Mary sends her kind remembrance, and covets the remarks equally with me.
C. LAMB.
[The reference to the "word-banker" and "register" is explained by Manning's first letter to Lamb from Paris, in which he says: "I … beg you to keep all my letters. I hope to send you many—and I may in the course of time, make some observations that I shall wish to recall to my memory when I return to England."
"Are you and the First Consul thick?"—Napoleon, with whom Manning was destined one day to be on terms. In 1803, on the declaration of war, when he wished to return to England, Manning's was the only passport that Napoleon signed; again, in 1817, on returning from China, Manning was wrecked near St. Helena, and, waiting on the island for a ship, conversed there with the great exile.
"Rumfordising." A word coined by Lamb from Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count von Rumford, the founder of the Royal Institution, the deviser of the Rumford stove, and a tireless scientific and philosophical experimentalist.
"Smellfungus." An allusion to Sterne's attack on Smollett, in The Sentimental Journey: "The lamented Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on; but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured or distorted."
"The Post." Lamb had been writing criticisms of plays; but Stuart, as we have seen, wanted them on the same night as the performance and Lamb found this impossible.
"I have done but one thing"—"The Londoner," referred to later.
"The Professor's Rib"—Godwin's second wife, the widow Clairmont (mother of Jane Clairmont), whom he had married in December, 1801.
"Fell"—R. Fell, author of a Tour through the Batavian Republic, 1801. Later he compiled a Life of Charles James Fox, 1808. Lamb knew him, as well as Fenwick, through Godwin.