Page 212, footnote. Graium tantum vidit. Adapted from Ovid's account of his own youth (Trist., IV., 10, 51):— Virgilium vidi tantum ; nec amara Tibullo Tempus amicitiæ fata dedere meæ. (Virgil I saw and no more; nor did harsh fate grant Tibullus time to be my friend.) Page 213. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. London Magazine, September, 1823, where it was entitled "Nugæ Criticæ. By the Author of Elia. No. 1. Defence of the Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney." Signed "L." The second and last of the " Nugæ Critica" series was the note on "The Tempest" (see Vol. I., page 243). 66 It may be interesting here to relate that Henry Francis Cary, the translator of Dante, and Lamb's friend, had, says his son in his memoir, lent Lamb Edward Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, which was returned after Lamb's death by Edward Moxon, with the leaf folded down at the account of Sir Philip Sidney. Mr. Cary thereupon wrote his "Lines to the memory of Charles Lamb," which begin : So should it be, my gentle friend; Lamb has some interesting references to Sidney in the note to Beaumont and Fletcher's "Maid's Tragedy" in the Dramatic Specimens. Page 213, line 12. Milton, censuring the Arcadia. In Milton's Eikonoklastes, replying to the Eikon Basilike, wherein Charles I. was said to have used a prayer from the Arcadia. Milton's passage runs : Who would have imagined so little fear in him of the true all-seeing deity, so little reverence of the Holy Ghost, whose office is to dictate and present our Christian prayers, so little care of truth in his last words, or honour to himself, or to his friends, or sense of his afflictions, or of that sad hour which was upon him, as immediately before his death to pop into the hand of that grave bishop who attended him, for a special relique of his saintly exercises, a prayer stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen woman praying to a heathen god; and that in no serious book, but the vain amatorious poem of sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia; a book in that kind full of worth and wit, but among religious thoughts and duties not worthy to be named; nor to be read at any time without good caution, much less in time of trouble and affliction to be a Christian's prayerbook? They who are yet incredulous of what I tell them for a truth, that this philippic prayer is no part of the king's goods, may satisfy their own eyes at leisure, in the 3d book of sir Philip's Arcadia, p. 248, comparing Pamela's prayer with the first prayer of his majesty, delivered to Dr. Juxton immediately before his death, and entitled a Prayer in time of Captivity, printed in all the best editions of his book. Page 213, line 18. The Masque at Ludlow Castle . . . the Arcades. The masque was Comus, 1634. Arcades, another masque, written a year earlier (see Lamb on Milton, Vol. I., page 376, and note to same, page 541). Page 213, line 19. The national struggle. The Civil War, culminating in the execution of Charles I. Milton's first contribution to the struggle was his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1648-1649, published just after the execution. Then he became Latin Secretary to the Council. He replied to the Eikon Basilike of Dr. John Gauden with Eikonoklastes in the same year. But between Comus and these works, in addition to Lycidas, 1638, he had been occupied in writing his tracts on divorce, the " Areopagitica," the "Tractate on Education," "Reasons of Church Government," etc. The "later Sydney was Sir Algernon Sidney (1622-1682), great-nephew of Sir Philip Sidney. Though a Republican, and an officer of the Parliamentary army, when appointed a commissioner for the trial of Charles I. he refused to serve, saying to Cromwell, "I will keep myself clean from having my hand in this business.' He was beheaded on a series of political charges in 1682. Sir Philip Sidney was born in 1554 and fell at Zutphen in 1586—a time of no great stress. His letter on the French match was a treatise prepared in 1580 and sent to Queen Elizabeth as a protest against her proposed marriage with the Duke of Anjou, a remonstrance so hot in its zeal as to lead to Sidney's banishment from court for some monthsduring which he wrote