Page 196, line 14. Population Essay. That was the day of population essays. Malthus's Essay on Population, 1798, had led to a number of replies.
Page 196, line 22. My ragged veterans. Crabb Robinson recorded in his diary that Lamb had the "finest collection of shabby books" he ever saw; "such a number of first-rate works in very bad condition is, I think, nowhere to be found." Leigh Hunt stated in his essay on "My Books" in The Literary Examiner, July 5, 1823, that Lamb's library had
an handsome contempt for appearance. It looks like what it is, a selection made at precious intervals from the book-stalls;—now a Chaucer at nine and twopence; now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas Browne at two shillings; now a Jeremy Taylor, a Spinoza; an old English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney; and the books are "neat as imported." The very perusal of the backs is a "discipline of humanity." There Mr. Southey takes his place again with an old Radical friend: there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden: there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, Sewel: there Guzman d'Alfarache thinks himself fit company for Sir Charles Grandison, and has his claims admitted. Even the "high fantastical" Duchess of Newcastle, with her laurel on her head, is received with grave honours, and not the less for declining to trouble herself with the constitutions of her maids.
It is in the same essay that Leigh Hunt mentions that he once saw Lamb kiss an old folio—Chapman's Homer—the work he paraphrased for children under the title The Adventures of Ulysses.
Page 197, line 15. Life of the Duke of Newcastle. Lamb's copy, a folio containing also the "Philosophical Letters," is in America.
Page 197, line 20. Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton… I cannot say where are Lamb's copies of Sidney and Fuller; but the British Museum has his Milton, rich in MS. notes, a two-volume edition, 1751. The Taylor, which Lamb acquired in 1798, is the 1678 folio Sermons. I cannot say where it now is.
Page 197, line 26. Shakspeare. Lamb's Shakespeare was not sold at the sale of his library; only a copy of the Poems, 12mo, 1714. His annotated copy of the Poems, 1640, is in America. There is a reference to one of Rowe's plates in the essay "My First Play." The Shakespeare gallery engravings were the costly series of illustrations to Shakespeare commissioned by John Boydell (1719-1804), Lord Mayor of London in 1790. The pictures were exhibited in the Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall, and the engravings were published in 1802.
After the word "Shakespeare," in the London Magazine, came the sentence: "You cannot make a pet book of an author whom everybody reads."
In a letter to Wordsworth, February 1, 1806, Lamb says: "Shakespear is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book." In the same letter he says of binding: "The Law Robe I have ever thought as comely and gentlemanly a garb as a Book would wish to wear."
Page 197, line 7 from foot. Beaumont and Fletcher. See note to "The
Two Races of Men" for an account of Lamb's copy, now in the British
Museum.