nea_, were published in
1680 and 1692; his works, in several volumes, between 1700 and 1709.
The best-known essay is that on "Ancient and Modern Learning," but
Lamb refers also to those "On Health and Long Life," "Of the Cure of
the Gout," "Of Gardening." The quotation on page 228 does not exactly
end Temple's garden essay, as Lamb says. Lamb has slightly altered
Temple's punctuation.

* * * * *

Page 230. BARBARA S----.

_London Magazine_, April, 1825.

This little story exhibits, perhaps better than anything that Lamb
wrote, his curious gift of blending fact and fancy, of building upon
a foundation of reality a structure of whimsicality and invention.
In the late Charles Kent's edition of Lamb's works is printed a
letter from Miss Kelly, the actress, and a friend of the Lambs,
in which the true story is told; for it was she, as indeed Lamb
admitted to Wordsworth in a letter in 1825, who told him the
incident--"beautifully," he says elsewhere.

Miss Kelly wrote, in 1875:--

I perfectly remember relating an incident of my childhood to
Charles Lamb and his dear sister, and I have not the least doubt
that the intense interest he seemed to take in the recital,
induced him to adopt it as the principal feature in his beautiful
story of "Barbara S----." Much, however, as I venerate the
wonderful powers of Charles Lamb as a writer--grateful as I ever
must feel to have enjoyed for so many years the friendship of
himself and his dear sister, and proudly honoured as I am by the
two exquisite sonnets he has given to the world as tributary to my
humble talent, I have never been able thoroughly to appreciate the
extraordinary skill with which he has, in the construction of his
story, desired and contrived so to mystify and characterize
the events, as to keep me out of sight, and render it utterly
impossible for any one to guess at me as the original heroine....

In the year 1799, Miss Jackson, one of my mother's daughters, by
her first husband, was placed under the special care of dear old
Tate Wilkinson, proprietor of the York Theatre, there to practice,
as in due progression, what she had learned of Dramatic Art, while
a Chorus Singer at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, coming back, as
she did after a few years, as the wife of the late celebrated,
inimitable Charles Mathews, to the Haymarket Theatre. In 1799,