Page 248, line 3. Thin diet of dainty words.  To this sentence, in the London Magazine, Lamb put the following footnote:—­

“A profusion of verbal dainties, with a disproportionate lack of matter and circumstance, is I think one reason of the coldness with which the public has received the poetry of a nobleman now living; which, upon the score of exquisite diction alone, is entitled to something better than neglect.  I will venture to copy one of his Sonnets in this place, which for quiet sweetness, and unaffected morality, has scarcely its parallel in our language.

      “TO A BIRD THAT HAUNTED THE WATERS OF LACKEN IN THE WINTER

      “By Lord Thurlow

      “O melancholy Bird, a winter’s day,
      Thou standest by the margin of the pool,
      And, taught by God, dost thy whole being school
      To Patience, which all evil can allay. 
      God has appointed thee the Fish thy prey;
      And given thyself a lesson to the Fool
      Unthrifty, to submit to moral rule,
      And his unthinking course by thee to weigh. 
      There need not schools, nor the Professor’s chair,
      Though these be good, true wisdom to impart. 
      He who has not enough, for these, to spare
      Of time, or gold, may yet amend his heart,
      And teach his soul, by brooks, and rivers fair: 
      Nature is always wise in every part.”

This sonnet, by Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow (1781-1829), an intense devotee of Sir Philip Sidney’s muse, was a special favourite with Lamb.  He copied it into his Commonplace Book, and De Quincey has described, in his “London Reminiscences,” how Lamb used to read it aloud.

Page 248, line 27. Epitaph made on him.  After these words, in the London Magazine, came “by Lord Brooke.”  Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, wrote Sidney’s Life, published in 1652.  After Sidney’s death appeared many elegies upon him, eight of which were printed at the end of Spenser’s Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, in 1595.  That which Lamb quotes is by Matthew Roydon, Stanzas 15 to 18 and 26 and 27.  The poem beginning “Silence augmenteth grief” is attributed to Brooke, chiefly on Lamb’s authority, in Ward’s English Poets.  This is one stanza:—­

  He was (woe worth that word!) to each well-thinking mind
  A spotless friend, a matchless man, whose virtue ever shined,
  Declaring in his thoughts, his life and that he writ,
  Highest conceits, longest foresights, and deepest works of wit.

Sidney was only thirty-two at his death.

* * * * *

Page 249.  NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.

Englishman’s Magazine, October, 1831, being the second paper under the heading “Peter’s Net,” of which “Recollections of a Late Royal Academician” was the first (see note, Vol.  I.).