ELLISTONIANA.

This para

Page 190. See note at the head of " To the Shade of Elliston," above. Page 190, line 3 of essay. My first introduction. graph was a footnote in the Englishman's Magazine. Elliston, according to the Memoirs of him by George Raymond, which have Lamb's phrase, "Joyousest of once embodied spirits," for motto, opened a circulating library at Leamington in the name of his sons William and Henry, and served there himself at times.

Possibly Lamb was visiting Charles Chambers at Leamington when he saw Elliston. That he did see him there we know from Raymond's book, where an amusing occurrence is described, illustrating Munden's frugality. It seems that Lamb, Elliston and Munden drove together to Warwick Castle. On returning Munden stopped the carriage just outside Leamington, on the pretext that he had to make a call on an old friend—a regular device, as Elliston explained, to avoid being present at the inn when the hire of the carriage was paid.

Page 191, line 11. Wrench. See notes to "The Old Actors." Wrench succeeded Elliston at Bath, and played in the same parts, and with something of the same manner.

Page 191, line 11 from foot. Appelles . G. D. Apelles, painter to Alexander the Great, was said to let no day pass without experimenting with his pencil. G. D. was George Dyer, whom we first met in "Oxford in the Vacation."

Page 192, line 6. Ranger. In Hoadley's "Suspicious Husband," one of Elliston's great parts.

Page 192, line 17 from foot. Cibber. Colley Cibber (16711757), the actor, who was a very vain man, created the part of Foppington in 1697-his first great success.

Page 192, last line. St. Dunstan's ... punctual giants. Old St. Dunstan Church, in Fleet Street, had huge figures which struck the hours, and which disappeared with the church, pulled down to make room for the present one some time before 1831. They are mentioned in Emily Barton's story in Mrs. Leicester's School (see Vol. III.). Moxon records that Lamb shed tears when the figures were taken away.

Page 193, line 6. Drury Lane. Drury Lane opened, under Elliston's management, on October 4, 1819, with "Wild Oats," in which he played Rover. He left the theatre, a bankrupt, in 1826.

Page 193, line 19. The Olympic. Lamb is wrong in his dates. Elliston's tenancy of the Olympic preceded his reign at Drury Lane. It was to the Surrey that he retired after the Drury Lane period, producing there Jerrold's Black-Eyed Susan" in

1829.

Page 193, line 12 from foot. Sir A- C. Sir Anthony Carlisle (see note to "A Quakers' Meeting").

Page 194, line 7. A Vestris. Madame Vestris (1797-1856), the great comédienne, who was one of Elliston's stars at Drury Lane.

Page 195, line 6. Latinity. Elliston was buried in St. John's Church, Waterloo Road, and a marble slab with a Latin inscription by Nicholas Torre, his son-in-law, is on the wall. Elliston was the nephew of Dr. Elliston, Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who sent him to St. Paul's School-not, however, that founded by Colet-but to St. Paul's School, Covent Garden. He was intended for the Church.

Page 195. DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. London Magazine, July, 1822, where, at the end, were the words, "To be continued;" but Lamb did not return to the topic.

For some curious reason Lamb passed over this essay when collecting Elia for the press. It was not republished till 1833, in the Last Essays.

Page 195, motto. The Relapse. The comedy by Sir John Vanbrugh. Lamb liked this quotation. He uses it in his letter about William Wordsworth, junior, to Dorothy Wordsworth, November 25, 1819; and again in his "Reminiscence of Sir Jeffery Dunstan " (see Vol. I.).

"What

Page 195, foot. I can read any thing which I call a book. Writing to Wordsworth in August, 1815, Lamb says: any man can write, surely I may read."

Page 195, last line. Pocket Books. In the London Magazine Lamb added in parenthesis "the literary excepted," the reference being to the Literary Pocket Book which Leigh Hunt brought out annually from 1819 to 1822.

