“Who first invented work—­and bound the free
      And holyday-rejoicing spirit down
      To the ever-haunting importunity
      Of business, in the green fields, and the town—­
      To plough, loom, anvil, spade—­and oh! most sad,
      To this dry drudgery of the desk’s dead wood? 
      Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,
      Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad
      Task ever plies ’mid rotatory burnings,
      That round and round incalculably reel—­
      For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel—­
      In that red realm from whence are no returnings;
      Where toiling, and turmoiling, ever and aye
      He, and his thoughts, keep pensive worky-day!

“O this divine Leisure!—­Reader, if thou art furnished with the Old Series of the London, turn incontinently to the third volume (page 367), and you will see my present condition there touched in a ‘Wish’ by a daintier pen than I can pretend to.  I subscribe to that Sonnet toto corde.”

The sonnet referred to, beginning—­

  They talk of time and of time’s galling yoke,

will be found quoted above, in the notes to “New Year’s Eve.”  It was, of course, by Lamb himself.  To the other sonnet he gave the title “Work” (see Vol.  IV.).  Cowley’s lines are from “The Complaint.”

Page 225, line 14 from foot. NOTHING-TO-DO.  Lamb wrote to Barton in 1827:  “Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps—­good works.”

* * * * *

Page 226.  THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING.

New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826, where it was one of the Popular Fallacies, under the title, “That my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are models of the Genteel Style in Writing.—­We should prefer saying—­of the Lordly and the Gentlemanly.  Nothing,” &c.

Page 226, beginning. My Lord Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the grandson of the great statesman, and the author of the Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times, 1711, and other less known works.  In the essay “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” Lamb says, “Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me.”

Page 226, beginning. Sir William Temple. Sir William Temple (1628-1699), diplomatist and man of letters, the patron of Swift, and the husband of the letter-writing Dorothy Osborne.  His first diplomatic mission was in 1665, to Christopher Bernard von Glialen, the prince-bishop of Munster, who grew the northern cherries (see page 228).  Afterwards he was accredited to Brussels and the Hague, and subsequently became English Ambassador at the Hague.  He was recalled in 1670, and spent the time between then and 1674, when he returned, in adding to his garden at Sheen, near Richmond, and in literary pursuits.  He re-entered active political life in 1674, but retired again in