NOTES.

CHARLES LAMB.

66

Text. Modern texts of The Superannuated Man differ from the original of the London Magazine, May, 1825. Though complete variorum readings would here be wholly out of place, it is well in adopting the familiar current text to note briefly some of the more important deviations from the original. Disregarding variations of spelling and word-compounding and other minor changes, two differences may be considered briefly. (1) The original text is divided into two parts, the first headed with the quotation from Vergil; the second-beginning with the sentence, "A fortnight has passed since the date of my first communication "-headed with the quotation from O'Keefe. (2) The original text has an additional half-page in the next to the last paragraph. After the sentence concluding, "and what is it all for?" Lamb quotes five lines from Cowley and in full his own sonnet on "Work", while a few added prose sentences glorify still further "divine Leisure!" The insertion of a foot-note on the Puritan Sabbath and one or two other interesting variations in the text are referred to below.

Heading. Superannuated Man. -Simply "retired on pension", as for example: "Mr. John Dickens, the father, was superannuated in 1816, while yet in the prime of life, and allowed a pension, according to the liberal practice in England." -R. S. Mackenzie, Life of Dickens, chapter I.

The quotation is from Vergil: Eclogue I. 28, where the order of words is, "Libertas ; quæ sera, tamen respexit inertem."

O'Keefe.-Almost certainly John O'Keeffe (1747–1833), an Irish dramatist who removed to London about 1780, and wrote frequent comic pieces for the Haymarket and Covent Garden theatres.

5: 10. Six-and-thirty years.-Lamb's "irksome confine.

ment" to his office-desk lasted from his entrance into the South Sea House, soon after leaving school in November, 1789, until his retirement from the India House, March 29, 1825.

5 11. Mincing Lane.-Leads off Fenchurch Street, between the Bank of England and the Tower of London.

5: 12. Transition at fourteen.-Lamb (born February 10, 1775), left Christ's Hospital School in November, 1789.

6:4. In the original text this foot-note is here appended : "Our ancestors, the noble old Puritans of Cromwell's day, could distinguish between a day of religious rest and a day of recreation; and while they exacted a rigorous abstinence from all amusements (even to the walking out of nursery maids with their little charges in the fields) upon the Sabbath; in the lieu of the superstitious observance of the Saints' days, which they abrogated, they humanely gave to the apprentices, and poorer sort of people, every alternate Thursday for a day of entire sport and recreation. A strain of piety and policy to be commended above the profane mockery of the Stuarts and their Book of Sports." A striking parallel to this note is found in an undated letter to Barton: "The Puritans, I have read in Southey's book, knew the distinction [between holliday and HOLY-day]. They made people observe Sunday rigorously, would not let a nursery-maid walk out in the fields with children for recreation on that day. But then-they gave the people a holliday from all sorts of work every second Tuesday."

69. Lamb's delight in London shops and street-life was unflagging. Letter to Thomas Manning (1800), a mathematical tutor at Cambridge when he first met Lamb, in 1799: "London, whose dirtiest drab-frequented alley, and her lowest bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn, James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardware-men, pastry-cooks! St. Paul's churchyard! the Strand! Exeter Change! Charing Cross, with the man upon a black horse! These are thy gods, O London!" Letter to Wordsworth, January 30, 1801: "I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life." Even after his visit to the English Lakes in 1802, when with Coleridge he climbed Mount

Skiddaw, he wrote to Manning, September 24:

"After all,

Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw."

6:27. Lamb took keen zest in his short holidays. On September 28, 1805, he wrote to Wordsworth : "We [Mary and Charles Lamb] have been two tiny excursions this summer for three or four days each, to a place near Harrow, and to Egham, where Cooper's Hill is; and that is the total history of our rustications this year."

6:29. In the Elia essay, Mackery End, in Hertfordshire, Lamb says: "The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End.. a farm-house,-delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I can just remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, under the care of Bridget" (his sister Mary). The sketch describes a visit after "more than forty years had elapsed."

7:4-7. Letter to Miss Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth's sister, April 18, 1825: "I go about quiet, and have none of that restless hunting after recreation, which made holidays formerly uneasy joys."

7: 12. Despite constant references to his office "thraldom", Lamb had a lively sense of the advantages of his fixed income. On January 9, 1823, he vigorously dissuades his friend Barton from abandoning his position in a bank for his favorite avocation, poetry. "Oh, you know not, may you never know! the miseries of subsisting by authorship. 'Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours or mine; but a slavery, worse than all slavery, to be a bookseller's dependant, to drudge your brains for pots of ale and breasts of mutton, to change your free thoughts and voluntary numbers for ungracious task-work.

