Writing to Manning, May 28, 1819, Lamb says:—­“How are my cousins, the Gladmans of Wheathampstead, and farmer Bruton?  Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman.

  “Hail, Mackery End!

“This is a fragment of a blank verse poem which I once meditated, but got no further.”

Page 89, verse. “But thou, that didst appear so fair ...” From Wordsworth’s “Yarrow Visited,” Stanza 6.  Writing to Wordsworth in 1815, Lamb said of this stanza that he thought “no lovelier” could be found in “the wide world of poetry.”  From a letter to Taylor, of the London Magazine, belonging to the summer of 1821, we gather that the proof-reader had altered the last word of the third line to “air” to make it rhyme to “fair.”  Lamb says:  “Day is the right reading, and I implore you to restore it.”

Page 90, line 4. B.F. Barron Field (see note to “Distant Correspondents"), then living in Sydney, where he composed, and had printed for private circulation in 1819, a volume of poems reviewed by Lamb (see Vol.  I.), in 1819, one of which was entitled “The Kangaroo.”  It was the first book printed in Australia.  Field edited Heywood for the old Shakespeare Society.  Although a Field, he was no kinsman of Lamb’s.

* * * * *

Page 90.  MODERN GALLANTRY.

London Magazine, November, 1822.

De Quincey writes in “London Reminiscences” concerning the present essay:—­

Among the prominent characteristics of Lamb, I know not how it is that I have omitted to notice the peculiar emphasis and depth of his courtesy.  This quality was in him a really chivalrous feeling, springing from his heart, and cherished with the sanctity of a duty.  He says somewhere in speaking of himself[?] under the mask of a third person, whose character he is describing, that, in passing a servant girl, even at a street-crossing, he used to take off his hat.  Now, the spirit of Lamb’s gallantry would have prompted some such expression of homage, though the customs of the country would not allow it to be literally fulfilled, for the very reason that would prompt it—­viz., in order to pay respect—­since the girl would, in such a case, suppose a man laughing at her.  But the instinct of his heart was to think highly of female nature, and to pay a real homage (not the hollow demonstration of outward honour which a Frenchman calls his “homage,” and which is really a mask for contempt) to the sacred idea of pure and virtuous womanhood.

Barry Cornwall has the following story in his Memoir of Lamb:—­