Then again, in Mrs. Leicester’s School, in the story of Maria Howe, called “The Witch Aunt,” one of the three stories in that book which Lamb wrote, Stackhouse’s Bible is found once more.  In my large edition I give a reproduction of the terrible picture.  Page 77, foot. Dear little T.H. This was the unlucky passage which gave Southey his chief text in his criticism of Elia as a book wanting “a sounder religious feeling,” and which led to Lamb’s expostulatory “Letter” (see Vol.  I.).  Southey commented thus:—­

This poor child, instead of being trained up in the way in which he should go, had been bred in the ways of modern philosophy; he had systematically been prevented from knowing anything of that Saviour who said, “Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven;” care had been taken that he should not pray to God, nor lie down at night in reliance upon His good Providence!

T.H. was Thornton Hunt, Leigh Hunt’s eldest son and Lamb’s “favourite child” (see verses to him in Vol.  IV.).

Page 79, line 18 from foot. Barry Cornwall.  Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874), Lamb’s friend.  The reference is to “A Dream,” a poem in Barry Cornwall’s Dramatic Scenes, 1819, which Lamb greatly admired.  See his sonnet to the poet in Vol.  IV., where it is mentioned again.

Page 80, last paragraph of essay.  In the original MS. of this essay (now in the Dyce and Forster collection at South Kensington) the last paragraph ran thus:—­

“When I awoke I came to a determination to write prose all the rest of my life; and with submission to some of our young writers, who are yet diffident of their powers, and balancing perhaps between verse and prose, they might not do unwisely to decide the preference by the texture of their natural dreams.  If these are prosaic, they may depend upon it they have not much to expect in a creative way from their artificial ones.  What dreams must not Spenser have had!”

* * * * *

Page 80.  MY RELATIONS.

London Magazine, June, 1821.

Page 80, beginning. At that point of life.  Lamb was forty-six on
February 10, 1821.

Page 80, line 12 of essay. I had an aunt.  Aunt Hetty, who died in 1797 (see the essay on “Christ’s Hospital").

Page 81, line 6. The chapel in Essex-street.  The headquarters of “that heresy,” Unitarianism.  Lamb was at first a Unitarian, but afterwards dropped away from all sects.