XII., LXXXIV. I have left the sonnets as Lamb copied them, but there are certain differences. For example (page 215), Sonnet II., line 9, "sweet" should be "smooth;" line 10, "to" and "to" should be "of" and "of;" line 12, "by" should be "in." Sonnet III., line 7, "my" should be "of." Sonnet IV., line 11, "worse" should be "worst." Page 217, Sonnet IX., line 12, "me" should be "we." Sonnet XI., line 2, should run :

I saw thee with full many a smiling line;

line 6, "beauty" should be "beauties."

Page 218, line 9. "Learning and of chivalry." Misquoted from Spenser's dedication of the Shepheards' Calendar to Sidney:

Go, little booke: thy selfe present,

As child whose parent is unkent,
To him that is the president,

Of Noblesse and of chivalrie.

Page 218, line 13. Which I have... heard objected. A criticism of Hazlitt's, in his sixth lecture on Elizabethan literature, delivered in 1820 at the Surrey Institution, is here criticised. Hazlitt's remarks on Sidney were uniformly slighting. "His sonnets inlaid in the Arcadia are jejune, far-fetch'd and frigid. . . . [The Arcadia] is to me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power upon record. . . . [Sidney_is] a complete intellectual coxcomb, or nearly so;" and so forth. The lectures were published in 1821. Elsewhere, however, Hazlitt found in Sidney much to praise.

Page 218, line 16. Trampling horses' feet." See line 3 of the 12th Sonnet, on page Page 218, line 30.

217.

Thin diet of dainty words. To this sentence, in the London Magazine, Lamb put the following footnote:

"A profusion of verbal dainties, with a disproportionate lack of matter and circumstance, is I think one reason of the coldness with which the public has received the poetry of a nobleman now living; which, upon the score of exquisite diction alone, is entitled to something better than neglect. I will venture to copy one of his Sonnets in this place, which for quiet sweetness, and unaffected morality, has scarcely its parallel in our language.

"TO A BIRD THAT HAUNTED THE WATERS OF LACKEN IN THE WINTER "By Lord Thurlow

"O melancholy Bird, a winter's day,
Thou standest by the margin of the pool,

And, taught by God, dost thy whole being school

To Patience, which all evil can allay.

God has appointed thee the Fish thy prey;

And given thyself a lesson to the Fool

Unthrifty, to submit to moral rule,

And his unthinking course by thee to weigh.
There need not schools, nor the Professor's chair,
Though these be good, true wisdom to impart.

He who has not enough, for these, to spare
Of time, or gold, may yet amend his heart,
And teach his soul, by brooks, and rivers fair :
Nature is always wise in every part."

This sonnet, by Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow (1781-1829), an intense devotee of Sir Philip Sidney's muse, was a special favourite with Lamb. He copied it into his Commonplace Book, and De Quincey has described, in his "London Reminiscences,' how Lamb used to read it aloud.

Page 218, line 37. critic of our day." Page 219, line 3.

Hazlitt."

W. H. In the London Magazine, "a favourite

The Critic. In the London Magazine, "Mr.

Page 219, line 4. A foolish nobleman. Lamb refers to Sidney's quarrel in the tennis-court with the Earl of Oxford, who called him "a puppy."

Page 219, line 5. Epitaph made on him. After these words, in the London Magazine, came "by Lord Brooke." Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, wrote Sidney's Life, published in 1652. After Sidney's death appeared many elegies upon him, eight of which were printed at the end of Spenser's Colin Clout's Come Home Again, in 1595. That which Lamb quotes is by Matthew Roydon, Stanzas 15 to 18 and 26 and 27. The poem beginning "Silence augmenteth grief" is 'attributed to Brooke, chiefly on Lamb's authority, in Ward's English Poets. This is one stanza :

He was (woe worth that word!) to each well-thinking mind

A spotless friend, a matchless man, whose virtue ever shined,
Declaring in his thoughts, his life and that he writ,

Highest conceits, longest foresights, and deepest works of wit.

Sidney was only thirty-two at his death.

