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Title: In the Footprints of Charles Lamb

Author: Benjamin Ellis Martin

Illustrator: Herbert Railton
             John Fulleylove

Release Date: December 6, 2017 [EBook #56140]

Language: English

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IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF
CHARLES LAMB

CHARLES LAMB.

IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF
CHARLES LAMB

BY
Benjamin Ellis Martin
AUTHOR OF “OLD CHELSEA,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY HERBERT RAILTON
AND JOHN FULLEYLOVE

WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY BY E. D. NORTH

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1890


Copyright, 1890, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.

Press of J. J. Little & Co.
Astor Place, New York.

TO
L.   H.   F.
 

During the half-century since the death of Charles Lamb, an immense mass of matter has been gathered about him and about his writings. In burrowing among the treasures and the rubbish of this mound, I have been struck by the total absence of what may be called a topographical biography of the man, or of any accurate record of his rovings: with the exception of that necessarily brief one contained in Mr. Laurence Hutton’s invaluable “Literary Landmarks of London.” Such a shortcoming is the more marked, inasmuch as Lamb is so closely identified with the Town. Not one among the men of letters, whose shadows walk the London streets with us, knew them better, or loved them more, than he did. In following his footsteps, I have found still untouched many of the houses that harboured him; and I have taken delight in the task, before the restless hand of reconstruction shall have plucked them forever away, of helping to keep alive the look of all that is left of the walls within which he lived and laboured.

From this mere memento of brick-and-mortar—all my original intent—I have been led on to a study of the man himself, from our more modern and more humane point of view. The time has long gone by for that kindly compact of reticence which may have been becoming in the years directly after his death. Nothing need be hidden now about the madness of Mary, about the terrible taking-off of her mother, about the early insanity of Charles himself, or his later weaknesses. And, in telling the entire truth, I have found comfort and cheer in the belief that neither apology nor homily can ever again be deemed needful to a decorous demeanour beside these dead.

So that I have sketched him just as he lives for me—the lines and the wrinkles of his aspect, the shine and the shadow of his soul: just as he moved in the crowd, among his friends, by his sister’s side, and alone. To show exactly what he was, rather than what he did, I have used his own words wherever this was possible; altering them as to their letter alone, where it has seemed essential. In this spirit of affectionate allegiance I have followed him faithfully in all his wanderings, from his cradle close by the Thames to his grave not far from the Lea.

B. E. M.

New York, October, 1890.

List of Illustrations.

{1}

{2}

{3}

I.

UCH is the legend that catches one’s eye, plain for all men to see, on many a hoarding in London streets. Behind those boards, wide or high, on which the callous contractor shamelessly blazons his dreadful trade—“Old Houses Bought to be Pulled Down”—he is stupidly pickaxing to pieces historic bricks and mortar which ought to be preserved priceless and imperishable. Within only a few years, I have had to look on, while thus were broken to bits and carted away to chaos John Dryden’s dwelling-place in Fetter Lane, Benjamin Franklin’s and Washington Irving’s lodgings in Little Britain, Byron’s birthplace in Hollis Street, Milton’s “pretty garden-house,” in Petty France, Westminster.{4} The spacious fireplace by which the poet sat, during his fast-darkening days—for in this house he lost his first wife and his eyesight—was knocked down, as only one among other numbered lots, to stolid builders. And the stone, “Sacred to Milton, the Prince of Poets”—placed in the wall facing the garden, by William Hazlitt, living here early in our century, beneath which Jeremy Bentham, occupant of the adjoining house, was wont to make his guests fall on their knees—this stone has gone to “patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw.”

To this house there used to come, to call on Hazlitt, a man of noticeable and impressive presence:—small of stature, fragile of frame, clad in clothing of tightly fitting black, which was clerical as to cut and well-worn as to texture; his “almost immaterial legs,” in Tom Hood’s phrase, ending in gaiters and straps; his dark hair, not quite black, curling crisply about a noble head and brow—“a head worthy of Aristotle,” Leigh Hunt tells us; “full of dumb eloquence,” are Hazlitt’s words; “such only may be seen in the finer portraits{5} of Titian,” John Forster puts it; “a long, melancholy face, with keen penetrating eyes,” we learn from Barry Cornwall; brown eyes, kindly, quick, observant; his dark complexion and grave expression brightened by the frequent “sweet smile, with a touch of sadness in it.”

