with the scenes of old times. They were the dearer to him that distance had withdrawn them. He wished to pass his life among things gone by yet not forgotten; we shall never forget the affectionate Yes, boy,' with which he returned our repeating his own striking lines:

"Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood,
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse.'

Page 46, line 11.

Great annual feast. In stating that he was born on Lord Mayor's Day, Lamb stretched a point. His birthday was February 10.

Page 48.

CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE.

Specimens, 1808, and Works, 1818.

These notes are abridgments of the notes to Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, 1808. The whole work is reproduced in my large edition, where such annotation as seems desirable may be found. The abridgment is printed here in order that the text of Lamb's own edition of his Works, 1818, may be preserved.

Page 65. ON THE INCONVENIENCES RESULTING FROM BEING HAN GED.

To the circumstance that Leigh Hunt edited The Reflector, which was founded by his brother in 1810 as a literary and political quarterly, may be attributed in a large measure the beginning of Lamb's career as an essayist. Leigh Hunt, himself a Christ's Hospitaller, sought his contributors among old scholars of that school; from whom, as he remarked in the little note prefixed to the two-volume edition of the periodical, came "the largest and most entertaining part." Among these contributors were Lamb, George Dyer, Thomas Barnes, afterwards editor of The Times, Thomes Mitchell, classical scholar, James Scholefield, afterwards Greek Professor at Cambridge, Hunt himself, and Barron Field, who, though not actually a Christ's Hospitaller, was through his father, Henry Field, apothecary to the school, connected with it.

Until Lamb received Hunt's invitation to let his fancy play to what extent he would in The Reflector's pages, he had received little or no encouragement as a writer; and he was naturally so diffident that without some external impulse he rarely brought himself to do his own work at all. Between John Woodvil (1802) and the first Reflector papers (1810) he had written "Mr. H., performed his share in the children's books, and compiled the Dramatic Specimens: a tale of work which, considering that it was also a social period, and a busy period at the India House, is not trifling. But between the last Reflector paper (1811 or 1812) and

the first Elia essay (1820) Lamb seems to have written nothing save the essays on Christ's Hospital, the "Confessions of a Drunkard," a few brief notes, reviews and dramatic criticisms, mainly at the instigation of Leigh Hunt, and some scraps of verse chiefly for The Champion. The world owes a great debt to Leigh Hunt for discerning Lamb's gifts and allowing him free rein. The comic letters to The Reflector may not be Lamb at his best, though they are excellent stepping-stones to that state; but upon the essays on Shakespeare's tragedies and Hogarth's genius it is doubtful if Lamb could have improved at any period.

The Reflector ran only to four numbers, which were very irregularly issued, and it then ceased. It ran nominally from October 1810 to December 1811. Crabb Robinson mentions reading No. I. on May 15, 1811.

Lamb, it may be remarked here, was destined to contribute to yet another Reflector. In 1832 Moxon started a weekly paper of that name in which part of Lamb's Elia essay on the "Defect of Imagination in Modern Paintings" was printed. The venture, however, quickly failed, and all trace of it seems to have vanished. Lamb's first Reflector paper was entitled "On the InconveNIENCES RESULTING FROM BEING HANged."

It appeared in No. II., 1811, and was reprinted in the Works, 1818. He made yet another use of the central idea of this essay. The farce, "The Pawnbroker's Daughter," written in 1825, turns upon the resuscitation of a hanged man, Jack Pendulous.

Page 68, line 6. Smoke his cravat. To smoke was old slang for to see, to notice. East-enders to-day would say

Page 72, line 1. The solution .. in "Hamlet."

Pipe his

First Clown. What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter ?

Second Clown. The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.

Act V., Scene 1, lines 46-50.

Page 72. Footnote. "The Spanish Tragedy." A play by Thomas Kyd (1557?-1595 ?), from which Lamb quoted largely in his Specimens, 1808. This line is in Act III., in Hieronimo's instructions to the painter: "And then at last, sir, starting, behold a man hanging, and tott'ring, and tott'ring, as you know the wind will wave a man.

Page 72, line 3. That scene in "Measure for Measure."

Pompey. Master Barnardine! you must rise and be hanged, Master Barnardine!

Abhorson. What, ho, Barnardine!

Bar. [Within.] A pox o' your throats! Who makes that noise there? What are you?

Pom. Your friends, sir; the hangman. You must be so good, sir,

to rise and be put to death.

Bar. [Within.] Away, you rogue, away! I am sleepy.
Abhor. Tell him he must awake, and that quickly too.

Pom. Pray, Master Barnardine, awake till you are executed, and

sleep afterwards.

Abhor. Go in to him, and fetch him out.

Pom. He is coming, sir, he is coming; I hear his straw rustle.
Abhor. Is the axe upon the block, sirrah?

Pom. Very ready, sir.

Act IV., Scene 3, lines 23-40.

Page 73, line 3.

The Angel in Milton.

Made so adorn for they delight the more,

So awful, that with honour thou may'st love

Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise.

Paradise Lost, VIII., 576-578.

Page 73, line 10. An ancestor. This punctilious hero may have been an ancestor of the Plumers, of Blakesware. See the Elia essay on " Blakesmoor, in H--shire."

Page 73, line 7 from foot. A waistcoat that had been mine. The clothes of his clients became the hangman's perquisites. In Lamb's letter to Bernard Barton concerning Thurtell (January 9, 1824) this subject is again played with.

The present essay led to some amusing speculation in the next number of The Reflector, signed M., as to the origin of Jack Ketch. Some of the questions propounded to Pensilis are almost in Lamb's

own manner :

Supposing the race of Ketches to be extinct, what cross does Pensilis think necessary to re-produce the breed? I have a very pretty knack myself at guessing what mixtures of different bloods will generate the ordinary professions of life; as a judge, an alderman, a bishop, &c., &c. but shall be happy to defer to his superior knowledge in this particular experiment of the art. Your correspondent, no doubt, is aware, how many generations it will frequently take a family, who value themselves upon their exterior, to wear out any little deformity; as, for instance, a snub nose, or a long chin. I could mention one noble family, whom it has cost a dozen intermarriages with the yeomanry, to introduce a stouter pair of legs among them; and another, which has been obliged to go through a course of milk-maids, to throw a little colour into their cheeks. Has your correspondent ever considered in what term of years a spirit of Ketchicism may be introduced into a family; and conversely, in how many generations the milk of human kindness may be instilled into, what Burke would call, a pure, unsophisticated dephlegmated, defecated Ketch?

Page 74. ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING MORAL WITH PERSONAL DEFORMITY.

The Reflector, No. II. Reprinted in the Works, 1818.

Page 79, line 16. The tales of our nursery. In his Elia essay "Dream Children" Lamb recalls his grandmother's narration of the old story of the "Children in the Wood."

Page 79, lines 20-21. Mrs. Radcliffe... Mr. Monk Lewis. The popularity of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), whose Mysteries of Udolpho appeared in 1794, and of Matthew Gregory Lewis (17751818), whose rival exercise in grisly romance, The Monk, was published in 1795, was then (1811) still considerable, although on the wane.

Page 80. NAMES.

ON THE

AMBIGUITIES ARISING FROM PROPER

The Reflector, No. II., 1811. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This paper is known to be Lamb's because he tells the story, in much the same words, in a letter to Wordsworth dated February 1, 1806. The young man who made the mistake of confusing Spencer and Spenser was a brother of Coleridge's Mary Evans. The Hon. William Robert Spencer (1769-1834), the second son of the third Duke of Marlborough, was a Society poet well enough known in his day-the first decade of the last century. His only poem that has survived is "Beth Gelert," a ballad often included in children's poetry books.

In Lamb's Letters the poet Spenser is usually spelt Spencer.

Page 81. ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH. The Reflector, No. III., 1811. The title there ran: "On the Genius and Character of Hogarth; with some Remarks on a Passage in the Writings of the late Mr. Barry." The article was signed L. It was reprinted in the Works, 1818.

Many of Hogarth's pictures, framed in black, hung round Lamb's sitting-room in his various homes. In 1817 Mary Lamb, writing to Dorothy Wordsworth, says that the Hogarths have been taken down from the walls and pasted into a book, but there is proof that some at any rate were framed both at Islington and Enfield.

Hazlitt in his Sketches of the Principal Picture-galleries in England, 1824, wrote, "Of the pictures in the Rake's Progress we shall not here say anything . . . because they have already been criticised by a writer, to whom we could add nothing, in a paper which ought to be read by every lover of Hogarth and of English genius." The reference was to Lamb's essay.

Page 82, line 1. Old-fashioned house in -shire. Lamb refers again to Blakesware, in Hertfordshire. In a letter to Southey, Oct. 31, 1799, Lamb mentions the Blakesware Hogarths. This

would suggest that Hogarth was the first artist that he knew, so many of his recollections dating from the old Hertfordshire days. Page 84, line 1. Kent, or Caius. See "Table Talk," pages 401-2 of the present volume, for an amplification of this passage many years later. Lamb's version of "Lear" in Tales from Shakespear, 1807, has similar praise of Kent.

Page 84, last line. Ferdinand Count Fathom. See Chapter XXVII. of Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, 1754:

When he beheld the white cliffs of Albion, his heart throbbed with all the joy of a beloved son, who, after a tedious and fatiguing voyage, reviews the chimnies of his father's house: he surveyed the neighbouring coast of England with fond and longing eyes, like another Moses reconnoitring the land of Canaan from the top of mount Pisgah; and to such a degree of impatience was he inflamed by the sight, that instead of proceeding to Calais, he resolved to take his passage directly from Boulogne, even if he should hire a vessel for the purpose.

Page 88. Footnote. Somewhere in his [Reynolds'] lectures. The passage is in the fourteenth of the Discourses on Painting-on Gainsborough :

After this admirable artist [Hogarth] had spent the greater part of his life in an active, busy, and, we may add, successful attention to the ridicule of life; after he had invented a new species of dramatic painting, in which probably he will never be equalled, and had stored his mind with infinite materials to explain and illustrate the domestic and familiar scenes of common life, which were generally, and ought to have been always, the subject of his pencil; he very imprudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted the great historical style, for which his previous habits had by no means prepared him he was indeed so entirely unacquainted with the principles of this style, that he was not even aware that any artificial preparation was at all necessary. It is to be regretted, that any part of the life of such a genius should be fruitlessly employed. Let his failure teach us not to indulge ourselves in the vain imagination, that by a momentary resolution we can give either dexterity to the hand, or a new habit to the mind.

Page 95, line 10. Children's books. The Reflector version added, "or the tale of Carlo the Dog."

Page 97, line 8 from foot. With Dr. Swift. The page opposite the title of the Tale of a Tub contains a (fictitious) list of "Treatises writ by the same author." The fifth of these is "A Panegyric upon the World." It is probable that Lamb had this in mind.

Page IOI. ON THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT THE THEATRES. The Reflector, No. III., 1811. Not reprinted by Lamb. Lamb omits to say that he joined in the hissing of his farce, "Mr. H.," on the unhappy night of December 10, 1806. In its ill fortune he seems always to have taken a kind of humorous