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Forgive me, Burney, if to thee these late

And hasty products of a critic pen,

Thyself no common judge of books and men,

In feeling of thy worth I dedicate.

My verse was offered to an older friend; The humbler prose has fallen to thy share: Nor could I miss the occasion to declare, What spoken in thy presence must offend— That, set aside some few caprices wild, Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days, In all my threadings of this worldly maze, (And I have watched thee almost from a child), Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, I have not found a whiter soul than thine.

Martin Burney was the son of Rear-Admiral Burney, who had sailed with Cook, and was the nephew of Madame D'Arblay. He was a barrister and very nearly Lamb's contemporary. Both Charles Lamb and his sister had for him a deep affection, although they made fun of his oddities, many of which are recorded in the correspondence. Burney lived to attend, and weep distressingly at, Mary Lamb's funeral in 1847.

Lamb seems to have meditated a collected edition of his works as early as 1816, for we find him telling Wordsworth (Sept. 23, 1816), that he had offered the book to Murray through Barron Field, but that Gifford had opposed the project successfully.

Page 1. Rosamund Gray.

First printed, 1798. Reprinted in the Works, 1818.

Rosamund Gray was published in 1798 by Lee & Hurst under the title A Tale of Rosamund Gray and old Blind Margaret, by Charles Lamb. It then had this dedication:—

This Tale

is

Inscribed in Friendship

to

Marmaduke Thompson,

of

Pembroke Hall,

Cambridge.

Thompson was at Christ's Hospital with Lamb. In the essay on that school in Elia, written in 1820, he is called "mildest of Missionaries" and the writer's good friend still, but there is no evidence that the intimacy was actively continued after the early days.

At the time that Rosamund Gray was written Lamb was twenty-two to twenty-three. It was his first prose of which we know anything.

Lamb reprinted the story without the dedication, under the title Rosamund Gray, a Tale, in his Works, 1818, the text of which is followed here. The differences of punctuation are numerous, but the text is mainly the same. In Chapter VI. (page 14, line 9) the phrase "take a cup of tea with her," ran, twenty years earlier, "drink a dish"; page 14, line 8 from foot, after "beauties of the season" old Margaret originally said, "I can still remember them with pleasure, and rejoice that younger eyes than mine can see and enjoy them. I shall be," etc.; and at the end of the same chapter (page 16), in the 1798 edition, came the quaintly particular passage which I have thrown into italics:—

"Besides, it was Margaret's bed-time, for she kept very good hours—indeed, in the distribution of her meals, and sundry other particulars, she resembled the livers in the antique world, more than might well beseem a creature of this—none but Rosamund could get her mess of broth ready, or put her night caps on—(she wore seven, the undermost was of flannel)—

"'You know, love, I can do nothing to help myself—here I must stay till you return.'

"So the new friends parted for that night—Elinor having made Margaret promise to give Rosamund leave to come and see her the next day."

Shelley's praise of Rosamund Gray has often been quoted: writing to Leigh Hunt, in 1819, he said, "What a lovely thing is Rosamund Gray! How much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest parts of our nature is in it!" Lamb mentions Julia de Roubigné in the text, and there is little doubt that he was influenced by Mackenzie's story. The epistolary form into which Rosamund Gray lapses is maintained throughout in Julia de Roubigné (1777), and there is a similar intensity of emotion and suggestion of fatality in both correspondences. There is, however, in Julia de Roubigné nothing of the sweet simplicity and limpid clarity of Lamb's earlier chapters; which may be described as his (perhaps unconscious) contribution to the revolt against convention that Coleridge and Wordsworth were leading in the same year in the Lyrical Ballads.

How far Lamb was recording fact in this story we do not know; but the letters seem to reflect his own frame of mind at that time—following upon his mother's death and his abandonment of his daydreams with the fair-haired maid of his sonnets. In this case we have the unusual spectacle of a masculine writer conveying his feelings through a feminine medium. But on pages 17–18 Lamb seems to be writing both as himself and his sister. Compare the passage at the foot of page 17 with Lamb's letter to Coleridge of October 17, 1796, where he quotes his sister as saying, "The spirit of my mother seems to descend and smile upon me," and the last paragraph on page 17 is paraphrased in Lamb's lines (composed at the same time that he was working on Rosamund Gray) "Written soon after the Preceding Poem," October, 1797. Again, the second paragraph on page 21 must exactly represent Lamb's hopes and wishes in connection with his sister at that date.

