lamb had known Scott as editor of The Champion in 1814, but, according to Talfourd, it was Hazlitt who introduced Lamb to the London Magazine.

John Scott, who was the author of two interesting books of travel, A Visit to Paris in 1814 and Paris Re-visited in 1815, was an admirable editor, and all was going exceedingly well until he plunged into a feud with Blackwood's Magazine in general, and John Gibson Lockhart in particular, the story of which in full may be read in Mr. Lang's Life and Letters of Lockhart, 1896. In the duel which resulted Scott was shot above the hip. The wound was at first thought lightly of, but Scott died on February 27, 1821—an able man much regretted.

The magazine did not at first show signs of Scott's loss; it continued to bear the imprint of its original publishers and its quality remained very high. With Lamb and Hazlitt writing regularly this could hardly be otherwise. But four months after the death of Scott and eighteen months after its establishment the London Magazine passed into the hands of the publishers Taylor & Hessey, the first number with their imprint being dated August, 1821. Although for a while no diminution of merit was perceptible and rather an access of gaiety—for Taylor brought Hood with him and John Hamilton Reynolds—yet the high editorial standards of Scott ceased to be applied. Thenceforward the decline of the magazine was steady.

John Taylor (1781-1864), senior partner in the firm of Taylor & Hessey, was known as the identifier of Sir Philip Francis with the author of "Junius," on which subject he had issued three books. Although unfitted for the post, he acted as editor of the London Magazine until it was again sold in 1825.

With the beginning of 1825 Taylor made a change in the magazine. He started a new series, and increased the size and the price. But the experiment did not answer; the spirit had evaporated; and in the autumn he sold it to Henry Southern (1799-1853), who had founded the Retrospective Review in 1820. The last number of the London Magazine to bear Taylor & Hessey's name, and (in my opinion) to contain anything by Lamb, was August, 1825. We have no definite information on the matter, but there is every indication in Lamb's Letters that Taylor was penurious and not clever in his relations with contributors. Scott Lamb seems to have admired and liked; but even in Scott's day payment does not seem to have been prompt. Lamb was paid, according to Barry Cornwall, two or three times the amount of other writers, who received for prose a pound a page. But Lamb himself says that the rate for him was twenty guineas a sheet, a sheet being sixteen pages; and he told Moore that he had received L170 for two years' Elia. In a letter to Barton in January, 1823, Lamb remarks: "B—— [Baldwin] who first engaged me as 'Elia' has not paid me up yet (nor any of us without repeated mortifying appeals)."

The following references to the London in Lamb's letters to Barton tell the story of its decadence quite clearly enough. In May, 1823:—"I cannot but think the London drags heavily. I miss Janus [Wainewright]. And O how it misses Hazlitt—Procter, too, is affronted (as Janus has been) with their abominable curtailment of his things."

Again, a little later, in September:—"The 'London' I fear falls off.—I linger among its creaking rafters, like the last rat. It will topple down, if they don't get some Buttresses. They have pulled down three, W. Hazlitt, Procter, and their best stay, kind light-hearted Wainwright, their Janus."

In January, 1824, at the beginning of his eight months' silence:—"The London must do without me for a time, a time, and half a time, for I have lost all interest about it."

Again, in December, 1824:—"Taylor & Hessey finding their magazine goes off very heavily at 2s. 6d., are prudently going to raise their price another shilling; and having already more authors than they want, intend to increase the number of them. If they set up against the New Monthly, they must change their present hands. It is not tying the dead carcase of a Review to a half-dead Magazine will do their business."

In January, 1825 (to Sarah Hutchinson):—"You ask about the editor of the Lond. I know of none. This first specimen [of a new series] is flat and pert enough to justify subscribers, who grudge at t'other shilling."

Next month Lamb writes, again to Barton:—"Our second Number [of the new series] is all trash. What are T. & H. about? It is whip syllabub, 'thin sown with aught of profit or delight'. Thin sown! not a germ of fruit or corn. Why did poor Scott die! There was comfort in writing with such associates as were his little band of scribblers, some gone away, some affronted away, and I am left as the solitary widow [in one of Barton's poems] looking for watercresses."

Finally, in August, 1825:—"Taylor has dropt the 'London'. It was indeed a dead weight. It was Job in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand like Christian with light and merry shoulders."

In addition to Lamb and Hazlitt the London Magazine had more or less regular contributions, in its best days, from De Quincey, Allan Cunningham (Nalla), T.G. Wainewright, afterwards the poisoner, but in those days an amusing weaver of gay artificial prose, John Clare, Bernard Barton, H.F. Cary, Richard Ayton, George Darley, Thomas Hood, John Hamilton Reynolds, Sir John Bowring, John Poole, B.W. Procter; while among occasional writers for it were Thomas Carlyle, Landor and Julius Hare.

