Pronaque cum spectent animalia cœtera terram,

Os homini sublime dedit, cœlumque videre

Jussit.

(And while the other animals face downwards to the ground, he gave to man an upwardlooking visage, and bade him behold the heaven.)

Page 119, line 13. Lusus. . . Accidentium. A lusus naturæ is a freak of nature, a lusus accidentium a freak of chance.

Page 119, line 30. There was a Yorick. See note on page 357. See also the quotations on page 399.

Page 119, line 33. "Age, thou hast lost thy breed." Possibly an adaptation of Casca's speech:

Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods.

"

'Julius Cæsar," Act I., Scene 2, line 151. Blind Bartimeus. See Mark x. 46. Feigned or not. In the London Magazine the essay did not end here. It continued thus:

Page 119, line 42.

Page 120, line 26.

Pray God your honour relieve me,' said a poor beadswoman to my friend L- one day; 'I have seen better days.' 'So have I, my good woman,' retorted he, looking up at the welkin which was just then threatening a storm-and the jest (he will have it) was as good to the beggar as a tester.

"It was at all events kinder than consigning her to the stocks, or the parish beadle

"But L. has a way of viewing things in rather a paradoxical light on

some occasions.

"ELIA.

"P.S.—My friend Hume (not MP.) has a curious manuscript in his possession, the original draught of the celebrated Beggars' Petition' (who cannot say by heart the Beggar's Petition?') as it was written by some school usher (as I remember) with corrections interlined from the pen of Oliver Goldsmith. As a specimen of the doctor's improvement, I recollect one most judicious alteration—

"Here is an instance of poetical or artificial language properly substituted for the phrase of common conversation; against Wordsworth. "I think I must get H. to send it to the LONDON, as a corollary to the foregoing."

Lamb's friend

The foregoing passage needs some commentary. L—— was Lamb himself. He tells the story to Manning in the letter of January 2, 1810.-Lamb's friend Hume was Joseph Hume of the

victualling office, Somerset House, to whom letters from Lamb will be found in Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's Lamb and Hazlitt, 1900. Hume translated The Inferno of Dante into blank verse, 1812.—The “ Beggar's Petition," a stock piece for infant recitation a hundred years ago, was a poem beginning thus:

Pity the sorrows of a poor old man

Whose trembling limbs have borne him to your door,
Whose days are dwindled to the shortest span;

Oh give relief, and Heaven will bless your store.

It was written by the Rev. Thomas Moss, of Trentham, in Staffordshire, and was first printed in his Poems in 1769. The version there given has "pamper'd menial."

In the reference to Wordsworth Lamb pokes fun at the statement, in his friend's preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, that the purpose of that book was to relate or describe incidents and situations from common life as far as possible in a selection of language really used by men.

Lamb's P.S. concerning the "Beggar's Petition" was followed in the London Magazine by this N.B. :

"N.B. I am glad to see JANUS veering about to the old quarter. I feared he had been rust-bound.

"C. being asked why he did not like Gold's 'London' as well as ours -it was in poor S.'s time-replied

"Because there is no WEATHERCOCK
And that's the reason why."

The explanation of this note is that "Janus Weathercock ❞—one of the pseudonyms of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright-after a long absence from its pages, had sent to the previous month's London Magazine, May, 1822, an amusing letter of criticism of that periodical, commenting on some of its regular contributors. Therein he said: "Clap Elia on the back for such a series of good behaviour."-Who C. is cannot be said; possibly Lamb, as a joke, intends Coleridge to be indicated; but poor S. would be John Scott, the first editor of the London Magazine, who was killed in a duel. C.'s reply consisted of the last lines of Wordsworth's "Anecdote for Fathers; or, Falsehood Corrected." Accurately they run :

At Kelve there was no weather-cock

And that's the reason why.

