orded in
his diary that Lamb had the "finest collection of shabby books" he
ever saw; "such a number of first-rate works in very bad condition is,
I think, nowhere to be found." Leigh Hunt stated in his essay on "My
Books" in _The Literary Examiner_, July 5, 1823, that Lamb's library
had

an handsome contempt for appearance. It looks like what it is, a
selection made at precious intervals from the book-stalls;--now
a Chaucer at nine and twopence; now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas
Browne at two shillings; now a Jeremy Taylor, a Spinoza; an old
English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney; and the books are
"neat as imported." The very perusal of the backs is a "discipline
of humanity." There Mr. Southey takes his place again with an old
Radical friend: there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden:
there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb,
Sewel: there Guzman d'Alfarache thinks himself fit company for Sir
Charles Grandison, and has his claims admitted. Even the "high
fantastical" Duchess of Newcastle, with her laurel on her head,
is received with grave honours, and not the less for declining to
trouble herself with the constitutions of her maids.

It is in the same essay that Leigh Hunt mentions that he once saw
Lamb kiss an old folio--Chapman's Homer--the work he paraphrased for
children under the title _The Adventures of Ulysses_.

Page 197, line 15. _Life of the Duke of Newcastle_. Lamb's copy, a
folio containing also the "Philosophical Letters," is in America.

Page 197, line 20. _Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton_... I cannot say
where are Lamb's copies of Sidney and Fuller; but the British Museum
has his Milton, rich in MS. notes, a two-volume edition, 1751. The
Taylor, which Lamb acquired in 1798, is the 1678 folio _Sermons_. I
cannot say where it now is.

Page 197, line 26. _Shakspeare_. Lamb's Shakespeare was not sold at
the sale of his library; only a copy of the _Poems_, 12mo, 1714.
His annotated copy of the _Poems_, 1640, is in America. There is a
reference to one of Rowe's plates in the essay "My First Play." The
Shakespeare gallery engravings were the costly series of illustrations
to Shakespeare commissioned by John Boydell (1719-1804), Lord Mayor of
London in 1790. The pictures were exhibited in the Shakespeare Gallery
in Pall Mall, and the engravings were published in 1802.

After the word "Shakespeare," in the _London Magazi