The essay, "Stage Illusion," in the number for August, 1825, was, I believe, the last that Lamb contributed. (In this connection see Mr. Bertram Dobell's Sidelights on Charles Lamb, 1903.) Lamb then passed over to Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, where the "Popular Fallacies" appeared, together with certain other of his later essays. His last contribution to that magazine was dated September, 1826. In 1827 he was chiefly occupied in selecting Garrick play extracts for Hone's Table Book, at the British Museum, and for a while after that he seems to have been more interested in writing acrostics and album verses than prose. In 1831, however, Moxon's Englishman's Magazine offered harbourage for anything Lamb cared to give it, and a brief revival of Elia (under the name of Peter) resulted. With its death in October, 1831, Lamb's writing career practically ceased.

* * * * *

Page 1. THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE.

London Magazine, August, 1820.

Although the "Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People," "Valentine's Day," and "On the Acting of Munden," were all written before this essay, it is none the less the first of the essays of Elia. I have remarked, in the notes to a small edition of Elia, that it is probably unique in literature for an author to find himself, as Lamb did, in his forty-fourth year, by recording impressions gathered in his seventeenth; but I think now that Lamb probably visited his brother at the South-Sea House from time to time in later years, and gathered other impressions then. I am led to this conclusion partly by the fact that Thomas Tame was not appointed Deputy-Accountant until four or five years after Lamb had left.

We do not know exactly what Lamb's duties were at the South-Sea House or how long he was there: probably only for the twenty-three weeks—from September, 1791—mentioned in the receipt below, discovered by Mr. J.A. Rutter in a little exhibition of documents illustrative of the South Sea Bubble in the Albert Museum at Exeter:—

Rec'd 8th feby 1792 of the Honble South Sea Company by the hands of their Secretary Twelve pounds 1s. 6d. for 23 weeks attendance in the Examiners Office.

L12 1 6. CHAS. LAMB.

This shows that Lamb's salary was half a guinea weekly, paid half-yearly. His brother John was already in the service of the Company, where he remained till his death, rising to Accountant. It has been conjectured that it was through his influence that Charles was admitted, with the view of picking up book-keeping; but the real patron and introducer was Joseph Pake, one of the directors, whom we meet on page 92. Whether Lamb had ideas of remaining, or whether he merely filled a temporary gap in the Examiners' Office, we cannot tell. He passed to the East India House in the spring of 1792.

The South Sea Company was incorporated in 1710. The year of the Bubble was 1720. The South-Sea House, remodelled, is now a congeries of offices.

Page 2, line 11. Forty years ago. To be accurate, twenty-eight to thirty.

Page 3, line 1. Accounts ... puzzle me. Here Elia begins his "matter-of-lie" career. Lamb was at this time in the Accountants' Office of the India House, living among figures all day.

Page 3, line 7 from foot. Evans. William Evans. The Directories of those days printed lists of the chief officials in some of the public offices, and it is possible to trace the careers of the clerks whom Lamb names. All are genuine. Evans, whose name is given one year as Evan Evans, was appointed cashier (or deputy-cashier) in 1792.

Page 4, line 4. Ready to imagine himself one. Lamb was fond of this conceit. See his little essay "The Last Peach" (Vol. I.), and the mischievous letter to Bernard Barton, after Fauntleroy's trial, warning him against peculation.

Page 4, line 7. Anderton's. Either the coffee-shop in Fleet Street, now Anderton's Hotel, or a city offshoot of it. The portrait, if it ever was in existence, is no longer known there.

Page 5, line 17. John Tipp. John Lamb succeeded Tipp as Accountant somewhen about 1806.

Page 5, line 27. I know not, etc. This parenthesis was not in the London Magazine, but the following footnote was appended to the sentence:—

"I have since been informed, that the present tenant of them is a Mr. Lamb, a gentleman who is happy in the possession of some choice pictures, and among them a rare portrait of Milton, which I mean to do myself the pleasure of going to see, and at the same time to refresh my memory with the sight of old scenes. Mr. Lamb has the character of a right courteous and communicative collector."

Mr. Lamb was, of course, John Lamb, or James Elia (see the essay "My Relations"), then (in 1820) Accountant of the South-Sea House. He left the Milton to his brother. It is now in America.

Page 6, line 5 from foot. Henry Man. This was Henry Man (1747-1790), deputy-secretary of the South-Sea House from 1776, and an author of light trifles in the papers, and of one or two books. The Miscellaneous Works in Verse and Prose of the late Henry Man was published in 1802, among the subscribers being three of the officials named in this essay—John Evans, R. Plumer, and Mr. Tipp, and also Thomas Maynard, who, though assigned to the Stock Exchange, is probably the "childlike, pastoral M——" of a later paragraph. Small politics are for the most part kept out of Man's volumes, which are high-spirited rather than witty, but this punning epigram (of which Lamb was an admirer) on Lord Spencer and Lord Sandwich may be quoted:—

Two Lords whose names if I should quote, Some folks might call me sinner: The one invented half a coat, The other half a dinner.

