“This afternoon,” Lamb wrote to Coleridge on February 13, 1797, “I attend the funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on Thursday.  I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended all her days of suffering and infirmity.  She was to me the ‘cherisher of infancy.’ ...”  Lamb’s Aunt Hetty was his father’s sister.  Her real name was Sarah Lamb.  All that we know of her is found in this poem, in the Letters, in the passages in “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” and “My Relations;” in the story of “The Witch Aunt,” in Mrs. Leicester’s School, and in a reference in one of Mary Lamb’s letters to Sarah Stoddart, where, writing of her aunt and her mother,—­“the best creatures in the world,”—­she speaks of Miss Lamb as being “as unlike a gentlewoman as you can possibly imagine a good old woman to be;” contrasting her with Mrs. Lamb, “a perfect gentlewoman.”  The description in “The Witch Aunt” bears out Mary Lamb’s letter.

After the tragedy of September, 1796, Aunt Hetty was taken into the house of a rich relative.  This lady, however, seems to have been of too selfish and jealous a disposition (see Lamb’s letter to Coleridge, December 9, 1796) to exert any real effort to make her guest comfortable or happy.  Hence Aunt Hetty returned to her nephew.

“My poor old aunt [Lamb wrote to Coleridge on January 5, 1797], whom you have seen, the kindest, goodest creature to me when I was at school; who used to toddle there to bring me fag [food], when I, school-boy like, only despised her for it, and used to be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps as you went into the old grammar-school, opend her apron, and bring out her bason with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for me—­the good old creature is now lying on her death bed....  She says, poor thing, she is glad to come home to die with me.  I was always her favourite.”

Line 24. One parent yet is left.  John Lamb, who is described as he was in his prime, as Lovel, in the Elia essay on "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," died in 1799.

Line 27. A semblance most forlorn of what he was.  Lamb uses this line as a quotation, slightly altered, in his account of Lovel.

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Page 22. Written a Year after the Events.

Lamb sent this poem to Coleridge in September, 1797, entitling it “Written a Twelvemonth after the Events,” and adding, “Friday next, Coleridge, is the day on which my Mother died.”  Mrs. Lamb’s death, at the hands of her daughter in a moment of frenzy, occurred on September 22, 1796.  Lamb added that he wrote the poem at the office with “unusual celerity.”  “I expect you to like it better than anything of mine; Lloyd does, and I do myself.”  The version sent to Coleridge differs only in minor and unimportant points from that in Blank Verse.

The second paragraph of the poem is very similar to a passage which Lamb had written in a letter to Coleridge on November 14, 1796:—­