contributed to the New Monthly Magazine by L. B. (Laman Blanchard) in 1835, preceded by an invocation to the spirit of Charles Lamb. Page 286. I. THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A Coward. New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826. Page 287, line 1. Hickman. This would be Tom Hickman, the pugilist. In Hazlitt's fine account of "The Fight," Hickman or the Gas-Man, "vapoured and swaggered too much, as if he wanted to grin and bully his adversary out of the fight." And again, "This is the grave digger' (would Tom Hickman exclaim in the moments of intoxication from gin and success, showing his tremendous right hand); this will send many of them to their long homes; I haven't done with them yet. But he went under to Neale, of Bristol, on the great day that Hazlitt describes. Page 287, line 2. Him of Clarissa. Mr. Hickman, in Richardson's novel Clarissa, the lover of Miss Bayes. Page 287. II.-THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPers. Page 287. III.-THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST. New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826. Page 288, line 12. In Mandeville. In Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, a favourite book of Lamb's. See Vol. I., note to "The Good Clerk." Page 288. IV. THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING, ETC. New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826. Page 288. V.-THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH. Page 290. VI.-THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST. Page 291. VII. OF Two DISPUTANTS, THE WARMEST IS GENERALLY IN THE WRONG. New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826. Page 291, line 4 from foot. Little Titubus. I do not know who this was, if any more than an abstraction; but it should be remembered that Lamb himself stammered. Page 292. ETC. VIII. THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826. Page 292. IX. THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST. New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826. Compare the reflections on puns in the essay on "Distant Correspondents." Compare also the review of Hood's Odes and Addresses (Vol. I.). Cary's account of a punning contest after Lamb's own heart makes the company vie with each in puns on the names of herbs. After anise, mint and other words had been ingeniously perverted Lamb's own turn, the last, was reached, and it seemed impossible that anything was left for him. He hesitated. "Now then, let us have it," cried the others, all expectant. "Patience," he replied; "it's c-c-cumin." Page 293, line 18. One of Swift's Miscellanies. This joke, often attributed to Lamb himself, will be found in Ars Pun-ica, sive flos Linguarum, The Art of Punning; or, The Flower of Languages, by Dr. Sheridan and Swift, which will be found in Vol. XIII. of Scott's edition of Swift. Among the directions to the punster is this: Rule 3. The Brazen Rule. He must have better assurance, like Brigadier C, who said, "That, as he was passing through a street, he made to a country fellow who had a hare swinging on a stick over his shoulder, and, giving it a shake, asked him whether it was his own hair or a periwig!" Whereas it is a notorious Oxford jest. Page 294, line 8. Virgil. . . broken Cremona. Swift (as Lamb explained in the original essay in the New Monthly Magazine), seeing a lady's mantua overturning a violin (possibly a Cremona), quoted Virgil's line: "Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremona!" (Eclogues, IX., 28), "Mantua, alas! too near unhappy Cremona." Page 294. X.-THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME does. Whether a Mrs. Conrady existed, or was invented or adapted by Lamb to prove his point, I have not been able to discover. But the evidence of Lamb's "reverence for the sex, to use Procter's phrase, is against her existence. The Athenæum reviewer on February 16, 1833, says, however, quoting the fallacy: "Here is a portrait of Mrs. Conrady. We agree with the writer that no one that has looked on her can pretend to forget the lady.'' The point ought to be cleared up. Page 296. XI.-THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE IN THE MOUTH. New Monthly Magazine, April, 1826. Page 297, line 13. Our friend Mitis. I do not identify Mitis among Lamb's many friends. Page 297, line 11 from foot. Presentation copies. The late Mr. Thomas Westwood, the son of the Westwoods with whom the Lambs lived at Edmonton, writing to Notes and Queries some thirtyfive years ago, gave an amusing account of Lamb pitching presentation copies out of the window into the garden-a Barry Cornwall, a Bernard Barton, a Leigh Hunt and so forth, Page 298, line 6. Odd presents of game. essay on "Presents of Game," Vol. I. Compare the little Page 298. XII.-THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY. New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826. In that place the first sentence began with the word "Two;" the second ended with "of our assertions;" and (fourteenth line of essay) it was said of the very poor man that he can ask " no visitors. Lamb, in a letter, wished Wordsworth particularly to like this fallacy and that on rising with the lark. Page 300, line 9. It has been prettily said. By Lamb himself, or more probably by his sister, in Poetry for Children, 1809. See "The First Tooth," Vol. III., which ends upon the line A child is fed with milk and praise. Page 301, line 3. There is yet another home. Writing to Mrs. Wordsworth on February 18, 1818, Lamb gives a painful account, very similar in part to this essay, of the homeless home to which he was reduced by visitors. But by the time he wrote the essay, when all his day was his own, the trouble was not acute. He tells Bernard Barton on March 20, 1826, "My tirade against visitors was not meant particularly at you or A. K. I scarce know what I meant, for I do not just now feel the grievance. to make an article." Compare the first of the "Lepus Vol. I. I wanted papers in Page 301, line 20. It is the refreshing sleep of the day. After this sentence, in the magazine, came this passage:— "O the comfort of sitting down heartily to an old folio, and thinking surely that the next hour or two will be your own—and the misery of being defeated by the useless call of somebody, who is come to tell you, that he is just come from hearing Mr. Irving! What is that to you? Let him go home, and digest what the good man said to him. You are at your chapel, in your oratory.' Mr. Irving was the Rev. Edward Irving (1792-1834), whom Lamb knew slightly and came greatly to admire. Page 302. XIII.-THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME, AND LOVE MY DOG. New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826. Compare "A Bachelor's Complaint." I cannot identify the particular friend whom Lamb has hidden under asterisks; although his cousin would seem to have some likeness to one of the Bethams mentioned in the essay "Many Friends" (Vol. I.), and in the letter to Landor of October, 1832 (usually dated April), after his visit to the Lambs. Page 304, line 15. Honorius dismiss his vapid wife. Writing to Bernard Barton on March 20, 1826, Lamb says:-" In another thing I talkd of somebody's insipid wife, without a correspondent object in my head: and a good lady, a friend's wife, whom I really love (don't startle, I mean in a licit way) has looked shyly on me ever since. The blunders of personal application are numerous. I send out a character every now and then, on purpose to exercise the ingenuity of my friends." Page 304, line 11 from foot. Merry, of Della Cruscan memory. Robert Merry (1755-1798), an affected versifier who settled in Florence as a young man, and contributed to the Florence Miscellany. He became a member of the Della Cruscan Academy, and on returning to England signed his verses, in The World, "Della Crusca.' A reply to his first effusion, "Adieu and Recall to Love," was written by Mrs. Hannah Cowley, author of The Belle's Stratagem, and signed " Anna Matilda;" this correspondence continued; a fashion of sentiment was thus started; and for a while Della Cruscan poetry was the rage. The principal Della Cruscan poems were published in the British Album in 1789, and the collection was popular until Gifford's Baviad (followed by his Maviad) appeared in 1791, and satirised its conceits so mercilessly that the school collapsed. A meeting with Anna Matilda in the flesh and the discovery that she was twelve years his senior had, however, put an end to Merry's enthusiasm long before Gifford's attack. Merry afterwards threw in his lot with the French Revolution, and died in America. He married, as Lamb says, Elizabeth Brunton, an excellent tragic actress, in 1791. But that was in England. The journey to America came later. The story of Merry's avoidance of the lady of his first choice is probably true. Carlo Antonio Delpini was a famous pantomimist in his day at Drury Lane, Covent Garden and the Haymarket. He also was stage manager at the Opera for a while, and occasionally arranged entertainments for George IV. at Brighton. He died in 1828. Page 305. XIV.—THAT We should Rise WITH THE LARK. New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826. Compare "The Superannuated Man," to which this little essay, which, with that following, is one of Lamb's most characteristic and perfect works, serves as a kind of postscript. Page 308. XV.—That WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE Lamb. New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826. Page 309. XVI.—THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE. New Monthly Magazine, September, 1826. This was the last of the series and Lamb's last contribution to the New Monthly Magazine. APPENDIX Page 315. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS, ETC. See notes to the essays "On Some of the Old Actors," "The Artificial Comedy" and "The Acting of Munden." Two portions of these essays, not re rinted by Lamb, call for comment: the story of the first night of "Antonio," and the account of Charles Mathews' collection of pictures. Page 328, line 14 from foot. My friend G.'s "Antonio." William Godwin's tragedy, produced on December 13, 1800, at Drury Lane. Lamb had written the epilogue (see Vol. IV.). Compare the letter to Manning of December 16, 1800. Page 329, line 28. M. wiped his cheek. Writing to Godwin after the failure Lamb says: "The breast of Hecuba, where she did suckle Hector, looked not to be more lovely than Marshal's forehead when it spit forth sweat, at Critic-swords contending. I remember two honest lines by Marvel . . . 'Where every Mower's wholesome heat And again, to Manning: "His [Marshal's] face was lengthened, and all over perspiration; I never saw such a care-fraught visage; I could have hugged him, I loved him so intensely. From every pore of him a perfume fell.' Page 329, foot. R- -s the dramatist. I imagine this to be Frederic Reynolds (1764-1841), author of "The Dramatist" and many other plays. We know Lamb to have known him later, from a mention in a letter to J. B. Dibdin. Page 330, foot. Brutus Appius. Brutus in " 'Julius Cæsar," or possibly in the play called "Brutus," by John Howard Payne, Lamb's friend (produced December 3, 1818), in which Brutus kills his son-a closer parallel. Appius was probably a slip of the pen for Virginius, who in Sheridan Knowles' drama that bears his name kills his daughter to protect her from Appius. Page 331, line 7. G. thenceforward. Godwin did, however, write another play, "Faulkener," for which Lamb wrote the prologue. It was moderately successful. Page 331, 1st line of essay. I do not know, etc. The paragraph beginning with these words is often printed by editors of Lamb as 444 |