For some curious reason Lamb passed over this essay when collecting Elia for the press.  It was not republished till 1833, in the Last Essays.

Page 195, motto. The Relapse.  The comedy by Sir John Vanbrugh.  Lamb liked this quotation.  He uses it in his letter about William Wordsworth, junior, to Dorothy Wordsworth, November 25, 1819; and again in his “Reminiscence of Sir Jeffery Dunstan” (see Vol.  I.).

Page 195, foot. I can read any thing which I call a book.  Writing to Wordsworth in August, 1815, Lamb says:  “What any man can write, surely I may read.”

Page 195, last line. Pocket Books.  In the London Magazine Lamb added in parenthesis “the literary excepted,” the reference being to the Literary Pocket Book which Leigh Hunt brought out annually from 1819 to 1822.

Page 196, line 2. Hume ...  Jenyns.  Hume would be David Hume (1711-1776), the philosopher and historian of England; Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), historian of Rome; William Robertson, D.D. (1721-1793), historian of America, Charles V., Scotland and India; James Beattie (1735-1803), author of “The Minstrel” and a number of essays, who had, however, one recommendation to Lamb, of which Lamb may have been unaware—­he loved Vincent Bourne’s poems and was one of the first to praise them; and Soame Jenyns (1704-1787), author of The Art of Dancing, and the Inquiry into Evil which Johnson reviewed so mercilessly.  It is stated in Moore’s Diary, according to Procter, that Lamb “excluded from his library Robertson, Gibbon and Hume, and made instead a collection of the works of the heroes of The Dunciad.”

Page 196, line 14. Population Essay.  That was the day of population essays.  Malthus’s Essay on Population, 1798, had led to a number of replies.

Page 196, line 22. My ragged veterans.  Crabb Robinson recorded in his diary that Lamb had the “finest collection of shabby books” he ever saw; “such a number of first-rate works in very bad condition is, I think, nowhere to be found.”  Leigh Hunt stated in his essay on “My Books” in The Literary Examiner, July 5, 1823, that Lamb’s library had

an handsome contempt for appearance.  It looks like what it is, a selection made at precious intervals from the book-stalls;—­now a Chaucer at nine and twopence; now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas Browne at two shillings; now a Jeremy Taylor, a Spinoza; an old English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney; and the books are “neat as imported.”  The very perusal of the backs is a “discipline of humanity.”  There Mr. Southey takes his place again with an old Radical friend:  there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden:  there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, Sewel:  there Guzman d’Alfarache thinks himself fit company for Sir Charles Grandison, and has his claims admitted.  Even the “high fantastical”