Page 194, line 7. A Vestris. Madame Vestris (1797-1856), the great comédienne, who was one of Elliston's stars at Drury Lane.
Page 195, line 6. Latinity. Elliston was buried in St. John's Church, Waterloo Road, and a marble slab with a Latin inscription by Nicholas Torre, his son-in-law, is on the wall. Elliston was the nephew of Dr. Elliston, Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who sent him to St. Paul's School—not, however, that founded by Colet—but to St. Paul's School, Covent Garden. He was intended for the Church.
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Page 195. DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING.
London Magazine, July, 1822, where, at the end, were the words, "To be continued;" but Lamb did not return to the topic.
For some curious reason Lamb passed over this essay when collecting Elia for the press. It was not republished till 1833, in the Last Essays.
Page 195, motto. The Relapse. The comedy by Sir John Vanbrugh.
Lamb liked this quotation. He uses it in his letter about William
Wordsworth, junior, to Dorothy Wordsworth, November 25, 1819; and
again in his "Reminiscence of Sir Jeffery Dunstan" (see Vol. I.).
Page 195, foot. I can read any thing which I call a book. Writing to
Wordsworth in August, 1815, Lamb says: "What any man can write, surely
I may read."
Page 195, last line. Pocket Books. In the London Magazine Lamb added in parenthesis "the literary excepted," the reference being to the Literary Pocket Book which Leigh Hunt brought out annually from 1819 to 1822.
Page 196, line 2. Hume … Jenyns. Hume would be David Hume (1711-1776), the philosopher and historian of England; Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), historian of Rome; William Robertson, D.D. (1721-1793), historian of America, Charles V., Scotland and India; James Beattie (1735-1803), author of "The Minstrel" and a number of essays, who had, however, one recommendation to Lamb, of which Lamb may have been unaware—he loved Vincent Bourne's poems and was one of the first to praise them; and Soame Jenyns (1704-1787), author of The Art of Dancing, and the Inquiry into Evil which Johnson reviewed so mercilessly. It is stated in Moore's Diary, according to Procter, that Lamb "excluded from his library Robertson, Gibbon and Hume, and made instead a collection of the works of the heroes of The Dunciad."