* * * * *
Page 281. OLD CHINA.
_London Magazine_, March, 1823.
This essay forms a pendant, or complement, to "Mackery End in
Hertfordshire," completing the portrait of Mary Lamb begun there.
It was, with "The Wedding," Wordsworth's favourite among the _Last
Essays_.
Page 282, line 23. _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 282, line 25. _Beaumont and Fletcher_. See note to "Books and
Reading."
Page 282, line 27. _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 282, line 30. _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 283, line 11. _The "Lady Blanch._" See Mary Lamb's poem on this
picture, Vol. IV. and note.
Page 283, line 15. _Colnaghi's_. Colnaghi, the printseller, then in
Cockspur Street, now Pall Mall East. After this word came in the
_London Magazine_ "(as W---- calls it)." The reference, Mr. Rogers
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, los. ed.), for I foresee that this
Dogma will occasion a considerable call for them--let them, therefore,
be ready."
Page 283, line 5 from foot. _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 286, line 12. _The Great yew 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 286. 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 in Vol. I. of this edition); and two others were
converted into separate essays (see "The Sanity of True Genius" and
"The Genteel Style in Writing").
After Lamb's death a new series of Popular Fallacies was 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.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
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.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
Page 290. VI.--THAT ENOUGH is AS GOOD AS A FEAST.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
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. VIII.--THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, ETC.
_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 Punica, sine 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 Cremonæ!" (_Eclogues_,
IX., 28), "Mantua, alas! too near unhappy Cremona."
Page 294. X.--THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES.
_New Monthly Magazine_, March, 1826.
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 thirty-five 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_.
Compare the little essay on "Presents of Game," Vol. I.
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. I wanted to make an _article_." Compare
the first of the "Lepus" papers in Vol. I.
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 Delia 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 Delia Cruscan Academy, and on returning to England
signed his verses, in _The World_, "Delia 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 Delia Cruscan poetry was the rage. The
principal Delia Cruscan poems were published in the _British Album_
in 1789, and the collection was popular until Gifford's _Baviad_
(followed by his _Mæviad_) 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_.