The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb. Charles Lamb
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href="#ulink_4f645f49-367c-5292-8b6a-c4389da781f4">Page 354, line 4 of letter. Poor relative of ours. February 29 (see page 349).
Page 355, line 11. George of Cappadocia, etc. George of Cappadocia was a Bishop of Alexandria in the fourth century, murdered by the populace. There was once a tendency to confuse him with St. George of England. George of Leyden was probably a slip of the pen for John of Leyden, the Anabaptist of Münster. George-a-Green, the hero of the History of George-a-Green, the Pindar of Wakefield, the stoutest opponent that Robin Hood ever met. The story was dramatised in a play attributed to Robert Green. George Dyer was Lamb's friend.
Page 355, line 15. Dismission of a set of men. Referring to the King's overthrow of the Whigs in the Caroline of Brunswick ferment.
To Lamb's letter Hone printed a clever reply.
Page 356. IV.—The Ass.
Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. I., October 5, 1825. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb.
The germ of this paper is found in a letter from Lamb to John Payne Collier in 1821 thanking him for the gift of his Poetical Decameron. After quoting the three lines also quoted in this essay, Lamb remarks, in the letter, "Cervantes, Sterne, and Coleridge, have said positively nothing for asses compared with this."
The immediate cause of the communication to the Every-Day Book was a previous article in praise of asses. Hone prefixed to Lamb's paper the following remarks: "The cantering of Tim Tims [who had written of asses on September 19] startles him who told of his 'youthful days,' at the school wherein poor 'Starkey' cyphered part of his little life. C. L., 'getting well, but weak' from painful and severe indisposition, is 'off and away' for a short discursion. Better health to him, and good be to him all his life. Here he is."
Lamb wrote to Hone in humorous protest against the implication of the phrase "Here he is," immediately above the title "The Ass." "My friends are fairly surprised [he said] that you should set me down so unequivocally for an ass. … Call you that friendship?"
Page 356, foot. "Between the years 1790 and 1800." This passage refers to an article in a previous issue of the Every-Day Book (see Vol. I., September 19) on cruelty to animals, where we read:—
Legislative discussion and interference have raised a feeling of kindness towards the brute creation which slumbered and slept in our forefathers. Formerly, the costermonger was accustomed to make wounds for the express purpose of producing torture. He prepared to drive an ass, that had not been driven, with his knife. On each side of the back bone, at the lower end, just above the tail, he made an incision of two or three inches in length through the skin, and beat into these incisions with his stick till they became open wounds, and so remained, while the ass lived to be driven to and from market, or through the streets of the metropolis. A costermonger, now, would shrink from this, which was a common practice between the years 1790 and 1800.
Page 357, line 9. "Lay on," etc. Anaxarchus, the philosopher, having offended Alexander the Great, was pounded in a stone mortar. During the process he exclaimed: "Pound the body of Anaxarchus; thou dost not pound the soul." Lamb proposed to use the phrase "You beat but on the case of Elia" in the preface to the Essays of Elia as a monition to adverse critics, but he changed his mind.
Page 358, foot. Jem Boyer. See the Elia essay on "Christ's Hospital" in Vol. II. (page 22), and notes to same. "As in præsenti perfectum format in avi"—"as in the present tense makes avi in the perfect"—was the first of the mnemonic rules for the formation of verbs in the old Latin primer (see the old Eton Latin Grammar). Lamb himself makes the pun in a letter to Mrs. Shelley in 1827.
Page 359. V.—In Re Squirrels.
Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. I., October 18, 1825. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb.
On October 7 Hone had reprinted a letter on squirrels from the Gentleman's Magazine. Lamb's postscript to that letter, as this little communication may be called, was thus introduced:—
"Be it remembered, that C. L. comes here and represents his relations, that is to say, on behalf of the recollections, being the next of kin, of him, the said C. L., and of sundry persons who are 'aye treading' in the manner of squirrels aforesaid; and thus he saith:—"
Page 359, line 12. Mr. Urban's correspondent. Mr. Urban—Sylvanus Urban—the dynastic name of the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine. "I know not," says the correspondent, "whether any naturalist has observed that their [squirrels'] teeth are of a deep orange colour."
Page 359, line 22. The author of the "Task" somewhere …
The squirrel, flippant, pert, and full of play,
He sees me, and at once, swift as a bird,
Ascends the neighb'ring beech; there whisks his brush,
And perks his ears, and stamps and scolds aloud,
With all the prettiness of feigned alarm,
And anger insignificantly fierce.
Cowper, The Task, Book VI., "The Winter's Walk at Noon," lines 315–320.
Page 359, foot. As for their "six quavers," etc. The writer in the Gentleman's Magazine describes his squirrels as dancing in their cages to exact time.
Page 359, foot. Along with the "melodious," etc. Referring to the preceding essay, "The Ass."
Page 360. VI.—An Appearance of the Season.
Every-Day Book, Vol. II., January 28, 1826. /a>Not reprinted by Lamb.
We know this to be Lamb's because the original copy was preserved at Rowfant, together with that of many other of Lamb's contributions to Hone's books.
The article in the London Magazine for December, 1822, to which Lamb refers, is entitled "A Few Words about Christmas." It is one of the best of the imitations of Lamb, of which there are many in that periodical, and was possibly from Hood's pen. A full description of Hood's "Progress of Cant" follows Lamb's little paper in the Every-Day Book, probably written by Hone. See page 431.
The motto under the Beadle's picture is from "Lear," Act IV., Scene 6, line 162.
Page 360, line 6 of essay. Within the bills. Within the bills of mortality. Geographically speaking, the phrase "within the bills" was the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth century counterpart of our phrase "within the radius." But the associations of the two terms are very different. The bills were the Bills of Mortality, or lists of deaths (also births) drawn up by the Parish Clerks of London and published by them on Thursdays. Devised as a means of publishing the increase or decrease of the ever-recurrent Plague, the bills were begun in 1592, were resumed during a visitation in 1603, and from that year, except for some interruption at the time of the Great Fire, they appeared week by week, until the middle of the nineteenth century.