P. 269. Lamb.—This appeared originally in The London Magazine, and was reprinted by Hone in The Every-Day Book. It was in Hone's Table Book that Lamb's extracts from the Elizabethan dramatists were published.
P. 269. Goldsmith.—See Bacon, on p. [65], and the note thereon.
P. 270. Scott.—Sir Walter was the first President of the Bannatyne Club, and he wrote these lines for the anniversary dinner in 1823. The club had been founded in the previous year with the object of printing works on the history and antiquities of Scotland. Bannatyne himself, whose name was given to the club, achieved immortality by copying out nearly all the ancient poetry of Scotland in 1568, at a time when the country was ravaged by plague, and the records of Scottish literature were also in danger of destruction. Of the other names mentioned here, Ritson had written a vegetarian book. The 'yeditur' was the name given by Lord Eldon to James Sibbald. 'Greysteel' was a romance that David Herd sought in vain, and it gave him his nickname.
P. 271. Maginn.—Sung at the Booksellers' Annual Dinner, Blackwall, June 7, 1840. Fraser, whose name lives in his magazine, died in the following year.
It is very tempting to give more passages about booksellers but I must refrain as it would be foreign to the purpose of this volume, and the subject has been recently treated with great fullness and greater ability by Mr. Frank A. Mumby in The Romance of Bookselling.
P. 273. de Bury.—'Would it not grieve a man of a good spirit to see Hobson finde more money in the tayles of 12 jades than a scholler in 200 bookes?'—The Pilgrimage to Parnassus. Hobson, the carrier, celebrated by Milton, is the hero of 'Hobson's choice'.
P. 274. Lamb.—'The motto I proposed for the [Edinburgh] Review was: Tenui Musam meditamur avena—"we cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal."'—Sydney Smith.
P. 274. Ruskin.—Mark Pattison said that nobody who respected himself could have less than 1,000 volumes, and that this number of octavo volumes could be stacked in a bookcase 13 feet by 10 feet and 6 inches deep. He complained that the bookseller's bill in the ordinary middle-class family is shamefully small, and he thought it monstrous that a man who is earning £1,000 a year should spend less than £1 a week on books. 'A shilling in the pound to be spent on books,' is Lord Morley's comment, 'by a clerk who earns a couple of hundred pounds a year, or by a workman who earns a quarter of that sum, is rather more, I think, than can be reasonably expected.'
P. 276. Lamb.—Comberbatch was the name in which Coleridge enlisted in the Dragoons. The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq., was by Thomas Amory. Leigh Hunt describes Buncle as 'a kind of innocent Henry VIII of private life'.
Charles Lamb, who at last grew tired of lending his books, threatened to chain Wordsworth's poems to his shelves, adding:—'For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read, but don't read; and some neither read nor mean to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money they never fail to make use of it.'—Sir T. N. Talfourd.