e to "Southey's book" as his authority--this being
_The Book of the Church_, 1824.

Page 220, line 25. _Native ... Hertfordshire_. This was a slight
exaggeration. Lamb was London born and bred. But Hertfordshire was his
mother and grandmother's county, and all his love of the open air was
centred there (see the essay on "Mackery End").

Page 221, line 1. _My health_. Lamb had really been seriously unwell
for some time, as the _Letters_ tell us.

Page 221, line 6. _I was fifty_. Lamb was fifty on February 10, 1825.

Page 231, line 7. _I had grown to my desk_. In his first letter to
Barton (September 11, 1822) Lamb wrote: "I am like you a prisoner to
the desk. I have been chained to that galley thirty years, a long
shot. I have almost grown to the wood." Again, to Wordsworth: "I sit
like Philomel all day (but not singing) with my breast against this
thorn of a Desk."

Page 222, line 7. _Boldero, Merryweather ..._ Feigned names of course.
It was Boldero that Lamb once pretended was Leigh Hunt's true name.
And in his fictitious biography of Liston (Vol. I.) Liston's mother
was said to have been a Miss Merryweather. In Lamb's early city days
there was a banking firm in Cornhill, called Boldero, Adey, Lushington
& Boldero.

Page 222, line 12 from foot. _I could walk it away_. Writing to
Wordsworth in March, 1822, concerning the possibility of being
pensioned off, Lamb had said:--"I had thought in a green old age (O
green thought!) to have retired to Ponder's End--emblematic name--how
beautiful! in the Ware road, there to have made up my accounts with
heaven and the Company, toddling about between it and Cheshunt, anon
stretching on some fine Izaac Walton morning, to Hoddsdon or Amwell,
careless as a Beggar, but walking walking ever till I fairly walkd
myself off my legs, dying walking."

And again, writing to Southey after the emancipation, he says (August,
1825): "Mary walks her twelve miles a day some days, and I twenty on
others. 'Tis all holiday with me now, you know."

Page 224, line 9. _Ch----_. John Chambers, son of the Rev. Thomas
Chambers, Vicar of Radway-Edgehill, Warwickshire, and an old Christ's
Hospitaller, to whom Lamb wrote the famous letter on India House
society, printed in the _Letters_, Canon Ainger's edition, under
December, 1818. John Chambers lived until 1872, and had many stories
of Lamb.

Page 224, line 9. _Do----_. Probably Henry Dodwell, to whom Lamb wrote
the letters of July, 1816, from