the Arcadia. Page 213, line 30. midriff." Hey-day of his blood. For at your age The hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble, Hamlet," Act III., Scene 4, lines 68-70. Circum præcordia frigus. Page 213, at foot. Tibullus, or the Page 214, line 5. Author of the Schoolmistress. In the London Magazine Lamb wrote "Catullus." Tibullus was one of the tenderest of Latin poets. William Shenstone (1714-1763) wrote "The Schoolmistress," a favourite poem with Lamb. The " "prettiest of poems he called it in a letter to John Clare. Page 214, line 8. Ad Leonoram. The following translation of Milton's sonnet was made by Leigh Hunt :— If God is all, and in all nature dwells, In thee alone he speaks, mute ruler in all else. The Latin in Masson's edition of Milton differs here and there from Lamb's version. Page 214. Sonnet I. Lamb cites the sonnets from Astrophel and Stella in his own order. That which he calls I. is XXXI.; II., XXXIX.; III., XXIII.; IV., XXVII.; V., XLI.; VI., LIII.; VII., LXIV.; VIII., LXXIII.; IX., LXXIV.; X., LXXV.; XI., CIII.; XII., LXXXIV. I have left the sonnets as Lamb copied them, but there are certain differences. For example (page 215), Sonnet II., line 9, "sweet "should be "smooth;" line 10, "to" and "to" should be "of" and "of;" line 12, "by" should be "in." Sonnet III., line 7, "my" should be "of." Sonnet IV., line 11, "worse" should be "worst." Page 217, Sonnet IX., line 12, "me" should be "we." Sonnet XI., line 2, should run:- I saw thee with full many a smiling line; line 6, "beauty" should be "beauties." Page 218, line 9. "Learning and of chivalry." Misquoted from Spenser's dedication of the Shepheards' Calendar to Sidney: Page 218, line 13. Go, little booke: thy selfe present, As child whose parent is unkent, Of Noblesse and of chivalrie. Which I have... heard objected. A criticism of Hazlitt's, in his sixth lecture on Elizabethan literature, delivered in 1820 at the Surrey Institution, is here criticised. Hazlitt's remarks on Sidney were uniformly slighting. "His sonnets inlaid in the Arcadia are jejune, far-fetch'd and frigid. [The Arcadia] is to me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power upon record. [Sidney is] a complete intellectual coxcomb, or nearly and so forth. The lectures were published in 1821. Elsewhere, however, Hazlitt found in Sidney much to praise. so; ... Page 218, line 16. "Trampling horses' feet." See line 3 of the 12th Sonnet, on page 217. Page 218, line 30. Thin diet of dainty words. To this sentence, in the London Magazine, Lamb put the following footnote :— "A profusion of verbal dainties, with a disproportionate lack of matter and circumstance, is I think one reason of the coldness with which the public has received the poetry of a nobleman now living; which, upon the score of exquisite diction alone, is entitled to something better than neglect. I will venture to copy one of his Sonnets in this place, which for quiet sweetness, and unaffected morality, has scarcely its parallel in our language. "TO A BIRD THAT HAUNTED THE WATERS OF LACKEN IN THE WINTER By Lord Thurlow "O melancholy Bird, a winter's day, Thou standest by the margin of the pool, And, taught by God, dost thy whole being school To Patience, which all evil can allay. God has appointed thee the Fish thy prey; And given thyself a lesson to the Fool Unthrifty, to submit to moral rule, And his unthinking course by thee to weigh. There need not schools, nor the Professor's chair, He who has not enough, for these, to spare This sonnet, by Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow (1781-1829), an intense devotee of Sir Philip Sidney's muse, was a special favourite with Lamb. He copied it into his Commonplace Book, and De Quincey has described, in his "London Reminiscences," how Lamb used to read it aloud. Page 218, line 37. critic of our day." Page 219, line 3. Hazlitt." W. H. In the London Magazine, "a favourite The Critic. In the London Magazine, "Mr. Page 219, line 4. A foolish nobleman. Lamb refers to Sidney's quarrel in the tennis-court with the Earl of Oxford, who called him "a puppy." After these words, in Fulke Greville, Lord Page 219, line 5. Epitaph made on him. the London Magazine, came "by Lord Brooke." Brooke, wrote Sidney's Life, published in 