7:17. In a letter to Manning (probably early in 1825), he writes of his joy in a physician's certificate "that I am non-capacitated, (I cannot write it in-) for business. O joyous imbecility! 7:25. Fifty years of age.-Lamb's exact age in 1825. 7:27. September 11, 1822, letter to Barton: "I am, like you, a prisoner to the desk. have been chained to that galley thirty years, a long shot. I have almost grown to the wood."

8: I. The real account of Lamb's resignation from the India House is given in a letter to Miss Hutchinson, April 18, 1825:

intimation that a resigThis was a kind bird's

"You want to know all about my jail delivery. Take it then. About twelve weeks since I had a sort of nation might be well accepted from me. whisper. On that hint I spake. G— and T————— furnished me with certificates of wasted health and sore spirits-not much more than the truth, I promise you-and for nine weeks I was kept in a fright. I had gone too far to recede, and they might take advantage and dismiss me with a much less sum than I had reckoned on. However, liberty came at last, with a liberal provision." It will be seen that Lamb, rhough varying the details, gives essentially the facts of his own story in the Elia sketch. L. The fictitious Lacy mentioned below.

8: 2. 8:15.

Letter to Wordsworth, April 6, 1825: "I came home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week." April 6 was Wednesday, and the preceding Tuesday was March 29.

8:24. B

9:4.

The fictitious Bosanquet mentioned below.

Pension for life.-According to the Rev. Canon Ainger in the Dictionary of National Biography Lamb's pension amounted to "three-fourths of his salary, with a slight deduction to insure an allowance for his sister in the event of her surviving."

9: 13, 14. The India House is here represented as a private firm. No such men were directors of the India House at the time of Lamb's retirement.

9:15. Esto perpetua.-The last words of Father Paul (or Paolo) Sarpi (1552-1623) spoken with reference to his native Venice. See H. T. Riley's Dictionary of Classical Quotations. 9: 16. The April 6 letter to Wordsworth contains many phrases that are reproduced almost without change in this paragraph of the Elia essay: "The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity. . . . But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift. Holidays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys; their conscious fugitiveness; the craving after making the most of them. Now, when all is holiday, there are no holidays. I can sit at home, in rain or shine, without a restless impulse for walkings. I lay no anxious schemes for going hither and thither, but take things as they Occur. Yesterday I excursioned twenty miles; to-day I write a few letters,"

10: 27. April 6 letter to Wordsworth: "Every year to be as long as three, i.e., to have three times as much real time-time that is my own, in it!"-Letter to Barton (April): "I will live another fifty years; or, if I live but ten, they will be thirty, reckoning the quantity of real time in them, i.e., the time that is a man's own.'

11:17-21. The lines are spoken by Verginia, "the Vestal", ", in The Vestal Virgin, Act V., Scene 1. Sir Robert Howard (1626– 1698) was the brother-in-law of Dryden.

II: 22. The very striking parallel in a letter to Barton (April) has already been quoted in the introductory note to this sketch. 12: 15. Ch; Do—; Pl. Names probably as fictitious as those in the house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, and Lacy."

12: 18. Gresham.-A distinguished family. Sir Richard Gresham was Lord Mayor of London in 1537, and his younger brother, Sir John, was Lord Mayor ten years later. Lamb probably had in mind Sir Thomas Gresham (1519?-1579), a wealthy government financier, who erected (1564–68) at his own expense the Royal Exchange for merchants, in memory of his only son who died at the age of twenty in 1564.

12: 18. Whittington. Richard Whittington (d. 1423), a

wealthy mercer who became Lord Mayor of London. "Dick' Whittington and his cat have become the heroes of popular ballads, puppet-shows, and nursery tales, which follow history chiefly in finally making Whittington Lord Mayor of London.

12:27. Aquinas.-The works of St. Thomas Aquinas, the illustrious theological philosopher of the thirteenth century, fill many folio volumes.

12: 29. In the original text the sketch is here divided, the title reading, "THE SUPERANNUATED MAN.-No. II.", followed by the quotation from O'Keefe.

13:6.

Carthusian.-The Carthusian order of monks in the Roman Catholic Church was founded by St. Bruno in the eleventh century.

13: II.

Bond Street. The various streets mentioned in this paragraph may all be located readily on the maps in Baedeker's London.

13:22.

'Change time.—The Royal Exchange building that