“I was set free on Tuesday in last week at 4 o’clock.

    “I came home for ever!...

“I went and sat among ’em all at my old 33 years desk yester morning; and deuce take me if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry sociable lads, at leaving them in the Lurch, fag, fag, fag.

    “I would not serve another 7 years for seven hundred thousand
    pound.”

To Miss Hutchinson Lamb said; “I would not go back to my prison for seven years longer for L10000 a year.”

In the London Magazine the essay was divided into two parts, with the two quotations now at the head apportioned each to one part.  Part II. began at “A fortnight has passed,” on page 224.  The essay was signed “J.D.,” whose address was given as “Beaufort-terrace, Regent-street; late of Ironmonger-court, Fenchurch-street.”

Page 220, line 3. Recreation.  At “recreation,” in the London Magazine, came the footnote:—­

“Our ancestors, the noble old Puritans of Cromwell’s day, could distinguish between a day of religious rest and a day of recreation; and while they exacted a rigorous abstinence from all amusements (even to the walking out of nursery maids with their little charges in the fields) upon the Sabbath; in the lieu of the superstitious observance of the Saints days, which they abrogated, they humanely gave to the apprentices, and poorer sort of people, every alternate Thursday for a day of entire sport and recreation.  A strain of piety and policy to be commended above the profane mockery of the Stuarts and their Book of Sports.”

Lamb had said the same thing to Barton in a letter in the spring, 1824, referring there to “Southey’s book” as his authority—­this being The Book of the Church, 1824.

Page 220, line 25. Native ...  Hertfordshire.  This was a slight exaggeration.  Lamb was London born and bred.  But Hertfordshire was his mother and grandmother’s county, and all his love of the open air was centred there (see the essay on “Mackery End").

Page 221, line 1. My health.  Lamb had really been seriously unwell for some time, as the Letters tell us.

Page 221, line 6. I was fifty.  Lamb was fifty on February 10, 1825.

Page 231, line 7. I had grown to my desk.  In his first letter to Barton (September 11, 1822) Lamb wrote:  “I am like you a prisoner to the desk.  I have been chained to that galley thirty years, a long shot.  I have almost grown to the wood.”  Again, to Wordsworth:  “I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing) with my breast against this thorn of a Desk.”

Page 222, line 7. Boldero, Merryweather ... Feigned names of course.  It was Boldero that Lamb once pretended was Leigh Hunt’s true name.  And in his fictitious biography of Liston (Vol.  I.) Liston’s mother was said to have been a Miss Merryweather.  In Lamb’s early city days there was a banking firm in Cornhill, called Boldero, Adey, Lushington & Boldero.