ing to Wordsworth in 1830 Lamb spoke of him as "sixty years ours and our father's friend." An attempt has been made to identify him with the Mr. Norris of Christ's Hospital who was so kind to the Lambs after the tragedy of September, 1796. I cannot find any trace of Randal Norris having been connected with anything but the law and the Inner Temple; but possibly the Mr. Norris of the school was a relative.

Mrs. Randal Norris was connected with Widford, the village adjoining Blakesware, where she had known Mary Field, Lamb's grandmother. It was thither that she and her son retired after Randal Norris's death, to join her daughters, Miss Betsy and Miss Jane, who had a school for girls known as Goddard House School. Lamb kept up his friendship with them to the end, and they corresponded with Mary Lamb after his death. Mrs. Norris died in 1843, aged seventyeight, and was buried at Widford. The grave of Richard Norris, the son, is also there. He died in 1836. One of the daughters, Elizabeth, married Charles Tween, of Widford, and lived until 1894. The other daughter, Jane, married Arthur Tween, his brother, and lived until 1891.

Mary Lamb was a bridesmaid at the Norris's wedding and after the ceremony accompanied the bride and bridegroom to Richmond for the day. So one of their daughters told Canon Ainger.

Crabb Robinson seems to have exerted himself for the family, as Lamb wished. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt says that an annuity of £80 was settled upon Mrs. Norris.

Poor deaf Robert.

Page 246, line 21. In the letter-" Richard." Page 246, line 30. To the last he called me Jemmy. In the letter to Crabb Robinson-"To the last he called me Charley. I have none to call me Charley now."

Page 246, line 32. That bound me to B. In the letter to Crabb Robinson-" that bound me to the Temple."

Page 247, line 5. Your Corporation Library. In the letter"The Temple Library.”

Page 247, line 11. He had one Song. I have not been able to find this song.

Page 247. Old China,

London Magazine, March, 1823.

This essay forms a pendant, or complement, to "Mackery End in Hertfordshire," page 75, completing the portrait of Mary Lamb begun there. It was, with "The Wedding" (page 239), Wordsworth's favourite among the Last Essays.

66

Page 248, line 26. Dancing the hays. An old English dance. Page 248, line 31. Speciosa miracula. Shining wonders." Horace, Ars Poetica, 144, uses the phrase in describing the wonders of the Odyssey.

Page 249, line 5. The brown suit. P. G. Patmore, in his recollections of Lamb in the Court Journal, 1835, afterwards reprinted, with some alterations, in his My Friends and Acquaintances, stated

that Lamb laid aside his snuff-coloured suit in favour of black, after twenty years of the India House; and he suggests that Wordsworth's stanzas in "A Poet's Epitaph" was the cause :—

But who is he, with modest looks,
And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.

He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.

Whatever Patmore's theory may be worth, it is certain that Lamb adhered to black after the change.

Page 249, line 7. Beaumont and Fletcher. See note on page 328. Page 249, line 8. Barker's. Barker's old book-shop was at No. 20 Great Russell Street, over which the Lambs went to live in 1817. It had then, however, become Mr. Owen's, a brazier's (Wheatley's London Past and Present gives Barker's as 19, but a contemporary directory says 20). Great Russell Street is now Russell Street.

Page 249, line 12. From Islington. This would be when Lamb and his sister lived at 36 Chapel Street, Pentonville, a stone's throw from the Islington boundary, in 1799-1800, after the death of their father.

Page 249, line 25. Corbeau. A draper's word—from corbeau, a

raven.

Page 249, line 33. The "Lady Blanch." See Mary Lamb's poem on this picture, Vol. V., page 38, and note. The picture, which is there reproduced, is known as "Modesty and Vanity."

Page 249, line 36. Colnaghi's. Colnaghi, the printseller, then in Cockspur Street. After this word came in the London Magazine “(as W calls it)." The reference, Mr. Roger Rees tells me, is to Wainewright's article "C. van Vinkbooms, his Dogmas for Dilletanti," in the same magazine for December, 1821, where he wrote: "I advise Colnaghi and Molteno to import a few impressions immediately of those beautiful plates from Da Vinci. The . . . and Miss Lamb's favourite, 'Lady Blanche and the Abbess,' commonly called 'Vanitas et Modestia' (Campanella, 10s. 6d.), for I foresee that this Dogma will occasion a considerable call for them-let them, therefore, be ready."

Page 250, line 6. Piscator . . Trout Hall. See The Complete Angler, Cotton's continuation.

Page 250, line 12. To see a play. "The Battle of Hexham" and "The Surrender of Calais" were by George Colman the Younger; "The Children in the Wood," a favourite play of Lamb's, especially with Miss Kelly in it, was by Thomas Morton. Mrs. Bland was Maria Theresa Bland, née Romanzini, 1769-1838, who married Mrs. Jordan's brother. Jack Bannister we have met, in "The Old Actors." Page 251, line 24. "Lusty brimmers."

Then let us welcome the new guest

With lusty brimmers of the best.

From Charles Cotton's "The New Year," quoted in "New Year's Eve," page 31, with a hint of Pope's line

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest

also quoted in the same essay.

Page 252, line 16. The great Jew R. This would be Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1777-1836), the founder of the English branch of the family and the greatest financier of modern times.

Page 252. POPULAR FALLACIES.

This series of little essays was printed in the New Monthly Magazine in 1826, beginning in January. The order of publication there was not the same as that in the Last Essays of Elia; one of the papers, "That a Deformed Person is a Lord," was not reprinted by Lamb at all (it will be found on page 290 of Vol. I. of this edition); and two others were converted into separate essays (see "The Sanity of True Genius" (page 187 of the present volume) and "The Genteel Style in Writing" (page 199)).

After Lamb's death a new series of Popular Fallacies was contributed to the New Monthly Magazine by L. B. (probably Laman Blanchard) in 1835, preceded by an invocation to the spirit of Charles Lamb.

Page 252. I. THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.

Page 253, line 2. Hickman. This would be, I think, 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 253, line 3.

Him of Clarissa.

Mr. Hickman, in Richard

son's novel Clarissa, the lover of Miss Bayes. Page 253, line 6.

Gath.

Harapha. In Samson Agonistes. The Giant of

Page 253, line 8. Almanzor. In Dryden's Conquest of Granada. Page 253, line 10. Tom Brown. Tom Brown, of Shifnal (16631704), author of a number of satirical and broadly-comic writings. Among his Letters from the Dead to the Living is one from Bully Dawson to his successor in the taverns. In The Spectator, No. 1, Bully Dawson is mentioned. A footnote describes him as a sharper and debauchee well-known in London in that day (1710).

Page 253. II. THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.