Rosamund Gray and her grandmother (if they had any real existence) are said to have lived in one of the group of cottages called Blenheims, between Blakesware and Ware, in the days when Lamb visited his grandmother at Blakesware house. These cottages were pulled down in 1895. But then Lamb's Anna—of the love sonnets—is also said to have lived at Blenheims; and they cannot possibly be identical. Old Margaret and Mrs. Field, Lamb's grandmother, may have had some traits in common, and the description of Blakesware, where Mrs. Field was housekeeper, is recognisable; but these researches cannot be pursued to any real purpose. According to a letter to Southey in October, 1798, "nothing but the first words" of the ballad—

An old woman clothed in gray,

Whose daughter was charming and young,

And she was deluded away

By Roger's false flattering tongue—

put Lamb "upon scribbling … Rosamund." This is quite conceivably the case. Whether we are to suppose that Lamb took not only the motive of his story, but also the word Gray, from this stanza, cannot be said; but it is generally thought that he found the name Rosamund Gray in a song thus entitled in his friend Charles Lloyd's Poems on Various Occasions, 1795. There is a suggestion that Lloyd may have had particular interest in the book in the circumstance that copies exist bearing the imprint of Pearson, a bookseller at Birmingham, where Lloyd lived. The Birmingham edition indeed is considered to be the first. Writing to Southey in May, 1799, Lamb says that Rosamund sells well in London.

Old Thomas Billet (page 28) was not the true name of the Widford innkeeper. It was Clemitson (see the poem "Going or Gone"). Lamb again used the name Billet, for his father's old Lincoln friend, in "Poor Relations." Nor was Ben Moxam the name of the Blakesware gardener, but Ben Carter. The Wilderness was actually the name given to the wood at the back of Blakesware house.

On the passage concerning the epitaphs, on pages 29–30, Talfourd wrote: "The reflections he [Lamb] makes on the eulogistic character of all the inscriptions are drawn from his own childhood; for when a very little boy, walking with his sister in a churchyard, he suddenly asked her, 'Mary, where do the naughty people lie?'"

Southey has a poem, "The Ruined Cottage," among his English Eclogues, which is practically a poetical paraphase of Rosamund Gray. I do not know whether Southey's version was taken from an independent source or whether it was a compliment to Lamb. Lamb's tale had, however, come first.

Finally, it may be remarked that in Barry Cornwall's Poems, Galignani, 1829, is a poem entitled "Rosamund Gray," which from the evidence of its few opening lines was to have been a blank verse adaptation of Lamb's theme.

Page 35. Curious Fragments.

John Woodvil, 1802, and Works, 1818.

Lamb engaged upon these experiments in the manner of Burton, always a favourite author with him, at the suggestion of Coleridge. We find him writing to Manning (March 17, 1800): "He [Coleridge] has lugged me to the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me, for a first plan, the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the anatomist of melancholy." Writing again to Manning a little later, probably in April, 1800, Lamb mentions having submitted two imitations of Burton to Stuart, the editor of the Morning Post, and states also that he has written the lines entitled "Conceipt of Diabolic Possession"—originally, in the John Woodvil volume, a part of these "Fragments," but afterwards, in the Works, separated from them. In August, 1800, Lamb tells Coleridge he has written the ballad in the manner of the "Old and Young Courtier," also originally part of these "Fragments," and mentions further that Stuart had rejected the proposed contribution.

Of Lamb's imitations the first two are most akin to the original in spirit, but the whole performance is curiously happy and a perfect illustration of his fellowship with the Elizabethans. Our language probably contains no more successful impersonation of any author: for the time being Lamb's mind approximated to that of Burton, while reserving enough individuality to make a new thing as well as a very subtle and exact echo. The Burton extracts and the Letters of Sir John Falstaff, written four or five years earlier (in which Lamb certainly had a hand: see pp. 225 and 491), represent in prose the same devotion to the Elizabethans that John Woodvil represents in verse. With 1800, when Lamb was twenty-five, this immediately derivative impulse ceased; but it is certain that without such interesting exercises in the manner of his favourite period his ripest work would have been far less rich.

The differences in text between the 1802 and 1818 editions are very slight. They are merely changes of punctuation and spelling—some twenty-four in all—with the exception that on page 39, line 18 "common sort" was originally "mobbe." Concerning this change Mr. Thomas Hutchinson, in The Athenæum, December 28, 1901, has an interesting note. Lamb, he says, made it "for the best of good reasons, because in the meantime he had recollected that to attribute the word mob to the pen of Robert Burton was to commit a linguistic anachronism. The earliest known examples of mob occur in Shadwell (1688) and Dryden (1690), whereas Burton died in January, 1640." I might add that "jokers" was another anachronism; since, according to the New English Dictionary, its first use is in the works of T. Cooke, 1729. "Inerudite" and "incomposite" seem to have been Lamb's coinage, but they are very Burtonian. The New English Dictionary gives Lamb's reference alone to the word "hebetant," meaning making dull.

