That, in particular, it is the posture best suited to contemplation. That it is that, in which the hen (a creature of all others best fitted to be a pattern of careful provision for a family) performs the most beautiful part of her maternal office. That it is that, in which judges deliberate, and senators take counsel. That a Speaker of the House of Commons at a debate, or a Lord Chancellor over a suit, will oftentimes sit as long as many tailors. Lastly, let these scoffers take heed, lest themselves, while they mock at others, be found 'sitting in the seat of the scornful.'"
[66] "It is notorious that to call a man a tailor, is to heap the utmost contempt upon him which the language of the streets can convey. Barber's clerk is an appellative less galling than this. But there is a word, which, though apparently divested of all ill meaning, has for some people a far deeper sting than either. It is the insulting appellation of governor, with which a black-guard, not in anger, but in perfect good will, salutes your second-rate gentry, persons a little above his own cut. He rarely bestows it upon the topping gentry of all, but reserves it for those of a rank or two above his own, or whose garb is rather below their rank. It is a word of approximation. A friend of mine will be melancholy a great while after, from being saluted with it. I confess I have not altogether been unhonoured with it myself."
It is told of Lamb that he once said he would sit with anything but a hen or a tailor.
Page 200. Motto. From Virgil's Æneid, Book VI., lines 617, 618. "There luckless Theseus sits, and shall sit for ever."
Page 201, line 25. Beautiful motto. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who married Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII., appeared at a tournament with a saddle-cloth made half of frieze and half of cloth of gold. Each side had a symbolical motto. One ran:—
Cloth of frize, be not too bold,
Though thou art match'd with cloth of gold.
The other:—
Cloth of gold do not despise,
Though thou art match'd with cloth of frize.
Page 201, line 3 from foot. Eliot's famous troop. General George Augustus Eliott (afterwards Lord Heathfield), the defender of Gibraltar and the founder of the 15th or King's Own Royal Light Dragoons, now the 15th Hussars, whose first action was at Emsdorf. At the time that regiment was being collected, there was a strike of tailors, many of whom joined it. Eliott, one version of the incident says, wished to get men who never having ridden had not to unlearn any bad methods of riding. Later they were engaged against the Spaniards in Cuba in 1762–1763.
Page 202, line 6. Speculative politicians. Lamb was probably referring to Francis Place (1771–1854), the tailor-reformer, among whose friends were certain of Lamb's own—William Frend, for example.
Page 202. Footnote. "Gladden life." From Johnson's Life of Edmund Smith—"one who has gladdened life"; or possibly from Coombe's "Peasant of Auburn":—
And whilst thy breast matures each patriot plan
That gladdens life and man endears to man.
Page 203, line 22. Dr. Norris's famous narrative. The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris concerning the strange and deplorable Frenzy of Mr. John Dennis was a satirical squib by Pope against the critic John Dennis (1657–1734). The passage referred to by Lamb runs:—
Doct. Pray, Sir, how did you contract the Swelling?
Denn. By a Criticism.
Doct. A Criticism! that's a Distemper I never read of in Galen.
Denn. S' Death, Sir, a Distemper! It is no Distemper, but a Noble Art. I have sat fourteen Hours a Day at it; and are you a Doctor, and don't know there's a Communication between the Legs and the Brain?
Doct. What made you sit so many Hours, Sir?
Denn. Cato, Sir.
Doct. Sir, I speak of your Distemper, what gave you this Tumour?
Denn. Cato, Cato, Cato.
Page 204, line 2. Envious Junos. Lucina, at Juno's bidding, sat cross-legged before Alcmena to prolong her travail. Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica; or, Enquiry into Vulgar Errors, Book V., speaks of the posture as "veneficious," and cites Juno's case.
Page 204, at the end. Well known that this last-named vegetable. This is the old joke about tailors "cabbaging," that is to say, stealing cloth. The term is thus explained in Phillips' History of Cultivated Vegetables:—
The word cabbage … means the firm head or ball that is formed by the leaves turning close over each other. … From thence arose the cant word applied to tailors, who formerly worked at the private houses of their customers, where they were often accused of cabbaging: which means the rolling up of pieces of cloth instead of the list and shreds, which they claim as their due.
Lamb returned to this jest against tailors in his verses "Satan in Search of a Wife," in 1831.
In The Champion for December 11, 1814, was printed a letter defending tailors against Lamb.
Page 204. On Needle-Work.
The British Lady's Magazine and Monthly Miscellany, April 1, 1815. By Mary Lamb.
The authority for attributing this paper to Mary Lamb is Crabb Robinson. In his Diary for December 11, 1814, he writes: "I called on Miss Lamb, and chatted with her. She was not unwell, but she had undergone great fatigue from writing an article about needle-work for the new Ladies' British Magazine. She spoke of writing as a most painful occupation, which only necessity could make her attempt."
We know that Mary Lamb's needle was required to help keep the Lamb family, not only after Samuel Salt's death in 1792, when they had to move from the Temple, but very likely while they were there also. In one of the newspaper accounts of the tragedy of September, 1796, she is described as "a mantua-maker." Possibly she continued to sew for a while after she joined her brother, in 1799, but she would hardly call that "early life," being thirty-five in that year.
Page 210. On the Poetical Works of George Wither.
This is the one prose article that, to the best of our knowledge, made its first and only appearance in the Works (1818). It was inspired by John Mathew Gutch (1776–1861), Lamb's schoolfellow at Christ's Hospital, with whom he shared rooms in Southampton Buildings in 1800. Later, when Gutch had become proprietor, at Bristol, of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal (in which many of Chatterton's poems had appeared), he took advantage of his press to set up a private
