London Magazine, October, 1821.
Compare with this essay Maria Howe's story of "The Witch Aunt," in Mrs. Leicester's School (see Vol. III.), which Lamb had written thirteen years earlier.
Page 75, line 12 from foot. History of the Bible, by Stackhouse. Thomas Stackhouse (1677-1752) was rector of Boldon, in Durham; his New History of the Holy Bible from the Beginning of the World to the Establishment of Christianity—the work in question—was published in 1737.
Page 75, line 6 from foot. The Witch raising up Samuel. This paragraph was the third place in which Lamb recorded his terror of this picture of the Witch of Endor in Stackhouse's Bible, but the first occasion in which he took it to himself. In one draft of John Woodvil (see Vol. IV.), the hero says:—
I can remember when a child the maids
Would place me on their lap, as they undrest me,
As silly women use, and tell me stories
Of Witches—make me read "Glanvil on Witchcraft,"
And in conclusion show me in the Bible,
The old Family Bible, with the pictures in it,
The 'graving of the Witch raising up Samuel,
Which so possest my fancy, being a child,
That nightly in my dreams an old Hag came
And sat upon my pillow.
Then again, in Mrs. Leicester's School, in the story of Maria Howe, called "The Witch Aunt," one of the three stories in that book which Lamb wrote, Stackhouse's Bible is found once more. In my large edition I give a reproduction of the terrible picture. Page 77, foot. Dear little T.H. This was the unlucky passage which gave Southey his chief text in his criticism of Elia as a book wanting "a sounder religious feeling," and which led to Lamb's expostulatory "Letter" (see Vol. I.). Southey commented thus:—
This poor child, instead of being trained up in the way in which he should go, had been bred in the ways of modern philosophy; he had systematically been prevented from knowing anything of that Saviour who said, "Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven;" care had been taken that he should not pray to God, nor lie down at night in reliance upon His good Providence!
T.H. was Thornton Hunt, Leigh Hunt's eldest son and Lamb's "favourite child" (see verses to him in Vol. IV.).
Page 79, line 18 from foot. Barry Cornwall. Bryan Waller Procter
(1787-1874), Lamb's friend. The reference is to "A Dream," a poem in
Barry Cornwall's Dramatic Scenes, 1819, which Lamb greatly admired.
See his sonnet to the poet in Vol. IV., where it is mentioned again.
Page 80, last paragraph of essay. In the original MS. of this essay (now in the Dyce and Forster collection at South Kensington) the last paragraph ran thus:—