Page 281. OLD CHINA.
London Magazine, March, 1823.
This essay forms a pendant, or complement, to "Mackery End in
Hertfordshire," completing the portrait of Mary Lamb begun there.
It was, with "The Wedding," Wordsworth's favourite among the Last
Essays.
Page 282, line 23. The brown suit. P.G. Patmore, in his recollections of Lamb in the Court Journal, 1835, afterwards reprinted, with some alterations, in his My Friends and Acquaintances, stated that Lamb laid aside his snuff-coloured suit in favour of black, after twenty years of the India House; and he suggests that Wordsworth's stanzas in "A Poet's Epitaph" was the cause:—
But who is he, with modest looks,
And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.
He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.
Whatever Patmore's theory may be worth, it is certain that Lamb adhered to black after the change.
Page 282, line 25. Beaumont and Fletcher. See note to "Books and
Reading."
Page 282, line 27. Barker's. Barker's old book-shop was at No. 20 Great Russell Street, over which the Lambs went to live in 1817. It had then, however, become Mr. Owen's, a brazier's (Wheatley's London Past and Present gives Barker's as 19, but a contemporary directory says 20). Great Russell Street is now Russell Street.
Page 282, line 30. From Islington. This would be when Lamb and his sister lived at 36 Chapel Street, Pentonville, a stone's throw from the Islington boundary, in 1799-1800, after the death of their father.