orough_
by Mr. _Walter Plummer_, he was cited before the house, as for
breach of privilege, and accused, I suppose very unjustly,
of opening letters to detect them. He was treated with great
harshness and severity, but declining their questions by pleading
his oath of secrecy, was at last dismissed. And it must be
recorded to his honour, that when he was ejected from his office,
he did not think himself discharged from his trust, but continued
to refuse to his nearest friends any information about the
management of the office.

I borrow from Canon Ainger an interesting note on Walter Plumer,
written in the eighteen-eighties, showing that Lamb was mistaken on
other matters too:--

The present Mr. Plumer, of Allerton, Totness, a grandson of
Richard Plumer of the South-Sea House, by no means acquiesces in
the tradition here recorded as to his grandfather's origin. He
believes that though the links are missing, Richard Plumer was
descended in regular line from the Baronet, Sir Walter Plumer,
who died at the end of the seventeenth century. Lamb's memory
has failed him here in one respect. The "Bachelor Uncle," Walter
Plumer, uncle of William Plumer of Blakesware, was most certainly
not a bachelor (see the pedigree of the family in Cussans'
_Hertfordshire_).

Page 7, line 10 from foot. M----. According to the Key to the initials
and blanks in some of the essays, which Lamb filled in for a curious
correspondent, M---- stood for one Maynard. "Maynard, hang'd himself"
is Lamb's entry. He was chief clerk in the Old Annuities and Three Per
Cents, 1788-1793.

* * * * *

Page 8. OXFORD IN THE VACATION.

_London Magazine_, October, 1820, where it is dated at the end,
"August 5, 1820. From my rooms facing the Bodleian." My own belief
is that Lamb wrote the essay at Cambridge, under the influence of
Cambridge, where he spent a few weeks in the summers of 1819 and 1820,
and transferred the scene to Oxford by way of mystification. He knew
Oxford, of course, but he had not been there for some years, and it
was at Cambridge that he met Dyer and saw the Milton MSS.

Concerning a visit to Oxford (in 1810), Hazlitt had written, in his
_Table Talk_ essay "On the Conversation of Authors," in the preceding
(the September) number of the _London Magazine_:--

L---- [that is, Lamb] once came down into the country to see us.