Such lords as these are useful men, Heaven sends them to console one; Because there's now not one in ten, That can procure a whole one.

Page 7, line 13. Plumer. Richard Plumer (spelled Plomer in the directories), deputy-secretary after Man. Lamb was peculiarly interested in the Plumers from the fact that his grandmother, Mrs. Field, had been housekeeper of their mansion at Blakesware, near Ware (see notes to "Dream-Children" and "Blakesmoor in H——shire"). The fine old Whig was William Plumer, who had been her employer, and was now living at Gilston. He died in 1821.

The following passage from the memoir of Edward Cave (1691-1754), which Dr. Johnson wrote for the Gentleman's Magazine (which Cave established) in 1754, shows that Lamb was mistaken about Plumer:—

He [Cave] was afterwards raised to the office of clerk of the franks, in which he acted with great spirit and firmness; and often stopped franks which were given by members of parliament to their friends; because he thought such extension of a peculiar right illegal. This raised many complaints, and having stopped, among others, a frank given to the old dutchess of Marlborough by Mr. Walter Plummer, he was cited before the house, as for breach of privilege, and accused, I suppose very unjustly, of opening letters to detect them. He was treated with great harshness and severity, but declining their questions by pleading his oath of secrecy, was at last dismissed. And it must be recorded to his honour, that when he was ejected from his office, he did not think himself discharged from his trust, but continued to refuse to his nearest friends any information about the management of the office.

I borrow from Canon Ainger an interesting note on Walter Plumer, written in the eighteen-eighties, showing that Lamb was mistaken on other matters too:—

The present Mr. Plumer, of Allerton, Totness, a grandson of Richard Plumer of the South-Sea House, by no means acquiesces in the tradition here recorded as to his grandfather's origin. He believes that though the links are missing, Richard Plumer was descended in regular line from the Baronet, Sir Walter Plumer, who died at the end of the seventeenth century. Lamb's memory has failed him here in one respect. The "Bachelor Uncle," Walter Plumer, uncle of William Plumer of Blakesware, was most certainly not a bachelor (see the pedigree of the family in Cussans' Hertfordshire).

Page 7, line 10 from foot. M——. According to the Key to the initials and blanks in some of the essays, which Lamb filled in for a curious correspondent, M—— stood for one Maynard. "Maynard, hang'd himself" is Lamb's entry. He was chief clerk in the Old Annuities and Three Per Cents, 1788-1793.

* * * * *

Page 8. OXFORD IN THE VACATION.

London Magazine, October, 1820, where it is dated at the end, "August 5, 1820. From my rooms facing the Bodleian." My own belief is that Lamb wrote the essay at Cambridge, under the influence of Cambridge, where he spent a few weeks in the summers of 1819 and 1820, and transferred the scene to Oxford by way of mystification. He knew Oxford, of course, but he had not been there for some years, and it was at Cambridge that he met Dyer and saw the Milton MSS.

Concerning a visit to Oxford (in 1810), Hazlitt had written, in his Table Talk essay "On the Conversation of Authors," in the preceding (the September) number of the London Magazine:—

L—— [that is, Lamb] once came down into the country to see us. He was "like the most capricious poet Ovid among the Goths." The country people thought him an oddity, and did not understand his jokes. It would be strange if they had; for he did not make any while he staid. But when we crossed the country to Oxford, then he spoke a little. He and the old colleges were hail-fellow well-met; and in the quadrangles, he "walked gowned."

The quotation is a reference to Lamb's sonnet, "I was not Trained in Academic Bowers," written at Cambridge in 1819:—

Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers, Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap; My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap, And I walk gowned.

Page 8, line 6 from foot. Agnize. Lamb was fond of this word. I have seen it stated ingeniously that it was of his own coinage—from agnus, a lamb—but the derivation is ad gnoscere, to acknowledge, to recognise, and the word is to be found in other places—in "Othello," for example (Act I., Scene 3, line 232):—

I do agnise A natural and prompt alacrity.

Page 9, middle. Red-letter days. See note on page 351. The holidays at the India House, which are given in the London directories of Lamb's early time there, make a considerable list. But in 1820 the Accountants' Office, where Lamb was, kept only five days in the year.

Page 10, line 11. I can here ... enact the student. Lamb had distilled the matter of this paragraph into his sonnet, "I was not Trained in Academic Bowers," written at Cambridge in August of the preceding year (see above and Vol. IV.).

Page 11, line 12 from foot. Unsettle my faith. At this point, in the London Magazine, Lamb appended the footnote:—

"There is something to me repugnant, at any time, in written hand. The text never seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty—as springing up with all its parts absolute—till, in evil hour, I was shown the original written copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the Library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them, after the latter cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspirations were made up of parts, and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the work-shop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture, till it is fairly off the easel; no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, and painting another Galatea."

In the Appendix to Vol. I., page 428, I have printed a passage from the original MS. of Comus, which there is reason to believe was contributed to the London Magazine by Lamb.

