ne_, came the
sentence: "You cannot make a _pet_ book of an author whom everybody
reads."

In a letter to Wordsworth, February 1, 1806, Lamb says: "Shakespear is
one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just
before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book." In the same letter
he says of binding: "The Law Robe I have ever thought as comely and
gentlemanly a garb as a Book would wish to wear."

Page 197, line 7 from foot. _Beaumont and Fletcher._ See note to "The
Two Races of Men" for an account of Lamb's copy, now in the British
Museum.

Page 197, line 5 from foot. _No sympathy with them._ After these
words, in the _London Magazine_, came, "nor with Mr. Gifford's Ben
Jonson." This edition by Lamb's old enemy, William Gifford, editor of
the _Quarterly_, was published in 1816. Lamb's copy of Ben Jonson was
dated 1692, folio. It is now in America, I believe.

Page 197, foot. _The reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy_. This
reprint was, I think, published in 1800, in two volumes, marked ninth
edition. Lamb's copy was dated 1621, quarto. I do not know where it
now is.

Page 198, line 4. _Malone_. This was Edmund Malone (1741-1812), the
critic and editor of Shakespeare, who in 1793 persuaded the Vicar of
Stratford-on-Avon to whitewash the coloured bust of the poet in the
chancel. A _Gentleman's Magazine_ epigrammatist, sharing Lamb's view,
wrote:--

Stranger, to whom this monument is shown,
Invoke the poet's curse upon Malone;
Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste betrays,
And daubs his tombstone, as he mars his plays.

Lamb has been less than fair to Malone. To defend his action in the
matter of the bust of Shakespeare is impossible, except by saying that
he acted in good faith and according to the fashion of his time. But
he did great service to the fame of Shakespeare and thus to English
literature, and was fearless and shrewd in his denunciation of the
impostor Ireland.

Page 198, line 26. _The Fairy Queen_. Lamb's copy was a folio, 1617,
12, 17, 13. Against Canto XI., Stanza 32, he has written: "Dear Venom,
this is the stave I wot of. I will maintain it against any in the
book."

Page 199, line 14. _Nando's_. A coffee-house in Fleet Street, at the
east corner of Inner Temple Lane, and thus at one time close to Lamb's
rooms.

Page 199, line 16. "_The Chronicle is in hand, Sir._" In the _London
Magazine_ the following paragraph was here inserted:--

"As in these littl