Lamb's affection for Burton was profound. His own copy was a quarto of 1621, which is now, I believe, in America. The following passage from John Payne Collier's An Old Man's Diary (for 1832) is interesting in this connection:—

This led him [Lamb] to ask me, whether I remembered two or three passages in his book of books, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, illustrating Shakespeare's notions regarding Witches and Fairies. I replied that if I had seen them, I did not then recollect them. I took down the book, the contents of which he knew so well that he opened upon the place almost immediately: the first passage was this, respecting Macbeth and Banquo and their meeting with the three Witches: "And Hector Boethius [relates] of Macbeth and Banco, two Scottish Lords, that, as they were wandering in woods, had their fortunes told them by three strange women." I said that I remembered to have seen that passage quoted, or referred to by more than one editor of Shakespeare. "Have you seen this quoted," he inquired, "which relates to fairies? 'Some put our fairies into this rank, which have been in former times adored with much superstition, with sweeping their houses and setting of a pail of clean water, good victuals and the like; and then they should not be pinched, but find money in their shoes and be fortunate in their enterprises … and, Olaus Magnus adds, leave that green circle which we commonly find in plain fields.' Farther on Burton gives them the very name assigned to one of them by Shakespeare, for he adds, 'These have several names in several places: we commonly call them Pucks' (part i., sect. 2), which Ben Jonson degrades to Pug."

Page 41. Early Journalism. I.—G. F. Cooke's "Richard the Third."

Morning Post, January 4, 1802. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This paper was printed by the late Mr. Dykes Campbell in The Athenæum, August 4, 1888, and was identified by him by means of a then unpublished letter of Lamb to John Rickman, January 9, 1802. Early in January, 1802, says Mr. Campbell, "Lamb ceased to contribute dramatic criticism to the Morning Post; the editor wanted the paragraphs to be written on the night of the performance for next day's paper; and this Lamb could not manage. He had tried it on one occasion [see below], but found he could not 'write against time.'"

Writing to Robert Lloyd at about the same time as this criticism, Lamb took up the subject again:—

"Cooke in 'Richard the Third' is a perfect caricature. He gives you the monster Richard, but not the man Richard. Shakespear's bloody character impresses you with awe and deep admiration of his witty parts, his consummate hypocrisy, and indefatigable prosecution of purpose. You despise, detest, and loathe the cunning, vulgar, low and fierce Richard, which Cooke substitutes in his place. He gives you no other idea than of a vulgar villain, rejoycing in his being able to over reach, and not possessing that joy in silent consciousness, but betraying it, like a poor villain, in sneers and distortions of the face, like a droll at a country fair: not to add that cunning so self-betraying and manner so vulgar could never have deceived the politic Buckingham nor the soft Lady Anne: both bred in courts, would have turned with disgust from such a fellow. Not but Cooke has powers; but not of discrimination. His manner is strong, coarse, and vigorous, and well adapted to some characters. But the lofty imagery and high sentiments and high passions of Poetry come black and prose-smoked from his prose Lips. … I am possessed with an admiration of the genuine Richard, his genius, and his mounting spirit, which no consideration of his cruelties can depress. Shakespear has not made Richard so black a Monster as is supposed. Where-ever he is monstrous, it was to conform to vulgar opinion. But he is generally a Man. Read his most exquisite address to the Widowed Queen to court her daughter for him—the topics of maternal feeling, of a deep knowledge of the heart, are such as no monster could have supplied [see Act IV., Scene 4]. Richard must have felt before he could feign so well; tho' ambition choked the good seed. I think it the most finished piece of Eloquence in the world; of persuasive oratory far above Demosthenes, Burke, or any man, far exceeding the courtship of Lady Anne."

George Frederick Cooke who produced "Richard III." at Covent Garden on October 31, 1801, with great success, lived from 1756–1811.

I imagine that the following article on another performance of Cooke's, printed in the Morning Post for January 9, 1802, is also Lamb's, probably written on the "one occasion" referred to above and the last that he wrote. No other bears so many signs of his authorship:—

