added. At the end of the present hall, one
passes through what was in Lamb's time the front door, and thereafter
the house is exactly as it used to be save that its south windows have
been filled in. By kind invitation of Mr. Dolphin Smith, the farmer,
who had been there over forty years, I spent in 1902 some time in the
same parlour in which the Lambs had been entertained. Harpenden, on
the north-west, has grown immensely since Lamb's day, and the houses
at the Folly, between Wheathampstead and the Cherry Trees, are new;
but Mackery End, or Mackrye End as the farmer's waggons have it,
remains unencroached upon. Near by is the fine old mansion which is
Mackery End house proper; Lamb's Mackery End was the farm.

Lamb's first visit there must have been when he was a very little
boy--somewhere about 1780. Probably we may see recollections of it in
Mary Lamb's story "The Farmhouse" in _Mrs. Leicester's School_ (see
Vol. III. of this edition).

Page 88, line 18. _A great-aunt_. Mary Field, Lamb's grandmother, was
Mary Bruton, whose sister married, as he says, a Gladman, and was the
great-aunt mentioned. The present occupier of the farm is neither
Gladman nor Bruton; but both names are still to be found in the
county. A Miss Sarah Bruton, a direct descendant of Lamb's great-aunt,
was living at Wheathampstead in 1902. She had on her walls two
charming oval portraits of ancestresses, possibly--for she was
uncertain as to their identity--two of the handsome sisters whom Lamb
extols.

Writing to Manning, May 28, 1819, Lamb says:--"How are my cousins,
the Gladmans of Wheathampstead, and farmer Bruton? Mrs. Bruton is a
glorious woman.

"Hail, Mackery End!

"This is a fragment of a blank verse poem which I once meditated, but
got no further."

Page 89, verse. "_But thou, that didst appear so fair ..._" From
Wordsworth's "Yarrow Visited," Stanza 6. Writing to Wordsworth in
1815, Lamb said of this stanza that he thought "no lovelier" could be
found in "the wide world of poetry." From a letter to Taylor, of the
_London Magazine_, belonging to the summer of 1821, we gather that the
proof-reader had altered the last word of the third line to "air" to
make it rhyme to "fair." Lamb says: "_Day_ is the right reading, and
_I implore you to restore it_."

Page 90, line 4. _B.F._ Barron Field (see note to "Distant
Correspondents"), then living in Sydney, where he composed, and had
printed for private circulation in 1819, a volume