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Page 124. THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS.
London Magazine, May, 1822, where it has a sub-title, "A May-Day Effusion."
This was not Lamb's only literary association with chimney-sweepers. In Vol. I. of this edition will be found the description of a sweep in the country which there is good reason to believe is Lamb's work. Again, in 1824, James Montgomery, the poet, edited a book—The Chimney-Sweepers' Friend and Climbing Boys' Album—with the benevolent purpose of interesting people in the hardships of the climbing boys' life and producing legislation to alleviate it. The first half of the book is practical: reports of committees, and so forth; the second is sentimental; verses by Bernard Barton, William Lisle Bowles, and many others; short stories of kidnapped children forced to the horrid business; and kindred themes. Among the "favourite poets of the day" to whom Montgomery applied were Scott, Wordsworth, Rogers, Moore, Joanna Baillie and Lamb. Lamb replied by copying out (with the alteration of Toddy for Dacre) "The Chimney-Sweeper" from Blake's Songs of Innocence, described by Montgomery as "a very rare and curious little work." In that poem it will be remembered the little sweep cries "weep, weep, weep." Lamb compares the cry more prettily to the "peep, peep" of the sparrow.
Page 125, line 6. Shop … Mr. Thomas Read's Saloop Coffee House was at No. 102 Fleet Street. The following lines were painted on a board in Read's establishment:—
Come, all degrees now passing by,
My charming liquor taste and try;
To Lockyer come, and drink your fill;
Mount Pleasant has no kind of ill.
The fumes of wine, punch, drams and beer,
It will expell; your spirits cheer;
From drowsiness your spirits free.
Sweet as a rose your breath will be,
Come taste and try, and speak your mind;
Such rare ingredients here are joined,
Mount Pleasant pleases all mankind.
Page 127, line 12 from foot. The young Montagu. Edward Wortley Montagu (1713-1776), the traveller, ran away from Westminster School more than once, becoming, among other things, a chimney-sweeper.
Page 127, line 9 from foot. Arundel Castle. The Sussex seat of the Dukes of Norfolk. The "late duke" was Charles Howard, eleventh duke, who died in 1815, and who spent enormous sums of money on curiosities. I can find no record of the story of the sweep. Perhaps Lamb invented it, or applied it to Arundel.
Page 128, line 14 from foot. Jem White. James White (1775-1820), who was at Christ's Hospital with Lamb, and who wrote Falstaff's Letters, 1796, in his company (see Vol. I.). "There never was his like," Lamb told another old schoolfellow, Valentine Le Grice, in 1833; "we shall never see such days as those in which he flourished." See the essay "On Some of the Old Actors," for an anecdote of White.
Page 128, line 8 from foot. The fair of St. Bartholomew. Held on September 3 at Smithfield, until 1855. George Daniel, in his recollections of Lamb, records a visit they paid together to the Fair. Lamb took Wordsworth through its noisy mazes in 1802.