Page 30, line 1. John Buncle. Most of Lamb's books are in America; Lamb's copy of John Buncle, with an introductory note written in by Coleridge, was sold, with other books from his library, in New York in 1848. The Life of John Buncle, Esq., a book highly praised by Hazlitt, was by Thomas Amory (1691?-1788), published, Part I. in 1756 and Part II. in 1766. A condensed reprint was issued in 1823 entitled The Spirit of Buncle, in which, Mr. W.C. Hazlitt suggests, Lamb may have had a hand with William Hazlitt.
Page 30, line 19. Spiteful K. James Kenney (1780-1849), the dramatist, then resident at Versailles, where Lamb and his sister visited him in 1822. He married Louisa Mercier, daughter of Louis Sebastian Mercier, the French critic, and widow of Lamb's earlier friend, Thomas Holcroft. One of their two sons was named Charles Lamb Kenney (1821-1881). Lamb recovered Margaret of Newcastle's Letters (folio, 1664), which is among the books in America, as is also the Fulke Greville (small folio, 1633).
Page 31, line 4. S.T.C…. annotations. Lamb's copy of Daniel's Poetical Works, two volumes, 1718, and of Browne's Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, folio, 1658, both with marginalia by himself and Coleridge, are in existence, but I cannot say where: probably in America. Lamb's copy of Beaumont and Fletcher, with Coleridge's notes (see "Old China"), is, however, safe in the British Museum. His Fulke Greville, as I have said, is in America, but I fancy it has nothing of Coleridge in it, nor has his Burton—quarto, 1621—which still exists.
Coleridge's notes in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio are not numerous, but usually ample and seriously critical. At the foot of a page of the "Siege of Corinth," on which he had written two notes (one, "O flat! flat! flat! Sole! Flounder! Place! all stinking! stinkingly flat!"), he added:—
N.B.—I shall not be long here, Charles!—I gone, you will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic.
S.T.C.
Octr. 1811.
Underneath the initials S.T.C. are the initials W.W. which suggest that Wordsworth was present.
The Museum also has Lamb's Milton, with annotations by himself and
Coleridge.
In the Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Charles Lamb, privately issued by the New York Dibdin Club in 1897, is a list of five of Lamb's books now in America containing valuable and unpublished marginalia by Coleridge: The Life of John Buncle, Donne's Poems ("I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be vexed that I have scribbled your book. S.T.C., 2d May, 1811"), Reynolds' God's Revenge against … Murder, 1651 ("O what a beautiful concordia discordantium is an unthinking good man's soul!"), The History of Philip de Commines in English, and Petwin's Letters Concerning the Mind.