Page 26, line 1. Fr——­.  Frederick William Franklin, master of the Hertford branch of the school from 1801 to 1827.  He died in 1836.

Page 26, line 2. Marmaduke T——­.  Marmaduke Thompson, to whom Lamb dedicated Rosamund Gray in 1798.

Page 26, line 3. Catalogue of Grecians.  Lamb was at Christ’s Hospital from 1782 to 1789, and his list is not quite complete.  He himself never was a Grecian; that is to say, one of the picked scholars on the grammar side of the school, two of whom were sent up to Cambridge with a hospital exhibition every year, on the understanding that they should take orders.  Lamb was one of the Deputy-Grecians from whom the Grecians were chosen, but his stammer standing in his way and a Church career being out of the question, he never became a full Grecian.  Writing to George Dyer, who had been a Grecian, in 1831, Lamb says:  “I don’t know how it is, but I keep my rank in fancy still since school days.  I can never forget I was a deputy Grecian!...  Alas! what am I now?  What is a Leadenhall clerk, or India pensioner, to a deputy Grecian?  How art thou fallen, O Lucifer!”

Lamb’s memory is preserved at Christ’s Hospital by a medal which is given for the best English essays.  It was first struck in 1875, the centenary of his birth.

* * * * *

Page 26.  THE TWO RACES OF MEN.

London Magazine, December, 1820.

Writing to Wordsworth in April of 1816, Lamb says:—­“I have not bound the poems yet.  I wait till people have done borrowing them.  I think I shall get a chain and chain them to my shelves, more Bodleiano, and people may come and read them at chain’s length.  For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read but don’t read; and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity.  I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them.  When they borrow my money they never fail to make use of it.”

Probably the germ of the essay is to be found in this passage, as Lamb never forgot his thoughts.

Page 26, line 17 of essay. Brinsley.  Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the dramatist and a great spendthrift.  He died in 1816.  Lamb knew him slightly.

Page 26, line 9 from foot. Beyond Tooke.  That is, beyond the philological theories of The Diversions of Purley by John Home Tooke (1736-1812).

Page 27, line 22. Ralph Bigod.  John Fenwick, an unlucky friend of the Lambs, an anticipatory Micawber, of whom we know too little, and seem likely to find out little more.  Lamb mentions him again in the essay on “Chimney Sweepers,” and in that on “Newspapers,” in his capacity as editor of The Albion, for which Lamb wrote its extinguishing epigram in the summer of 1801.  There are references to the Fenwicks in Mary Lamb’s letters to Sarah Stoddart and in Lamb’s letters; but nothing very informing.  After financial embarrassments in England they emigrated to America.