Page 98, line 21. Lovel.  See below.

Page 98, line 9 from foot. Miss Blandy.  Mary Blandy was the daughter of Francis Blandy, a lawyer at Henley-on-Thames.  The statement that she was to inherit L10,000 induced an officer in the marines, named Cranstoun, a son of Lord Cranstoun, to woo her, although he already had a wife living.  Her father proving hostile, Cranstoun supplied her with arsenic to bring about his removal.  Mr. Blandy died on August 14, 1751.  Mary Blandy was arrested, and hanged on April 6 in the next year, after a trial which caused immense excitement.  The defence was that Miss Blandy was ignorant of the nature of the powder, and thought it a means of persuading her father to her point of view.  In this belief the father, who knew he was being tampered with, also shared.  Cranstoun avoided the law, but died in the same year.  Lamb had made use of Salt’s faux pas, many years earlier, in “Mr. H.” (see Vol.  IV.).

Page 99, line 13. His eye lacked lustre.  At these words, in the London Magazine, came this passage:—­

“Lady Mary Wortley Montague was an exception to her sex:  she says, in one of her letters, ’I wonder what the women see in S. I do not think him by any means handsome.  To me he appears an extraordinary dull fellow, and to want common sense.  Yet the fools are all sighing for him.’”

I have not found the passage.

Page 99, line 14. Susan P——­.  This is Susannah Peirson, sister of the Peter Peirson to whom we shall come directly.  Samuel Salt left her a choice of books in his library, together with a money legacy and a silver inkstand, hoping that reading and reflection would make her life “more comfortable.”  B——­d Row would be Bedford Row.

Page 99, line 12 from foot, F., the counsel.  I cannot be sure who this was.  The Law Directory of that day does not help.

Page 99, foot. Elwes.  John Elwes, the miser (1714-1789), whose Life was published in 1790 after running through The World—­the work of Topham, that paper’s editor, who is mentioned in Lamb’s essay on “Newspapers.”

Page 100, line 15. Lovel.  Lovel was the name by which Lamb refers to his father, John Lamb.  We know nothing of him in his prime beyond what is told in this essay, but after the great tragedy, there are in the Letters glimpses of him as a broken, querulous old man.  He died in 1799.  Of John Lamb’s early days all our information is contained in this essay, in his own Poetical Pieces, where he describes his life as a footman, and in the essay on “Poor Relations,” where his boyish memories of Lincoln are mentioned.  Of his verses it was perhaps too much (though prettily filial) to say they were “next to Swift and Prior;” but they have much good humour and spirit.  John Lamb’s poems were printed in a thin quarto under the title Poetical Pieces on Several Occasions.