er all I used to meet at Shacklewell. The little
household, cake-producing, wine-bringing out Emma--the old servant, that
didn't stay, and ought to have staid, and was always very dirty and
friendly, and Miss H., the counter-tenor with a fine voice, whose sister
married Thurtell. They all live in my mind's eye, and Mr. N.'s and
Holmes's walks with us half back after supper. Troja fuit!

["_The Companion_." Leigh Hunt's paper lasted only for seven months.
Madame Pasta, of whom too much was written, was Giudetta Pasta
(1798-1865), a singer of unusual compass, for whom Bellini wrote "La
Somnambula."

The following is the account of the Sliding Watchman in the essay,
"Walks Home by Night in Bad Weather. Watchmen":--

But the oddest of all was the _Sliding_ Watchman. Think of walking
up a street in the depth of a frosty winter, with long ice in the
gutters, and sleet over head, and then figure to yourself a sort of
bale of a man in white, coming towards you with a lantern in one
hand, and an umbrella over his head. It was the oddest mixture of
luxury and hardship, of juvenility and old age! But this looked
agreeable. Animal spirits carry everything before them; and our
invincible friend seemed a watchman for Rabelais. Time was run at
and butted by him like a goat. The slide seemed to bear him half
through the night at once; he slipped from out of his box and his
common-places at one rush of a merry thought, and seemed to say,
"Everything's in imagination;--here goes the whole weight of my
office."

"Your sister"--Mrs. Isabella Jane Towers, author of _The Children's
Fireside_, 1828, and other books for children, to whom Lamb had sent a
sonnet (see Vol. IV.).

"Novello... dedications... I read the _Atlas_." In _The Atlas_ for
February 17 was reviewed _Select Airs from Spohr's celebrated Opera of
Faust, arranged as duetts for the Pianoforte and inscribed to his friend
Charles Cowden Clarke by Vincent Novello_. Holmes was musical critic for
_The Atlas_.

"One Clarke a schoolmaster." See note to the letter to Clarke in the
summer of 1821.

"Holofernes' days"--Holofernes, the schoolmaster, in "Love's Labour's
Lost." Cowden Clarke had assisted his father.

"Master Stephen." I do not identify Stephen.

"Victoria"--Mary Victoria Novello, afterwards Mrs. Charles Cowden
Clarke.

"At Shacklewell"--the Novellos' old home. They now lived in Bedford
Street, Covent Garden.