By thy imagination have been brought

Over my spirit. From the olden time

Of Authorship thy Patent should be dated,

And thou with Marvell, Browne, and Burton, mated.

In the number for March, 1823, under "The Lion's Head," was this further announcement :

Elia is not dead!-We thought as much-and even hinted our thought in the number for January. The following letter declaring Elia's existence is in his own handwriting, and was left by his own hand. We never saw a man so extremely alive, as he was, to the injury done him :

"Elia returns his thanks to the facetious Janus Weathercock, who, during his late unavoidable excursion to the Isles of Sark, Guernsey and Jersey, took advantage of his absence to plot a sham account of his death; and to impose upon the town a posthumous Essay, signed by his Ghost-which, how like it is to any of the undoubted Essays of the author, may be seen by comparing it with his volume just published. One or two former papers, with his signature, which are not re-printed in the volume, he has reason to believe were pleasant forgeries by the same ingenious hand."

This was, of course, a joke of Lamb's, for Wainewright had nothing to do with the essay named- "Rejoicings on the New Year's Coming of Age." Nor did Lamb visit the Channel Islands.

The list of "Books lately published" in the January number of the magazine contained an announcement of Elia, in one volume, post 8vo, 9s. 6d.

Page 153.

London Magazine, September, 1824.

With this essay Lamb made his reappearance in the magazine, after eight months' absence.

By Blakesmoor Lamb meant Blakesware, the manor-house near Widford, in Hertfordshire, where his grandmother, Mary Field, had been housekeeper for many years. Compare the essay "Dream-Children," page 100.

Blakesware, which was built by Sir Francis Leventhorpe about 1640, became the property of the Plumers in 1683, being then purchased by John Plumer, of New Windsor, who died in 1718. It descended to William Plumer, M.P. for Yarmouth, in the Isle of Wight, and afterwards for Hertfordshire, who died in 1767, and was presumably Mrs. Field's first employer. His widow and the younger children remained at Blakesware until Mrs. Plumer's death in 1778, but the eldest son, William Plumer, moved at once to Gilston, a few miles east of Blakesware, a mansion which for a long time was confused with Blakesware by commentators on Lamb. This William Plumer, who was M.P. for Lewes, for Hertfordshire, and finally for Higham Ferrers, and a governor of Christ's Hospital, kept up Blakesware after his mother's death in 1778 (when Lamb was three) exactly as before, but it remained empty

save for Mrs. Field and the servants under her. Mrs. Field became thus practically mistress of it, as Lamb says in "Dream-Children.” Hence the increased happiness of her grandchildren when they visited her. Mrs. Field died in 1792, when Lamb was seventeen.

William Plumer died in 1822, aged eighty-six, having apparently arranged with his widow, who continued at Gilston, that Blakesware should be pulled down--a work of demolition which at once was begun. This lady, née Jane Hamilton, afterwards married a Mr. Lewin, and then, in 1828, Robert Ward (1765-1846), author of Tremaine and other novels, who took the name of Plumer-Ward, and may be read of, together with curious details of Gilston House, in P. G. Patmore's My Friends and Acquaintances.

Nothing now remains of Lamb's Blakesware, of which a picture is given on the opposite page, but a few mounds, beneath which are bricks and rubble. The present house, the seat of Sir Martin Gosselin, is a

quarter of a mile behind the old one, high on the hill. In Lamb's day this hillside was known as the Wilderness, and where now is turf were formal walks with clipped yew hedges and here and there a statue. The stream of which he speaks is the Ashe, running close by the walls of the old house. Standing there now, among the trees which mark its site, it is easy to reconstruct the past as described in the essay. The above map of Blakesware and Widford has been prepared for me by Miss M. C. G. Jackson.

The Twelve Cæsars, the tapestry and other more notable possessions of Blakesware, although moved to Gilston on the demolition of Blakesware, are there no longer, and their present destination is a mystery. Gilston was pulled down in 1853, following upon a sale by auction, when all its treasures were dispersed. Some, I have discovered, were bought by the enterprising tenant of the old Rye House Inn at Broxbourne, but absolute identification of anything now seems impossible.

Blakesware is again described in Mrs. Leicester's School, in Mary Lamb's story of "The Young Mahometan" (see Vol. III.). There the Twelve Cæsars are spoken of as hanging on the wall, as if they were medallions; but Mr. E. S. Bowlby tells me that he perfectly remembers the Twelve Cæsars at Gilston, about 1850, as busts, just as Lamb says. In "Rosamund Gray" (see Vol. I., page 25) Lamb describes the Blakesware wilderness. See also notes to "The Last Peach," Vol. I., page 501, to "Dream-Children" in this volume, page 377, and to "Going or Gone," Vol. V., page 319.

Lamb has other references to Blakesware and the irrevocability of his happiness there as a child, in his letters. Writing to Southey on October 31, 1799, he says::

"Dear Southey,-I have but just got your letter, being returned from Herts, where I have passed a few red-letter days with much pleasure. I would describe the county to you, as you have done by Devonshire; but alas! I am a poor pen at that same. I could tell you of an old house with a tapestry bedroom, the Judgment of Solomon' composing one pannel, and 'Acteon spying Diana naked' the other. I could tell of an old marble hall, with Hogarth's prints, and the Roman Cæsars in marble hung round. I could tell of a wilderness, and of a village church, and where the bones of my honoured grandam lie; but there are feelings which refuse to be translated, sulky aborigines, which will not be naturalised in another soil. Of this nature are old family faces, and scenes of infancy."

And again, to Bernard Barton, in August, 1827 :

"You have well described your old-fashioned grand paternall Hall. Is it not odd that every one's earliest recollections are of some such place. I had my Blakesware (Blakesmoor in the 'London'). Nothing fills a child's mind like a large old Mansion . . . better if un- or partially-occupied; peopled with the spirits of deceased members of the County and Justices of the Quorum. Would I were buried in the peopled solitude of one, with my feelings at 7 years old!

"Those marble busts of the Emperors, they seem'd as if they were to stand for ever, as they had stood from the living days of Rome, in that old Marble Hall, and I to partake of their permanency; Eternity was, while I thought not of Time. But he thought of me, and they are toppled down, and corn covers the spot of the noble old Dwelling and its princely gardens. I feel like a grasshopper that chirping about the grounds escaped his scythe only by my littleness. Ev'n now he is whetting one of his smallest razors to clean wipe me out, perhaps. Well!"

Writing to Barton in August, 1824, concerning the present essay, Lamb describes it as a "futile effort 'wrung from me with slow pain'."

Page 155, lines 2-6. Ovid. The Metamorphoses relate (Book III.) how Acteon, for daring to behold Diana and her attendants bathing, was changed to a stag and hunted to death. In Book VI. we have