I have not found the passage.
Page 99, line 14. Susan P——. This is Susannah Peirson, sister of the Peter Peirson to whom we shall come directly. Samuel Salt left her a choice of books in his library, together with a money legacy and a silver inkstand, hoping that reading and reflection would make her life "more comfortable." B——d Row would be Bedford Row.
Page 99, line 12 from foot, F., the counsel. I cannot be sure who this was. The Law Directory of that day does not help.
Page 99, foot. Elwes. John Elwes, the miser (1714-1789), whose Life was published in 1790 after running through The World—the work of Topham, that paper's editor, who is mentioned in Lamb's essay on "Newspapers."
Page 100, line 15. Lovel. Lovel was the name by which Lamb refers to his father, John Lamb. We know nothing of him in his prime beyond what is told in this essay, but after the great tragedy, there are in the Letters glimpses of him as a broken, querulous old man. He died in 1799. Of John Lamb's early days all our information is contained in this essay, in his own Poetical Pieces, where he describes his life as a footman, and in the essay on "Poor Relations," where his boyish memories of Lincoln are mentioned. Of his verses it was perhaps too much (though prettily filial) to say they were "next to Swift and Prior;" but they have much good humour and spirit. John Lamb's poems were printed in a thin quarto under the title Poetical Pieces on Several Occasions. The dedication was to "The Forty-Nine Members of the Friendly Society for the Benefit of their Widows, of whom I have the honour of making the Number Fifty," and in the dedicatory epistle it is stated that the Society was in some degree the cause of Number Fifty's commencing author, on account of its approving and printing certain lines which were spoken by him at an annual meeting it the Devil Tavern. The first two poetical pieces are apologues on marriage and the happiness that it should bring, the characters being drawn from bird life. Then follow verses written for the meetings of the Society, and miscellaneous compositions. Of these the description of a lady's footman's daily life, from within, has a good deal of sprightliness, and displays quite a little mastery of the mock-heroic couplet. The last poem is a long rhymed version of the story of Joseph. With this exception, for which Lamb's character-sketch does not quite prepare us, it is very natural to think of the author as Lovel. One of the pieces, a familiar letter to a doctor, begins thus:—
My good friend,
For favours to my son and wife,
I shall love you whilst I've life,
Your clysters, potions, help'd to save,
Our infant lambkin from the grave.
The infant lambkin was probably John Lamb, but of course it might have been Charles. The expression, however, proves that punning ran in the family. Lamb's library contained his father's copy of Hudibras.
Lamb's phrase, descriptive of his father's decline, is taken with a variation from his own poems—from the "Lines written on the Day of my Aunt's Funeral" (Blank Verse, 1798):—
One parent yet is left,—a wretched thing,
A sad survivor of his buried wife
A palsy-smitten, childish, old, old man,
A semblance most forlorn of what he was—
A merry cheerful man.
Page 100, line 17. "Flapper." This is probably an allusion to the flappers in Gulliver's Travels—the servants who, in Laputa, carried bladders with which every now and then they flapped the mouths and ears of their employers, to recall them to themselves and disperse their meditations.