I'd lay my life he knows not what it is.
His spite at music is a pretty whim--
He loves not it, because it loves not him.

M. LAMB.

* * * * *

UNCOLLECTED PIECES

Page 85. _Dramatic Fragment_.

_London Magazine_, January, 1822. An excerpt from Lamb's play, "Pride's
Cure" (_John Woodvil_). See note below.

* * * * *

Page 86. _Dick Strype_.

Writing to John Rickman in January, 1802, Lamb says, "My editor [Dan
Stuart of the _Morning Post_] uniformly rejects all that I do,
considerable in length. I shall only do paragraphs with now and then a
slight poem, such as Dick Strype, if you read it, which was but a long
epigram." The verses, which appeared on January 6, 1802, may be compared
with the story of Ephraim Wagstaff, on page 432 of Vol. I., written
twenty-five years later. It has been pointed out that _Points of
Misery_, 1823, by Charles Molloy Westmacott (Bernard Blackmantle of the
_English Spy_), contains the poem with slight alterations. But
Westmacott reaped where he could, and his book is confessedly not wholly
original. Lamb seems to me to admit authorship by implication fairly
completely. Westmacott was only thirteen when it was first printed.

* * * * *

Page 88. _Two Epitaphs on a young Lady, etc_.

_Morning Post_, February 7, 1804. Signed C.L. Lamb sends the poem both
to Wordsworth and Manning in 1803. He says to Manning:--"Did I send you
an epitaph I scribbled upon a poor girl who died at nineteen?--a good
girl, and a pretty girl, and a clever girl, but strangely neglected by
all her friends and kin.... Brief, and pretty, and tender, is it not? I
send you this, being the only piece of poetry I have _done_ since the
Muses all went with T.M. [Thomas Manning] to Paris."

The young lady was Mary Druitt of Wimborne who died of consumption in
1801. The verses are not on her tombstone. A letter from Lamb to his
friend Rickman (see Canon Ainger's edition), shows that it was for
Rickman that the lines were written. Lamb did not know Mary Druitt.
Writing to Rickman in February, 1802, Lamb sends the second
epitaph:--"Your own prose, or nakedly the letter which you sent me,
which was in some sort an epitaph, would do better on her gravestone
than the cold lines of a stranger."

* * * * *

Page 89. _The Ape_.