"Felo de omittendo." See the preceding letter, where Lamb remonstrated with Wordsworth for omitting the last lines from "Rural Architecture." Wordsworth seems to have charged Lamb with the criticism that decided their removal.
"The Pun." Canon Ainger pointed out that Hood, in his "Ode to
Melancholy," makes the same pun very happily:—
Even as the blossoms of the May,
Whose fragrance ends in must.
"Young Romilly." In "The Force of Prayer," which opens with the question—
What is good for a bootless bene?
Later Mary Lamb made another joke, when at Munden's farewell performance she said, "Sic transit gloria Munden!"
The stanzas from which Lamb quotes run:—
"What is good for a bootless bene?"
The Falconer to the Lady said;
And she made answer "Endless sorrow!"
In that she knew that her Son was dead.
She knew it by the Falconer's words,
And from the look of the Falconer's eye;
And from the love which was in her soul
For her youthful Romilly.
Sir Samuel Romilly (1757-1818), the lawyer and law reformer, was the great opponent of capital punishment for small offences.