Page 11, line 9 from foot. G.D. George Dyer (1755-1841), Lamb's friend for many years. This is the first mention of him in the essays; but we shall meet him again, particularly in "Amicus Redivivus." George Dyer was educated at Christ's Hospital long before Lamb's time there, and, becoming a Grecian, had entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He became at first an usher in Essex, then a private tutor to the children of Robert Robinson, the Unitarian, whose life he afterwards excellently wrote, then an usher again, at Northampton, one of his colleagues being John Clarke, father of Lamb's friend, Charles Cowden Clarke. In 1792 he settled in Clifford's Inn as a hack; wrote poems, made indexes, examined libraries for a great bibliographical work (never published), and contributed "all that was original" to Valpy's classics in 141 volumes. Under this work his sight gave way; and he once showed Hazlitt two fingers the use of which he had lost in copying out MSS. of Procrus and Plotinus in a fine Greek hand. Fortunately a good woman took him under her wing; they were married in 1825; and Dyer's last days were happy. His best books were his Life of Robert Robinson and his History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge. Lamb and his friends laughed at him and loved him. In addition to the stories told by Lamb in his letters and essays, there are amusing characteristics of Dyer in Crabb Robinson's diary, in Leigh Hunt, in Hazlitt, in Talfourd, and in other places. All bear upon his gentleness, his untidiness and his want of humour. One of the most famous stories tells of Dyer's criticism of Williams, the terrible Ratcliffe Highway murderer. Dyer, who would never say an ill word of any one, was asked his opinion of this cold-blooded assassin of two families. "He must," he replied after due thought, "be rather an eccentric character."

Page 12, line 10. Injustice to him. In the London Magazine the following footnote came here, almost certainly by Lamb:—

"Violence or injustice certainly none, Mr. Elia. But you will acknowledge that the charming unsuspectingness of our friend has sometimes laid him open to attacks, which, though savouring (we hope) more of waggery than malice—such is our unfeigned respect for G.D.—might, we think, much better have been omitted. Such was that silly joke of L[amb], who, at the time the question of the Scotch Novels was first agitated, gravely assured our friend—who as gravely went about repeating it in all companies—that Lord Castlereagh had acknowledged himself to be the author of Waverly! Note—not by Elia."

Page 12, line 11. "Strike an abstract idea." I do not find this quotation—if it be one; but when John Lamb once knocked Hazlitt down, during an argument on pigments, Hazlitt refrained from striking back, remarking that he was a metaphysician and dealt not in blows but in ideas. Lamb may be slyly remembering this.

Page 12, line 15. C——. Cambridge. Dyer added a work on Privileges of the University if Cambridge to his History.

Page 12, line 8 from foot. Our friend M.'s. Basil Montagu, Q.C. (1770-1851), legal writer, philanthropist, editor of Bacon, and the friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Mrs. M. here referred to was Montagu's third wife, a Mrs. Skepper. It was she who was called by Edward Irving "the noble lady," and to whom Carlyle addressed some early letters. A.S. was Anne Skepper, afterwards Mrs. Bryan Waller Procter, a fascinating lady who lived to a great age and died as recently as 1888. The Montagus then lived at 25 Bedford Square.

Page 13, line 17. Starts like a thing surprised. Here we have an interesting example of Lamb's gift of fused quotation. Wordsworth's line in the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality,"

Tremble like a guilty thing surprised,

and Shakespeare's phrase in "Hamlet" (Act I., Scene 1, line 148),

Started like a guilty thing,

were probably both in his mind as he wrote.

Page 13, line 24. Obtruded personal presence. In the London Magazine the following passage came here:—

"D. commenced life, after a course of hard study in the 'House of pure Emanuel,' as usher to a knavish fanatic schoolmaster at ***, at a salary of eight pounds per annum, with board and lodging. Of this poor stipend, he never received above half in all the laborious years he served this man. He tells a pleasant anecdote, that when poverty, staring out at his ragged knees, has sometimes compelled him, against the modesty of his nature, to hint at arrears, Dr. *** would take no immediate notice, but, after supper, when the school was called together to even-song, he would never fail to introduce some instructive homily against riches, and the corruption of the heart occasioned through the desire of them—ending with 'Lord, keep thy servants, above all things from the heinous sin of avarice. Having food and raiment, us therewithal be content. Give me Agar's wish,'—and the like;—which to the little auditory, sounded like a doctrine full of Christian prudence and simplicity,—but to poor D. was a receipt in full for that quarter's demands at least.

