The subjects for 1830 were Suum Cuique and Brevis esse latoro.  After some three or four exercise nights I confess that I was literally “at my wits’ end.”  But a brilliant idea struck me.  I had frequently, boy as I was, seen Charles Lamb (Elia) at my father’s house, and once, in 1825 or 1826, I had been taken to have tea with him and his sister, Mary Lamb, at their little house, Colebrook Cottage, a whitish-brown tenement, standing by itself, close to the New River, at Islington.  He was very kind, as he always was to young people, and very quaint.  I told him that I had devoured his “Roast Pig;” he congratulated me on possessing a thorough schoolboy’s appetite.  And he was pleased when I mentioned my having seen the boys at Christ’s Hospital at their public suppers, which then took place on the Sunday evenings in Lent.  “Could this good-natured and humorous old gentleman be prevailed upon to give me an Epigram?” “I don’t know,” said my father, to whom I put the question, “but I will ask him at any rate, and send him the mottoes.”  In a day or two there arrived from Enfield, to which Lamb had removed some time in 1827, not one, but two epigrams, one on each subject.  That on Suum Cuique was in Latin, and was suggested by the grim satisfaction which had recently been expressed by the public at the capture and execution of some notorious highwayman.  That on Brevis esse laboro was in English, and might have represented an adventure which had befallen Lamb himself, for he stammered frequently, though he was not so grievous a Balbulus as his friend George Darley, whom I had also often seen.  I need scarcely say that the two Epigrams were highly appreciated, and that my brother and myself, for I gave my brother one of them, were objects of envy to our schoolfellows.

The death of George IV., however, prevented their being recited on the occasion for which they were written.

“Suum Cuique,” which was signed F. Hessey, was thus translated by its presumptive author:—­

A thief, on dreary Bagshot’s heath well known, Was fond of making others’ goods his own; Meum was never thought of, nor was Tuum, But everything with him was counted Suum.  At length each gets his own, and no one grieves; The rope his neck, Jack Ketch his clothes receives:  His body to dissecting knife has gone; Himself to Orcus:  well—­each gets his own.

The English epigram, which was signed J.A.  Hessey, was a rhyming version of a story which Lamb was fond of telling.  Three, at least, of his friends relate the story in their recollections of him:  Mrs. Mathews in her life of her husband; Leigh Hunt in The Companion; and De Quincey in Fraser’s Magazine.  The incident possibly occurred to Lamb when as a boy—­or little more—­he stayed at Margate about 1790.  Lamb must have written Merchant Taylors’ epigrams before, for in 1803, in a letter to Godwin about writing to order, he speaks of having undertaken, three or four times, a schoolboy copy of verses for Merchant Taylors’ boys at a guinea a copy, and refers to the trouble and vexation the work was to him.