The dedication was to “The Forty-Nine Members of the Friendly Society for the Benefit of their Widows, of whom I have the honour of making the Number Fifty,” and in the dedicatory epistle it is stated that the Society was in some degree the cause of Number Fifty’s commencing author, on account of its approving and printing certain lines which were spoken by him at an annual meeting it the Devil Tavern.  The first two poetical pieces are apologues on marriage and the happiness that it should bring, the characters being drawn from bird life.  Then follow verses written for the meetings of the Society, and miscellaneous compositions.  Of these the description of a lady’s footman’s daily life, from within, has a good deal of sprightliness, and displays quite a little mastery of the mock-heroic couplet.  The last poem is a long rhymed version of the story of Joseph.  With this exception, for which Lamb’s character-sketch does not quite prepare us, it is very natural to think of the author as Lovel.  One of the pieces, a familiar letter to a doctor, begins thus:—­

  My good friend,
  For favours to my son and wife,
  I shall love you whilst I’ve life,
  Your clysters, potions, help’d to save,
  Our infant lambkin from the grave.

The infant lambkin was probably John Lamb, but of course it might have been Charles.  The expression, however, proves that punning ran in the family.  Lamb’s library contained his father’s copy of Hudibras.

Lamb’s phrase, descriptive of his father’s decline, is taken with a variation from his own poems—­from the “Lines written on the Day of my Aunt’s Funeral” (Blank Verse, 1798):—­

  One parent yet is left,—­a wretched thing,
  A sad survivor of his buried wife
  A palsy-smitten, childish, old, old man,
  A semblance most forlorn of what he was—­
  A merry cheerful man.

Page 100, line 17. “Flapper.”  This is probably an allusion to the flappers in Gulliver’s Travels—­the servants who, in Laputa, carried bladders with which every now and then they flapped the mouths and ears of their employers, to recall them to themselves and disperse their meditations.

Page 100, line 9 from foot. Better was not concerned.  At these words, in the London Magazine, came:—­

“He pleaded the cause of a delinquent in the treasury of the Temple so effectually with S. the then treasurer—­that the man was allowed to keep his place.  L. had the offer to succeed him.  It had been a lucrative promotion.  But L. chose to forego the advantage, because the man had a wife and family.”

Page 101, line 10. Bayes.  Mr. Bayes is the author and stage manager in Buckingham’s “Rehearsal.”  This phrase is not in the play and must have been John Lamb’s own, in reference to Garrick.

Page 101, line 23. Peter Pierson.  Peter Peirson (as his name was rightly spelled) was the son of Peter Peirson of the parish of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, who lived probably in Bedford Row.  He became a Bencher in 1800, died in 1808, and is buried in the Temple Church.  When Charles Lamb entered the East India House in April, 1792, Peter Peirson and his brother, John Lamb, were his sureties.