Page 40, line 5. "Party in a parlour. From a stanza in Wordsworth's Peter Bell, first edition. Wordsworth afterwards expunged it, but Shelley's satire, Peter Bell the Third, extended it mercilessly. Page 40, line 22. tion x. 10. Disappointing book in Patmos. See Revela Page 40, line 23. Described by Burton. See Anatomy of Melancholy, Part I., Section 2, Mem. 2, Subsection 6, not quite correctly copied by Lamb. 66 Page 40, line 28. Amabilis insania. 'Delightful ecstasy." From Horace, Odes, III., 4, 5. Mentis gratissimus error. Pleasing hallucinations." From Horace, Epistles, II., 2, 140. Page 40, line 40. Subrusticus pudor. "Awkward bashfulness." From Cicero's Letters, "Ad Fam.," V., 12, 1. My friend, Nov. Vincent Novello (1781father of Mrs. Cowden Clarke, and a great Page 41, line 4. 1861), the organist, the friend of Lamb. Page 41, lines 12, 14. That and xix. 9. Converted into anthems by Benjamin Cook and William Boyce respectively. Page 41, line 17. The Complete Angler, "Rapt above earth ." An adaptation from I was for that time lifted above earth; Page 41, line 21. Her " 1 Corinthians xv. 48. Page 41, line 25. Those Arions. Arion was a lyric poet of Lesbos, who, on a voyage, when threatened with death by sailors that coveted his riches, begged to be allowed to play one more melody. They granted leave; he played; and, drawing a shoal of dolphins to the vessel's side by his harmony, he leapt on the back of one and was carried safely away. The Tritons were sea gods, half dolphin and half man. Page 41, line 34. Malleus hereticorum-the heretics' hammer-the title of a work by Johann Faber (1478-1541), the opponent of the heretics Luther and Zwinglius. The grand heresiarch, the chief of heretics. Page 41, line 36. I am Marcion, Ebion and Cerinthus. Three early sectarians. Marcion dispensed with the Old Testament and adhered to the teaching of Paul; Ebion, a Nazarene, founded the Ebionites, some of whom believed in Christ and others denied Him; Cerinthus combined Judaism, pagan philosophy and Christianity. The existence of Ebion is, however, doubtful; the Ebionites probably took their name from the Hebrew word "Ebyjon," meaning a poor or humble Gibbon says in Chapter XLVII. of the Decline and Fall: "Cerinthus of Asia. . . laboured to reconcile the Gnostic with the Ebionite, by confessing in the same Messiah the supernatural union of man. a man and a God, and this mystic doctrine was adopted with many fanciful improvements by Carpocrates, Basilides and Valentine, the heretics of the Egyptian school." For Gog and Magog in this connection see Revelation xx. 7-9, where they personate all unbelievers. Page 41, line 38. Lutheran beer. Edmund Ollier, the son of Charles Ollier, the publisher of Lamb's Works, 1818, in his reminis-. cences of Lamb, prefixed to one edition of Elia, tells this story: "Once at a musical party at Leigh Hunt's, being oppressed with what to him was nothing better than a prolonged noise . . . he said-'If one only had a pot of porter, one might get through this.' It was procured for him and he weathered the Mozartian storm." Page 41. Footnote. Another friend of Vincent Novello's uses the same couplet (from Watt's Divine Songs for Children, Song XXVIII., "For the Lord's Day, Evening") in the description of glees by the old cricketers at the Bat and Ball on Broad Halfpenny Down, near Hambledon—I refer to John Nyren, author of The Young Cricketer's Tutor, 1833. There is no evidence that Lamb and Nyren ever met, but one feels that they ought to have done so, in Novello's hospitable rooms. In the London Magazine this essay had the following postscript:"P.S.—A writer, whose real name, it seems, is Boldero, but who has been entertaining the town for the last twelve months, with some very pleasant lucubrations, under the assumed signature of Leigh Hunt,1 in his Indicator, of the 31st January last, has thought fit to insinuate, that I Elia do not write the little sketches which bear my signature, in this Magazine; but that the true author of them is a Mr. L——b. Observe the critical period at which he has chosen to impute the calumny!—on the very eve of the publication of our last number— affording no scope for explanation for a full month-during which time, I must needs lie writhing and tossing, under the cruel imputation of nonentity.-Good heavens! that a plain man must not be allowed to be——— They call this an age of personality: but surely this spirit of antipersonality (if I may so express it) is something worse. "Take away my moral reputation: I may live to discredit that calumny. Injure my literary fame,-I may write that up again— But when a gentleman is robbed of his identity, where is he? "Other murderers stab but at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle at the best. But here is an assassin who aims at our very essence; who not only forbids us to be any longer, but to have been at all. Let our ancestors look to it "Is the parish register nothing? Is the house in Princes-street, "1 Clearly a fictitious appellation; for if we admit the latter of these names to be in a manner English, what is Leigh? Christian nomenclature knows no such." VOL. II.-22 Cavendish-square, where we saw the light six-and-forty years ago, nothing? Were our progenitors from stately Genoa, where we flourished four centuries back, before the barbarous name of Boldero1 was known to a European mouth, nothing? Was the goodly scion of our name, transplanted into England, in the reign of the seventh Henry, nothing? Are the archives of the steel yard, in succeeding reigns (if haply they survive the fury of our envious enemies) showing that we flourished in prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the commonwealth, nothing? Why then the world, and all that's in't is nothing- "I am ashamed that this trifling writer should have power to move me so." "It is clearly of transatlantic origin." Leigh Hunt, in The Indicator, January 31 and February 7, 1821, had reprinted from The Examiner a review of Lamb's Works, with a few prefatory remarks in which it was stated: "We believe we are taking no greater liberty with him [Charles Lamb] than our motives will warrant, when we add that he sometimes writes in the London Magazine under the signature of Elia." In Lamb's reply, printed above, he may have invented the Genoese ancestry or it may have truly belonged to the old Italian clerk of the South