[Page 371,] line 10. "In the flowery spring," etc. From Chapman's Translation of Homer's "Hymn to Pan," 31-33.
[Page 373,] line 15 from foot. Sir Thomas Gresham. It is told of Sir Thomas Gresham (1519?-1579), the founder of the Royal Exchange, that as a baby his life was saved by the chirping of a grasshopper, as related here. But cold veracity says not. The legend seems to have had its origin in the grasshopper crest of the Greshams, but it has been found that this crest was worn by an ancestor of Sir Thomas's who lived a hundred years earlier.
[Page 375.] An Autobiographical Sketch.
Lamb wrote this little sketch for William Upcott (1779-1845), the autograph collector and assistant librarian of the London Institution. Upcott permitted John Forster to quote it in the New Monthly Magazine for April, 1835, shortly after Lamb's death. It is here printed from the original MS. in the possession of Mr. B. B. MacGeorge, of Glasgow, contained in a MS. volume entitled "Reliques of my Contemporaries. William Upcott." Whether or no Lamb ever caught a swallow flying is not known; but everything else in the autobiography is true. The reference to Mr. Upcott's book may be to the album in which this sketch was written, or to a new edition of the Biographical Dictionary of Living Authors, published in 1816, in which Upcott is supposed to have had a hand. I cannot discover whether a second edition of this work was published. There is none at the British Museum, nor at the London Institution, of which Upcott was librarian. In the first edition, A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland ... 1816, Lamb figures thus:—
"Lamb, Charles, was born in London, in 1775, and educated at Christ's Hospital. He is at present a clerk in the India House, and has published "Lamb, Miss, sister of the preceding, has published Mrs. Leicester's School, 12mo, 1808; Poetry for Children, 2 vs., 12mo, 1809." Upcott is not considered to have done more than to collect some of the materials for the Dictionary, which was the work of John Watkins and Frederick Shoberl. Lamb's sense of time was never good: the Elia essays were published in 1823 and the Specimens in 1808, fully four years and nineteen years before the date of this autobiography. The joke about the Works will be found also in the original version of the "Character of the Late Elia."