r of him
that hears it," and it were doing a poor service to Lamb or his
readers to draw out and arrange in order the threads he has wrought
into the very fabric of his English.'

Then Mr. Ainger's notes are not meddlesome notes, but truly explanatory
ones, genuine aids to enjoyment. Lamb needs notes, and yet the task of
adding them to a structure so fine and of such nicely studied proportions
is a difficult one; it is like building a tool-house against La Sainte
Chapelle. Deftly has Mr. Ainger inserted his notes, and capital reading
do they make; they tell us all we ought to want to know. He is no true
lover of Elia who does not care to know who the 'Distant Correspondent'
was. And Barbara S---. 'It was not much that Barbara had to claim.' No,
dear child! it was not--'a bare half-guinea'; but you are surely also
entitled to be known to us by your real name. When Lamb tells us
Barbara's maiden name was Street, and that she was three times
married--first to a Mr. Dancer, then to a Mr. Barry, and finally to a Mr.
Crawford, whose widow she was when he first knew her--he is telling us
things that were not, for the true Barbara died a spinster, and was born
a Kelly.

Mr. Ainger, as was to be expected, has a full, instructive note anent the
Old Benchers of the Inner Temple. Some hasty editors, with a sorrowfully
large experience of Lamb's unblushing fictions and Defoe-like falsehoods,
and who, perhaps, have wasted good hours trying to find out all about
Miss Barbara's third husband, have sometimes assumed that at all events
most of the names mentioned by Lamb in his immortal essay on the Benchers
are fictitious. Mr. Ainger, however, assures us that the fact is
otherwise. Jekyl, Coventry, Pierson, Parton, Read, Wharry, Jackson, and
Mingay, no less than 'unruffled Samuel Salt,' were all real persons, and
were called to the Bench of the Honourable Society by those very names.
One mistake, indeed, Lamb makes--he writes of Mr. Twopenny as if he had
been a Bencher. Now, there never yet was a Bencher of the name of
Twopenny; though the mistake is easily accounted for. There was a Mr.
Twopenny, a very thin man too, just as Lamb described him, who lived in
the Temple; but he was not a Bencher, he was not even a barrister; he was
a much better thing, namely, stockbroker to the Bank of England. The
holding of this office, which Mr. Ainger rightly calls important,
doubtless accounts for Twopenny's constant good-hum