Sea-House, whose name Elia he had borrowed (see page 299). The quotation, "Why, then the world," &c., is from a speech of Leontes in "The Winter's Tale," Act I., Scene 2, lines 293, 294. The reason for calling Hunt Boldero is not now clear. In The Indicator of March 7, 1821, Leigh Hunt replied to Elia. Leigh Hunt was no match for Lamb in this kind of raillery, and the first portion of the reply is rather cumbersome. At the end, however, he says: "There was, by the bye, a family of the name of Elia who came from Italy,-Jews; which may account for this boast about Genoa. See also in his last article in the London Magazine [the essay on "Ears"] some remarkable fancies of conscience in reference to the Papal religion. They further corroborate what we have heard; viz. that the family were obliged to fly from Genoa for saying that the Pope was the author of Rabelais; and that Elia is not an anagram, as some have thought it, but the Judaico-Christian name of the writer before us, whose surname, we find, is not Lamb, but Lomb;-Elia Lomb! What a name! He told a friend of ours so in company, would have palmed himself upon him for a Scotchman, but that his countenance betrayed him." and It is amusing to note that Maginn, writing the text to accompany the Maclise portrait of Lamb in Fraser's Magazine in 1835, gravely states that Lamb's name was really Lomb, and that he was of Jewish extraction. The subject of Lamb's birth reopened a little while later. In the "Lion's Head," which was the title of the pages given to correspondence in the London Magazine, in the number for November, 1821, was the following short article from Lamb's pen :— "ELIA TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS.-A Correspondent, who writes himself Peter Ball, or Bell,—for his hand-writing is as ragged as his manners— admonishes me of the old saying, that some people (under a courteous periphrasis I slur his less ceremonious epithet) had need have good memories. In my Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,' I have delivered myself, and truly, a Templar born. Bell clamours upon this, and thinketh that he hath caught a fox. It seems that in a former paper, retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called my good identity in question, (see P.S. to my 'Chapter on Ears,') I profess myself a native of some spot near Cavendish Square, deducing my remoter origin from Italy. But who does not see, except this tinkling cymbal, that in that idle fiction of Genoese ancestry I was answering a fool according to his folly-that Elia there expresseth himself ironically, as to an approved slanderer, who hath no right to the truth, and can be no fit recipient of it? Such a one it is usual to leave to his delusions; or, leading him from error still to contradictory error, to plunge him (as we say) deeper in the mire, and give him line till he suspend himself. No understanding reader could be imposed upon by such obvious rhodomontade to suspect me for an alien, or believe me other than English. -To a second Correspondent, who signs himself 'a Wiltshire man,’ and claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an equivocal phrase in my 'Christ's Hospital,' 'Christ's Hospital,' a more mannerly reply is due. Passing over the Genoese fable, which Bell makes such a ring about, he nicely detects a more subtle discrepancy, which Bell was too obtuse to strike upon. Referring to the passage (in page 484 of our second volume 1), I must confess, that the term 'native town,' applied to Calne, prima facie seems to bear out the construction which my friendly Correspondent is willing to put upon it. The context too, I am afraid, a little favours it. But where the words of an author, taken literally, compared with some other passage in his writings, admitted to be authentic, involve a palpable contradiction, it hath been the custom of the ingenuous commentator to smooth the difficulty by the supposition, that in the one case an allegorical or tropical sense was chiefly intended. So by the word 'native,' I may be supposed to mean a town where I might have been born; or where it might be 1 See page 13 of this volume. desirable that I should have been born, as being situate in wholesome air, upon a dry chalky soil, in which I delight; or a town, with the inhabitants of which I passed some weeks, a summer or two ago, so agreeably, that they and it became in a manner native to me. Without some such latitude of interpretation in the present case, I see not how we can avoid falling into a gross error in physics, as to conceive that a gentleman may be born in two places, from which all modern and ancient testimony is alike abhorrent. Bacchus cometh the nearest to it, whom I remember Ovid to have honoured with the epithet 'Twice born.' 1 But not to mention that he is so called (we conceive) in reference to the places whence rather than the places where he was delivered,—for by either birth he may probably be challenged for a Theban-in a strict way of speaking, he was a filius femoris by no means in the same sense as he had been before a filius alvi, for that latter was but a secondary and tralatitious way of being born, and he but a denizen of the second house of his geniture. Thus much by way of explanation was thought due to the courteous Wiltshire man.'-To 'Indagator,' 'Investigator,' 'Incertus,' and the rest of the pack, that are so importunate about the true localities of his birth —as if, forsooth, Elia were presently about to be passed to his parish— to all such churchwarden critics he answereth, that, any explanation here given notwithstanding, he hath not so fixed his nativity (like a rusty vane) to one dull spot, but that, if he seeth occasion, or the argument shall demand it, he will be born again, in future whatever place, and at whatever period, shall seem good unto him. "Modò me Thebis-modò Athenis. papers, "ELIA." Metamorph. lib. iii., 310." in Concerning the quotation with which Lamb closes: The true dramatic poet, says Horace, is he Meum qui pectus inaniter angit, Ut magus, et modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis. Epist. II., i., lines 211-213. (Who racks my heart with shadows, fires, allays, fills with imaginary terrors, and sets me now at Thebes and now at Athens.) The passage from Ovid runs, in English: "The child, an embryo yet, is snatched from his mother's womb, and (if we may believe it) sewn |