Admiral Burney (1750-1821), a son of Dr. Burney, the historian of music, and friend of Johnson and Reynolds, was the brother of Fanny Burney, afterwards Madame d’Arblay.  See also “The Wedding,” page 275 of this volume, for another glimpse of Lamb’s old friend.  Admiral Burney wrote An Essay on the Game of Whist, which was published in 1821.  As he lived until November, 1821, he probably read the present essay.  Writing to Wordsworth, March 20, 1822, Lamb says:  “There’s Capt.  Burney gone!—­what fun has whist now; what matters it what you lead, if you can no longer fancy him looking over you?”

Page 37, line 1 of essay. “A clean hearth.”  To this, in the London Magazine, Lamb put the footnote:—­

“This was before the introduction of rugs, reader.  You must remember the intolerable crash of the unswept cinder, betwixt your foot and the marble.”

Page 37, line 8 of essay. Win one game, and lose another.  To this, in the London Magazine, Lamb put the note:—­

    “As if a sportsman should tell you he liked to kill a fox one day,
    and lose him the next.”

Page 38, line 26. Mr. Bowles.  The Rev. William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), whose sonnets had so influenced Coleridge’s early poetical career.  His edition of Pope was published in 1806.  I have tried in vain to discover if Mr. Bowles’ MS. and notes for this edition are still in existence.  If so, they might contain Lamb’s contribution.  But it is rather more likely, I fear, that Lamb invented the story.  The game of ombre is in Canto III. of The Rape of the Lock.

The only writing on cards which we know Lamb to have done, apart from this essay, is the elementary rules of whist which he made out for Mrs. Badams quite late in his life as a kind of introduction to the reading of Admiral Burney’s treatise.  This letter is in America and has never been printed except privately; nor, if its owner can help it, will it.

Page 40, line 26. Old Walter Plumer.  See the essay on “The South-Sea House.”

Page 42, line 18 from foot. Bad passions.  Here came in the London Magazine, in parenthesis, “(dropping for a while the speaking mask of old Sarah Battle).”

Page 43, line 2. Bridget Elia.  This is Lamb’s first reference in the essays to Mary Lamb under this name.  See “Mackery End” and “Old China.”

A little essay on card playing in the Every-Day Book, the authorship of which is unknown, but which may be Hone’s, ends with the following pleasant passage:—­

Cousin Bridget and the gentle Elia seem beings of that age wherein lived Pamela, whom, with “old Sarah Battle,” we may imagine entering their room, and sitting down with them to a square game.  Yet Bridget and Elia live in our own times:  she, full of kindness to all, and of soothings to Elia especially;—­he, no less kind and consoling to Bridget, in all simplicity holding converse with the world, and, ever and anon, giving us scenes that Metzu and De Foe would admire, and portraits that Deuner and Hogarth would rise from their graves to paint.

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