"Theatre

"Covent Garden

"Mr. Cooke performed Lear in the celebrated Tragedy of that name at this Theatre last night. It is a character little suited to his talents. In the expression of strong and turbulent passions, he will always find his forte; but he wants gentleness and softness for melting and melancholy scenes. Whatever, therefore, may be his excellence in the ambitious and heroic Richard, those who have duly weighed his peculiar powers could not expect much from his representation of the broken-hearted Lear. No principle can be more clear, than that cruelty and ingratitude are black in proportion to the weakness and helplessness of the object on which they are exercised. The great master of the human heart accordingly makes this good old King represent himself as a man standing upon the last verge of life—a man 'eighty years old and upwards.' It is from turning such a man as this out of doors, and by his ungrateful children, too, to 'bide the pelting of the pityless storm,' that the interest principally arises. In this line, so clearly marked by the poet, Mr. Cooke showed a total want of discrimination. His step was almost uniformly firm, and his whole deportment too vigorous for his years. The heart, therefore, could not feel that pity which the sight of a deserving object, physically unable to contend with unmerited hardships, never fails to produce. His enunciation also, which was clear and strong, had none of the tremulousness of feeble old age, and his voice seldom succeeded in the modulation of tones sufficiently plaintive and delicate to express the agonies of a broken heart. The scene where he imprecates a curse upon the undutiful Goneril was given with energy, but without that anguish which must wring a parent's bosom in such a situation. The mad scene with Edgar was also a very imperfect piece of acting, and few of the beautiful passages with which the piece abounds, received that excellent colouring and embellishment with which Mr. Kemble in the same character calls down such plaudits in the other House. Mr. Cooke having so evidently placed himself in the way of comparison, this allusion cannot be deemed invidious.—This new essay should, however, make him slow to venture beyond his depth, and justifies our apprehension that he does not possess an elasticity of mind, a pliancy of powers, to enable him to pursue his rival through all the variety of his characters with the same success that he encounters him on Bosworth field.

"Mr. H. Siddons was an excellent Edgar; his mad scenes displayed much chaste and natural acting, and several passages were marked with beauties peculiarly his own. His representation of the character would be still more interesting, were he to infuse into his manner more fondness for his mistress, Cordelia, and his unfortunate father, the Earl of Gloucester. Miss Murray, whose excellence in characters of simple pathos is so well known, was a most interesting portrait of Cordelia. She played the part with great delicacy and feeling, sweetness and simplicity.

"Mr. Hull, in Glo'ster, was natural and impressive; and Mr. Waddy, though a little coarse as Earl of Kent, was a good picture of blunt honesty in his humble disguise as Caius. The other characters did not possess much merit, or deserve much notice."

Page 44. II.—Grand State Bed.

Writing to Rickman about his Morning Post work, in January, 1802, Lamb says that in addition to certain other things it was he who made the Lord Mayor's bed. The reference is undoubtedly to this little article on January 4, 1802.

Page 44. III.—Fable for Twelfth Day.

On January 6 (Twelfth Night), 1802, this fable was printed in the Morning Post. That Lamb was the author no one need have any doubt after reading the Elia essay, "Rejoicings on the New Year's Coming of Age."

Page 46. IV.—The Londoner.

Morning Post. February 1, 1802. Works, 1818.

This paper, although it is included in the Works among "Letters under assumed signatures, published in The Reflector," and although it is nominally addressed to the editor of that paper, did not, however, appear in it. It was first printed in the Morning Post for February 1, 1802, during Lamb's brief connection with that paper, the story of which is told in the note to the essay on "Newspapers" in Elia.

"The Londoner" in the Morning Post differed from the version subsequently reprinted. See notes to vol. I. of my large edition.

John Forster, in his memoir of Lamb in the New Monthly Magazine in 1835, has the following passage, which, applying to Lamb's later life (Forster was only twenty-two when Lamb died), rounds off, with certain ecstatic passages in the letters, the present London eulogium. The lines quoted by Forster are from "The Old Familiar Faces":—

"We recollect being once sent by her [Mary Lamb] to seek 'Charles,' who had rambled away from her. We found him in the Temple, looking up, near Crown-office-row, at the house where he was born. Such was his ever-touching habit of seeking alliance with the scenes of old times. They were the dearer to him that distance had withdrawn them. He wished to pass his life among things gone by yet not forgotten; we shall never forget the affectionate 'Yes, boy,' with which he returned our repeating his own striking lines:—

"'Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood,

Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse.'"

Page 46, line 11. Great annual feast. In stating that he was born on Lord Mayor's Day, Lamb stretched a point. His birthday was February 10.

Page 48. Characters of Dramatic Writers Contemporary with Shakspeare.

Specimens, 1808, and Works, 1818.

These notes are abridgments of the notes to Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, 1808. The whole work is reproduced in my large edition, where such annotation as seems desirable may be found. The abridgment is printed here in order that the text of Lamb's own edition of his Works, 1818, may be preserved.

Page 65. On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged.

To the circumstance that Leigh Hunt edited The Reflector, which was founded by his brother in 1810 as a literary and political quarterly, may be attributed in a large measure the beginning of Lamb's career as an essayist. Leigh Hunt, himself a Christ's Hospitaller, sought his contributors among old scholars of that school; from whom, as he remarked in the little note prefixed to the two-volume edition of the periodical, came "the largest and most entertaining part." Among these contributors were Lamb, George Dyer, Thomas Barnes, afterwards editor of The Times, Thomes Mitchell, classical scholar, James Scholefield, afterwards Greek Professor at Cambridge, Hunt himself, and Barron Field, who, though not actually a Christ's Hospitaller, was through his father, Henry Field, apothecary to the school, connected with it.

