Linguarum, The Art of Punning; or, The Flower of Languages, by Dr. Sheridan and Swift, which will be found in Vol. XIII. of Scott's edition of Swift. Among the directions to the punster is this: Rule 3. The Brazen Rule. He must have better assurance, like Brigadier C――, who said, "That, as he was passing through a street, he made to a country fellow who had a hare swinging on a stick over his shoulder, and, giving it a shake, asked him whether it was his own hair or a periwig! Whereas it is a notorious Oxford jest. Page 259, line 10. Virgil... broken Cremona. Swift (as Lamb explained in the original essay in the New Monthly Magazine), seeing a lady's mantua overturning a violin (possibly a Cremona), quoted Virgil's line: "Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremona !" (Eclogues, IX., 28), "Mantua, alas! too near unhappy Cremona." Page 259. X.-THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES. Whether a Mrs. Conrady existed, or was invented or adapted by Lamb to prove his point, I have not been able to discover. But the evidence of Lamb's "reverence for the sex," to use Procter's phrase, is against her existence. The Athenæum reviewer on February 16, 1833, says, however, quoting the fallacy: "Here is a portrait of Mrs. Conrady. We agree with the writer that no one that has looked on her can pretend to forget the lady.'" Page 259, second line of essay. If we may believe Plotinus. Part of the theory of Plotinus (205-270), the Neo-Platonic philosopher. In this sentence, Mr. W. J. Craig conjectures, Lamb was paraphrasing Dryden's lines in Absalom and Achitophel (156-158):— " A fiery soul, which working out its way, And o'er-informed the tenement of clay. Page 259, at foot. Divine Spenser. The lines are in Spenser's Hymn in Honour of Beauty," Stanza 19; as also is the next quotation, Stanza 21. Not quite correctly quoted. Don Quixote's charger. Page 261. XI.—THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE IN THE MOUTH. New Monthly Magazine, April, 1826. Page 261, fifth line of essay. Rozinante. Page 261, seventh line of essay. Eclipse or Lightfoot. Famous race-horses. Eclipse was never beaten. He won 344 races and £158,000. Page 261, third line from foot. Our friend Mitis. I do not identify Mitis among Lamb's many friends. Page 262, line 16. Presentation copies. The late Mr. Thomas Westwood, the son of the Westwoods with whom the Lambs lived at Edmonton, writing to Notes and Queries some thirty years ago, gave an amusing account of Lamb pitching presentation copies out of the window into the garden-a Barry Cornwall, a Bernard Barton, a Leigh Hunt and so forth. Page 262, line 31. Odd presents of game. Compare the little essay on "Presents of Game," Vol. I., page 343, and note. quotation. Plump corpusculum." I have not traced this Certain restrictive regulations. Page 262, line 42. The gamelaws. "The hare. . makes many friends," is an allusion to Gay's version of Æsop's fable, "The Hare and Many Friends." . Page 263. XII. THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY. New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826. In that place the first sentence began with the word "Two; the second ended with "of our assertions; and (fourteenth line of essay) it was said of the very poor man that he "can ask " no visitors. Lamb, in a letter, wished Wordsworth particularly to like this fallacy and that on rising with the lark, page 269. See Page 264, line 22. It has been prettily said. By Lamb himself, or more probably by his sister, in Poetry for Children, 1809. "The First Tooth," Vol. III., which ends upon the line A child is fed with milk and praise. Page 265, line 10. There is yet another home. Writing to Mrs. Wordsworth on February 18, 1818, Lamb gives a painful account, very similar in part to this essay, of the homeless home to which he was reduced by visitors. But by the time he wrote the essay, when all his day was his own, the trouble was not acute. He tells Bernard Barton on March 20, 1826, “My tirade against visitors was not meant particularly at you or A. K. I scarce know what I meant, for I do not just now feel the grievance. I wanted to make an article." Compare the first of the "Lepus" papers in Vol. I., page 270. Page 265, line 26. It is the refreshing sleep of the day. After this sentence, in the magazine, came this passage: "O the comfort of sitting down heartily to an old folio, and thinking surely that the next hour or two will be your own-and the misery of being defeated by the useless call of somebody, who is come to tell you, that he is just come from hearing Mr. Irving! What is that to you ? Let him go home, and digest what the good man said to him. You are at your chapel, in your oratory." Mr. Irving was the Rev. Edward Irving (1792-1834), whom Lamb knew slightly and came greatly to admire. Page 265, line 29. We have neither much knowledge... Compare Ecclesiastes ix. 10: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest." Page 266, line 14. With Dante's lovers. Paolo and Francesca, in the fifth canto of The Inferno: "Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante." Page 266, line 18. Says. Bishop Taylor. The passage is in "A Discourse of the Nature, Offices, and Measures of Friendship." See Hebers' edition, 1822, Vol. XI., p. 309. Page 