Page 70, line 14 from foot. Hugh of Lincoln.  Hugh was a small Lincoln boy who, tradition states, was tortured to death by the Jews.  His dead body being touched by a blind woman, she received sight.

Many years earlier Lamb had spoken of the Jew in English society with equal frankness (see his note to the “Jew of Malta” in the Dramatic Specimens).

Page 71, line 18. B——­.  John Braham, nee Abraham (1774?-1856), the great tenor.  Writing to Manning in 1808, Lamb says:—­“Do you like Braham’s singing?  The little Jew has bewitched me.  I follow him like as the boys followed Tom the Piper.  He cures me of melancholy as David cured Saul....  I was insensible to music till he gave me a new sense....  Braham’s singing, when it is impassioned, is finer than Mrs. Siddons’s or Mr. Kemble’s acting! and when it is not impassioned it is as good as hearing a person of fine sense talking.  The brave little Jew!”

Two years later Lamb tells Manning of Braham’s absence from London, adding:  “He was a rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel; yet all these elements mixed up so kindly in him that you could not tell which preponderated.”  In this essay Lamb refers to Braham’s singing in Handel’s oratorio “Israel in Egypt.”  Concerning Braham’s abandonment of the Jewish faith see Lamb’s sarcastic essay “The Religion of Actors,” Vol.  I., page 338.

Page 73, line 17 from foot. I was travelling.  Lamb did not really take part in this story.  It was told him by Sir Anthony Carlisle (1768-1840), the surgeon, as he confessed to his Quaker friend, Bernard Barton (March 11, 1823), who seemed to miss its point.  Lamb described Carlisle as “the best story-teller I ever heard.”

* * * * *

Page 74.  WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS.

London Magazine, October, 1821.

Compare with this essay Maria Howe’s story of “The Witch Aunt,” in Mrs. Leicester’s School (see Vol.  III.), which Lamb had written thirteen years earlier.

Page 75, line 12 from foot. History of the Bible, by Stackhouse.  Thomas Stackhouse (1677-1752) was rector of Boldon, in Durham; his New History of the Holy Bible from the Beginning of the World to the Establishment of Christianity—­the work in question—­was published in 1737.

Page 75, line 6 from foot. The Witch raising up Samuel.  This paragraph was the third place in which Lamb recorded his terror of this picture of the Witch of Endor in Stackhouse’s Bible, but the first occasion in which he took it to himself.  In one draft of John Woodvil (see Vol.  IV.), the hero says:—­

  I can remember when a child the maids
  Would place me on their lap, as they undrest me,
  As silly women use, and tell me stories
  Of Witches—­make me read “Glanvil on Witchcraft,”
  And in conclusion show me in the Bible,
  The old Family Bible, with the pictures in it,
  The ’graving of the Witch raising up Samuel,
  Which so possest my fancy, being a child,
  That nightly in my dreams an old Hag came
  And sat upon my pillow.