prized, undervalued, and made a word of scorn.1 I have often racked my brains to discover the grounds of this unaccountable prejudice, which is known to exist against a useful and industrious body of men. I confess I can discover none, except in the sedentary posture, before touched upon, which from long experience has been found by these artists to be the one most convenient for the exercise of their vocation. But I would beg the more stirring and locomotive part of the community, to whom the quiescent state of the tailor furnishes a perpetual fund of rudeness, to consider, that in the mere action of sitting (which they make so merry with) there is nothing necessarily ridiculous. That, in particular, it is the posture best suited to contemplation. That it is that, in which the hen (a creature of all others best fitted to be a pattern of careful provision for a family) performs the most beautiful part of her maternal office. That it is that, in which judges deliberate, and senators take counsel. That a Speaker of the House of Commons at a debate, or a Lord Chancellor over a suit, will oftentimes sit as long as many tailors. Lastly, let these scoffers take heed, lest themselves, while they mock at others, be found sitting in the seat of the scornful."" It is told of Lamb that he once said he would sit with anything but a hen or a tailor. Page 200. Motto. From Virgil's Eneid, Book VI., lines 617, 618. "There luckless Theseus sits, and shall sit for ever." Page 201, line 25. Beautiful motto. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who married Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII., appeared at a tournament with a saddle-cloth made half of frieze and half of cloth of gold. Each side had a symbolical motto. The other : Cloth of frize, be not too bold, Though thou art match'd with cloth of gold. Cloth of gold do not despise, Though thou art match'd with cloth of frize. One ran: Page 201, line 3 from foot. Eliot's famous troop. General George Augustus Eliott (afterwards Lord Heathfield), the defender "It is notorious that to call a man a tailor, is to heap the utmost contempt upon him which the language of the streets can convey. Barber's clerk is an appellative less galling than this. But there is a word, which, though apparently divested of all ill meaning, has for some people a far deeper sting than either. It is the insulting appellation of governor, with which a black-guard, not in anger, but in perfect good will, salutes your second-rate gentry, persons a little above his own cut. He rarely bestows it upon the topping gentry of all, but reserves it for those of a rank or two above his own, or whose garb is rather below their rank. It is a word of approximation. A friend of mine will be melancholy a great while after, from being saluted with it. I confess I have not altogether been unhonoured with it myself." of Gibraltar and the founder of the 15th or King's Own Royal Light Dragoons, now the 15th Hussars, whose first action was at Emsdorf. At the time that regiment was being collected, there was a strike of tailors, many of whom joined it. Eliott, one version of the incident says, wished to get men who never having ridden had not to unlearn any bad methods of riding. Later they were engaged against the Spaniards in Cuba in 1762-1763. Page 202, line 6. Speculative politicians. Lamb was probably referring to Francis Place (1771-1854), the tailor-reformer, among whose friends were certain of Lamb's own-William Frend, for example. Page 202. Footnote. "Gladden life." From Johnson's Life of Edmund Smith-"one who has gladdened life"; or possibly from Coombe's "Peasant of Auburn " And whilst thy breast matures each patriot plan Page 203, line 22. Dr. Norris's famous narrative. The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris concerning the strange and deplorable Frenzy of Mr. John Dennis was a satirical squib by Pope against the critic John Dennis (1657-1734). The passage referred to by Lamb runs : Doct. Pray, Sir, how did you contract the Swelling? Doct. A Criticism! that's a Distemper I never read of in Galen. Denn. S'Death, Sir, a Distemper! It is no Distemper, but a Noble Art. I have sat fourteen Hours a Day at it; and are you a Doctor, and don't know there's a Communication between the Legs and the Brain? Doct. What made you sit so many Hours, Sir? Denn. Cato, Sir. Doct. Sir, I speak of your Distemper, what gave you this Tumour? Denn. Cato, Cato, Cato. Sir Page 204, line 2. Envious Junos. Lucina, at Juno's bidding, sat cross-legged before Alcmena to prolong her travail. Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica; or, Enquiry into Vulgar Errors, Book V., speaks of the posture as "veneficious," and cites Juno's case. Page 204, at the end. Well known that this last-named vegetable. This is the old joke about tailors "cabbaging," that is to say, stealing cloth. The term is thus explained in Phillips' History of Cultivated Vegetables : The word cabbage . . . means the firm head or ball that is formed by the leaves turning close over each other. From thence arose the cant word applied to tailors, who formerly worked at the private houses of their customers, where they were often accused of cabbaging: which means the rolling up of pieces of cloth instead of the list and shreds, which they claim as their due, Lamb returned to this jest against tailors in his verses in Search of a Wife," in 1831. "Satan In The Champion for December 11, 1814, was printed a letter defending tailors against Lamb. Page 204. On Needle-Work. The British Lady's Magazine and Monthly Miscellany, April 1, 1815. By Mary Lamb. The authority for attributing this paper to Mary Lamb is Crabb Robinson. In his Diary for December 11, 1814, he writes: "I called on Miss Lamb, and chatted with her. She was not unwell, but she had undergone great fatigue from writing an article about needle-work for the new Ladies' British Magazine. She spoke of writing as a most painful occupation, which only necessity could make her attempt. We know that Mary Lamb's needle was required to help keep the Lamb family, not only after Samuel Salt's death in 1792, when they had to move from the Temple, but very likely while they were there also. In one of the newspaper accounts of the tragedy of September, 1796, she is described as “a mantua-maker." Possibly she continued to sew for a while after she joined her brother, in 1799, but she would hardly call that "early life," being thirty-five in that year. Page 210. This is the one prose article that, to the best of our knowledge, made its first and only appearance in the Works (1818). It was inspired by John Mathew Gutch (1776-1861), Lamb's schoolfellow at Christ's Hospital, with whom he shared rooms in Southampton Buildings in 1800. Later, when Gutch had become proprietor, at Bristol, of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal (in which many of Chatterton's poems had appeared), he took advantage of his press to set up a private edition of selections from Wither, a poet then little known and not easily accessible, an interleaved copy of which, in two volumes, was sent to Lamb in 1809 or 1810. Gutch told the story in an Appendix to his Lytell Geste of Robin Hoode (1847), wherein he printed a letter from Lamb dated April 9, 1810, concerning the edition, in the course of which Lamb remarks: "I never saw Philarete before-judge of my pleasure. I could not forbear scribbling certain critiques in pencil on the blank leaves. . . Perhaps I could digest the few critiques prefixed to the Satires,' Shepherd's Hunting,' etc., into a short abstract of Wither's character and works. . ON THE POETICAL WORKs of GEORGE Wither. 6 Lamb returned the book with this letter; and Gutch seems to have then sent it to Dr. John Nott (1751-1825), of the Hot Wells, Bristol, a medical man with literary tastes, and the author of a number of translations, medical treatises, and subsequently of an edition of Herrick; who added comments of his own both upon Wither and upon Lamb. Lamb, Gutch tells us, subsequently asked for the book again, with the intention of preparing from it the present essay on Wither, and coming then upon Nott's criticisms of himself, superimposed sarcastic criticisms of Nott. Thus the volumes contain first Wither, then Gutch and Lamb on Wither, then Nott on Wither and Lamb, and then Lamb on Nott again and incidentally on Wither again, too, for some of his earlier opinions were slightly modified. Lamb gave the volume to his friend John Brook Pulham of the East India House, and the treasure passed to the fitting possession of the late Mr. Swinburne, who described it in a paper in the Nineteenth Century for January, 1885, afterwards republished in his Miscellanies, 1886. Mr. Swinburne permitted me to quote from his very entertaining analysis :— The second fly-leaf of the first volume bears the inscription, "Jas Pulham Esqr. from Charles Lamb." A proof impression of the wellknown profile sketch of Lamb by Pulham has been inserted between this and the preceding fly-leaf. The same place is occupied in the second volume by the original pencil drawing, to which is attached an engraving of it "Scratched on Copper by his Friend Brook Pulham ;" and on the fly-leaf following is a second inscription-"James Pulham Esq. from his friend Chas Lamb. On the reverse of the leaf inscribed with these names in the first volume begins the commentary afterwards republished, with slight alterations and transpositions, as an essay on the poetical works of George Wither. 