266. XIII. THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME, and LOVE MY DOG. New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826. Compare "A Bachelor's Complaint," page 126. I cannot identify the particular friend whom Lamb has hidden under asterisks; although his cousin would seem to have some likeness to one of the Bethams mentioned in the essay "Many Friends" (Vol. I., page 270), and in the letter to Landor of October, 1832 (usually dated April), after his visit to the Lambs. Page 267, line 27. The old "Athenian Oracle." This was a threevolume selection of articles from The Athenian Mercury (originally Athenian Gazette), a kind of Notes and Queries, conducted between 1689 and 1696 by John Dunton (1659-1733) the bookseller. Sir William Temple contributed to it, and Swift's "Pindaric Ode, in the Manner of Cowley," was printed there, which caused Dryden to say, "Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet." Page 267, line 38. Procerity. Height. From proceritas. Page 267, fifth line from foot. Sempronia, etc. Probably Lamb was inventing (see next note). Page 268, line 5. Honorius dismiss his vapid wife. Writing to Bernard Barton on March 20, 1826, Lamb says: "In another thing I talkd of somebody's insipid wife, without a correspondent object in my head: and a good lady, a friend's wife, whom I really love (don't startle, I mean in a licit way) has looked shyly on me ever since. The blunders of personal application are numerous. I send out a character every now and then, on purpose to exercise the ingenuity of my friends." Page 268, line 21. Merry, of Della Cruscan memory. Robert Merry (1755-1798), an affected versifier who settled in Florence as a young man, and contributed to the Florence Miscellany. He became a member of the Della Cruscan Academy, and on returning to England signed his verses, in The World, "Della Crusca." A reply to his first effusion, "Adieu and Recall to Love," was written by Mrs. Hannah Cowley, author of The Belle's Stratagem, and signed "Anna Matilda ;' this correspondence continued ; a fashion of sentiment was thus started; and for a while Della Cruscan poetry was the rage. The principal Della Cruscan poems were published in the British Album in 1789, and the collection was popular until Gifford's Baviad (followed by his Maviad) appeared in 1791, and satirised its conceits so mercilessly that the school collapsed. A meeting with Anna Matilda in the flesh and the discovery that she was twelve years his senior had, however, put an end to Merry's enthusiasm long before Gifford's attack. Merry afterwards threw in his lot with the French Revolution, and died in America. He married, as Lamb says, Elizabeth Brunton, an excellent tragic actress, in 1791. But that was in England. The journey to America came later. The story of Merry's avoidance of the lady of his first choice is probably true. Carlo Antonio Delpini was a famous pantomimist in his day at Drury Lane, Covent Garden and the Haymarket. He also was stage manager at the Opera for a while, and occasionally arranged entertainments for George IV. at Brighton. He died in 1828. Page 268, line 34. The golden shaft. Duke. How will she love, when the rich golden shaft That live in her. "Twelfth Night," Act I., Scene 1, lines 35-37 Page 269. XIV.—THAT WE SHOULD RISE WIth the Lark. New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826. Compare "The Superannuated Man," page 193, to which this little essay, which, with that following, is one of Lamb's most characteristic and perfect works, serves as a kind of postscript. Page 270, line 19. Imperial forgetter of his dreams. Nebuchadnezzar (see Daniel ii.). Page 271. XV. THAT We should Lie down with the Lamb. Page 271, last line. How he burnishes! Mr. W. J. Craig has pointed out that Sussex folk have a phrase "You burnish nicely"-you look well; and suggests that the word here has kindred meaning. But might it not rather apply to the illuminating of the smoker's face by the fire in the pipe stimulated by the redoubled puffs? Burnish— to make bright? Page 272, line 12. Things that were born. .. These lines are from the Apologetical Dialogue at the end of Ben Jonson's "Poetaster." Page 272, line 16. As mine author hath it. Ben Jonson again. In the verses "To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and what He hath Left us : Look how the father's face Lives in his issue; even so the race Of Shakespeare's mind and manners, brightly shines In his well torned, and true filed lines. Page 272, line 19. Milton's Morning Hymn. Beginning: These are thy glorious works, Parent of good. Paradise Lost, V., line 153, &c. This Page 272, line 21. Taylor's richer description of a sun-rise. is in Taylor's Holy Dying, Chapter I., Section III. As it was an especially favourite passage with Lamb I quote it here :— the life of a man comes upon him slowly and insensibly. But as when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those which decked the brow of roses when he was forced to wear a veil because himself had seen the face of God; and still while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets quickly; so is a man's reason and his life. Page 272, line 24. "Blessing the doors." Or the bell-man's drowsy charm To bless the door from nightly harm. Il Penseroso, lines 83, 84. |