1652. appeared many elegies upon him, eight of which were printed at the end of Spenser's Colin Clout's Come Home Again, in 1595. That which Lamb quotes is by Matthew Roydon, Stanzas 15 to 18 and 26 and 27. The poem beginning "Silence augmenteth grief" is attributed to Brooke, chiefly on Lamb's authority, in Ward's English Poets. This is one stanza : He was (woe worth that word !) to each well-thinking mind Highest conceits, longest foresights, and deepest works of wit. Sidney was only thirty-two at his death. Page 220. NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. Englishman's Magazine, October, 1831, being the second paper under the heading "Peter's Net," of which "Recollections of a Late Royal Academician" was the first (see note, Vol. I., page 331). The title ran thus: PETER'S NET BY THE AUTHOR OF "ELIA" No. II.-On the Total Defect of the faculty of Imagination observable in the works of modern British Artists. For explanation of this title see note to the essay that follows, page 446. When reprinting the essay in the Last Essays of Elia, 1833, Lamb altered the title to the one it now bears: the period referred to thus seeming to be about 1798, but really 1801-1803. Page 220, line 5. Dan Stuart. See next page. Page 220, line 6. The Exhibition at Somerset House. Between the years 1780 and 1838 the Royal Academy held its exhibitions at Somerset House. It then moved, first to Trafalgar Square, next to the National Gallery, and to Burlington House, its present quarters, in 1869. The Morning Post office is still almost opposite Somerset House, at the corner of Wellington Street. Page 220, line 14. A word or two of D. S. Daniel Stuart (17661846), one of the Perthshire Stuarts, whose father was out in the '45, and his grandfather in the '15, began, with his brother, to print the Morning Post in 1788. In 1795 they bought it for £600, Daniel assumed the editorship, and in two years' time the circulation had risen from 350 to 1,000. Mackintosh (afterwards Sir James), Stuart's brotherin-law, was on the staff; and in 1797 Coleridge began to contribute. Coleridge's "Devil's Walk" was the most popular thing printed in Stuart's time; his political articles also helped enormously to give the paper prestige. Stuart sold the Morning Post in 1803 for £25,000, and then turned his attention to the development of The Courier, an evening paper, in which he also had occasional assistance from Coleridge and more regular help from Mackintosh. Lamb's memory served him badly in the essay. So far as I can discover, his connection with the Morning Post, instead of ending when Stuart sold the paper, can hardly be said to have existed until after that event. The paper changed hands in September, 1803 (two years after the failure of The Albion), and Lamb's hand almost immediately begins to be apparent. He had, we know, made earlier efforts to get a footing there, but had been only moderately successful. The first specimens prepared for Stuart, in 1800, were not accepted. In the late summer of 1801 he was writing for the Morning Chronicle— a few comic letters, as I imagine-under James Perry; but that lasted only a short time. At the end of 1801 Lamb tried the Post again. In January and February, 1802, Stuart printed some epigrams by him on public characters, two criticisms of G. F. Cooke, in Richard III. and Lear, and the essay "The Londoner" (see Vol. I., pages 36, 39 and 399). Possibly there were also some paragraphs. In a letter to Rickman in January, 1802, Lamb says that he is leaving the Post, partly on account of his difficulty in writing dramatic criticisms on the same night as the performance. We know nothing of Lamb's journalistic adventures between February, 1802, and October, 1803, when the fashion of pink stockings came in, and when he was certainly back on the Post (Stuart having sold it to establish The Courier), and had become more of a journalist than he had ever been. I quote a number of the paragraphs which I take to be his on this rich topic; but the specimen given in the essay is not discoverable : "Oct. 8.-The fugitive and mercurial matter, of which a Lady's blush is made, after coursing from its natural position, the cheek, to the tip of the elbow, and thence diverging for a time to the knee, has finally |