Until Lamb received Hunt's invitation to let his fancy play to what extent he would in The Reflector's pages, he had received little or no encouragement as a writer; and he was naturally so diffident that without some external impulse he rarely brought himself to do his own work at all. Between John Woodvil (1802) and the first Reflector papers (1810) he had written "Mr. H.," performed his share in the children's books, and compiled the Dramatic Specimens: a tale of work which, considering that it was also a social period, and a busy period at the India House, is not trifling. But between the last Reflector paper (1811 or 1812) and the first Elia essay (1820) Lamb seems to have written nothing save the essays on Christ's Hospital, the "Confessions of a Drunkard," a few brief notes, reviews and dramatic criticisms, mainly at the instigation of Leigh Hunt, and some scraps of verse chiefly for The Champion. The world owes a great debt to Leigh Hunt for discerning Lamb's gifts and allowing him free rein. The comic letters to The Reflector may not be Lamb at his best, though they are excellent stepping-stones to that state; but upon the essays on Shakespeare's tragedies and Hogarth's genius it is doubtful if Lamb could have improved at any period.

The Reflector ran only to four numbers, which were very irregularly issued, and it then ceased. It ran nominally from October 1810 to December 1811. Crabb Robinson mentions reading No. I. on May 15, 1811.

Lamb, it may be remarked here, was destined to contribute to yet another Reflector. In 1832 Moxon started a weekly paper of that name in which part of Lamb's Elia essay on the "Defect of Imagination in Modern Paintings" was printed. The venture, however, quickly failed, and all trace of it seems to have vanished.

Lamb's first Reflector paper was entitled "On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged."

It appeared in No. II., 1811, and was reprinted in the Works, 1818.

He made yet another use of the central idea of this essay. The farce, "The Pawnbroker's Daughter," written in 1825, turns upon the resuscitation of a hanged man, Jack Pendulous.

Page 68, line 6. Smoke his cravat. To smoke was old slang for to see, to notice. East-enders to-day would say "Pipe his necktie!"

Page 72, line 1. The solution … in "Hamlet."

First Clown. What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?

Second Clown. The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.

Act V., Scene I, lines 46–50.

Page 72. Footnote. "The Spanish Tragedy." A play by Thomas Kyd (1557?-1595?), from which Lamb quoted largely in his Specimens, 1808. This line is in Act III., in Hieronimo's instructions to the painter: "And then at last, sir, starting, behold a man hanging, and tott'ring, and tott'ring, as you know the wind will wave a man. … "

Page 72, line 3. That scene in "Measure for Measure."

Pompey. Master Barnardine! you must rise and be hanged, Master Barnardine!

Abhorson. What, ho, Barnardine!

Bar. [Within.] A pox o' your throats! Who makes that noise there? What are you?

Pom. Your friends, sir; the hangman. You must be so good, sir, to rise and be put to death.

Bar. [Within.] Away, you rogue, away! I am sleepy.

Abhor. Tell him he must awake, and that quickly too.

Pom. Pray, Master Barnardine, awake till you are executed, and sleep afterwards.

Abhor. Go in to him, and fetch him out.

Pom. He is coming, sir, he is coming; I hear his straw rustle.

Abhor. Is the axe upon the block, sirrah?

Pom. Very ready, sir.

Act IV., Scene 3, lines 23–40.

Page 73, line 3. The Angel in Milton.

Made so adorn for they delight the more,

So awful, that with honour thou may'st love

Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise.

Paradise Lost, VIII., 576–578.

Page 73, line 10. An ancestor. This punctilious hero may have been an ancestor of the Plumers, of Blakesware. See the Elia essay on "Blakesmoor, in H——shire."

Page 73, line 7 from foot. A waistcoat that had been mine. The clothes of his clients became the hangman's perquisites. In Lamb's letter to Bernard Barton concerning Thurtell (January 9, 1824) this subject is again played with.

