Page 34, line 15 from foot. Midnight darlings.  Leigh Hunt records, in his essay “My Books,” that he once saw Lamb kiss an old folio—­Chapman’s Homer.

Page 34, line 8 from foot. “Sweet assurance of a look.”  A favourite quotation of Lamb’s (here adapted) from Matthew Roydon’s elegy on Sir Philip Sidney:—­

  A sweet attractive kind of grace,
  A full assurance given by looks.

A portion of the poem is quoted in the Elia essay on “Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney.”

* * * * *

Page 37.  MRS. BATTLE’S OPINIONS ON WHIST.

London Magazine, February, 1821.

Mrs. Battle was probably, in real life, to a large extent Sarah Burney, the wife of Rear-Admiral James Burney, Lamb’s friend, and the centre of the whist-playing set to which he belonged.  The theory that Lamb’s grandmother, Mrs. Field, was the original Mrs. Battle, does not, I think, commend itself, although that lady may have lent a trait or two.  It has possibly arisen from the relation of the passage in the essay on Blakesware, where Mrs. Battle is said to have died in the haunted room, to that in “Dream-Children,” where Lamb says that Mrs. Field occupied this room.

The fact that Mrs. Battle and Mrs. Burney were both Sarahs is a small piece of evidence towards their fusion, but there is something more conclusive in the correspondence.  Writing in March, 1830, concerning the old whist days, to William Ayrton, one of the old whist-playing company, and the neighbour of the Burneys in Little James Street, Pimlico, Lamb makes use of an elision which, I think, may be taken as more than support of the theory that Mrs. Battle and Mrs. Burney were largely the same—­practically proof.  “Your letter, which was only not so pleasant as your appearance would have been, has revived some old images; Phillips (not the Colonel), with his few hairs bristling up at the charge of a revoke, which he declares impossible; the old Captain’s significant nod over the right shoulder (was it not?); Mrs. B——­’s determined questioning of the score, after the game was absolutely gone to the d——­l.”  Lamb, I think, would have written out Mrs. Burney in full had he not wished to suggest Mrs. Battle too.

This conjecture is borne out by the testimony of the late Mrs. Lefroy, in her youth a friend of the Burneys and the Lambs, who told Canon Ainger that though Mrs. Battle had many differing points she was undoubtedly Mrs. Burney.  But of course there are the usual cross-trails—­the reference to the pictures at Sandham; to Walter Plumer; to the legacy to Lamb; and so forth.  Perhaps among the Blakesware portraits was one which Lamb chose as Mrs. Battle’s presentment; perhaps Mrs. Field had told him of an ancient dame who had certain of Mrs. Battle’s characteristics, and he superimposed Mrs. Burney upon this foundation.

For further particulars concerning the Burney whist parties see the notes to the “Letter to Southey,” Vol.  I.