Page 43.  A CHAPTER ON EARS.

London Magazine, March, 1821.

Lamb was not so utterly without ear as he states.  Crabb Robinson in his diary records more than once that Lamb hummed tunes, and Barron Field, in the memoir of Lamb contributed by him to the Annual Biography and Obituary for 1836, mentions his love for certain beautiful airs, among them Kent’s “O that I had wings like a dove” (mentioned in this essay), and Handel’s “From mighty kings.”  Lamb says that it was Braham who awakened a love of music in him.  Compare Lamb’s lines to Clara Novello, Vol.  IV., page 101, and also Mary Lamb’s postscript to his “Free Thoughts on Eminent Composers,” same volume.

Page 43, foot. I was never ... in the pillory.  This sentence led to an amusing article in the London Magazine for the next month, April, 1821, entitled “The Confessions of H.F.V.H.  Delamore, Esq.,” unmistakably, I think, by Lamb, which will be found in Vol.  I. of this edition, wherein Lamb confesses to a brief sojourn in the stocks at Barnet for brawling on Sunday, an incident for the broad truth of which we have the testimony of his friend Brook Pulham.

Page 44, lines 6 and 7. “Water parted from the sea,” “In Infancy.”  Songs by Arne in “Artaxerxes,” Lamb’s “First Play” (see page 113).

Page 44, line 11. Mrs. S——­.  The Key gives “Mrs. Spinkes.”  We meet a Will Weatherall in “Distant Correspondents,” page 120; but I have not been able to discover more concerning either.

Page 44, line 17. Alice W——­n.  See note to “Dream Children.”

Page 44, line 26. My friend A. Probably William Ayrton (1777-1818), the musical critic, one of the Burneys’ whist-playing set, and a friend and correspondent of Lamb’s.  See the musical rhyming letter to him from Lamb, May 17, 1817.

Page 47, line 5. My friend, Nov——­.  Vincent Novello (1781-1861), the organist, the father of Mrs. Cowden Clarke, and a great friend of Lamb.

Page 47, footnote.  Another friend of Vincent Novello’s uses the same couplet (from Watt’s Divine Songs for Children, Song XXVIII., “For the Lord’s Day, Evening”) in the description of glees by the old cricketers at the Bat and Ball on Broad Halfpenny Down, near Hambledon—­I refer to John Nyren, author of The Young Cricketer’s Tutor, 1833.  There is no evidence that Lamb and Nyren ever met, but one feels that they ought to have done so, in Novello’s hospitable rooms.

Page 48, line 3. Lutheran beer.  Edmund Ollier, the son of Charles Ollier, the publisher of Lamb’s Works, 1818, in his reminiscences of Lamb, prefixed to one edition of Elia, tells this story:  “Once at a musical party at Leigh Hunt’s, being oppressed with what to him was nothing but a prolonged noise ... he said—­’If one only had a pot of porter, one might get through this.’  It was procured for him and he weathered the Mozartian storm.”