Lamb has been less than fair to Malone.  To defend his action in the matter of the bust of Shakespeare is impossible, except by saying that he acted in good faith and according to the fashion of his time.  But he did great service to the fame of Shakespeare and thus to English literature, and was fearless and shrewd in his denunciation of the impostor Ireland.

Page 198, line 26. The Fairy Queen.  Lamb’s copy was a folio, 1617, 12, 17, 13.  Against Canto XI., Stanza 32, he has written:  “Dear Venom, this is the stave I wot of.  I will maintain it against any in the book.”

Page 199, line 14. Nando’s.  A coffee-house in Fleet Street, at the east corner of Inner Temple Lane, and thus at one time close to Lamb’s rooms.

Page 199, line 16. “The Chronicle is in hand, Sir.” In the London Magazine the following paragraph was here inserted:—­

“As in these little Diurnals I generally skip the Foreign News, the Debates—­and the Politics—­I find the Morning Herald by far the most entertaining of them.  It is an agreeable miscellany, rather than a newspaper.”

The Morning Herald, under Alexander Chalmers, had given more attention to social gossip than to affairs of State; but under Thomas Wright it suddenly, about the time of Lamb’s essay, became politically serious and left aristocratic matters to the Morning Post.

Page 199, line 20. Town and Country Magazine.  This magazine flourished between 1769 and 1792.

Page 199, line 26. Poor Tobin.  Possibly John Tobin (1770-1804), the playwright, though I think not.  More probably the Tobin mentioned in Lamb’s letter to Wordsworth about “Mr. H.” in June, 1806 (two years after John Tobin’s death), to whom Lamb read the manager’s letter concerning the farce.  This would be James, John Tobin’s brother.

Page 200, line 13. The five points.  After these words came, in the London Magazine, the following paragraph:—­

“I was once amused—­there is a pleasure in affecting affectation—­at the indignation of a crowd that was justling in with me at the pit-door of Covent Garden theatre, to have a sight of Master Betty—­then at once in his dawn and his meridian—­in Hamlet.  I had been invited quite unexpectedly to join a party, whom I met near the door of the playhouse, and I happened to have in my hand a large octavo of Johnson and Steevens’s Shakspeare, which, the time not admitting of my carrying it home, of course went with me to the theatre.  Just in the very heat and pressure of the doors opening—­the rush, as they term it—­I deliberately held the volume over my head, open at the scene in which the young Roscius had been most cried up, and quietly read by the lamplight.  The clamour became universal.  ‘The affectation of the fellow,’ cried one.  ‘Look at that gentleman reading, papa,’ squeaked a young lady, who in her admiration of the novelty