Lamb pasted the article in his Album or Commonplace Book accompanied by a portrait of the actress. Writing to Mrs. Wordsworth in February, 1818, he speaks of his power, during business, of reserving "in some corner of my mind 'some darling thoughts, all my own,'—faint memory of some passage in a book, or the tone of an absent friend's voice—a snatch of Miss Burrell's singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine plain face."
[Page 215,] line 2 of essay. A burletta founded, etc. This was "Rochester; or, King Charles the Second's Merry Days," by William Thomas Moncrieff (1794-1857).
[Page 215,] line 8 of essay. Elliston and Mrs. Edwin. Robert William Elliston (1774-1831), a famous comedian, and the lessee of the Olympic at that date, of whom Lamb wrote with enthusiasm in his Elia essays, "To the Shade of Elliston," and "Ellistoniana." Elizabeth Rebecca Edwin (1771?-1854) was the wife of John Edwin the younger, a favourite actress in Mrs. Jordan's parts.
[Page 215,] line 11 of essay. "Don Giovanni." "Giovanni in London; or, The Libertine Reclaimed," 1817, also by Moncrieff—the play in which Madame Vestris made so great a hit a year or so later.
[Page 216,] line 14 from foot. We have seen Mrs. Jordan. Mrs. Jordan had left the London stage in 1815.
[Page 216,] line 10 from foot. Great house in the Haymarket. This was the King's Theatre (afterwards His Majesty's) where Mozart's "Don Giovanni" was produced in 1817, with Ambrogetti, the buffo, in the caste. Lamb's friend, William Ayrton, was the moving spirit in this representation.
[Page 217.] II.—Miss Kelly at Bath.
Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, January 30, 1819. The present article has been set up from that paper. Usually, however, it has been set up from Leigh Hunt's copy in The Examiner, February 7 and 8, 1819, where it was quoted with the following introduction:—
The Reader, we are sure, will thank us for extracting the following observations on a favourite Actress, from a Provincial Paper, the Bristol Journal. We should have guessed the masterly and cordial hand that wrote them had we met with it in the East Indies. There is but one praise belonging to Miss Kelly which it has omitted, and which it could not supply;—and that is, that she has had finer criticism written upon her, than any performer that ever trod the stage.