“Can I, who loved ray beloved
    But for the scorn ‘was in her eye,’
  Can I be moved for my beloved,
    When she returns me sigh for sigh?

  “In stately pride, by my bedside,
    High-born Helen’s portrait hung;
  Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays
    Are nightly to the portrait sung.

  “To that I weep, nor ever sleep,
    Complaining all night long to her.—­
  Helen, grown old, no longer cold,
    Said—­’you to all men I prefer.’”]

* * * * *

Page 178.  POOR RELATIONS.

London Magazine, May, 1823.

Page 179, line 10. A pound of sweet. After these words, in the London Magazine, came one more descriptive clause—­“the bore par excellence.”

Page 181, line 4, Richard Amlet, Esq. In “The Confederacy” by Sir John Vanbrugh—­a favourite part of John Palmer’s (see the essay “On Some of the Old Actors").

Page 181, line 16. Poor W——­.  In the Key Lamb identifies W——­ with Favell, who “left Cambridge because he was asham’d of his father, who was a house-painter there.”  Favell has already been mentioned in the essay on “Christ’s Hospital.”

Page 183, line 22. At Lincoln. The Lambs, as we have seen, came from Lincolnshire.  The old feud between the Above and Below Boys seems now to have abated, but a social gulf between the two divisions of the city remains.

Page 184, line 11 from foot. John Billet.  Probably not the real name.  Lamb gives the innkeeper at Widford, in “Rosamund Gray,” the name of Billet, when it was really Clemitson.

* * * * *

Page 185.  STAGE ILLUSION.

London Magazine, August, 1825, where it was entitled “Imperfect Dramatic Illusion.”

This was, I think, Lamb’s last contribution to the London, which had been growing steadily heavier and less hospitable to gaiety.  Some one, however, contributed to it from time to time papers more or less in the Elian manner.  There had been one in July, 1825, on the Widow Fairlop, a lady akin to “The Gentle Giantess.”  In September, 1825, was an essay entitled “The Sorrows of ** ***” (an ass), which might, both from style and sympathy, be almost Lamb’s; but was, I think, by another hand.  And in January, 1826, there was an article on whist, with quotations from Mrs. Battle, deliberately derived from her creator.  These and other essays are printed in Mr. Bertram Dobell’s Sidelights on Charles Lamb, 1903, with interesting comments.

The present essay to some extent continues the subject treated of in “The Artificial Comedy,” but it may be taken also as containing some of the matter of the promised continuation of the essay “On the Tragedies of Shakspeare,” which was to deal with the comic characters of that dramatist (see Vol.  I.).

Page 185, line 15 from foot. Jack Bannister.  See notes to the essay on “The Old Actors.”  His greatest parts were not those of cowards; but his Bob Acres was justly famous.  Sir Anthony Absolute and Tony Lumpkin were perhaps his chief triumphs.  He left the stage in 1815.