"And D. has been under-working for himself ever since;—drudging at low rates for unappreciating booksellers,—wasting his fine erudition in silent corrections of the classics, and in those unostentatious but solid services to learning, which commonly fall to the lot of laborious scholars, who have not the art to sell themselves to the best advantage. He has published poems, which do not sell, because their character is inobtrusive like his own,—and because he has been too much absorbed in ancient literature, to know what the popular mark in poetry is, even if he could have hit it. And, therefore, his verses are properly, what he terms them, crotchets; voluntaries; odes to Liberty, and Spring; effusions; little tributes, and offerings, left behind him, upon tables and window-seats, at parting from friends' houses; and from all the inns of hospitality, where he has been courteously (or but tolerably) received in his pilgrimage. If his muse of kindness halt a little behind the strong lines, in fashion in this excitement-craving age, his prose is the best of the sort in the world, and exhibits a faithful transcript of his own healthy natural mind, and cheerful innocent tone of conversation."

The foregoing passage called forth a protest from one W.K. necessitating the following reply from Lamb, which was printed in the London Magazine, under the "Lion's Head," for December, 1820:—

"Elia requests the Editor to inform W.K. that in his article on Oxford, under the initials G.D., it is his ambition to make more familiar to the public, a character, which, for integrity and single-heartedness, he has long been accustomed to rank among the best patterns of his species. That, if he has failed in the end which he proposed, it was an error of judgment merely. That, if in pursuance of his purpose, he has drawn forth some personal peculiarities of his friend into notice, it was only from the conviction that the public, in living subjects especially, do not endure pure panegyric. That the anecdotes, which he produced, were no more than he conceived necessary to awaken attention to character, and were meant solely to illustrate it. That it is an entire mistake to suppose, that he undertook the character to set off his own wit or ingenuity. That, he conceives, a candid interpreter might find something intended, beyond a heartless jest. That G.D., however, having thought it necessary to disclaim the anecdote respecting Dr. ——, it becomes him, who never for a moment can doubt the veracity of his friend, to account for it from an imperfect remembrance of some story he heard long ago, and which, happening to tally with his argument, he set too hastily to the account of G.D. That, from G.D.'s strong affirmations and proofs to the contrary, he is bound to believe it belongs to no part of G.D.'s biography. That the transaction, supposing it true, must have taken place more than forty years ago. That, in consequence, it is not likely to 'meet the eye of many who might be justly offended.'

"Finally, that what he has said of the Booksellers, referred to a period of many years, in which he has had the happiness of G.D.'s acquaintance; and can have nothing to do with any present or prospective engagements of G.D., with those gentlemen, to the nature of which he professes himself an entire stranger."

The result of the protest was that Lamb omitted the passage objected to when he collected Elia in 1823. It might well be restored now; but I have preferred to print everything in the body of this edition as Lamb arranged it for press.

* * * * *

Page 14. CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO.

London Magazine, November, 1820.

This essay, which is based upon the "Recollections of Christ's Hospital" in Vol. I., is a curious blend of Lamb's own experiences at school with those of Coleridge. Both boys entered at the same time—on July 17, 1782: Coleridge was then nearly ten, Lamb was seven and a half. Coleridge was "clothed" on July 18 and went to Hertford for a while; Lamb was clothed on October 9. Lamb left the school in November, 1789, Coleridge in September, 1791.

The school which Lamb knew is now no more. The boys are now all in new buildings in the midst of green fields near Horsham, many miles from Lamb's city and its roar.

Page 14, line 15. The worthy sub-treasurer. Randal Norris (see note to "A Death-Bed"). I have not been able to discover the cause of his influence.

Page 14, lines 18, 19. Crug ... piggins. Crug is still current slang. In the school museum one of these piggins is preserved.

Page 14, line 25. Three banyan days. Three vegetarian days. Coleridge complains (in a letter to Poole) that he was never sufficiently fed except on Wednesdays. He gives the following table of food:—

Our diet was very scanty. Every morning a bit of dry bread and some bad small beer. Every evening a larger piece of bread, and cheese or butter, whichever we liked. For dinner,—on Sunday, boiled beef and broth; Monday, bread and butter, and milk and water; Tuesday, roast mutton; Wednesday, bread and butter, and rice milk; Thursday, boiled beef and broth; Friday, boiled mutton and broth; Saturday, bread and butter, and pease-porridge. Our food was portioned; and, excepting on Wednesdays, I never had a bellyfull. Our appetites were damped, never satisfied; and we had no vegetables.

Page 14, line 8 from foot. Caro equina. Horseflesh. Mr. Pearce's chapter on food at the school in his excellent Annals of Christ's Hospital is very interesting, and records great changes. Rotten-roasted or rare, i.e., over-roasted or under-done.

Page 15, line 3. The good old relative. Aunt Hetty, or more properly, Sarah Lamb. Compare the "Lines written on the Day of my Aunt's Funeral," Vol. IV.:—

I have not forgot How thou didst love thy Charles, when he was yet A prating schoolboy: I have not forgot The busy joy on that important day, When, childlike, the poor wanderer was content To leave the bosom of parental love, His childhood's play-place, and his early home, For the rude fosterings of a stranger's hand, Hard, uncouth tasks, and schoolboys' scanty fare. How did thine eyes peruse him round and round And hardly knew him in his yellow coats, Red leathern belt, and gown of russet blue.

