The sonnet referred to, beginning—
They talk of time and of time's galling yoke,
will be found quoted above, in the notes to "New Year's Eve." It was, of course, by Lamb himself. To the other sonnet he gave the title "Work" (see Vol. IV.). Cowley's lines are from "The Complaint."
Page 225, line 14 from foot. NOTHING-TO-DO. Lamb wrote to Barton in 1827: "Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps—good works."
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Page 226. THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING.
New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826, where it was one of the Popular Fallacies, under the title, "That my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are models of the Genteel Style in Writing.—We should prefer saying—of the Lordly and the Gentlemanly. Nothing," &c.
Page 226, beginning. My Lord Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the grandson of the great statesman, and the author of the Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times, 1711, and other less known works. In the essay "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading" Lamb says, "Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me."
Page 226, beginning. Sir William Temple. Sir William Temple (1628-1699), diplomatist and man of letters, the patron of Swift, and the husband of the letter-writing Dorothy Osborne. His first diplomatic mission was in 1665, to Christopher Bernard von Glialen, the prince-bishop of Munster, who grew the northern cherries (see page 228). Afterwards he was accredited to Brussels and the Hague, and subsequently became English Ambassador at the Hague. He was recalled in 1670, and spent the time between then and 1674, when he returned, in adding to his garden at Sheen, near Richmond, and in literary pursuits. He re-entered active political life in 1674, but retired again in 1680, and moved to an estate near Farnham; which he named Moor Park, laid out in the Dutch style, and made famous for its wall fruit. Hither Swift came, as amanuensis, in 1689, and he was there, with intervals of absence, in 1699, when Temple died, "and with him," Swift wrote in his Diary, "all that was good and amiable among men." He was buried in Westminster Abbey, but his heart, by his special wish, was placed in a silver casket under the sun-dial at Moor Park, near his favourite window seat.
Temple's essays, under the title of Miscellanea, were published in 1680 and 1692; his works, in several volumes, between 1700 and 1709. The best-known essay is that on "Ancient and Modern Learning," but Lamb refers also to those "On Health and Long Life," "Of the Cure of the Gout," "Of Gardening." The quotation on page 228 does not exactly end Temple's garden essay, as Lamb says. Lamb has slightly altered Temple's punctuation.