How, especially, is Victoria?
I try to remember all I used to meet at Shacklewell. The little household, cake-producing, wine-bringing out Emma—the old servant, that didn't stay, and ought to have staid, and was always very dirty and friendly, and Miss H., the counter-tenor with a fine voice, whose sister married Thurtell. They all live in my mind's eye, and Mr. N.'s and Holmes's walks with us half back after supper. Troja fuit!
["The Companion." Leigh Hunt's paper lasted only for seven months. Madame Pasta, of whom too much was written, was Giudetta Pasta (1798-1865), a singer of unusual compass, for whom Bellini wrote "La Somnambula."
The following is the account of the Sliding Watchman in the essay,
"Walks Home by Night in Bad Weather. Watchmen":—
But the oddest of all was the Sliding Watchman. Think of walking up a street in the depth of a frosty winter, with long ice in the gutters, and sleet over head, and then figure to yourself a sort of bale of a man in white, coming towards you with a lantern in one hand, and an umbrella over his head. It was the oddest mixture of luxury and hardship, of juvenility and old age! But this looked agreeable. Animal spirits carry everything before them; and our invincible friend seemed a watchman for Rabelais. Time was run at and butted by him like a goat. The slide seemed to bear him half through the night at once; he slipped from out of his box and his common-places at one rush of a merry thought, and seemed to say, "Everything's in imagination;—here goes the whole weight of my office."
"Your sister"—Mrs. Isabella Jane Towers, author of The Children's Fireside, 1828, and other books for children, to whom Lamb had sent a sonnet (see Vol. IV.).
"Novello… dedications… I read the Atlas." In The Atlas for
February 17 was reviewed Select Airs from Spohr's celebrated Opera of
Faust, arranged as duetts for the Pianoforte and inscribed to his friend
Charles Cowden Clarke by Vincent Novello. Holmes was musical critic for
The Atlas.
"One Clarke a schoolmaster." See note to the letter to Clarke in the summer of 1821.
"Holofernes' days"—Holofernes, the schoolmaster, in "Love's Labour's
Lost." Cowden Clarke had assisted his father.
"Master Stephen." I do not identify Stephen.