He was "like the most capricious poet Ovid among the Goths." The
country people thought him an oddity, and did not understand his
jokes. It would be strange if they had; for he did not make any
while he staid. But when we crossed the country to Oxford, then he
spoke a little. He and the old colleges were hail-fellow well-met;
and in the quadrangles, he "walked gowned."

The quotation is a reference to Lamb's sonnet, "I was not Trained in
Academic Bowers," written at Cambridge in 1819:--

Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers,
Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap;
My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap,
And I walk _gowned_.

Page 8, line 6 from foot. _Agnize_. Lamb was fond of this word. I
have seen it stated ingeniously that it was of his own coinage--from
_agnus_, a lamb--but the derivation is _ad gnoscere_, to acknowledge,
to recognise, and the word is to be found in other places--in
"Othello," for example (Act I., Scene 3, line 232):--

I do agnise
A natural and prompt alacrity.

Page 9, middle. _Red-letter days_. See note on page 351. The holidays
at the India House, which are given in the London directories of
Lamb's early time there, make a considerable list. But in 1820 the
Accountants' Office, where Lamb was, kept only five days in the year.

Page 10, line 11. _I can here ... enact the student._ Lamb had
distilled the matter of this paragraph into his sonnet, "I was not
Trained in Academic Bowers," written at Cambridge in August of the
preceding year (see above and Vol. IV.).

Page 11, line 12 from foot. _Unsettle my faith._ At this point, in the
_London Magazine_, Lamb appended the footnote:--

"There is something to me repugnant, at any time, in written hand.
The text never seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought
of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty--as springing up with all
its parts absolute--till, in evil hour, I was shown the original
written copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its
author, in the Library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be
proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them,
after the latter cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How
it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined,
corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable
at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just
as