The present essay led to some amusing speculation in the next number of The Reflector, signed M., as to the origin of Jack Ketch. Some of the questions propounded to Pensilis are almost in Lamb's own manner:—

Supposing the race of Ketches to be extinct, what cross does Pensilis think necessary to re-produce the breed? I have a very pretty knack myself at guessing what mixtures of different bloods will generate the ordinary professions of life; as a judge, an alderman, a bishop, &c., &c. but shall be happy to defer to his superior knowledge in this particular experiment of the art. Your correspondent, no doubt, is aware, how many generations it will frequently take a family, who value themselves upon their exterior, to wear out any little deformity; as, for instance, a snub nose, or a long chin. I could mention one noble family, whom it has cost a dozen intermarriages with the yeomanry, to introduce a stouter pair of legs among them; and another, which has been obliged to go through a course of milk-maids, to throw a little colour into their cheeks. Has your correspondent ever considered in what term of years a spirit of Ketchicism may be introduced into a family; and conversely, in how many generations the milk of human kindness may be instilled into, what Burke would call, a pure, unsophisticated dephlegmated, defecated Ketch?

Page 74. On the Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity.

The Reflector, No. II. Reprinted in the Works, 1818.

Page 79, line 16. The tales of our nursery. In his Elia essay "Dream Children" Lamb recalls his grandmother's narration of the old story of the "Children in the Wood."

Page 79, lines 20–21. Mrs. Radcliffe … Mr. Monk Lewis. The popularity of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), whose Mysteries of Udolpho appeared in 1794, and of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818), whose rival exercise in grisly romance, The Monk, was published in 1795, was then (1811) still considerable, although on the wane.

Page 80. On the Ambiguities Arising from Proper Names.

The Reflector, No. II., 1811. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This paper is known to be Lamb's because he tells the story, in much the same words, in a letter to Wordsworth dated February 1, 1806. The young man who made the mistake of confusing Spencer and Spenser was a brother of Coleridge's Mary Evans. The Hon. William Robert Spencer (1769–1834), the second son of the third Duke of Marlborough, was a Society poet well enough known in his day—the first decade of the last century. His only poem that has survived is "Beth Gelert," a ballad often included in children's poetry books.

In Lamb's Letters the poet Spenser is usually spelt Spencer.

Page 81. On the Genius and Character of Hogarth.

The Reflector, No. III., 1811. The title there ran: "On the Genius and Character of Hogarth; with some Remarks on a Passage in the Writings of the late Mr. Barry." The article was signed L. It was reprinted in the Works, 1818.

Many of Hogarth's pictures, framed in black, hung round Lamb's sitting-room in his various homes. In 1817 Mary Lamb, writing to Dorothy Wordsworth, says that the Hogarths have been taken down from the walls and pasted into a book, but there is proof that some at any rate were framed both at Islington and Enfield.

Hazlitt in his Sketches of the Principal Picture-galleries in England, 1824, wrote, "Of the pictures in the Rake's Progress we shall not here say anything … because they have already been criticised by a writer, to whom we could add nothing, in a paper which ought to be read by every lover of Hogarth and of English genius." The reference was to Lamb's essay.

Page 82, line 1. Old-fashioned house in——shire. Lamb refers again to Blakesware, in Hertfordshire. In a letter to Southey, Oct. 31, 1799, Lamb mentions the Blakesware Hogarths. This would suggest that Hogarth was the first artist that he knew, so many of his recollections dating from the old Hertfordshire days.

Page 84, line 1. Kent, or Caius. See "Table Talk," pages 401–2 of the present volume, for an amplification of this passage many years later. Lamb's version of "Lear" in Tales from Shakespear, 1807, has similar praise of Kent.

Page 84, last line. Ferdinand Count Fathom. See Chapter XXVII. of Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, 1754:—

When he beheld the white cliffs of Albion, his heart throbbed with all the joy of a beloved son, who, after a tedious and fatiguing voyage, reviews the chimnies of his father's house: he surveyed the neighbouring coast of England with fond and longing eyes, like another Moses reconnoitring the land of Canaan from the top of mount Pisgah; and to such a degree of impatience was he inflamed by the sight, that instead of proceeding to Calais, he resolved to take his passage directly from Boulogne, even if he should hire a vessel for the purpose.

Page 88. Footnote. Somewhere in his [Reynolds'] lectures. The passage is in the fourteenth of the Discourses on Painting—on Gainsborough:—

After this admirable artist [Hogarth] had spent the greater part of his life in an active, busy, and, we may add, successful attention to the ridicule of life; after he had invented a new species of dramatic painting, in which probably he will never be equalled, and had stored his mind with infinite materials to explain and illustrate the domestic and familiar scenes of common life, which were generally, and ought to have been always, the subject of his pencil; he very imprudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted the great historical style, for which his previous habits had by no means prepared him: he was indeed so entirely unacquainted with the principles of this style, that he was not even aware that any artificial preparation was at all necessary. It is to be regretted, that any part of the life of such a genius should be fruitlessly employed. Let his failure teach us not to indulge ourselves in the vain imagination, that by a momentary resolution we can give either dexterity to the hand, or a new habit to the mind.

