ds uproarious. 'O ma'am, who do you think Miss
Ouldcroft (they pronounce it Holcroft) has been working a cap for?' 'A
child," answered Mary, in true Shandean female simplicity.' 'Tis the
man's child as was taken up for sheep-stealing.' Miss Ouldcroft was
staggered, and would have cut the connection; but by main force I made
her go and take her leave of her protegee. I thought, if she went no
more, the Abactor or the Abactor's wife (_vide_ Ainsworth) would suppose
she had heard something; and I have delicacy for a sheep-stealer. The
overseers actually overhauled a mutton-pie at the baker's (his first,
last, and only hope of mutton pie), which he never came to eat, and
thence inferred his guilt. _Per occasionem cujus_, I framed the sonnet;
observe its elaborate construction. I was four days about it. [Here came
the sonnet.] Barry, study that sonnet. It is curiously and perversely
elaborate. 'Tis a choking subject, and therefore the reader is directed
to the structure of it. See you? and was this a fourteener to be
rejected by a trumpery annual? forsooth,'twould shock all mothers; and
may all mothers, who would so be shocked, be damned! as if mothers were
such sort of logicians as to infer the future hanging of _their_ child
from the theoretical hangibility (or capacity of being hanged, if the
judge pleases) of every infant born with a neck on. Oh B.C.! my whole
heart is faint, and my whole head is sick (how is it?) at this damned
canting unmasculine age!"

[Footnote 27: Talfourd. Canon Ainger gives "Damn"]

* * * * *

COMMENDATORY VERSES

Page 61. _To the Author of Poems, published under the name of Barry
Cornwall_.

Printed in the _London Magazine_, September, 1820.

Barry Cornwall was the pen-name of Bryan Waller Procter, 1787-1874,
whose impulse to write poetry came largely from Lamb himself. In his
_Dramatic Scenes_, 1819, was the beginning of a blank-verse treatment or
adaptation of Lamb's "Rosamund Gray." Procter addressed to Lamb some
excellent lines "Over a Flask of Sherris," which were printed in the
_London Magazine_, 1825, and again in _English Songs_, 1832. His
_Martian Colonna; an Italian Tale_, was published in 1820 and his
_Sicilian Story_ later in the same year. The "Dream" was printed in
_Dramatic Scenes_. Procter in his old age wrote a charming memoir of
Lamb.

* * * * *

Page 62. _To R.S. Knowles, Esq_.

First printed