The hero of this poem was a son of Lamb's friend Basil Montagu. Gold's London Magazine was a contemporary of the better known London magazine of the same name. In Vol. III. appeared an article entitled "The Literary Ovation," describing an imaginary dinnerparty given by Messrs. Baldwin, Cradock & Joy in February, 1821, at which Lamb was supposed to be present and to sing a song by Webster, one of his old dramatists. Mr. Bertram Dobell conjectures that Wainewright may have written this squib.

The same number of the London Magazine-June, 1822-that con

tained this essay printed also, under the "Lion's Head," the following notice :

*

**that he has

"Elia assures his pleasant Remembrancer not lost sight of the topic he recommends so warmly. He has only put it off for a Number or two."

Neither the correspondent nor the topic can now be identified.

Page 120. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG.
London Magazine, September, 1822.

There has been some discussion as to the origin of the central idea of this essay. A resemblance is found in a passage in The Turkish Spy, where, after describing the annual burnt-offering of a bull by the Athenians, The Spy continues:

In process of time a certain priest, in the midst of his bloody sacrifice, taking up a piece of the broiled flesh which had fallen from the altar on the ground, and burning his fingers therewith, suddenly clapt them to his mouth to mitigate the pain. But, when he had once tasted the sweetness of the fat, not only longed for more of it, but gave a piece to his assistant; and he to others; who, all pleased with the new-found dainties, fell to eating of flesh greedily. And hence this species of gluttony was taught to other mortals.

"Este," a contributor to Notes and Queries, June 21, 1884, wrote :— A quarto volume of forty-six pages, once in " Charles Lamb's library" (according to a pencilled note in the volume) is before me, entitled: Gli Elogi del Porco, Capitoli Berneschi di Tigrinto Bistonio P. A., E. Accademico Ducale de' Dissonanti di Modena. In Modena per gli Eredi di Bartolomeo Soliani Stampatori Ducali MDCCLXI. Con Licenza de' Superiori, [wherein] some former owner of the volume has copied out Lamb's prose with many exact verbal resemblances from the poem.

It has also been suggested that Porphyry's tract on Abstinence from Animal Food, translated by William Taylor, bears a likeness to the passage. Taylor's translation, however, was not published till 1823, some time after Lamb's essay.

These parallels merely go to show that the idea was a commonplace; at the same time it is not Lamb, but Manning, who told him the story, that must declare its origin. Not only in the essay, but in a letter to Barton in March, 1823, does Lamb express his indebtedness to his traveller friend. Allsop, indeed, in his Letters of Coleridge, claims to give the Chinese story which Manning lent to Lamb and which produced the "Dissertation." It runs thus:

A child, in the early ages, was left alone by its mother in a house in which was a pig. fire took place; the child escaped, the pig was burned. The child scratched and pottered amongst the ashes for its pig, which at last it found. All the provisions being burnt, the child was very hungry, and not yet having any artificial aids, such as golden ewers and damask napkins, began to lick or suck its fingers to free them from the ashes. A piece of fat adhered to one of his thumbs, which, being very savoury alike in taste and odour, he rightly judged to belong to the pig. Liking it much, he took it to his mother, just then appearing, who also tasted it, and both agreed that it was better than fruit or vegetables.

They rebuilt the house, and the woman, after the fashion of good wives, who, says the chronicle, are now very scarce, put a pig into it, and was about to set it on fire, when an old man, one whom observation and reflection had made a philosopher, suggested that a pile of wood would do as well. (This must have been the father of economists.) The next pig was killed before it was roasted, and thus

"From low beginnings,
We date our winnings."

Manning, by the way, contributed articles on Chinese jests to the New Monthly Magazine in 1826.

A preliminary sketch of the second portion of this essay will be found in the letter to Coleridge dated March 9, 1822. See also the letters of Mr. and Mrs. Bruton, January 6, 1823, to Mrs. Collier, November 2, 1824, and to H. Dodwell, October 7, 1827, both in acknowledgment of pigs sent to Lamb probably from an impulse found in this essay.

Later, Lamb abandoned the extreme position here taken. In the little essay entitled "Thoughts on Presents of Game," 1833 (see Vol. I., page 343), he says: "Time was, when Elia .

preferred to all a roasted pig. But he disclaims all such green-sickness appetites in future." The late Charles Kent, in his centenary edition of Lamb's works, printed these "Thoughts" next the "Dissertation," under the title "A Recantation."