Page 15, line 13. I was a poor friendless boy. Here Lamb speaks as Coleridge, who came all the way from Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire (not Calne, in Wiltshire), and had no London friends. In John Woodvil Lamb borrowed St. Mary Ottery again (see Vol. IV.). Coleridge has recorded how unhappy he was in his early days at school.

Page 15, line 12 from foot. Whole-day-leaves. In this connection the following passage from Trollope's History of Christ's Hospital, 1834, is interesting:—

Those days, on which leave is given to be absent from the Hospital during the whole day, are called whole-day leaves.... A ticket is a small oval medal attached to the button-hole, without which, except on leaves, no boy is allowed to pass the gates. Subjoined is a list of the holidays, which have been hitherto kept at Christ's Hospital; but it is in contemplation to abridge them materially. Of the policy of such a measure great doubts may fairly be entertained, inasmuch as the vacations are so short as to give sufficient respite neither to master nor scholar; and these occasional breaks, in the arduous duties of the former more especially, enable him to repair the exhausted energies of body and mind by necessary relaxation. If those days, which are marked with an asterisk, fall on a Sunday, they are kept on the Monday following; and likewise the state holidays.

HOLIDAYS KEPT AT CHRIST'S HOSPITAL

Jan. 25. St. Paul's conversion. *30. King Charles's martyrdom. Feb. 2. Candlemas Day. 24. St. Matthias. Shrove Tuesday. Ash Wednesday. March 25. Lady Day. April 23. St. George. 25. St. Mark. May 1. St. Philip and St. James. *29. Restoration of King Charles II. Ascension Day. Whit Monday. Whit Tuesday. June 11. St. Barnabas. 24. St. John Baptist. 29. St. Peter. July 25. St. James. Thursday after St. James. (Nurses' Holiday.) Aug. 24. St. Bartholomew. Sept. *2. London burnt. *21. St. Matthew. 29. St. Michael. Oct. 18. St. Luke. *23. King Edward VI. born. 28. St. Simon and St. Jude. Nov. 1. All Saints. *5. Gunpowder Plot. *9. Lord Mayor's Day. *17. Queen Elizabeth's birthday. 30. St. Andrew. Dec. 21. St. Thomas.

Also the birthdays of the King and Queen, and the Prince and Princess of Wales: and the King's accession, proclamation, and coronation.

In addition to the generous allowance of holidays above given the boys had every alternate Wednesday for a whole day; eleven days at Easter, four weeks in the summer, and fifteen days at Christmas. In 1837 the holiday system was remodelled. Compare Lamb's other remarks on his whole-day rambles in "Recollections of Christ's Hospital" (Vol. I.) and in the essays in the present volume entitled "Amicus Redivivus" and "Newspapers."

Page 16, line 14. The Tower. Blue-coat boys still have this right of free entrance to the Tower; but the lions are no more. They were transferred to the Zoological Gardens in 1831.

Page 16, line 16. L.'s governor. Meaning Samuel Salt, M.P.; but it was actually his friend Mr. Timothy Yeats who signed Lamb's paper. More accurately, Lamb's father lived under Salt's roof.

Page 16, line 7 from foot. H——. According to Lamb's Key this was Hodges; but in the British Museum copy of Elia, first edition, some one has written Huggins. It is immaterial. Nevis and St. Kitt's (St. Christopher's) are islands in the British West Indies. Tobin would be James Webbe Tobin, of Nevis, who died in 1814, the brother of the playwright John Tobin, author of "The Honeymoon."

Page 17, line 2. A young ass. The general opinion at Christ's Hospital is that Lamb invented this incident; and yet it has the air of being true.

Page 17, line 18. L.'s admired Perry. John Perry, steward from 1761 to 1785, mentioned in Lamb's earlier essay.

Page 17, foot. Gags. Still current slang.

Page 17, foot. ——. No name in the Key. The quotation is an adaptation of:—

It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh Which some did die to look on.

"Antony and Cleopatra," Act I., Scene 4, lines 67-68.

It is perhaps worth remarking that in David Copperfield Dickens has a school incident of a similar character.

Page 18, line 14 from foot. Mr. Hathaway. Matthias Hathaway, steward from 1790 to 1813.

Page 19, line 8. I was a hypochondriac lad. Here Lamb drops the Coleridge mask and speaks as himself.

Page 20, line 15. Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter Aubert. Bamber Gascoigne, M.P. (1725-1791), of Bifrons, in Essex. Of Peter Aubert I can find nothing, except that the assistant secretary of the East India Company at the time Lamb wrote this essay was Peter Auber, afterwards full secretary. His name here may be a joke.

Page 20, line 6 from foot. Matthew Field. The Rev. Matthew Feilde, also vicar of Ugley and curate of Berden. For the Rev. James Boyer see below.

