"Violence or injustice certainly none, Mr. Elia. But you will acknowledge that the charming unsuspectingness of our friend has sometimes laid him open to attacks, which, though savouring (we hope) more of waggery than malice—such is our unfeigned respect for G.D.—might, we think, much better have been omitted. Such was that silly joke of L[amb], who, at the time the question of the Scotch Novels was first agitated, gravely assured our friend—who as gravely went about repeating it in all companies—that Lord Castlereagh had acknowledged himself to be the author of Waverly! Note—not by Elia."
Page 12, line 11. "Strike an abstract idea." I do not find this quotation—if it be one; but when John Lamb once knocked Hazlitt down, during an argument on pigments, Hazlitt refrained from striking back, remarking that he was a metaphysician and dealt not in blows but in ideas. Lamb may be slyly remembering this.
Page 12, line 15. C——. Cambridge. Dyer added a work on Privileges of the University if Cambridge to his History.
Page 12, line 8 from foot. Our friend M.'s. Basil Montagu, Q.C. (1770-1851), legal writer, philanthropist, editor of Bacon, and the friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Mrs. M. here referred to was Montagu's third wife, a Mrs. Skepper. It was she who was called by Edward Irving "the noble lady," and to whom Carlyle addressed some early letters. A.S. was Anne Skepper, afterwards Mrs. Bryan Waller Procter, a fascinating lady who lived to a great age and died as recently as 1888. The Montagus then lived at 25 Bedford Square.
Page 13, line 17. Starts like a thing surprised. Here we have an interesting example of Lamb's gift of fused quotation. Wordsworth's line in the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality,"
Tremble like a guilty thing surprised,
and Shakespeare's phrase in "Hamlet" (Act I., Scene 1, line 148),
Started like a guilty thing,
were probably both in his mind as he wrote.
Page 13, line 24. Obtruded personal presence. In the London
Magazine the following passage came here:—