You have well described your old fashioned Grand-paternall Hall.  Is it not odd that every one’s earliest recollections are of some such place.  I had my Blakesware (Blakesmoor in the “London").  Nothing fills a childs mind like a large old Mansion [one or two words wafered over]; better if un-or-partially-occupied; peopled with the spirits of deceased members of [for] the County and Justices of the Quorum.  Would I were buried in the peopled solitude of one, with my feelings at 7 years old.

Those marble busts of the Emperors, they seem’d as if they were to stand for ever, as they had stood from the living days of Rome, in that old Marble Hall, and I to partake of their permanency; Eternity was, while I thought not of Time.  But he thought of me, and they are toppled down, and corn covers the spot of the noble old Dwelling and its princely gardens.  I feel like a grasshopper that chirping about the grounds escaped his scythe only by my littleness.  Ev’n now he is whetting one of his smallest razors to clean wipe me out, perhaps.  Well!

["My Engraving”—­Brook Pulham’s caricature.

“You have well described your ...  Grand-paternall Hall.”  Barton wrote the following account of this house, the home of his step-grandfather at Tottenham; but I do not know whether it is the same that Lamb saw:—­

My most delightful recollections of boyhood are connected with the fine old country-house in a green lane diverging from the high road which runs through Tottenham.  I would give seven years of life as it now is, for a week of that which I then led.  It was a large old house, with an iron palisade and a pair of iron gates in front, and a huge stone eagle on each pier.  Leading up to the steps by which you went up to the hall door, was a wide gravel walk, bordered in summer time by huge tubs, in which were orange and lemon trees, and in the centre of the grass-plot stood a tub yet huger, holding an enormous aloe, The hall itself, to my fancy then lofty and wide as a cathedral would seem now, was a famous place for battledore and shuttlecock; and behind was a garden, equal to that of old Alcinous himself.  My favourite walk was one of turf by a long straight pond, bordered with lime-trees.  But the whole demesne was the fairy ground of my childhood; and its presiding genius was grandpapa.  He must have been a very handsome man in his youth, for I remember him at nearly eighty, a very fine-looking one, even in the decay of mind and body.  In the morning a velvet cap; by dinner, a flaxen wig; his features always expressive of benignity and placid cheerfulness.  When he walked out into the garden, his cocked hat and amber-headed cane completed his costume.  To the recollection of this delightful personage, I am, I think, indebted for many soothing and pleasing associations, with old age.

“Those marble busts of the Emperors.”  See the Elia essay “Blakesmoor in H——­shire,” in Vol.  II, of this edition.]