Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 8.djvu/511

 10 s. vm. NOV. so, loo:.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

421

LONDON, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1907.

CONTENTS. No. 205.


 * NOTES: The Lambs in Great Russell Street, 421 The

Roundel Stone, 422 Inscriptions at Naples, 423 Queen Victoria's Letters Henriette Marie, Princess Palatine- William Rufus Chetwood, 425" Autochrome "Sibyl : Burke's Image Kingsland Almshouses, 426.

QUERIES : St. Bartholomew the Gre t at 'Le Terze Rime di Dante,' 1502 Boswell's Lodgings in Piccadilly, 427 School for the Indigent Blind Authors of Quotations Wanted Samplers in France Rev. E. Fitzgerald : Rev. .1. McGregor Carlyle's ' French Literature ' Wald- miiller, 1383 The Minor Inns of Court, 428 "The Silly Sixties " ' The Days when We had Tails on Us ' Richard Strange Monastic Scriptorium Apples : their Old Names Miniatures by Rossi" Nitor in adversum," 409 "Crown" Hotel, St. Martin's Court ' Childe Harold ' Sir James Burrough, 430.

REPLIES : Taxes in England, 430" Moucharaby " Pie : Tart, 431 "Author" used for " Editor," 432 Effigies of Heroic Size Tombstones and Inscriptions, 433 Authors of Quotations Wanted Sir George Monoux "Down in the shires" Arundel Castle Legend, 434 "Dry" Spirituous Liquors Two Popular Refrains Dissenting Preachers in the Old Jewry, 435 Hamlet Fairchild Early Eighteenth-Century Queries "Chase" Lee alias Tyson, 43t> Tottenham Churchyard First English Jesuit Tyrrell Family, 437 Peroun College He"raldique de France Peacock's ' Maid Marian ' Wren and the Moon, 438.

NOTES ON BOOKS : 'The Cambridge History of English Literature 1 Lady Fanshawe's 'Memoirs' Prof. Skeat's Modernization of Chaucer 'The New Quarterly' 'The Diary of Master William Silence ' " The London Library."

Notices to Correspondents.

THE LAMBS IN GREAT RUSSELL STREET.

" WE are in the individual spot I like best in all this great city." Such was Lamb's confession to Dorothy Wordsworth the month following his removal of October, 1817, to Great Russell Street. He gave as his chief reason for gratulation the proximity of the theatres ; but to him, who delighted to recall " persons one would wish to have een," who loved old bookshops, and to whom the face of living friend was the fairest sight on God's fair earth, his Russell Street home was a desirable spot for other reasons.

What an essay Elia might have written on the ghosts who frequented the spot he had chosen for his home ! He once wrote :

" In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we con- tract political alliances with shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The extracted media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence, upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little of the usages of that colony : to learn the langa^ge and the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at our first coming among them. We willingly call a phantom our fellow."

And what ghosts those were about him ! For the site of the house in which Lamb lodged in Russell Street was once occu- pied by the famous Will's Coffee-House, which had (as Lamb would have found in his copy of Congreve's ' Love for Love ' ) " ruined more young men than the Royal Oak lottery ; nothing thrives that belongs to 't."

Here, at one time or other in the olden days, came Dryden with his snuff-box, Pepys, Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Colley Gibber, Smollett, Gay, Johnson ; and surely, in the ' Elia ' essay which Lamb did not write, they would have returned to their old corner to renew their experiences, as well as to see how the modern world wagged without them and they would have found something to say about it all.

Then there was Barker's bookshop next door, from which, years before, Lamb had extracted his folio Beaumont and Fletcher

"near ten o'clock of the Saturday night when

the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures for the mighty sum of fifteen or six- teen shillings was it ? "

Barker's bookshop was here in 1790 and in 1817 (in which latter year Lamb became the old man's neighbour). In his ' Catalogue of a Rare Assemblage of Old Plays,' in 1791, Barker gave his address as " Near the Pitt Door, Russell Court, Drury Lane " ; whilst in 1814 ' Barker's List of Plays ' was issued from the " Dramatic Repository, Great Russell Street, Covent Garden." One of his publications, Prince Hoare's ' Indiscretion ' (third edition), contains a page-list of books on sale, in 1800, at the " Dramatic Reposi- tory, No. 19, Great Russell Street, Covent Garden." This last item might be taken as a final settlement of the number of Barker's shop, which I have seen set down as 20. In 1817 Mr. Owen, a brazier, of whom Lamb said, " I never knew him give anything away in my life," was the tenant of both 20 and 21, the latter being the corner house, on the first floor of which the Lambs had rooms, the entrance being, I take it, through the street door of No. 20,* opening on to what George Daniel was pleased to term " a

Procter distinctly states that the Lambs "lived in the corner house adjoining Bow Street," whfch would be No. 21, whilst Lamb gives his address as 20, "next the corner." The business entrance to the two shops was probably at 21, and that to the private apartments at 20. Another explanation sug- gests itself. The Lambs had two sitting-rooms was one over No. 20 and the other over 21 ?
 * This seems the only satisfactory conclusion.