By Mary Lamb.  Possibly autobiographical in the matter of the first play.  Charles Lamb’s first play was the opera “Artaxerxes;” Mary’s may quite well have been Congreve’s “Mourning Bride.”  The book-shop at the corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard would be Harris’s (late Newbery’s); that in Skinner Street (No. 41) was, of course, Godwin’s, where Mrs. Leicester’s School was published and sold.  This pleasant art of advertising one’s wares in one’s own children’s books was brought to perfection by Newbery, and by Harris, his successor, whose tiny histories are full of reminders of the merits of the corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard.  By making Mr. Barton hesitate between the two shops and then go to Mrs. Godwin’s, Lamb (for here it was probably he and not his sister) carried the joke a step farther than Newbery.

The following account of the figures on old St. Dunstan’s Church (the children of to-day are taken to Cheapside to see Bennett’s clock) is given in Hughson’s London (1805):—­

On the outside of the church, within a niche and pediment at the south-west end, over the clock, are two figures of savages or wild men, carved in wood, and painted natural colour, as big as the life, standing erect, with each a knotty club in his hand, with which they alternately strike the quarters, not only their arms, but even their heads, moving at every blow.

Moxon tells us that when the old church was pulled down and the figures were removed, Lamb shed tears.  The figures I am told still exist in the garden of the villa in Regent’s Park—­“St. Dunstan’s”—­that once belonged to the Marquis of Hertford and is now the Earl of Londesborough’s London House.

Miss Pearson kept a toy-shop at No. 7 Fleet Street.  The Lambs knew her through Charles’s old schoolmistress, Mrs. Reynolds.

Page 368.  VII.—­Maria Howe.  “The Witch Aunt.”

By Charles Lamb.  This story is peculiarly interesting to students of Lamb’s life, for it describes, probably with absolute fidelity, his Aunt Hetty, and elaborates the passage concerning Stackhouse’s New History of the Bible, which is to be found in the Elia essay “Witches and other Night Fears.”  Aunt Hetty is described elsewhere by Lamb in his Elia essays, “Christ’s Hospital” and “My Relations;” and in the poem “Written on the Day of my Aunt’s Funeral.”  In Mary Lamb’s letter to Sarah Stoddart on September 21, 1803, is a short passage corroborative of Lamb’s account of the relations subsisting between his aunt and his parents:—­

My father had a sister lived with us—­of course, lived with my Mother, her sister-in-law; they were, in their different ways, the best creatures in the world—­but they set out wrong at first.  They made each other miserable for full twenty years of their lives—­my Mother was a perfect gentlewoman, my Aunty as unlike a gentlewoman as you can possibly imagine a good old woman to