as in the air.

ON A VISIT TO ST. PAUL'S

What can be hop'd from Priests who, 'gainst the Poor,
For lack of two-pence, shut the church's door;
Who, true successors of the ancient leaven,
Erect a turnpike on the road to Heaven?
"Knock, and it shall be open'd," saith our LORD;
"Knock, and pay two-pence," say the Chapter Board:
The Showman of the booth the fee receives,
And God's house is again a "den of thieves."

* * * * *

Page 237. AMICUS REDIVIVUS.

_London Magazine_, December, 1823.

A preliminary sketch of the first portion of this essay will be
found in the letter from Lamb to Sarah Hazlitt, written probably in
November, 1823. In Barry Cornwall's _Memoir_ of Lamb, Chapter VI.,
there is also an account of the accident to Dyer--Procter (Barry
Cornwall) having chanced to visit the Lambs just after the event. For
an account of George Dyer see notes to the essay on "Oxford in the
Vacation". In 1823 he was sixty-eight; later he became quite blind.

We have another glimpse of G.D. on that fatal day, in the
reminiscences of Mr. Ogilvie, an India House clerk with Lamb,
as communicated to the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell (see _Scribner's
Magazine_, March, 1876):--

At the time George Dyer was fished out of New River in front of
Lamb's house at Islington, after he was resuscitated, Mary brought
him a suit of Charles's clothes to put on while his own were
drying. Inasmuch as he was a giant of a man, and Lamb undersized;
inasmuch, moreover, as Lamb's wardrobe afforded only knee breeches
for the nether limbs (Dyer's were colossal), the spectacle he
presented when the clothes were on--or as much on as they could
be--was vastly ludicrous.

Allsop, in a letter to Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, remarked, of Dyer's
immersion, that Lamb had said to him: "If he had been drowned it would
have made me famous. Think of having a Crowner's quest, and all the
questions and dark suspicions of murder. People would haunt the spot
and say, 'Here died the poet of Grongar Hill.'" The poet of "Grongar
Hill" was, of course, John Dyer--another of Lamb's instances of the
ambiguities arising from proper names.

Page 238, line 19. _The rescue_. At these words, in the _London
Magazine_, Lamb put this footnote:--

"The topography of my cottage, and its relation to the river,
will explain this; as I have been at some cost to have the whole
engraved (in time, I h