Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers,
Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap;
My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap,
And I walk gownèd.
Page 8, line 6 from foot. Agnize. Lamb was fond of this word. I have seen it stated ingeniously that it was of his own coinage—from agnus, a lamb—but the derivation is ad gnoscere, to acknowledge, to recognise, and the word is to be found in other places—in "Othello," for example (Act I., Scene 3, line 232):—
I do agnise
A natural and prompt alacrity.
Page 9, middle. Red-letter days. See note on page 351. The holidays
at the India House, which are given in the London directories of
Lamb's early time there, make a considerable list. But in 1820 the
Accountants' Office, where Lamb was, kept only five days in the year.
Page 10, line 11. I can here … enact the student. Lamb had distilled the matter of this paragraph into his sonnet, "I was not Trained in Academic Bowers," written at Cambridge in August of the preceding year (see above and Vol. IV.).
Page 11, line 12 from foot. Unsettle my faith. At this point, in the London Magazine, Lamb appended the footnote:—
"There is something to me repugnant, at any time, in written hand. The text never seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty—as springing up with all its parts absolute—till, in evil hour, I was shown the original written copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the Library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them, after the latter cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspirations were made up of parts, and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the work-shop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture, till it is fairly off the easel; no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, and painting another Galatea."
In the Appendix to Vol. I., page 428, I have printed a passage from the original MS. of Comus, which there is reason to believe was contributed to the London Magazine by Lamb.
Page 11, line 9 from foot. G.D. George Dyer (1755-1841), Lamb's friend for many years. This is the first mention of him in the essays; but we shall meet him again, particularly in "Amicus Redivivus." George Dyer was educated at Christ's Hospital long before Lamb's time there, and, becoming a Grecian, had entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He became at first an usher in Essex, then a private tutor to the children of Robert Robinson, the Unitarian, whose life he afterwards excellently wrote, then an usher again, at Northampton, one of his colleagues being John Clarke, father of Lamb's friend, Charles Cowden Clarke. In 1792 he settled in Clifford's Inn as a hack; wrote poems, made indexes, examined libraries for a great bibliographical work (never published), and contributed "all that was original" to Valpy's classics in 141 volumes. Under this work his sight gave way; and he once showed Hazlitt two fingers the use of which he had lost in copying out MSS. of Procrus and Plotinus in a fine Greek hand. Fortunately a good woman took him under her wing; they were married in 1825; and Dyer's last days were happy. His best books were his Life of Robert Robinson and his History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge. Lamb and his friends laughed at him and loved him. In addition to the stories told by Lamb in his letters and essays, there are amusing characteristics of Dyer in Crabb Robinson's diary, in Leigh Hunt, in Hazlitt, in Talfourd, and in other places. All bear upon his gentleness, his untidiness and his want of humour. One of the most famous stories tells of Dyer's criticism of Williams, the terrible Ratcliffe Highway murderer. Dyer, who would never say an ill word of any one, was asked his opinion of this cold-blooded assassin of two families. "He must," he replied after due thought, "be rather an eccentric character."
Page 12, line 10. Injustice to him. In the London Magazine the following footnote came here, almost certainly by Lamb:—