other qualities than those of a quaint and conceited writer, is of the same kind as that with which those two great Poets have been treated."
Page 138. Edax on Appetite.
The Reflector, No. IV., 1811. Works, 1818.
Page 138, line 14 from foot. The best of parents. Lamb, of course, is not here autobiographical. His father was no clergyman.
Page 139, line 21. Ventri natus, etc. These nicknames may be roughly translated: Ventri natus, glutton-born; ventri deditus, gluttony-dedicated; vesana gula, greedy gullet; escarum gurges, sink of eatables; dapibus indulgens, feast-lover; non dans fræna gulæ, not curbing the gullet; sectans lautæ fercula mensæ, dainty-hunting.
Page 141, line 15. Mandeville. Bernard Mandeville (1670?-1733), whose Fable of the Bees, 1714, was one of Lamb's favourite books.
Page 145. Hospita on the Immoderate Indulgence of the Palate.
The Reflector, No. IV., 1811. Works, 1818. In The Reflector this letter followed immediately upon that of Edax (see page 138). In his Works Lamb reversed this order. In The Reflector the following footnote was appended, signed Ref.:—
To all appearance, the obnoxious visitor of Hospita can be no other than my inordinate friend Edax, whose misfortunes are detailed, ore rotundo, in the preceding article. He will of course see the complaint that is made against him; but it can hardly be any benefit either to himself or his entertainers. The man's appetite is not a bad habit but a disease; and if he had not thought proper to relate his own story, I do not know whether it would have been altogether justifiable to be so amusing upon such a subject.
Page 147, second paragraph. Mr. Malthus. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), author of the Essay on Population, 1798. He wrote On the High Price of Provisions in 1800.
Page 148. The Good Clerk, a Character.
The Reflector, No. IV., 1811. Signed L. B., possibly as the first and last letters of Lamb. Not reprinted by Lamb.
Page 153, line 12. As Solomon says. Defoe seems to be remembering Proverbs XXII. 7, and possibly Isaiah XXIV. 2.
Sixteen years later, in 1827, William Hone reprinted "The Good Clerk" in his Table Book, I., columns 562–567. The first half was given under its own title; the second half under this title, "Defoeana, No. I., The Tradesman;" followed by a kindred passage from The Fable of the Bees, to which the following note was appended, signed L.:—
"We have copied the above from Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, Edition 1725. How far, and in what way, the practice between the same parties differs at this day, we respectfully leave to our fair shopping friends, of this present year 1827, to determine."
Page 153. Memoir of Robert Lloyd.
Gentleman's Magazine, November, 1811. Not reprinted by Lamb.
Robert Lloyd (1778–1811) was a younger brother of Charles Lloyd, for a while Coleridge's pupil and Lamb's friend of the later nineties, with whom he collaborated in Blank Verse, 1798. They were sons of Charles Lloyd, of Birmingham (1748–1828), the Quaker banker, philanthropist, and, in a quiet private way, a writer of verse (see Charles Lamb and the Lloyds).
Robert Lloyd first met Lamb in 1797; he was then nineteen years old, an apprentice at Saffron Walden. He was inclined to morbidness, though not to the same extent as his brother Charles, and Lamb did what he could to get more health and contentment into him. In 1799 Robert Lloyd seems to have left his father's roof in a state of revolt, and to have settled with Lamb for a while. He returned home, however, and met Manning (who was then teaching Charles Lloyd mathematics at Cambridge), and, after drawing from Lamb several fine letters—notably upon Jeremy Taylor, and that upon Cooke from which I have quoted in the notes above—he passed out of his life until 1809, when, paying a short visit to London, he saw the Lambs again several times.
The autumn of 1811 was a sad one for the Lloyd family. Thomas Lloyd died on September 12, Caroline on October 15, and Robert on October 26. The Gentleman's Magazine obituary just mentions Thomas and Caroline, and passes on to Robert. We know the article to be Lamb's from a letter from Charles Lloyd to Robert's widow, enclosing the memoir (which Lamb had sent to him), and adding, "If I loved him for nothing else, I should now love [Charles Lamb] for the affecting interest that he has taken in the memory of my dearest Brother and Friend."
Page 154. Confessions of a Drunkard.
The Philanthropist, No. IX., 1813. Some Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented Liquors, 1814; second edition, 1818. London Magazine, August, 1822. Last Essays of Elia, second edition, 1835.
The first appearance of this paper was in a quarterly magazine entitled The Philanthropist; or, Repository for Hints and Suggestions calculated to promote the Comfort and Happiness of Man. Vol. III., No. IX., 1813. It was there unsigned and addressed "To the Editor of The Philanthropist." The editor of this magazine was William Allen (1770–1843), the Quaker, and his chief associate was James Mill, the Father of John Stuart Mill. Lamb's friend, Basil Montagu (1770–1851), was among the contributors; and another prominent name was that of Benjamin Meggot Forster (1764–1829), who, like Montagu, opposed capital punishment, and was zealous in the cause of chimney-sweepers.
In its original Philanthropist form the essay differs from its later appearances. Concerning the differences I should like to quote from an interesting article by Mr. Thomas Hutchinson in The Athenæum of August 16, 1902:—
The text of the "Confessions," as it stands in The Philanthropist, bears evident traces of Mill's editorial hand; the verbal changes smack of those precise and literal modes of thought and expression which Lamb found so uncongenial in the Scotsman. "They seemed to have something noble about them," writes Lamb of the friends of 1801. "But moral qualities are not external to us, they are resident in us," objects Mill; and so "about" is struck out and "in" substituted. "Avoid the bottle as you would fly your greatest destruction," says Lamb. "But," interposes the precisian, "the idea of destruction does not admit of more or less; besides, 'to fly' is properly a verb intransitive"—and thus the sentence is rewritten: " … fly from certain destruction." "The pain of the self-denial is all one"—"is equal," substitutes the Scot. "I scarce knew what it was to ail anything"—"to have an ailment," corrects the lover of plain words; and so on. Of the sixth paragraph of the essay only the opening sentence ("Why should I hesitate," etc.) is suffered to stand. The rest is cancelled—doubtless as at variance with Utilitarian views. Again the close of the fourteenth paragraph ("But he is too hard for us," etc., onwards) is struck out—either by Mill, as too broadly implying the existence of the "muckle
