Page 302.  XIII.—­THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME, AND LOVE MY DOG.

New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826.

Compare “A Bachelor’s Complaint.”  I cannot identify the particular friend whom Lamb has hidden under asterisks; although his cousin would seem to have some likeness to one of the Bethams mentioned in the essay “Many Friends” (Vol.  I.), and in the letter to Landor of October, 1832 (usually dated April), after his visit to the Lambs.

Page 304, line 15. Honorius dismiss his vapid wife.  Writing to Bernard Barton on March 20, 1826, Lamb says:—­“In another thing I talkd of somebody’s insipid wife, without a correspondent object in my head:  and a good lady, a friend’s wife, whom I really love (don’t startle, I mean in a licit way) has looked shyly on me ever since.  The blunders of personal application are numerous.  I send out a character every now and then, on purpose to exercise the ingenuity of my friends.”

Page 304, line 11 from foot. Merry, of Delia Cruscan memory.  Robert Merry (1755-1798), an affected versifier who settled in Florence as a young man, and contributed to the Florence Miscellany.  He became a member of the Delia Cruscan Academy, and on returning to England signed his verses, in The World, “Delia Crusca.”  A reply to his first effusion, “Adieu and Recall to Love,” was written by Mrs. Hannah Cowley, author of The Belle’s Stratagem, and signed “Anna Matilda;” this correspondence continued; a fashion of sentiment was thus started; and for a while Delia Cruscan poetry was the rage.  The principal Delia Cruscan poems were published in the British Album in 1789, and the collection was popular until Gifford’s Baviad (followed by his Maeviad) appeared in 1791, and satirised its conceits so mercilessly that the school collapsed.  A meeting with Anna Matilda in the flesh and the discovery that she was twelve years his senior had, however, put an end to Merry’s enthusiasm long before Gifford’s attack.  Merry afterwards threw in his lot with the French Revolution, and died in America.  He married, as Lamb says, Elizabeth Brunton, an excellent tragic actress, in 1791.  But that was in England.  The journey to America came later.

The story of Merry’s avoidance of the lady of his first choice is probably true.  Carlo Antonio Delpini was a famous pantomimist in his day at Drury Lane, Covent Garden and the Haymarket.  He also was stage manager at the Opera for a while, and occasionally arranged entertainments for George IV. at Brighton.  He died in 1828.

Page 305.  XIV.—­THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK.

New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826.

Compare “The Superannuated Man,” to which this little essay, which, with that following, is one of Lamb’s most characteristic and perfect works, serves as a kind of postscript.

Page 308.  XV.—­THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB.