As when a child on some long winter’s night
  Affrighted clinging to its Grandam’s knees
  With eager wond’ring and perturb’d delight
  Listens strange tales of fearful dark decrees
  Mutter’d to wretch by necromantic spell;
  Or of those hags, who at the witching time
  Of murky midnight ride the air sublime,
  And mingle foul embrace with fiends of Hell: 
  Cold Horror drinks its blood!  Anon the tear
  More gentle starts, to hear the Beldame tell
  Of pretty babes, that lov’d each other dear,
  Murder’d by cruel Uncle’s mandate fell: 
  Ev’n such the shiv’ring joys thy tones impart,
  Ev’n so thou, SIDDONS! meltest my sad heart!

* * * * *

Page 115.  DREAM-CHILDREN.

London Magazine, January, 1822.

John Lamb died on October 26, 1821, leaving all his property to his brother.  Charles was greatly upset by his loss.  Writing to Wordsworth in March, 1822, he said:  “We are pretty well save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness to every thing, which I think I may date from poor John’s Loss....  Deaths over-set one, and put one out long after the recent grief.” (His friend Captain Burney died in the same month.) Lamb probably began “Dream-Children,”—­in some ways, I think, his most perfect prose work—­almost immediately upon his brother’s death.  The essay “My Relations” may be taken in connection with this as completing the picture of John Lamb.  His lameness was caused by the fall of a stone in 1796, but I doubt if the leg were really amputated.

The description in this essay of Blakesware, the seat of the Plumers, is supplemented by the essay entitled “Blakesmoor in H——­shire.”  Except that Lamb substitutes Norfolk for the nearer county, the description is accurate; it is even true that there is a legend in the Plumer family concerning the mysterious death of two children and the loss of the baronetcy thereby—­Sir Walter Plumer, who died in the seventeenth century, being the last to hold the title.  In his poem “The Grandame” (see Vol.  IV.), Lamb refers to Mrs. Field’s garrulous tongue and her joy in recounting the oft-told tale; and it may be to his early associations with the old story that his great affection for Morton’s play, “The Children in the Wood,” which he so often commended—­particularly with Miss Kelly in the caste—­was due.  The actual legend of the children in the wood belongs, however, to Norfolk.

William Plumer’s newer and more fashionable mansion was at Gilston, which is not in the adjoining county, but also in Hertfordshire, near Harlow, only a few miles distant from Blakesware.  Mrs. Field died of cancer in the breast in August, 1792, and was buried in Widford churchyard, hard by Blakesware.