L——­ [that is, Lamb] once came down into the country to see us.  He was “like the most capricious poet Ovid among the Goths.”  The country people thought him an oddity, and did not understand his jokes.  It would be strange if they had; for he did not make any while he staid.  But when we crossed the country to Oxford, then he spoke a little.  He and the old colleges were hail-fellow well-met; and in the quadrangles, he “walked gowned.”

The quotation is a reference to Lamb’s sonnet, “I was not Trained in Academic Bowers,” written at Cambridge in 1819:—­

  Yet can I fancy, wandering ’mid thy towers,
  Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap;
  My brow seems tightening with the Doctor’s cap,
  And I walk gowned.

Page 8, line 6 from foot. Agnize.  Lamb was fond of this word.  I have seen it stated ingeniously that it was of his own coinage—­from agnus, a lamb—­but the derivation is ad gnoscere, to acknowledge, to recognise, and the word is to be found in other places—­in “Othello,” for example (Act I., Scene 3, line 232):—­

              I do agnise
  A natural and prompt alacrity.

Page 9, middle. Red-letter days.  See note on page 351.  The holidays at the India House, which are given in the London directories of Lamb’s early time there, make a considerable list.  But in 1820 the Accountants’ Office, where Lamb was, kept only five days in the year.

Page 10, line 11. I can here ... enact the student. Lamb had distilled the matter of this paragraph into his sonnet, “I was not Trained in Academic Bowers,” written at Cambridge in August of the preceding year (see above and Vol.  IV.).

Page 11, line 12 from foot. Unsettle my faith. At this point, in the London Magazine, Lamb appended the footnote:—­

“There is something to me repugnant, at any time, in written hand.  The text never seems determinate.  Print settles it.  I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty—­as springing up with all its parts absolute—­till, in evil hour, I was shown the original written copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the Library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of.  I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them, after the latter cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel.  How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspirations were made up of parts, and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent!  I will never go into the work-shop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture, till it is fairly off the easel; no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, and painting another Galatea.”

In the Appendix to Vol.  I., page 428, I have printed a passage from the original MS. of Comus, which there is reason to believe was contributed to the London Magazine by Lamb.