Page 220. NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.

Englishman's Magazine, October, 1831, being the second paper under the heading "Peter's Net," of which "Recollections of a Late Royal Academician" was the first (see note, Vol. I., page 331).

The title ran thus :

PETER'S NET

BY THE AUTHOR OF "ELIA"

No. II.-On the Total Defect of the faculty of Imagination observable in the works of modern British Artists.

For explanation of this title see note to the essay that follows, page 446. When reprinting the essay in the Last Essays of Elia, 1833, Lamb altered the title to the one it now bears: the period referred to thus seeming to be about 1798, but really 1801-1803.

Page 220, line 5. Dan Stuart. See next page.

Page 220, line 6. The Exhibition at Somerset House. Between the years 1780 and 1838 the Royal Academy held its exhibitions at Somerset House. It then moved, first to Trafalgar Square, next to the National Gallery, and to Burlington House, its present quarters, in 1869. The Morning Post office is still almost opposite Somerset House, at the corner of Wellington Street.

Page 220, line 14. A word or two of D. S. Daniel Stuart (17661846), one of the Perthshire Stuarts, whose father was out in the '45, and his grandfather in the '15, began, with his brother, to print the Morning Post in 1788. In 1795 they bought it for £600, Daniel assumed the editorship, and in two years' time the circulation had risen from 350 to 1,000. Mackintosh (afterwards Sir James), Stuart's brotherin-law, was on the staff; and in 1797 Coleridge began to contribute. Coleridge's "Devil's Walk" was the most popular thing printed in Stuart's time; his political articles also helped enormously to give the paper prestige. Stuart sold the Morning Post in 1803 for £25,000, and then turned his attention to the development of The Courier, an evening paper, in which he also had occasional assistance from Coleridge and more regular help from Mackintosh.

Lamb's memory served him badly in the essay. So far as I can discover, his connection with the Morning Post, instead of ending when Stuart sold the paper, can hardly be said to have existed until after that event. The paper changed hands in September, 1803 (two years after the failure of The Albion), and Lamb's hand almost immediately begins to be apparent. He had, we know, made earlier efforts to get a footing there, but had been only moderately successful. The first specimens prepared for Stuart, in 1800, were not accepted. In the late summer of 1801 he was writing for the Morning Chronicle— a few comic letters, as I imagine-under James Perry; but that lasted only a short time. At the end of 1801 Lamb tried the Post again. In January and February, 1802, Stuart printed some epigrams by him on public characters, two criticisms of G. F. Cooke, in Richard III. and Lear, and the essay "The Londoner" (see Vol. I., pages 36, 39 and 399). Possibly there were also some paragraphs. In a letter to Rickman in January, 1802, Lamb says that he is leaving the Post, partly on account of his difficulty in writing dramatic criticisms on the same night as the performance.

We know nothing of Lamb's journalistic adventures between February, 1802, and October, 1803, when the fashion of pink stockings came in, and when he was certainly back on the Post (Stuart having sold it to establish The Courier), and had become more of a journalist than he had ever been. I quote a number of the paragraphs which I take to be his on this rich topic; but the specimen given in the essay

is not discoverable :

"Oct. 8.-The fugitive and mercurial matter, of which a Lady's blush is made, after coursing from its natural position, the cheek, to the tip of the elbow, and thence diverging for a time to the knee, has finally

settled in the legs, where, in the form of a pair of red hose, it combines with the posture and situation of the times, to put on a most warlike and martial appearance."

"Nov. 2.-BARTRAM, who, as a traveller, was possessed of a very lively fancy, describes vast plains in the interior of America, where his horse's fetlocks for miles were dyed a perfect blood colour, in the juice of the wild strawberries. A less ardent fancy than BARTRAM'S may apply this beautiful phenomenon of summer, to solve the present strawberry appearance of the female leg this autumn in England."

"Nov. 3.-The roseate tint, so agreeably diffused through the silk stockings of our females, induces the belief that the dye is cast for their lovers."