Page 196, line 2. Hume Fenyns. Hume would be David Hume (1711-1776), the philosopher and historian of England; Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), historian of Rome; William Robertson, D.D. (1721-1793), historian of America, Charles V., Scotland and India; James Beattie (1735-1803), author of "The Minstrel" and a number of essays, who had, however, one recommendation to Lamb, of which Lamb may have been unaware-he loved Vincent Bourne's poems and was one of the first to praise them; and Soame Jenyns (1704-1787), author of The Art of Dancing, and the Inquiry into Evil which Johnson reviewed so mercilessly. It is stated in Moore's Diary, according to Procter, that Lamb "excluded from his library Robertson, Gibbon and Hume, and made instead a collection of the works of the heroes of The Dunciad."

Page 196, line 14. Population Essay. That was the day of population essays. Malthus's Essay on Population, 1798, had led to a number of replies.

Page 196, line 22. My ragged veterans. Crabb Robinson recorded in his diary that Lamb had the "finest collection of shabby books" he ever saw; "such a number of first-rate works in very bad condition is, I think, nowhere to be found." Leigh Hunt

stated in his essay on "My Books" in The Literary Examiner, July 5, 1823, that Lamb's library had

an handsome contempt for appearance. It looks like what it is, a selection made at precious intervals from the book-stalls;-now a Chaucer at nine and twopence; now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas Browne at two shillings; now a Jeremy Taylor, a Spinoza; an old English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney; and the books are neat as imported." The very perusal of the backs is a "discipline of humanity.' There Mr. Southey takes his place again with an old Radical friend: there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden: there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, Sewel: there Guzman d'Alfarache thinks himself fit company for Sir Charles Grandison, and has his claims admitted. Even the "high fantastical" Duchess of Newcastle, with her laurel on her head, is received with grave honours, and not the less for declining to trouble herself with the constitutions of her maids.

It is in the same essay that Leigh Hunt mentions that he once saw Lamb kiss an old folio-Chapman's Homer-the work he paraphrased for children under the title The Adventures of Ulysses. Page 197, line 15. Life of the Duke of Newcastle. Lamb's copy, a folio containing also the "Philosophical Letters," is in America.

Page 197, line 20. Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton . . . I cannot say where are Lamb's copies of Sidney and Fuller; but the British Museum has his Milton, rich in MS. notes, a two-volume edition, 1751. The Taylor, which Lamb acquired in 1798, is the 1678 folio Sermons. I cannot say where it now is.

Page 197, line 26. Shakspeare. Lamb's Shakespeare was not sold at the sale of his library; only a copy of the Poems, 12mo, 1714. His annotated copy of the Poems, 1640, is in America. There is a reference to one of Rowe's plates in the essay "My First Play." The Shakespeare gallery engravings were the costly series of illustrations to Shakespeare commissioned by John Boydell (1719-1804), Lord Mayor of London in 1790. The pictures were exhibited in the Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall, and the engravings were published in 1802.

After the word "Shakespeare," in the London Magazine, came the sentence: "You cannot make a pet book of an author whom everybody reads."

66

In a letter to Wordsworth, February 1, 1806, Lamb says: 'Shakespear is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book. In the same letter he says of binding: "The Law Robe I have ever thought as comely and gentlemanly a garb as a Book would wish to wear.' ""

Page 197, line 7 from foot. Beaumont and Fletcher. See note to"The Two Races of Men" for an account of Lamb's copy, now in the British Museum.

Page 197, line 5 from foot. No sympathy with them. After these

words, in the London Magazine, came, "nor with Mr. Gifford's Ben Jonson." This edition by Lamb's old enemy, William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly, was published in 1816. Lamb's copy of Ben Jonson was dated 1692, folio. It is now in America, I believe. Page 197, foot. The reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy. This reprint was, I think, published in 1800, in two volumes, marked ninth edition. Lamb's copy was dated 1621, quarto. I do not know where it now is.

Page 198, line 4. Malone. This was Edmund Malone (17411812), the critic and editor of Shakespeare, who in 1793 persuaded the Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon to whitewash the coloured bust of

the poet in the chancel. A Gentleman's Magazine epigrammatist, sharing Lamb's view, wrote:

Stranger, to whom this monument is shown,
Invoke the poet's curse upon Malone;

Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste betrays,
And daubs his tombstone, as he mars his plays.

Lamb has been less than fair to Malone. To defend his action in the matter of the bust of Shakespeare is impossible, except by saying that he acted in good faith and according to the fashion of his time. But he did great service to the fame of Shakespeare and thus to English literature, and was fearless and shrewd in his denunciation of the impostor Ireland.

Page 198, line 26. The Fairy Queen. Lamb's copy was a folio, 1617, 12, 17, 13. Against Canto XI., Stanza 32, he has written: "Dear Venom, this is the stave I wot of. I will maintain it against any in the book."

Page 199, line 14. Nando's. A coffee-house in Fleet Street, at the east corner of Inner Temple Lane, and thus at one time close to Lamb's rooms.

Page 199, line 16. "The Chronicle is in hand, Sir." In the London Magazine the following paragraph was here inserted:

"As in these little Diurnals I generally skip the Foreign News, the Debates-and the Politics-I find the Morning Herald by far the most entertaining of them. It is an agreeable miscellany, rather than a newspaper."

The Morning Herald, under Alexander Chalmers, had given more attention to social gossip than to affairs of State; but under Thomas Wright it suddenly, about the time of Lamb's essay, became politically serious and left aristocratic matters to the Morning Post.

Page 199, line 20. Town and Country Magazine. This magazine flourished between 1769 and 1792.

Page 199, line 26. Poor Tobin. Possibly John Tobin (17701804), the playwright, though I think not. More probably the Tobin mentioned in Lamb's letter to Wordsworth about " Mr. H." in June, 1806 (two years after John Tobin's death), to whom Lamb

read the manager's letter concerning the farce. This would be James, John Tobin's brother.

Page 200, line 13. The five points. After these words came, in the London Magazine, the following paragraph :

"I was once amused-there is a pleasure in affecting affectation -at the indignation of a crowd that was justling in with me at the pit-door of Covent Garden theatre, to have a sight of Master Betty-then at once in his dawn and his meridian-in Hamlet. I had been invited quite unexpectedly to join a party, whom I met near the door of the playhouse, and I happened to have in my hand a large octavo of Johnson and Steevens's Shakspeare, which, the time not admitting of my carrying it home, of course went with me to the theatre. Just in the very heat and pressure of the doors opening-the rush, as they term it-I deliberately held the volume over my head, open at the scene in which the young Roscius had been most cried up, and quietly read by the lamplight. The clamour became universal.The affectation of the fellow,' cried one. 'Look at that gentleman reading, papa,' squeaked a young lady, who in her admiration of the novelty almost forgot her fears. I read on. 'He ought to have his book knocked out of his hand,' exclaimed a pursy cit, whose arms were too fast pinioned to his side to suffer him to execute his kind intention. Still I read on-and, till the time came to pay my money, kept as unmoved, as Saint Antony at his Holy Offices, with the satyrs, apes, and hobgoblins, mopping, and making mouths at him, in the picture, while the good man sits undisturbed at the sight, as if he were sole tenant of the desart.-The individual rabble (I recognised more than one of their ugly faces) had damned a slight piece of mine but a few nights before, and I was determined the culprits should not a second time put me out of countenance."

Master Betty was William Henry West Betty (1791-1874), known as the "Young Roscius," whose Hamlet and Douglas sent playgoers wild in 1804-5-6. Pitt, indeed, once adjourned the House in order that his Hamlet might be witnessed. His most cried-up scenes in "Hamlet" were the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and the fencing scene before the king and his mother. The piece of Lamb's own which had been hissed was, of course, "Mr. H.," produced on December 10, 1806; but very likely he added this reference as a symmetrical afterthought, for he would probably have visited Master Betty much earlier in his career, that phenomenon's first appearance at Covent Garden being two years before the advent of the ill-fated Hogsflesh.

Page 200, line 22. Martin B- --. Martin Charles Burney, son of Admiral Burney, and a lifelong friend of the Lambs-to whom Lamb dedicated the prose part of his Works in 1818 (see Vol. IV.).

Page 200, line 28. A quaint poetess. Mary Lamb. The poem