Whether a Mrs. Conrady existed, or was invented or adapted by Lamb to prove his point, I have not been able to discover.  But the evidence of Lamb’s “reverence for the sex,” to use Procter’s phrase, is against her existence. The Athenaeum reviewer on February 16, 1833, says, however, quoting the fallacy:  “Here is a portrait of Mrs. Conrady.  We agree with the writer that ’no one that has looked on her can pretend to forget the lady.’” The point ought to be cleared up.

Page 296.  XI.—­THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE IN THE MOUTH.

New Monthly Magazine, April, 1826.

Page 297, line 13. Our friend Mitis.  I do not identify Mitis among
Lamb’s many friends.

Page 297, line 11 from foot. Presentation copies.  The late Mr. Thomas Westwood, the son of the Westwoods with whom the Lambs lived at Edmonton, writing to Notes and Queries some thirty-five years ago, gave an amusing account of Lamb pitching presentation copies out of the window into the garden—­a Barry Cornwall, a Bernard Barton, a Leigh Hunt, and so forth.  Page 298, line 6. Odd presents of game.  Compare the little essay on “Presents of Game,” Vol.  I.

Page 298.  XII.—­THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY.

New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826.  In that place the first sentence began with the word “Two;” the second ended with “of our assertions;” and (fourteenth line of essay) it was said of the very poor man that he “can ask” no visitors.  Lamb, in a letter, wished Wordsworth particularly to like this fallacy and that on rising with the lark.

Page 300, line 9. It has been prettily said.  By Lamb himself, or more probably by his sister, in Poetry for Children, 1809.  See “The First Tooth,” Vol.  III., which ends upon the line

  A child is fed with milk and praise.

Page 301, line 3. There is yet another home.  Writing to Mrs. Wordsworth on February 18, 1818, Lamb gives a painful account, very similar in part to this essay, of the homeless home to which he was reduced by visitors.  But by the time he wrote the essay, when all his day was his own, the trouble was not acute.  He tells Bernard Barton on March 20, 1826, “My tirade against visitors was not meant particularly at you or A.K.  I scarce know what I meant, for I do not just now feel the grievance.  I wanted to make an article.”  Compare the first of the “Lepus” papers in Vol.  I.

Page 301, line 20. It is the refreshing sleep of the day.  After this sentence, in the magazine, came this passage:—­

“O the comfort of sitting down heartily to an old folio, and thinking surely that the next hour or two will be your own—­and the misery of being defeated by the useless call of somebody, who is come to tell you, that he is just come from hearing Mr. Irving!  What is that to you?  Let him go home, and digest what the good man said to him.  You are at your chapel, in your oratory.”

Mr. Irving was the Rev. Edward Irving (1792-1834), whom Lamb knew slightly and came greatly to admire.