be; so that my dear Mother (who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart) used to distress and weary her with incessant and unceasing attention and politeness, to gain her affection.  The old woman could not return this in kind, and did not know what to make of it—­thought it all deceit, and used to hate my Mother with a bitter hatred; which, of course, was soon returned with interest.

Lamb told Coleridge, in a letter upon his aunt’s death, “she was to me the ‘cherisher of infancy.’”

In the Elia essay on “Witches” no mention is made of Glanvil; but there is a passage in the unpublished version of John Woodvil which mentions both it and Stackhouse:—­

  I can remember when a child the maids
  Would place me on their lap, as they undrest me,
  As silly women use, and tell me stories
  Of Witches—­Make me read “Glanvil on Witchcraft,”
  And in conclusion show me in the Bible,
  The old Family-Bible, with the pictures in it,
  The ’graving of the Witch raising up Samuel,
  Which so possest my fancy, being a child,
  That nightly in my dreams an old Hag came
  And sat upon my pillow.

That was written some eight or nine years earlier than “Maria Howe;” the essay on “Witches” some fifteen years later.  Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680) issued his Philosophical Considerations touching Witches and Witchcraft, in 1666.

Page 375.  VIII.—­Charlotte Wilmot.  “The Merchant’s Daughter.”

By Mary Lamb.

Page 378.  IX.—­Susan Yates.  “First Going to Church.”

By Charles Lamb.  John Lamb, the father, came from Lincolnshire, but Charles did not know that county at all.  The remark, “to see how goodness thrived,” may well have been John Lamb’s, or possibly his father’s; and Lamb’s own first impressions of church, probably acquired at the Temple (which he mentions here by comparison), were, it is easy to believe, identical with the imaginary narrator’s.  Church bells seem always to have had an attraction for him:  he has a pretty reference to them in John Woodvil, and a little poem in Blank Verse, 1798, entitled “The Sabbath Bells.”

Page 384.  X.—­Arabella Hardy.  “The Sea Voyage.”

By Charles Lamb.  Nothing else that Lamb wrote is quite so far from the ordinary run of his thoughts; and nothing has, I think, more charm.

* * * * *

Page 389.  The King and Queen of Hearts This is probably the first of Charles Lamb’s books for children.  Of its history nothing is known:  the proof that Charles Lamb wrote it is to be found in a letter from Lamb to Wordsworth, now in America, dated February 1, 1806, the concluding portion of which, and the only portion that has been printed—­beginning “Apropos of Spenser”—­will be found in most editions of the correspondence tacked on to the letter dated June, 1806.  In the earlier