Page 21, line 18. "Peter Wilkins," etc. The Adventures of Peter Wilkins, by Robert Paltock, 1751, is still read; but The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle, 1736, has had its day. It was a blend of unconvincing travel and some rather free narrative: a piece of sheer hackwork to meet a certain market. See Lamb's sonnet to Stothard, Vol. IV. The Fortunate Blue-Coat Boy I have not seen. Canon Ainger describes it as a rather foolish romance, showing how a Blue-coat boy marries a rich lady of rank. The sub-title is "Memoirs of the Life and Happy Adventures of Mr. Benjamin Templeman; formerly a Scholar in Christ's Hospital. By an Orphanotropian," 1770.

Page 22, footnote. I have not discovered a copy of Matthew Feilde's play.

Page 23, line 17 from foot. Squinting W——. Not identifiable.

Page 23, line 7 from foot. Coleridge, in his literary life. Coleridge speaks in the Biographia Literaria of having had the "inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe master, the Reverend James Bowyer [Boyer]," and goes on to attribute to that master's discrimination and thoroughness much of his own classical knowledge and early interest in poetry and criticism. Coleridge gives this example of Boyer's impatient humour:—

In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education), he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp and lyre, Muse, Muses and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus and Hippocrene, were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now exclaiming, "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh, aye! the cloister pump, I suppose!"

Touching Boyer's cruelty, Coleridge adds that his "severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep."

In Table Talk Coleridge tells another story of Boyer. "The discipline at Christ's Hospital in my time," he says, "was ultra-Spartan; all domestic ties were to be put aside. 'Boy!' I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, 'Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying!'"

Leigh Hunt in his autobiography also has reminiscences of Boyer and Feilde.

James Boyer or Bowyer was born in 1736, was admitted to the school in 1744, and passed to Balliol. He resigned his Upper Grammar Mastership in 1799, and probably retired to the rectory of Gainscolne to which he had been appointed by the school committee six years earlier. They also gave him L500 and a staff.

Page 23, line 6 from foot. Author of the Country Spectator. Thomas Fanshaw Middleton (1769-1822), afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, who was at school with Lamb and Coleridge. In the little statuette group which is called the Coleridge Memorial, subscribed for in 1872, on the centenary of Coleridge's birth, and held in rotation by the ward in which most prizes have been gained in the year, Middleton is the tallest figure. It is reproduced in my large edition. The story which it celebrates is to the effect that Middleton found Coleridge reading Virgil in the playground and asked him if he were learning a lesson. Coleridge replied that he was "reading for pleasure," an answer which Middleton reported to Boyer, and which led to Boyer taking special notice of him. The Country Spectator was a magazine conducted by Middleton in 1792-1793.

Page 23, line 3 from foot. C——. Coleridge again.

Page 24, line 4. Lancelot Pepys Stevens. Rightly spelled Stephens, afterwards Under Grammar Master at the school.

Page 24, line 6. Dr. T——e. Arthur William Trollope (1768-1827), who succeeded Boyer as Upper Grammar Master. He resigned in 1826.

Page 24, line 21. Th——. Sir Edward Thornton (1766-1852), diplomatist, who was sent as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Lower Saxony, to Sweden, to Denmark and other courts, afterwards becoming minister to Portugal.

Page 24, line 23. Middleton. See note above. The treatise was The Doctrine of the Greek Article as applied to the Criticism and the Illustration of the New Testament, 1808. It was directed chiefly against Granville Sharpe. Middleton was the first Bishop of Calcutta.

Page 24, line 8 from foot. Richards. This was George Richards (1767-1837). His poem on "Aboriginal Britons," which won a prize given in 1791 by Earl Harcourt, is mentioned favourably in Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Richards became vicar of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields and a Governor of Christ's Hospital. He founded a gold medal for Latin hexameters.

Page 24, foot. S—— ... M——. According to the Key "Scott, died in Bedlam," and "Maunde, dismiss'd school."

Page 24, foot. "Finding some of Edward's race." From Prior's Carmen Seculare for 1700:—

Finding some of Stuart's race Unhappy, pass their annals by.

Lamb alters Stuart to Edward because Edward VI. founded Christ's Hospital.

Page 25, line 12. C.V. Le G——. Charles Valentine Le Grice (1773-1858), whom we meet also in the essay on "Grace Before Meat." Le Grice, in his description of Lamb as a schoolboy in Talfourd's Memorials, remarked: "I never heard his name mentioned without the addition of Charles, although, as there was no other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition was unnecessary; but there was an implied kindness in it, and it was a proof that his gentle manners excited that kindness."

Page 25, line 20. Allen. Robert Allen, whom we meet again in the essay on "Newspapers." After a varied and not fortunate career he died of apoplexy in 1805.

