LETTER 397
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HILL
D'r Sir It is necessary I see you sign, can you step up to me 4 Inner
Temple Lane this evening. I shall wait at home.
Yours,
C. LAMB.
[I have no notion to what the note refers. It is quite likely, Mr. J.A. Rutter suggests, that Hill the drysalter, a famous busy-body, and a friend of Theodore Hook, stood for the portrait of Tom Pry in Lamb's "Lepus Papers" (see Vol. I.). S.C. Hall, in his Book of Memories, says of Hill that "his peculiar faculty was to find out what everybody did, from a minister of state to a stableboy.">[