essay will be found in a letter from him to Walter Savage Landor on October 9, 1832, where he writes:—
"Next, I forgot to tell you I knew all your Welsh annoyancers, the measureless B.'s. I knew a quarter of a mile of them. Seventeen brothers and sixteen sisters, as they appear to me in memory. There was one of them that used to fix his long legs on my fender, and tell a tale of a shark every night, endless, immortal. How have I grudged the salt-sea ravener not having had his gorge of him! The shortest of the daughters measured five foot eleven without her shoes. Well, some day we may confer about them. But they were tall. Truly, I have discover'd the longitude."
Lamb also returned to the charge a little later in the Popular Fallacy "That Home is Home." The first idea for both this essay and the Fallacy we find in the letter to Mrs. Wordsworth dated February 18, 1818. Lamb also utilised a portion of this essay in his Popular Fallacy "That You must Love Me, and Love My Dog," published in February, 1826.
Page 318, last line. Captain Beacham. From the letter to Landor we know this name to have disguised that of a brother of the Lambs' friend, Matilda Betham, the author of The Lay of Marie.
Page 319. II.—Readers against the Grain.
The New Times, January 13, 1825. Signed "Lepus."
Page 322. III.—Mortifications of an Author.
The New Times, January 31, 1825. Signed "Lepus."
Page 322, line 7 from foot. A——n C——m. Allan Cunningham.
Page 324. IV.—Tom Pry.
The New Times, February 8, 1825. Signed "Lepus."
The original of this character sketch was probably Thomas Hill, the drysalter, whom Lamb knew well. S. C. Hall's Book of Memories, p. 157, says: "His peculiar faculty was to find out what everybody did, from a minister of state to a stable-boy," etc. etc. John Poole's famous play "Paul Pry," in which Liston played so admirably, was not produced until September of this year, 1825. Lamb and Poole had a slight acquaintance through the London Magazine, to which Poole contributed dramatic burlesques. Lamb had given to the landlord in "Mr. H.," in 1806, the name and character of Pry.
Page 324, line 5 of essay. Like the man in the play. Chremes, in the opening scene of the Heauton Timoroumenos by Terence (line 77), says: "Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto". I am a man and to nothing that concerns mankind am I indifferent.
Page 325, line 8. "Usque recurrit." Horace's Epist., L, x., lines 24–25:—
Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret,
Et mala perrumpet furtim fastidia victrix.
(You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, yet she will persistently return, and will stealthily break through depraved fancies, and be winner.)
Page 326. V.—Tom Pry's Wife.
The New Times, February 28, 1825. Signed "Lepus."
In a letter from Lamb to the Kenneys, of which the date is uncertain, we get an inkling as to the identity of Mrs. Pry:—
"I suppose you know we've left the Temple pro tempore. By the way, this conduct has caused many strange surmises in a good lady of our acquaintance. She lately sent for a young gentleman of the India House, who lives opposite her at Monroe's the flute shop in Skinner Street, Snowhill—I mention no names. You shall never get out of me what lady I mean—on purpose to ask all he knew about us. I had previously introduced him to her whist table. Her inquiries embraced every possible thing that could be known of me—how I stood in the India House, what was the amount of my salary, what it was likely to be hereafter, whether I was thought clever in business, why I had taken country lodgings, why at Kingsland in particular, had I friends in that road, was anybody expected to visit me, did I wish for visitors, would an unexpected call be gratifying or not, would it be better that she sent beforehand, did any body come to see me, was not there a gentleman of the name of Morgan, did he know him, didn't he come to see me, did he know how Mr. Morgan lived, she could never make out how they were maintained, was it true he lived out of the profits of a linen draper's shop in Bishopsgate Street?"
Mrs. Godwin's address was 41 Skinner Street.
Again, Mary Lamb tells Sarah Hazlitt on November 7, 1809: "Charles told Mrs. Godwin Hazlitt had found a well in his garden which, water being scarce in your country, would bring him in two hundred a year; and she came in great haste the next morning to ask me if it were true."
Page 327. VI.—A Character.
The New Times, August 25, 1825. Signed "Lepus."
This differed from the five papers that have preceded it in inaugurating a new series entitled "Sketches Original and Select." Lepus, however, contributed no more. I have no idea who the original Egomet was, possibly an India House clerk. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the Janus Weathercock of the London Magazine, had occasionally used the pseudonym Egomet Bonmot, and Lamb may have borrowed it.
Page 328, line 26. "There is no reciprocity." Lamb may have been remembering a story in Joe Miller about the reciprocity being "all on one side."
Page 328, line 6 from foot. "Nimium vicini." In allusion to Virgil's (Ecl., IX., 28) "Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremonæ"—"Mantua alas, too near ill-starred Cremona" (for it shared the fate of Cremona, which had rebelled against Augustus and suffered confiscation). Lamb comments in his "Popular Fallacies" upon Swift's punning use of the phrase.
Page 329. Reflections in the Pillory.
London Magazine, March, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.
The editor's note is undoubtedly Lamb's, as is, of course, the whole imaginary story. It must have been about this time that Lamb was writing his "Ode to the Treadmill" which appeared in The New Times in October, 1825.
The pillory, which has not been used in this country since 1837, was latterly kept principally for seditious and libellous offenders. In May, 1812, for instance, Eaton, the publisher of Tom Paine's Age of Reason, stood in the pillory. The time was usually one hour, as in the case of Lamb's hero, the victim being a quarter turned at each fifteen minutes, in order that every member of the crowd might witness the disgrace. The offender's neck and wrists were fixed in holes cut for the purpose in a plank fastened crosswise to an upright pole. The London pillories were erected in different spots—at Charing Cross, in the Haymarket, in St. Martin's Lane, opposite the Royal Exchange, and elsewhere.
