Charles Lamb (left) has left a short record of Henry Man which he included in his Essays on Elia.  Two years after Lamb left Christ’s hospital school, he obtained a temporary appointment in the examiner’s office in the South-Sea house, which he held from September, 1791, to February, 1792. This dignified establishment, in the unexacting service of which his brother John spent his life, is described in the first essay 'The South Sea House' which appeared in Lamb's Essays of Elia.  These essays are the foundation of Lamb's literary fame, for they speak of Lamb's own thought and life. Among those he mentions in the first essay is Henry Man who was Secretary to the South Sea House during Lamb's time there. Lamb writes:

Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom common qualities become uncommon? Can I forget thee, Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, the author, of the South Sea House? who never enteredst thy office in a morning, or quittedst it in mid-day -- (what didst thou in an office ?) -- without some quirk that left a sting! Thy gibes and thy jokes are now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the good fortune to rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in these fastidious days -- thy topics are staled by the "new-born gauds" of the time -- but great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, and Shelburne, and Rockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, and Clinton, and the war which ended in the tearing from Great Britain her rebellious colonies, -- and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, and Dunning, and Pratt, and Richmond, -- and such small politics.

The 'two forgotten volumes' are The Miscellaneous Works in Verse and Prose of the late Henry Man which was published in 1802.  Among the subscribers being three of the officials named in Lamb's essay--John Evans, R. Plumer, and Mr. Tipp, and also Thomas Maynard, who, though assigned to the Stock Exchange, is probably the "childlike, pastoral M----" of a later paragraph in the Essays of Elia. Small politics are for the most part kept out of Man's volumes, which are high-spirited rather than witty, but this punning epigram (of which Lamb was an admirer) on Lord Spencer and Lord Sandwich may be quoted:

Two Lords whose names if I should quote,
Some folks might call me sinner:
The one invented "half a coat",
The other  "half a dinner".

Such lords as these are useful men,
Heaven sends them to console one;
Because there's now not one in ten,
That can procure a  "whole one".

The following is taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Lamb's greatest achievements in prose were the essays that he wrote under the pseudonym Elia for London Magazine, which was founded in 1820. The essays are almost wholly autobiographical (though often he appropriated to himself the experiences of others). Many of the best deal with things half a century past: vistas revealed by an imagination looking back down the experiences of a lifetime. The subject of his first essay was the South Sea house, where his elder brother, John, was a clerk. In order to spare his brother's feelings, Lamb called himself Elia (the name of another clerk at the South Sea house). The persona of Elia predominates in nearly all of the essays. Lamb's style, therefore, is highly personal and mannered, its function being to "create" and delineate this persona, and the writing, though sometimes simple, is never plain. The essays conjure up, with humour and sometimes with pathos, old acquaintances such as Samuel Salt; they recall scenes from childhood and from later life, indulge the author's sense of playfulness and fancy, and avoid only whatever is urgent or disturbing--politics, suffering, sex, religion. The first essays were published separately in 1823; a second series appeared, as The Last Essays of Elia, in 1833.