“Nov. 8.—A popular superstition in the North of Germany is said to be the true original of the well-known sign of Mother REDCAP. Who knows but that late posterity, when, what is regarded by us now as fashion, shall have long been classed among the superstitious observances of an age gone by, may dignify their signs with the antiquated personification of a Mother RED LEGS?"

"Nov. 9.-Curiosity is on tip-toe for the arrival of ELPHY BEY's fair Circassian Ladies. The attraction of their naturally-placed, fine, proverbial bloom, is only wanting to reduce the wandering colour in the 'elbows' and 'ancles' of our belles, back to its native metropolis and palace, the 'cheek.'

"Nov. 22.-Pink stockings beneath dark pelices are emblems of Sincerity and Discretion; signifying a warm heart beneath a cool exterior."

"Nov. 29.-The decline of red stockings is as fatal to the wits, as the going out of a fashion to an overstocked jeweller: some of these gentry have literally for some months past fed on roses."

"Dec. 21.—The fashion of red stockings, so much cried down, dispraised, and followed, is on the eve of departing, to be consigned to the family tomb of all the fashions,' where sleep in peace the ruffs and hoops, and fardingales of past centuries; and

On February 7, 1804, was printed Lamb's "Epitaph on a young Lady who Lived Neglected and Died Obscure" (see Vol. V., page 80), and now and then we find a paragraph likely to be his; but, as we know from a letter from Mary Lamb to Sarah Stoddart, he had left the Post

in the early spring, 1804. I think this was the end of his journalism, until he began to write a little for The Examiner in 1812.

In 1838 Stuart was drawn into a correspondence with Henry Coleridge in the Gentleman's Magazine (May, June, July and August) concerning some statements about Coleridge's connection with the Morning Post and The Courier which were made in Gillman's Life. Stuart, in the course of straightening out his relations with Coleridge, referred thus to Lamb:

But as for good Charles Lamb, I never could make anything out of his writings. Coleridge often and repeatedly pressed me to settle him on a salary, and often and repeatedly did I try; but it would not do. Of politics he knew nothing; they were out of his line of reading and thought; and his drollery was vapid, when given in short paragraphs fit for a newspaper; yet he has produced some agreeable books, possessing a tone of humour and kind feeling, in a quaint style, which it is amusing to read, and cheering to remember.

For further remarks concerning Lamb's journalism see below when we come to The Albion and his connection with it.

Page 220, line 15. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle. James Perry (1756-1821), the editor of the Morning Chronicle-the leading Whig paper, for many years-from about 1789. Perry was a noted talker and the friend of many brilliant men, among them Porson. Southey's letters inform us that Lamb was contributing to the Chronicle in the summer of 1801, and I fancy I see his hand now and then; but his identifiable contributions to the paper came much later than the period under notice. Coleridge contributed to it a series of sonnets to eminent persons in 1794, in one of which, addressed to Mrs. Siddons, he collaborated with Lamb (see Vol. V., page 3, and note). Page 220, line 21. "With holy reverence Mr. W. J. Craig ran these lines to earth in the Scottish poet, William Armstrong's The Art of Preserving Health, 1744. The passage (Book II., lines 357-360)

runs:

I hear the din

Of waters thundering o'er the ruined cliffs,

With holy rev'rence I approach the rocks
Whence glide the streams renown'd in ancient song.

Page 220, line 23. The Abyssinian Pilgrim. For notes to this passage about the New River see page 434.

Page 221, line 7. The Gnat. Virgil is supposed to have written as quite a young man some small bucolic poems before the Bucolica, the earliest work known to be his. Among them was the "Culex" or Gnat. It was translated by Spenser.

Page 221, line 8. The Duck... Samuel Johnson trod on.

There has been another story of his [Johnson's] infant precocity, generally circulated, and generally believed, the truth of which I am to refute upon his own authority. It is told [by Mrs. Piozzi and Sir John Hawkins] that, when a child of three years old, he chanced to tread upon a duckling, the eleventh of a brood, and killed it ; upon which, it is said, he dictated to his mother the following epitaph: