Page 31, foot. “I saw the skirts of the departing Year.”  From Coleridge’s “Ode to the Departing Year,” as printed in 1796 and 1797.  Lamb was greatly taken by this line.  He wrote to Coleridge on January 2, 1797, in a letter of which only a small portion has been printed:—­“The opening [of the Ode] is in the spirit of the sublimest allegory.  The idea of the ’skirts of the departing year, seen far onwards, waving in the wind,’ is one of those noble Hints at which the Reader’s imagination is apt to kindle into grand conceptions.”  Afterwards Coleridge altered “skirts” to “train.”

Page 32, line 21. Seven.... years.  See note to “Dream-Children.”  Alice W—­n is identified with Ann Simmons, who lived near Blakesware when Lamb was a youth, and of whom he wrote his love sonnets.  According to the Key the name is “feigned.”

Page 32, line 25. Old Dorrell.  See the poem “Going or Gone,” Vol.  IV.  There seems really to have been such an enemy of the Lamb fortunes.  He was one of the witnesses to the will of John Lamb, the father—­William Dorrell.

Page 33, line 5. Small-pox at five.  There is no other evidence than this casual mention that Lamb ever suffered from this complaint.  Possibly he did not.  He went to Christ’s Hospital at the age of seven.

Page 33, line 13. From what have I not fallen.  Lamb had had this idea many years before.  In 1796 he wrote this sonnet (text of 1818):—­

  We were two pretty babes, the youngest she,
    The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween,
    And Innocence her name.  The time has been
  We two did love each other’s company;
    Time was, we two had wept to have been apart: 
    But when by show of seeming good beguil’d,
    I left the garb and manners of a child,
  And my first love for man’s society,
    Defiling with the world my virgin heart—­
  My loved companion dropp’d a tear, and fled,
  And hid in deepest shades her awful head. 
    Beloved, who shall tell me where thou art—­
  In what delicious Eden to be found—­
  That I may seek thee the wide world around?

Page 33, line 27. Phantom cloud of Elia.  The speculations in the paragraph that ends with these words were fantastical at any rate to one reader, who, under the signature “A Father,” contributed to the March number of the London Magazine a eulogy of paternity, in which Elia was reasoned with and rebuked.  “Ah!  Elia! hadst thou possessed ‘offspring of thine own to dally with,’ thou wouldst never have made the melancholy avowal that thou hast ‘almost ceased to hope!’” Lamb did not reply.

Page 33, line 7 from foot. Not childhood alone ... The passage between these words and “freezing days of December” was taken by Charles Lloyd, Lamb’s early friend, as the motto of a poem, in his Poems, 1823, entitled “Stanzas on the Difficulty with which, in Youth, we Bring Home to our Habitual Consciousness the Idea of Death.”