Page 197, line 5 from foot. No sympathy with them. After these words, in the London Magazine, came, "nor with Mr. Gifford's Ben Jonson." This edition by Lamb's old enemy, William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly, was published in 1816. Lamb's copy of Ben Jonson was dated 1692, folio. It is now in America, I believe.
Page 197, foot. The reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy. This reprint was, I think, published in 1800, in two volumes, marked ninth edition. Lamb's copy was dated 1621, quarto. I do not know where it now is.
Page 198, line 4. Malone. This was Edmund Malone (1741-1812), the critic and editor of Shakespeare, who in 1793 persuaded the Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon to whitewash the coloured bust of the poet in the chancel. A Gentleman's Magazine epigrammatist, sharing Lamb's view, wrote:—
Stranger, to whom this monument is shown,
Invoke the poet's curse upon Malone;
Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste betrays,
And daubs his tombstone, as he mars his plays.
Lamb has been less than fair to Malone. To defend his action in the matter of the bust of Shakespeare is impossible, except by saying that he acted in good faith and according to the fashion of his time. But he did great service to the fame of Shakespeare and thus to English literature, and was fearless and shrewd in his denunciation of the impostor Ireland.
Page 198, line 26. The Fairy Queen. Lamb's copy was a folio, 1617, 12, 17, 13. Against Canto XI., Stanza 32, he has written: "Dear Venom, this is the stave I wot of. I will maintain it against any in the book."
Page 199, line 14. Nando's. A coffee-house in Fleet Street, at the east corner of Inner Temple Lane, and thus at one time close to Lamb's rooms.
Page 199, line 16. "The Chronicle is in hand, Sir." In the London
Magazine the following paragraph was here inserted:—
"As in these little Diurnals I generally skip the Foreign News,
the Debates—and the Politics—I find the Morning Herald by far
the most entertaining of them. It is an agreeable miscellany,
rather than a newspaper."
The Morning Herald, under Alexander Chalmers, had given more attention to social gossip than to affairs of State; but under Thomas Wright it suddenly, about the time of Lamb's essay, became politically serious and left aristocratic matters to the Morning Post.