Moxon tells us that when the old church was pulled down and the figures were removed, Lamb shed tears. The figures I am told still exist in the garden of the villa in Regent's Park—"St. Dunstan's"—that once belonged to the Marquis of Hertford and is now the Earl of Londesborough's London House.
Miss Pearson kept a toy-shop at No. 7 Fleet Street. The Lambs knew her through Charles's old schoolmistress, Mrs. Reynolds.
Page 368. VII.—Maria Howe. "The Witch Aunt."
By Charles Lamb. This story is peculiarly interesting to students of Lamb's life, for it describes, probably with absolute fidelity, his Aunt Hetty, and elaborates the passage concerning Stackhouse's New History of the Bible, which is to be found in the Elia essay "Witches and other Night Fears." Aunt Hetty is described elsewhere by Lamb in his Elia essays, "Christ's Hospital" and "My Relations;" and in the poem "Written on the Day of my Aunt's Funeral." In Mary Lamb's letter to Sarah Stoddart on September 21, 1803, is a short passage corroborative of Lamb's account of the relations subsisting between his aunt and his parents:—
My father had a sister lived with us—of course, lived with my Mother, her sister-in-law; they were, in their different ways, the best creatures in the world—but they set out wrong at first. They made each other miserable for full twenty years of their lives—my Mother was a perfect gentlewoman, my Aunty as unlike a gentlewoman as you can possibly imagine a good old woman to be; so that my dear Mother (who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart) used to distress and weary her with incessant and unceasing attention and politeness, to gain her affection. The old woman could not return this in kind, and did not know what to make of it—thought it all deceit, and used to hate my Mother with a bitter hatred; which, of course, was soon returned with interest.
Lamb told Coleridge, in a letter upon his aunt's death, "she was to me the 'cherisher of infancy.'"
In the Elia essay on "Witches" no mention is made of Glanvil; but there is a passage in the unpublished version of John Woodvil which mentions both it and Stackhouse:—
I can remember when a child the maids
Would place me on their lap, as they undrest me,
As silly women use, and tell me stories
Of Witches—Make me read "Glanvil on Witchcraft,"
And in conclusion show me in the Bible,
The old Family-Bible, with the pictures in it,
The 'graving of the Witch raising up Samuel,
Which so possest my fancy, being a child,
That nightly in my dreams an old Hag came
And sat upon my pillow.
That was written some eight or nine years earlier than "Maria Howe;" the essay on "Witches" some fifteen years later. Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680) issued his Philosophical Considerations touching Witches and Witchcraft, in 1666.
Page 375. VIII.—Charlotte Wilmot. "The Merchant's Daughter."