Page 25, line 8 from foot. The junior Le G——. Samuel Le Grice became a soldier and died in the West Indies. Lamb wrote of him to Coleridge in 1796, after the tragedy at his home, at a time when friends were badly needed, "Sam Le Grice who was then in town was with me the first 3 or 4 days, and was as a brother to me, gave up every hour of his time to the very hurting of his health and spirits, in constant attendance and humouring my poor father."

Page 25, line 8 from foot. F——. Joseph Favell, afterwards Captain, who had a commission from the Duke of York—as had Sam Le Grice—and was killed in the Peninsula, at Salamanca, 1812. Lamb states in the essay on "Poor Relations," where Favell figures as "W.," that he met his death at St. Sebastian. Both Sam Le Grice and Favell were to have accompanied Coleridge and Southey to the Susquehanna as Pantisocrats.

Page 26, line 1. Fr——. Frederick William Franklin, master of the Hertford branch of the school from 1801 to 1827. He died in 1836.

Page 26, line 2. Marmaduke T——. Marmaduke Thompson, to whom Lamb dedicated Rosamund Gray in 1798.

Page 26, line 3. Catalogue of Grecians. Lamb was at Christ's Hospital from 1782 to 1789, and his list is not quite complete. He himself never was a Grecian; that is to say, one of the picked scholars on the grammar side of the school, two of whom were sent up to Cambridge with a hospital exhibition every year, on the understanding that they should take orders. Lamb was one of the Deputy-Grecians from whom the Grecians were chosen, but his stammer standing in his way and a Church career being out of the question, he never became a full Grecian. Writing to George Dyer, who had been a Grecian, in 1831, Lamb says: "I don't know how it is, but I keep my rank in fancy still since school days. I can never forget I was a deputy Grecian!... Alas! what am I now? What is a Leadenhall clerk, or India pensioner, to a deputy Grecian? How art thou fallen, O Lucifer!"

Lamb's memory is preserved at Christ's Hospital by a medal which is given for the best English essays. It was first struck in 1875, the centenary of his birth.

* * * * *

Page 26. THE TWO RACES OF MEN.

London Magazine, December, 1820.

Writing to Wordsworth in April of 1816, Lamb says:—"I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till people have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain and chain them to my shelves, more Bodleiano, and people may come and read them at chain's length. For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read but don't read; and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money they never fail to make use of it."

Probably the germ of the essay is to be found in this passage, as Lamb never forgot his thoughts.

Page 26, line 17 of essay. Brinsley. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the dramatist and a great spendthrift. He died in 1816. Lamb knew him slightly.

Page 26, line 9 from foot. Beyond Tooke. That is, beyond the philological theories of The Diversions of Purley by John Home Tooke (1736-1812).

Page 27, line 22. Ralph Bigod. John Fenwick, an unlucky friend of the Lambs, an anticipatory Micawber, of whom we know too little, and seem likely to find out little more. Lamb mentions him again in the essay on "Chimney Sweepers," and in that on "Newspapers," in his capacity as editor of The Albion, for which Lamb wrote its extinguishing epigram in the summer of 1801. There are references to the Fenwicks in Mary Lamb's letters to Sarah Stoddart and in Lamb's letters; but nothing very informing. After financial embarrassments in England they emigrated to America.

Page 29, line 12. Comberbatch. Coleridge, who had enlisted as a young man in the 15th Light Dragoons as Silas Titus Comberback.

Page 29, line 16. Bloomsbury. Lamb was then in rooms at 20 Great Russell Street (now Russell Street), Covent Garden, which is not in Bloomsbury.

Page 29, line 27. Should he go on acting. The Letters contain references to this habit of Coleridge's. Writing to him in 1809 Lamb says, referring among other loans to the volume of Dodsley with Vittoria Corombona ("The White Devil," by John Webster) in it:—"While I think on it, Coleridge, I fetch'd away my books which you had at the Courier Office, and found all but a third volume of the old plays, containing the 'White Devil, 'Green's 'Tu Quoque,' and the 'Honest Whore,' perhaps the most valuable volume of them all—that I could not find. Pray, if you can, remember what you did with it, or where you took it out with you a walking perhaps; send me word, for, to use the old plea, it spoils a set. I found two other volumes (you had three), the Arcadia and Daniel, enriched with manuscript notes. I wish every book I have were so noted. They have thoroughly converted me to relish Daniel, or to say I relish him, for after all, I believe I did relish him."

And several years later (probably in 1820) we find him addressing Coleridge with reference to Luther's Table Talk:—"Why will you make your visits, which should give pleasure, matter of regret to your friends? You never come but you take away some folio, that is part of my existence. With a great deal of difficulty I was made to comprehend the extent of my loss. My maid, Becky, brought me a dirty bit of paper, which contained her description of some book which Mr. Coleridge had taken away. It was Luster's Tables, which, for some time, I could not make out. 'What! has he carried away any of the tables, Becky?' 'No, it wasn't any tables, but it was a book that he called Luster's Tables.' I was obliged to search personally among my shelves, and a huge fissure suddenly disclosed to me the true nature of the damage I had sustained."