Dim were the stars, and clouded was the azure, Silence in darkness
   brooded on the ocean, Save when the wave upon the pebbled sea-beach
   Faintly resounded.

   Then, O forsaken daughter of Acrisius!  Seiz’d in the hour of woe and
   tribulation, Thou, with the guiltless victim of thy love, didst Rock on
   the surges.

   Sad o’er the silent bosom of the billow, Borne on the breeze and
   modulated sweetly, Plaintive as music, rose the mother’s tones of
   Comfortless anguish.

   “Sad is thy birth, and stormy is thy cradle, Offspring of sorrow!
   nursling of the ocean!  Waves rise around to pillow thee, and night winds
   Lull thee to slumber!”

Page 115. To Sir James Mackintosh.

In a letter to Manning in August, 1801, Lamb quotes this epigram as having been printed in The Albion and caused that paper’s death the previous week.  In his Elia essay on “Newspapers,” written thirty years later, he stated that the epigram was written at the time of Mackintosh’s departure for India to reap the fruits of his apostasy; but here Lamb’s memory deceived him, for Mackintosh was not appointed Recorder of Bombay until 1803 and did not sail until 1804, whereas there is reason to believe the date of Lamb’s letter to Manning of August, 1801, to be accurate.  The epigram must then have referred to a rumour of some earlier appointment, for Mackintosh had been hoping for something for several years.

Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832), the lawyer and philosopher, had in 1791 issued his Vindicia Galliae, a reply to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution.  Later, however, he became one of Burke’s friends and an opponent of the Revolution, and in 1798 he issued his Introductory Discourse to his lectures on “The Law of Nature and Nations,” in which the doctrines of his Vindiciae Gallicae were repudiated.  Hence his “apostasy.”  Mackintosh applied unsuccessfully for a judgeship in Trinidad, and for the post of Advocate-General in Bengal, and Lord Wellesley had invited him to become the head of a college in Calcutta.  Rumour may have credited him with any of these posts and thus have suggested Lamb’s epigram.  In 1803 he was appointed Recorder of Bombay.  Lamb’s dislike of Mackintosh may have been due in some measure to Coleridge, between whom and Mackintosh a mild feud subsisted.  It had been Mackintosh, however, brother-in-law of Daniel Stuart of the Morning Post, who introduced Coleridge to that paper. (See notes to Vol.  II., where further particulars of The Albion, edited by Lamb’s friend, John Fenwick, will be found.)

Lamb may or may not have invented the sarcasm in this epigram; but it was not new.  In Mrs. Montagu’s letters, some years before, we find something of the kind concerning Charles James Fox:  “His rapid journeys to England, on the news of the king’s illness, have brought on him a violent complaint in the bowels, which will, it is imagined, prove mortal.  However, if it should, it will vindicate his character from the general report that he has no bowels, as has been most strenuously asserted by his creditors.”