Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 8.djvu/175

 9* s. vm. AUG. 24, 1901.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

167

2. Again, take the long but incomplete letter to Manning numbered xcviii. and dated " February, 1803," in ed. 1888, as in all former editions. This belongs, in fact, to February, 1802, and one is glad to find it correctly dated and placed (ci.) in the edition de luxe, 1900. Here, however, the editor has failed to discern that ci. and the preceding fragment dated 15 February, 1802 (Nos. xcviii. and Ixxxvii. of ed. 1888), are in truth parts of one and the same letter ci. being the earlier and c. the latter portion. In ci. Lamb writes, " In all this time" i.e., since Manning's departure to Paris at the close of 1801 "I have done but one thing which I reckon tolerable, and

that I will transcribe You will find it on

my last page. It absurdly is a first Number of a series thus" viz., through Lamb's retire- ment from the Morning Post, already com- municated to Manning in this letter "strangled in embryo." Some chat follows about "the Professor's Rib" (Mrs. Godwin) and here No. c. begins about Lamb's play ; then Lamb proceeds, " I will now transcribe the Londoner (No. I.), and wind up all with affection and humble servant at the end." There can be no doubt whatsoever that what is described in ci. as the " first Number of a series strangled in embryo " is no other than "the Londoner (No. I.)" of letter c. The essay which appeared under this heading in the Morning Post of 1 February, 1802, was never followed up, the series being abruptly broken off owing to the fact that Lamb just at this date threw up his engagement with Dan Stuart, the editor of that journal.

3. Oddly enough, while he has detected the year's error in the received date of ci., Canon Ainger has failed to perceive a precisely similar error in the dating of cxv., ed. 1900 (cii., ed. 1888). This letter, which was written on St. George's Day, Canon Ainger in com- mon with all the editors assigns to the year 1803 ; it belongs in truth to 1802, as the fol- lowing extracts from the contents serve to show. "I find nothing new," i.e., no news to tell. "Something [however] I will say about people that you and I know. Southey is Secretary to the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer." Now Southey was appointed in the summer of 1801, and by July, 1802, he had resigned. "Stoddart is turned Doctor of Civil Law, and dwells in Doctors' Com- mons." John Stoddart became D.C.L. and was admitted to the College of Advocates late in 1801. To Manning at Paris this intelli- gence might be fresh in April, 1802, but the news would be stale indeed by April, 1803.

The Professor has not done making love to his new spouse." Now the " Bad Baby " (Mrs.

Godwin No. 2) was but a four months' bride in April, 1802, but she could not be fitly de- scribed as a "new spouse" a twelvemonth

later. "I send you an epitaph I scribbled

upon a poor girl [Mary Druitt] who died

at nineteen being the only piece of poetry I

have done since the Muses all went with T. M. [Thomas Manning] to Paris " (i.e., since the end of December, 1801). Now, in an unpub- lished letter to Rickman Lamb encloses an alternative epitaph on Mary Druitt. So Canon Ainger himself informs us in a note on No. cxv. ; and he adds that the date of the letter to Rickman was 1 February, 1802. Yet he assigns the letter to Manning (cxv.) to April, 1803! Well, well! no doubt the Quarterly critic will murmur " Credo quia impossible, and bow the head in meek assent.

4. The critic of Canon Ainger's chronology is embarrassed with the wealth of material at his hand. The foregoing examples have been taken at random out of a large number of misdated letters in his recent "revised" Edition de luxe. One more shall be added, as it furnishes an amusing illustration of the editor's inveterate wrongheadedness in the matter of dates. Canon Ainger and Mr. W. C. Hazlitt have for years past been bog- gling and bickering over the dates of the three letters to Cottle, numbered respectively cxcvii., cxcviii., and cxcix. in ed. 1900, and clxxvii., clxxviii., and clxxix. in ed. 1888. (See 'The Lambs: their Lives,' &c., by W. C. Hazlitt, 1897, pp. 102-105.) In 1888 Canon Ainger originated the comical blunder of affixing to the third of these letters the date 5 November, 1819 which appears in the autograph MS. of the first. This blunder has been corrected in the Edition de luxe ; but in setting it to rights the indefatigable editor has ingeniously evolved yet another bungle : he has dated the third letter ' close of the year 1819." Now it happens that of the three letters this alone contains internal evidence of date ; and that evidence proves letter cxcix. to have been written in May or early June, 1820 Lamb writes, "Southey is in town, whom I have seen slightly ; Words- worth expected, whom I hope to see much of." Southey, who had stayed at home in Keswick during November and December, 1819, arrived in town on May Day, 1820. In May, too, Wordsworth left home for London on his way abroad. He came up by Oxford, where he composed the two well-known sonnets Ye Sacred Nurseries ' and ' Shame on this Faithless Heart ! ' on 30 May, and arrived in town early in June to attend the wedding of bis wife's cousin Thomas Monkhouse. Thus Lamb's letter cannot have been written