Duchess of Newcastle, with her laurel on her head, is received with grave honours, and not the less for declining to trouble herself with the constitutions of her maids.

It is in the same essay that Leigh Hunt mentions that he once saw Lamb kiss an old folio—­Chapman’s Homer—­the work he paraphrased for children under the title The Adventures of Ulysses.

Page 197, line 15. Life of the Duke of Newcastle.  Lamb’s copy, a folio containing also the “Philosophical Letters,” is in America.

Page 197, line 20. Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton...  I cannot say where are Lamb’s copies of Sidney and Fuller; but the British Museum has his Milton, rich in MS. notes, a two-volume edition, 1751.  The Taylor, which Lamb acquired in 1798, is the 1678 folio Sermons.  I cannot say where it now is.

Page 197, line 26. Shakspeare.  Lamb’s Shakespeare was not sold at the sale of his library; only a copy of the Poems, 12mo, 1714.  His annotated copy of the Poems, 1640, is in America.  There is a reference to one of Rowe’s plates in the essay “My First Play.”  The Shakespeare gallery engravings were the costly series of illustrations to Shakespeare commissioned by John Boydell (1719-1804), Lord Mayor of London in 1790.  The pictures were exhibited in the Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall, and the engravings were published in 1802.

After the word “Shakespeare,” in the London Magazine, came the sentence:  “You cannot make a pet book of an author whom everybody reads.”

In a letter to Wordsworth, February 1, 1806, Lamb says:  “Shakespear is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.”  In the same letter he says of binding:  “The Law Robe I have ever thought as comely and gentlemanly a garb as a Book would wish to wear.”

Page 197, line 7 from foot. Beaumont and Fletcher. See note to “The Two Races of Men” for an account of Lamb’s copy, now in the British Museum.

Page 197, line 5 from foot. No sympathy with them. After these words, in the London Magazine, came, “nor with Mr. Gifford’s Ben Jonson.”  This edition by Lamb’s old enemy, William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly, was published in 1816.  Lamb’s copy of Ben Jonson was dated 1692, folio.  It is now in America, I believe.

Page 197, foot. The reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy.  This reprint was, I think, published in 1800, in two volumes, marked ninth edition.  Lamb’s copy was dated 1621, quarto.  I do not know where it now is.

Page 198, line 4. Malone.  This was Edmund Malone (1741-1812), the critic and editor of Shakespeare, who in 1793 persuaded the Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon to whitewash the coloured bust of the poet in the chancel.  A Gentleman’s Magazine epigrammatist, sharing Lamb’s view, wrote:—­

  Stranger, to whom this monument is shown,
  Invoke the poet’s curse upon Malone;
  Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste betrays,
  And daubs his tombstone, as he mars his plays.