"Our ancestors, the noble old Puritans of Cromwell's day, could distinguish between a day of religious rest and a day of recreation; and while they exacted a rigorous abstinence from all amusements (even to the walking out of nursery maids with their little charges in the fields) upon the Sabbath; in the lieu of the superstitious observance of the Saints days, which they abrogated, they humanely gave to the apprentices, and poorer sort of people, every alternate Thursday for a day of entire sport and recreation. A strain of piety and policy to be commended above the profane mockery of the Stuarts and their Book of Sports."
Lamb had said the same thing to Barton in a letter in the spring, 1824, referring there to "Southey's book" as his authority—this being The Book of the Church, 1824.
Page 220, line 25. Native … Hertfordshire. This was a slight exaggeration. Lamb was London born and bred. But Hertfordshire was his mother and grandmother's county, and all his love of the open air was centred there (see the essay on "Mackery End").
Page 221, line 1. My health. Lamb had really been seriously unwell for some time, as the Letters tell us.
Page 221, line 6. I was fifty. Lamb was fifty on February 10, 1825.
Page 231, line 7. I had grown to my desk. In his first letter to Barton (September 11, 1822) Lamb wrote: "I am like you a prisoner to the desk. I have been chained to that galley thirty years, a long shot. I have almost grown to the wood." Again, to Wordsworth: "I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing) with my breast against this thorn of a Desk."
Page 222, line 7. Boldero, Merryweather … Feigned names of course. It was Boldero that Lamb once pretended was Leigh Hunt's true name. And in his fictitious biography of Liston (Vol. I.) Liston's mother was said to have been a Miss Merryweather. In Lamb's early city days there was a banking firm in Cornhill, called Boldero, Adey, Lushington & Boldero.
Page 222, line 12 from foot. I could walk it away. Writing to Wordsworth in March, 1822, concerning the possibility of being pensioned off, Lamb had said:—"I had thought in a green old age (O green thought!) to have retired to Ponder's End—emblematic name—how beautiful! in the Ware road, there to have made up my accounts with heaven and the Company, toddling about between it and Cheshunt, anon stretching on some fine Izaac Walton morning, to Hoddsdon or Amwell, careless as a Beggar, but walking walking ever till I fairly walkd myself off my legs, dying walking."
And again, writing to Southey after the emancipation, he says (August, 1825): "Mary walks her twelve miles a day some days, and I twenty on others. 'Tis all holiday with me now, you know."
Page 224, line 9. Ch——. John Chambers, son of the Rev. Thomas Chambers, Vicar of Radway-Edgehill, Warwickshire, and an old Christ's Hospitaller, to whom Lamb wrote the famous letter on India House society, printed in the Letters, Canon Ainger's edition, under December, 1818. John Chambers lived until 1872, and had many stories of Lamb.