Page 95, line 10. Children's books. The Reflector version added, "or the tale of Carlo the Dog."

Page 97, line 8 from foot. With Dr. Swift. The page opposite the title of the Tale of a Tub contains a (fictitious) list of "Treatises writ by the same author." The fifth of these is "A Panegyric upon the World." It is probable that Lamb had this in mind.

Page 101. On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres.

The Reflector, No. III., 1811. Not reprinted by Lamb.

Lamb omits to say that he joined in the hissing of his farce, "Mr. H.," on the unhappy night of December 10, 1806. In its ill fortune he seems always to have taken a kind of humorous sympathetic pride. When he printed the play at the end of his Works, 1818, he prefixed a quotation from Hazlitt's essay on "Great and Little Things," of which this is a portion:—

Mr. H.——thou wert damned. Bright shone the morning on the play-bills that announced thy appearance, and the streets were filled with the buzz of persons asking one another if they would go to see Mr. H.——, and answering that they would certainly; but before night the gaiety, not of the author, but of his friends, and the town, was eclipsed, for thou wert damned!

Writing to Manning concerning the play's failure, Lamb said:—"Damn 'em, how they hissed! It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese, with roaring sometimes, like bears, mows and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hiss'd me into madness. 'Twas like St. Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should give his favourite children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that they should turn them into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labours of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them!"

Page 101, line 3 of essay. That memorable season, 1806–1807. Lamb here exaggerates. It is true that ten new pieces were tried at Drury Lane in the season mentioned; but five were successful, and Monk Lewis's "Adelgitha," the only tragedy, could hardly be called a failure. Of the remaining four plays which failed, Holcroft's "Vindictive Man" was the most notable.

Page 101, line 9 of essay. The Clerk of Chatham.

Cade. Dost thou use to write thy name? or hast thou a mark to thyself, like an honest plain-dealing man?

Clerk of Chatham. Sir, I thank God, I have been so well brought up that I can write my name.

All. He hath confessed: away with him! he's a villain and a traitor.

Cade. Away with him, I say! hang him with his pen and ink-horn about his neck.

"II. Henry VI.," Act IV., Scene 2, lines 109–117.

Page 101, line 7 from foot. "The Vindictive Man." This was the comedy by Thomas Holcroft, Lamb's friend, the failure of which occurred a few nights before that of "Mr. H." Lamb describes the luckless performance in a letter to Manning dated December 5, 1806.

Page 102, line 5. "Our nonsense did not … suit their nonsense." From Burnet's History of His Own Times, Vol. II.: "He [Charles II.] told me he had a chaplain that was a very honest man, but a very great blockhead, to whom he had given a living in Suffolk, that was full of that sort of people: he had gone about among them from house to house, though he could not imagine what he could say to them, for, he said, he was a very silly fellow, but that he believed his nonsense suited their nonsense; yet he had brought them all to church: and, in reward of his diligence, he had given him a bishopric in Ireland." (A note by Swift states the cleric to be Bishop Woolly of Clonfert.)

Page 102, line 25. A Syren Catalani. Angelica Catalani (1779–1849), one of the most beautiful of all singers.

Page 104, line 19. The O.P. differences. The O.P.—Old Prices—Riots raged in 1809. On September 18 of that year the new Covent Garden Theatre was opened under the management of John Philip Kemble and Charles Kemble, with a revised price list. The opposition to this revision was so determined that "Macbeth," with John Philip Kemble as Macbeth, and Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth, was played practically in dumb show, and in the end the theatre was closed again for a while. The battle was waged not only by fists but by pamphlets. After two months' fighting a compromise was effected.

Page 105, line 17. Obstinate, in John Bunyan. At the beginning of the Pilgrim's Progress. It was not Obstinate, however, but Christian who put his fingers in his ears. Obstinate pursued and caught him. Lamb made the same mistake again in some verses to Bernard Barton.

A club of hissed authors existed in Paris in the 1870's. Flaubert, Daudet and Zola were members.

Page 107. On Burial Societies; and the Character of an Undertaker.

Reflector, No. III., 1811. The letter there begins "Sir." Printed again in part, in The Yellow Dwarf, January 17, 1818. Reprinted in the Works, 1818.

Page 110. The following short Essay. "The Character of an Undertaker" is, of course, Lamb's own. Sable is the undertaker in Sir Richard Steele's "Funeral; or, Grief à la Mode," 1702. Two of his remarks run thus: "There is often nothing more … deeply Joyful than a Young Widow in her Weeds and Black Train," and "The poor Dead are deliver'd to my Custody … not to do them Honour, but to satisfy the Vanity or Interest of their Survivors."

Page 112. On the Tragedies of Shakespeare.

