He [Cave] was afterwards raised to the office of clerk of the franks, in which he acted with great spirit and firmness; and often stopped franks which were given by members of parliament to their friends; because he thought such extension of a peculiar right illegal.  This raised many complaints, and having stopped, among others, a frank given to the old dutchess of Marlborough by Mr. Walter Plummer, he was cited before the house, as for breach of privilege, and accused, I suppose very unjustly, of opening letters to detect them.  He was treated with great harshness and severity, but declining their questions by pleading his oath of secrecy, was at last dismissed.  And it must be recorded to his honour, that when he was ejected from his office, he did not think himself discharged from his trust, but continued to refuse to his nearest friends any information about the management of the office.

I borrow from Canon Ainger an interesting note on Walter Plumer, written in the eighteen-eighties, showing that Lamb was mistaken on other matters too:—­

The present Mr. Plumer, of Allerton, Totness, a grandson of Richard Plumer of the South-Sea House, by no means acquiesces in the tradition here recorded as to his grandfather’s origin.  He believes that though the links are missing, Richard Plumer was descended in regular line from the Baronet, Sir Walter Plumer, who died at the end of the seventeenth century.  Lamb’s memory has failed him here in one respect.  The “Bachelor Uncle,” Walter Plumer, uncle of William Plumer of Blakesware, was most certainly not a bachelor (see the pedigree of the family in Cussans’ Hertfordshire).

Page 7, line 10 from foot.  M——.  According to the Key to the initials and blanks in some of the essays, which Lamb filled in for a curious correspondent, M——­ stood for one Maynard.  “Maynard, hang’d himself” is Lamb’s entry.  He was chief clerk in the Old Annuities and Three Per Cents, 1788-1793.

* * * * *

Page 8.  OXFORD IN THE VACATION.

London Magazine, October, 1820, where it is dated at the end, “August 5, 1820.  From my rooms facing the Bodleian.”  My own belief is that Lamb wrote the essay at Cambridge, under the influence of Cambridge, where he spent a few weeks in the summers of 1819 and 1820, and transferred the scene to Oxford by way of mystification.  He knew Oxford, of course, but he had not been there for some years, and it was at Cambridge that he met Dyer and saw the Milton MSS.

Concerning a visit to Oxford (in 1810), Hazlitt had written, in his Table Talk essay “On the Conversation of Authors,” in the preceding (the September) number of the London Magazine:—­