66 After the quotation from Drayton, with which the printed essay concludes, the manuscript proceeds thus : "The whole poem, for the delicacy of the thoughts, and height of the passion, is equal to the best of Spenser's, Daniel's or Drayton's love verses; with the advantage of comprising in a whole all the fine things which lie scatter'd in their works, in sonnets, and smaller addresses-The happy chearful spirit of the author goes with it all the way; that_sanguine temperament, which gives to all Wither's lines (in his most loved metre especially, where chiefly he is a Poet) an elasticity, like a dancing measure; it [is] as full of joy, and confidence, and high and happy thoughts, as if it were his own Epithalamium which, like Spenser, he were singing, and not a piece of perambulary, probationary flattery. On page 70 Lamb has proposed a new reading which speaks for itself "Jove's endeared Ganimed," for the meaningless "endured" of the text before him. Against a couplet now made famous by his enthusiastic citation of it "Thoughts too deep to be expressed 1 Lamb subsequently altered the conclusion of this paragraph to: “as if, like Spenser, he were singing his own Epithalamium, and not a strain of probationary courtship.' he has written-"Two eminently beautiful lines." Opposite the couplet in which Wither mentions the poets " 'whose verse set forth Rosalind and Stella's worth" Gutch (as I suppose) has written the names of Lodge and Sidney under which Lamb has pencilled the words "Qu. Spenser and Sidney; perhaps the more plausible conjecture, as the date of Lodge's popularity was out, or nearly so, before Wither began to write. The next verses [The Shepherd's Hunting] are worth transcription on their own account no less than on account of Lamb's annotation. "It is known what thou canst do, When that Cuddy, thou, and I, To the fifth of these verses the following note is appended : "The Devil Tavern, Fleet Street, where Child's Place now stands, and where a sign hung in my memory within 18" (substituted for 16) "years, of the Devil and St. Dunstan-Ben Jonson made this a famous place of resort for poets by drawing up a set of Leges Convivales which were engraven in marble on the chimney piece in the room called Apollo. One of Drayton's poems is called The Sacrifice to Apollo; it is addrest to the priests or Wits of Apollo, and is a kind of poetical paraphrase upon the Leges Convivales-This tavern to the very last kept up a room with that name. C. L."-who might have added point and freshness to this brief account by citing the splendid description of a revel held there under the jovial old Master's auspices, given by Careless to Aurelia [Carlesse to Emilia] in Shakerley Marmion's admirable comedy, A Fine Companion. But it is remarkable that Lamb-if I mistake not has never quoted or mentioned that brilliant young dramatist and poet who divided with Randolph the best part of Jonson's mantle. At the close of Wither's high-spirited and manly postscript to the poem on which, as he tells us, his publisher had bestowed the name of The Shepherd's Hunting, a passage occurs which has provoked one of the most characteristic outbreaks of wrath and mirth to be found among all Lamb's notes on Nott's notes on Lamb's notes on the text of Wither. "Neither am I so cynical but that I think a modest expression of such amorous conceits as suit with reason, will yet very well become my years; in which not to have feeling of the power of love, were as great an argument of much stupidity, as an over-sottish affection were of extreme folly." In illustration of this simple and dignified sentence Lamb cites the following most apt and admirable parallel. "Nor blame it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a reward, as the noblest dispositions above other things in this life have sometimes preferred; whereof not to be sensible, when good and fair in |