fternoon," Lamb wrote to Coleridge on February 13, 1797, "I
attend the funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on Thursday. I own I am
thankful that the good creature has ended all her days of suffering and
infirmity. She was to me the 'cherisher of infancy.' ..." Lamb's Aunt
Hetty was his father's sister. Her real name was Sarah Lamb. All that we
know of her is found in this poem, in the _Letters_, in the passages in
"Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," and "My Relations;" in
the story of "The Witch Aunt," in _Mrs. Leicester's School_, and in a
reference in one of Mary Lamb's letters to Sarah Stoddart, where,
writing of her aunt and her mother,--"the best creatures in the
world,"--she speaks of Miss Lamb as being "as unlike a gentlewoman as
you can possibly imagine a good old woman to be;" contrasting her with
Mrs. Lamb, "a perfect gentlewoman." The description in "The Witch Aunt"
bears out Mary Lamb's letter.

After the tragedy of September, 1796, Aunt Hetty was taken into the
house of a rich relative. This lady, however, seems to have been of too
selfish and jealous a disposition (see Lamb's letter to Coleridge,
December 9, 1796) to exert any real effort to make her guest comfortable
or happy. Hence Aunt Hetty returned to her nephew.

"My poor old aunt [Lamb wrote to Coleridge on January 5, 1797], whom you
have seen, the kindest, goodest creature to me when I was at school; who
used to toddle there to bring me fag [food], when I, school-boy like,
only despised her for it, and used to be ashamed to see her come and sit
herself down on the old coal-hole steps as you went into the old
grammar-school, opend her apron, and bring out her bason with some nice
thing she had caused to be saved for me--the good old creature is now
lying on her death bed.... She says, poor thing, she is glad to come
home to die with me. I was always her favourite."

Line 24. _One parent yet is left_. John Lamb, who is described as he was
in his prime, as Lovel, in the _Elia_ essay on _"The Old Benchers of the
Inner Temple,"_ died in 1799.

Line 27. _A semblance most forlorn of what he was_. Lamb uses this line
as a quotation, slightly altered, in his account of Lovel.

* * * * *

Page 22. _Written a Year after the Events_.

Lamb sent this poem to Coleridge in September, 1797, entitling it
"Written a Twelvemonth after the Events," and adding, "Friday next,
Coleridge, is the day on which my Mother