Printed in The Reflector, No. IV. (1811), under the title "Theatralia, No. I. On Garrick, and Acting; and the Plays of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their fitness for Stage-Representation." Reprinted in the Works, 1818.

At the close of the Reflector article Lamb wrote: "I have hitherto confined my observation to the Tragic parts of Shakespeare; in some future Number I propose to extend this inquiry to the Comedies." The Reflector ending with the fourth number, the project was not carried out. From time to time, however, throughout his life, Lamb returned incidentally to Shakespearian criticism, as in several essays in the present volume, and the Elia essay "The Old Actors," with its masterly analysis of the character of Malvolio. David Garrick died in 1779, just before Lamb's fourth birthday. Lamb's father often talked of him.

Page 113, line 6. "To paint fair Nature," etc. These lines on Garrick's monument, which have been corrected from the stone, were by Samuel Jackson Pratt (1749–1814), the same author whose Gleanings Lamb described in a letter to Southey in 1798 as "a contemptible book, a wretched assortment of vapid feelings." Pratt's lines on Garrick were chosen in place of a prose epitaph written by Edmund Burke.

Page 114, line 23. Mr. K. John Philip Kemble (1757–1823), who first appeared as Hamlet in London at Drury Lane, September 30, 1783.

Page 114, line 24. Mrs. S. Mrs. Siddons, John Philip Kemble's sister (1755–1831). Her regular stage career ended on June 29, 1812, when she played Lady Macbeth. Her first part in London was Portia on December 29, 1775. Lamb admired her greatly. As early as 1794 he wrote, with Coleridge's collaboration, a sonnet on the impression which Mrs. Siddons made upon him.

Page 118, line 4. Banks and Lillo. John Banks, a very inferior Restoration melodramatist. George Lillo (1693–1739), the author among other plays of "George Barnwell—The London Merchant; or The History of George Barnwell," 1731 (mentioned a little later), which held the stage for a century. The story, the original of which is to be found in the Percy Reliques, tells how George, an apprentice, robs his master and kills his uncle at the instigation of Millwood, an adventuress. Lamb's footnote (page 118) refers to the custom, which was of long endurance, of playing "George Barnwell" in the Christmas and Easter holidays as an object-lesson to apprentices.

Page 121, line 25. The Hills and the Murphys and the Browns. Dr. John Hill (1716?-1775), the herbalist, controversialist, and miscellaneous writer, who quarrelled with Garrick. In The Reflector Lamb had written the Hooles. It was changed to Hills afterwards. Hoole would be John Hoole (1727–1803), translator of Tasso and the author of some turgid tragedies, who had been in his time an India House clerk. Arthur Murphy (1727–1805), actor and author, who wrote, in addition to many plays and books, a Life of Garrick (1801). The Rev. John Brown (1715–1766), the author of "Barbarossa" and "Athelstane," in both of which Garrick acted.

Page 122, line 8 from foot. Mr. C. G. F. Cooke. See above.

Page 123, line 25. Glenalvon. In Home's "Douglas." Lamb wrote an early poem on this tragedy, which seems to have so dominated his youthful imagination that when in 1795–1796 he was for a while in confinement he believed himself at times to be young Norval.

Page 127, line 12. A ghost by chandelier light … It should perhaps be borne in mind that in 1811, and for many years after, the stage was still lighted by candles, so that the regulation of light, which can be effected with such nicety on the modern stage, was then impossible. This is especially to be remembered with regard to such details as the presentation of the Witches in "Macbeth." It would be simple enough, with our electric switchboard, to frighten a nervous child in that scene to-day.

Page 129, line 3. Webb. Webb was a theatrical robemaker at 98 Chancery Lane.

Page 130. Specimens from the Writings of Fuller.

The Reflector, No. IV., 1812. Works, 1818. In The Reflector the signature Y was appended to the introductory paragraphs.

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661), the divine and historian. The passages selected by Lamb are identified in the notes to my large edition, the references being to The Holy State, 1642; The History of the Worthies of England, 1662; A Pisgah-sight of Palestine and the Confines thereof, with the Histories of the Old and New Testaments acted thereon, 1650; and The Church History of Britain from the Birth of Jesus Christ until the year MDCXLVIII., 1655. Lamb's transcriptions are, of course, not exact.

Page 135. Footnote. Fuller's bird. Lamb's friend Procter (Barry Cornwall) was also greatly impressed by this legend. His English Songs, 1832, contains a poem on the subject.

Page 137. Footnote. Wickliffe's ashes. Landor has a passage on this subject in his poem "On Swift joining Avon near Rugby." Wordsworth's fine sonnet, in the Ecclesiastical Sketches, Part II., may have been suggested by this very quotation in Lamb's essay:—