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Page 86. Dick Strype.

Writing to John Rickman in January, 1802, Lamb says, “My editor [Dan Stuart of the Morning Post] uniformly rejects all that I do, considerable in length.  I shall only do paragraphs with now and then a slight poem, such as Dick Strype, if you read it, which was but a long epigram.”  The verses, which appeared on January 6, 1802, may be compared with the story of Ephraim Wagstaff, on page 432 of Vol.  I., written twenty-five years later.  It has been pointed out that Points of Misery, 1823, by Charles Molloy Westmacott (Bernard Blackmantle of the English Spy), contains the poem with slight alterations.  But Westmacott reaped where he could, and his book is confessedly not wholly original.  Lamb seems to me to admit authorship by implication fairly completely.  Westmacott was only thirteen when it was first printed.

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Page 88. Two Epitaphs on a young Lady, etc.

Morning Post, February 7, 1804.  Signed C.L.  Lamb sends the poem both to Wordsworth and Manning in 1803.  He says to Manning:—­“Did I send you an epitaph I scribbled upon a poor girl who died at nineteen?—­a good girl, and a pretty girl, and a clever girl, but strangely neglected by all her friends and kin....  Brief, and pretty, and tender, is it not?  I send you this, being the only piece of poetry I have done since the Muses all went with T.M. [Thomas Manning] to Paris.”

The young lady was Mary Druitt of Wimborne who died of consumption in 1801.  The verses are not on her tombstone.  A letter from Lamb to his friend Rickman (see Canon Ainger’s edition), shows that it was for Rickman that the lines were written.  Lamb did not know Mary Druitt.  Writing to Rickman in February, 1802, Lamb sends the second epitaph:—­“Your own prose, or nakedly the letter which you sent me, which was in some sort an epitaph, would do better on her gravestone than the cold lines of a stranger.”

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Page 89. The Ape.

Printed in the London Magazine, October, 1820, where it was preceded by these words:—­

“To THE EDITOR

“Mr. Editor,—­The riddling lines which I send you, were written upon a young lady, who, from her diverting sportiveness in childhood, was named by her friends The Ape.  When the verses were written, L.M. had outgrown the title—­but not the memory of it—­being in her teens, and consequently past child-tricks.  They are an endeavour to express that perplexity, which one feels at any alteration, even supposed for the better, in a beloved object; with a little oblique grudging at Time, who cannot bestow new graces without taking away some portion of the older ones, which we can ill miss.

“*****.”