They talk of time and of time's galling yoke,
will be found quoted above, in the notes to "New Year's Eve." It was,
of course, by Lamb himself. To the other sonnet he gave the title
"Work" (see Vol. IV.). Cowley's lines are from "The Complaint."
Page 225, line 14 from foot. _NOTHING-TO-DO_. Lamb wrote to Barton in
1827: "Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing,
and next to that perhaps--good works."
* * * * *
Page 226. THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING.
_New Monthly Magazine_, March, 1826, where it was one of the Popular
Fallacies, under the title, "That my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William
Temple are models of the Genteel Style in Writing.--We should prefer
saying--of the Lordly and the Gentlemanly. Nothing," &c.
Page 226, beginning. _My Lord Shaftesbury_, Anthony Ashley Cooper,
third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the grandson of the great
statesman, and the author of the _Characteristicks of Men, Manners,
Opinions and Times_, 1711, and other less known works. In the essay
"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading" Lamb says, "Shaftesbury is
not too genteel for me."
Page 226, beginning. _Sir William Temple._ Sir William Temple
(1628-1699), diplomatist and man of letters, the patron of Swift,
and the husband of the letter-writing Dorothy Osborne. His first
diplomatic mission was in 1665, to Christopher Bernard von Glialen,
the prince-bishop of Munster, who grew the northern cherries (see page
228). Afterwards he was accredited to Brussels and the Hague, and
subsequently became English Ambassador at the Hague. He was recalled
in 1670, and spent the time between then and 1674, when he returned,
in adding to his garden at Sheen, near Richmond, and in literary
pursuits. He re-entered active political life in 1674, but retired
again in 1680, and moved to an estate near Farnham; which he named
Moor Park, laid out in the Dutch style, and made famous for its wall
fruit. Hither Swift came, as amanuensis, in 1689, and he was there,
with intervals of absence, in 1699, when Temple died, "and with him,"
Swift wrote in his _Diary_, "all that was good and amiable among men."
He was buried in Westminster Abbey, but his heart, by his special
wish, was placed in a silver casket under the sun-dial at Moor Park,
near his favourite window seat.
Temple's essays, under the title of _Miscellanea_, were published in
1680 and 1692; his works, in several volumes, between 1700 and 1709.
The best-known essay is that on "Ancient and Modern Learning," but
Lamb refers also to those "On Health and Long Life," "Of the Cure of
the Gout," "Of Gardening." The quotation on page 228 does not exactly
end Temple's garden essay, as Lamb says. Lamb has slightly altered
Temple's punctuation.
* * * * *
Page 230. BARBARA S----.
_London Magazine_, April, 1825.
This little story exhibits, perhaps better than anything that Lamb
wrote, his curious gift of blending fact and fancy, of building upon
a foundation of reality a structure of whimsicality and invention.
In the late Charles Kent's edition of Lamb's works is printed a
letter from Miss Kelly, the actress, and a friend of the Lambs,
in which the true story is told; for it was she, as indeed Lamb
admitted to Wordsworth in a letter in 1825, who told him the
incident--"beautifully," he says elsewhere.