Writing to Southey on May 10, 1830, Lamb said, at the end:—­“Perhaps an epigram (not a very happy-gram) I did for a school-boy yesterday may amuse.  I pray Jove he may not get a flogging for any false quantity; but ’tis, with one exception, the only Latin verses I have made for forty years, and I did it ‘to order.’

“CUIQUE SUUM

“Adsciscit sibi divitias et opes alienas
Fur, rapiens, spolians quod mihi, quod-que tibi,
Proprium erat, temnens haec verba, meum-que tuum-que
Omne suum est:  tandem Cui-que Suum tribuit. 
Dat resti collum; restes, vah! carnifici dat;
Sese Diabolo, sic bene; Cuique Suum.”

Page 123. On “The Literary Gazette".

The Examiner, August 22, 1830.  This epigram, consisting only of the first four lines, slightly altered, and headed “Rejected Epigrams, 6"-evidently torn from a paper containing a number of verses (the figure 7 is just visible underneath it)—­is in the British Museum among the letters left by Vincent Novello.  It is inscribed, “In handwriting of Mr. Charles Lamb.”  The same collection contains a copy, in Mrs. Cowden Clarke’s handwriting, of the sonnet to Mrs. Jane Towers (see page 50). The Literary Gazette was William Jerdan’s paper, a poor thing, which Lamb had reason to dislike for the attack it made upon him when Album Verses was published (see note on page 331).

The Examiner began the attack on August 14, 1830.  All the epigrams are signed T.A.  This means that if Lamb wrote the above, he wrote all; which is not, I think, likely.  I do not reproduce them, the humour of punning upon the name of the editor of the Literary Gazette being a little outmoded.

T.A. may, of course, have been Lamb’s pseudonymous signature.  If so, he may have chosen it as a joke upon his friend Thomas Allsop.  But since one of the epigrams is addressed to himself I doubt if Lamb was the author.

Page 123. On the Fast-Day.

John Payne Collier, in his privately printed reminiscences, An Old Man’s Diary, quotes this epigram as being by Charles Lamb.  It may have been written for the Fast-Day on October 19, 1803, for that on May 25, 1804, or for a later one.  Lamb tells Hazlitt in February, 1806, that he meditates a stroll on the Fast-Day.

Page 123. Nonsense Verses.

Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, in Mary and Charles Lamb, 1874, says:  “I found these lines—­a parody on the popular, or nursery, ditty, ’Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home’—­officiating as a wrapper to some of Mr. Hazlitt’s hair.  There is no signature; but the handwriting is unmistakably Lamb’s; nor are the lines themselves the worst of his playful effusions.”  The piece suggests that Lamb, in a wild mood, was turning his own “Angel Help” (see page 51) into ridicule—­possibly to satisfy some one who dared him to do it, or vowed that such a feat could not be accomplished.

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