Page 120, ninth line from foot. Seventy thousand. An examination of the original MS. of this essay, which has been facsimiled in more than one edition of Lamb, inclines one to think that Lamb wrote twenty." It is now in America.

Page 120, seventh line from foot. Confucius. Here Lamb was inventing.

Page 121, line 29. He tasted-crackling! At these words, in the London Magazine, came the sentence: "He stood in a posture of idiot wonder."

Page 123, line 15. Like our Locke. John Locke, the philosopher (1632-1704), author of the Essay Concerning the Human Understanding.

Page 123, lines 29, 30. Mundus edibilis. . . princeps obsoniorum. "Of all the delicacies in the whole world of things to eat, I will maintain it to be the most delicate, the chief of tidbits."

Page 123, line 34. Amor immunditia. "Love of dirt"-an allusion to original sin in the porcine Adam and Eve.

Page 124, line 11. Radiant jellies-shooting stars. Messrs. Hallward and Hill have this interesting note: "In Donne's Eclogues there is a reference to the superstition that shooting stars left jellies behind them where they fell:—

"As he that sees a star fall runs apace,
And finds a jelly in the place."'

Mr. W. J. Craig tells me that in Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny, Book XI., Chapter XII., is the suggestion that honey on the leaves at daybreak is "Either a certaine sweat of the skies, or some unctuous jelly proceeding from the stars." The belief is still popular in Ireland that the jelly-like fungoid growth on damp hillsides is caused by shooting stars.

Page 124, line 23. For such a tomb. . . Lamb probably had in mind the final couplet from Milton's epitaph on Shakespeare:-

And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie,

That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

Page 124, line 25. He is the best of Sapors. This sentence was printed as a quotation of verse in the London Magazine. The word sapor is probably from Sir Thomas Browne's vocabulary.

Page 125, line 5. "Tame villatic fowl." A phrase from Milton's Samson Agonistes, line 1695.

Page 125, line 9. Like Lear.

Lear (to Regan). I gave you all.

King Lear," Act II., Scene 4, line 253.

Page 125, line 16. My good old aunt. Probably Aunt Hetty. See the essay on "Christ's Hospital," page 13, for another story of her. The phrase, "Over London Bridge," unless an invention, suggests that before this aunt went to live with the Lambs-probably not until they left the Temple in 1792—she was living on the Surrey side. But it was possibly an Elian mystification. Lamb had another aunt, but of her we know nothing.

Page 126, line 7. St. Omer's. The French Jesuit College. Lamb, it is unnecessary to say, was never there.

Page 126. PEOPLE.

A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED

It was

When Lamb

This paper is, by many years, the earliest of the Elia essays. printed first in The Reflector, No. IV., in 1811 or 1812. brought his Works together, in 1818, he omitted it. In September, 1822, it appeared in the London Magazine as one of the reprints of Lamb's earlier writings, of which the "Confessions of a Drunkard" (see Vol. I., page 133, and note) was the first. In that number also appeared the "Dissertation upon Roast Pig" (see page 120), thereby offering the reader an opportunity of comparing Lamb's style in 1811 with his riper and richer style of 1822. The germ of the essay must have been long in Lamb's mind, for we find him writing to Hazlitt in 1805 concerning Mrs. Rickman: "A good-natured woman though, which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with as a bachelor.

"

The essay in The Reflector began thus: "Mr. Reflector, I am a single man not quite turned of forty, who have spent . . .' and so forth. There were other slight changes. In The Reflector "joke' (page 128, line 4) was "jest.' To "Morellas" (page 131, line 40) was this footnote: "I don't know how to spell this word; I mean Morella cherries." The signature was " Innuptus." When reprinted in the London Magazine the letter ended with "Your humble servant, Elia." There are several other small differences. Page 128, line 27. "Like as the arrows

See Psalms cxxvii.