asual mention that Lamb ever suffered from this complaint.
Possibly he did not. He went to Christ's Hospital at the age of seven.

Page 33, line 13. _From what have I not fallen_. Lamb had had this
idea many years before. In 1796 he wrote this sonnet (text of 1818):--

We were two pretty babes, the youngest she,
The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween,
And Innocence her name. The time has been
We two did love each other's company;
Time was, we two had wept to have been apart:
But when by show of seeming good beguil'd,
I left the garb and manners of a child,
And my first love for man's society,
Defiling with the world my virgin heart--
My loved companion dropp'd a tear, and fled,
And hid in deepest shades her awful head.
Beloved, who shall tell me where thou art--
In what delicious Eden to be found--
That I may seek thee the wide world around?

Page 33, line 27. _Phantom cloud of Elia_. The speculations in the
paragraph that ends with these words were fantastical at any rate to
one reader, who, under the signature "A Father," contributed to the
March number of the _London Magazine_ a eulogy of paternity, in which
Elia was reasoned with and rebuked. "Ah! Elia! hadst thou possessed
'offspring of thine own to dally with,' thou wouldst never have made
the melancholy avowal that thou hast 'almost ceased to hope!'" Lamb
did not reply.

Page 33, line 7 from foot. _Not childhood alone ..._ The passage
between these words and "freezing days of December" was taken by
Charles Lloyd, Lamb's early friend, as the motto of a poem, in his
_Poems_, 1823, entitled "Stanzas on the Difficulty with which, in
Youth, we Bring Home to our Habitual Consciousness the Idea of Death."

Page 34, line 15 from foot. _Midnight darlings_. Leigh Hunt
records, in his essay "My Books," that he once saw Lamb kiss an old
folio--Chapman's _Homer_.

Page 34, line 8 from foot. "_Sweet assurance of a look_." A favourite
quotation of Lamb's (here adapted) from Matthew Roydon's elegy on Sir
Philip Sidney:--

A sweet attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks.

A portion of the poem is quoted in the Elia essay on "Some Sonnets of
Sir Philip Sidney."

* * * * *

Page 37. MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST.

_London Magazine_, February, 1821.

Mrs. Battle was probably, in real life, to a large extent Sarah
Burney, the wife of Rear-Admiral James Burney, Lam