This visitor, of such peculiar and piquant personality—externally “a rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel,” to use his own words of the singer Braham—is Charles Lamb, a clerk in the East India House, living with his sister Mary in chambers in the Inner Temple. Let us walk with him as he returns to those peaceful precincts, still of signal interest, despite the ruin wrought by recent improvements. Here, as in the day of Spenser, “studious lawyers have their bowers,” and “have thriven;” here, on every hand, we see the shades of Evelyn, Congreve, Cowper, the younger Colman, Fielding, Goldsmith, Johnson, Boswell; here, above all, the atmosphere is still redolent with sweet memories of the “best beloved of English writers,” as Algernon Swinburne well calls Charles Lamb. Closer{6} and more compact than elsewhere are his footprints in these Temple grounds; for he was born within their gates, his youthful world was bounded by their walls, his happiest years, as boy and as man, were passed in their buildings.

And out beyond these borders we shall track his steps mainly through adjacent streets, almost always along the City’s streets, of which he was as fond as Samuel Johnson or Charles Dickens. He loved, all through life, “enchanting London, whose dirtiest, drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn.... O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardware men, pastry-cooks, St. Paul’s Churchyard, the Strand, Exeter ’Change, Charing Cross, with the man upon a black horse! These are thy gods, O London!” He couldn’t care, he said, for the beauties of nature, as they have been confinedly called; and used to persist, with his pleasing perversity, that when he climbed Skiddaw he was thinking of the ham-and-beef shop in St. Martin’s Lane! “Have I not enough without your mountains?” he wrote to Wordsworth.{7} “I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with anything”—even with scenery! It was a serious step which Lamb took in later life, out from his beloved streets into the country; a step which certainly saddened, and doubtless shortened, the last stage of his earthly journey.

By a happy chance—for they have an unhallowed habit in London town of destroying just those buildings which I should select to save, leaving unmolested those that would not be missed, for all they ever have to say to us—nearly every one of Lamb’s successive homes has been rescued from ruin, and kept inviolate for our reverent regard. “Cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure)”—to use his own words—has been only partly rebuilt; and that end of the block wherein lived his parents stands almost in the same state as when it was erected in 1737; this date told to us to-day by the old-fashioned figures cut on its easterly end. It was then named “The New Building, opposite the Garden-Wall,” and under that division of the Chamber-Book of the Inner Temple I have hunted up its numerous occupants.{8} By this archive, and by the Books of Accounts for the eighteenth century, I have thus been enabled to trace Samuel Salt from his first residence within the Temple in 1746, in Ram Alley Building—now gone—through successive removals, until he settled down in his last chambers, wherein he died in February, 1793. The record reads—a “parliament” meaning one of the fixed meetings in each term of the Benchers of the Temple, for the purpose of transacting business, and of calling students to the bar—“13th May, 1768. At this Parliament: It is ordered that Samuel Salt, Esquire, a Barrister of this Society, aged about Fifty, be and is hereby admitted, for his own life, to the benefit of an Assignment in and to All that Ground Chamber, No. 2, opposite the Garden Walk in Crown Office Row: He, the said Samuel Salt having paid for the Purchase thereof into the Treasury of this Society, the sum of One Hundred and Fifty pounds.”

So that it was in No. 2—the numbers having remained always unchanged—of Crown Office Row, in one of the rear rooms of the ground floor, which then looked out on Inner Temple{9} Lane, some of which rooms have been swept away since, and others have been slightly altered, that Charles Lamb was born, on the 10th February, 1775.

For Samuel Salt, Esquire—one of “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,” whose pensive gentility is portrayed in Elia’s essay of that title—had in his employ, as “his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his ‘flapper,’ his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer,” one John Lamb; who formed, with his wife and children, the greater part of the household. Of him, too, under the well-chosen name of Lovel, we have the portrait, vivid and rounded, in his son’s paper. “He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal and ‘would strike.’ In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents.... Lovel was the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick’s, whom he was said greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry—next to Swift and Prior—moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration,{10} by the dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage-boards and such small cabinet toys, to perfection; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch better than any man of his degree in England; had the merriest quips and conceits, and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of the angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr. Izaak Walton would have chosen to go a-fishing with.” In truth,

This John Lamb was devoted to the welfare of his master, Samuel Salt; who, in turn, did nothing without consulting him, or failed in anything without expecting and fearing his admonishing. “He put himself almost too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in the world.” To him and to his children Salt was a life-long benefactor, and never, until death{11} had made an end to the good man’s good deeds, did there fall on the family any shadow of change or trouble or penury.

It was in Salt’s chambers that Charles and his sister Mary, in their youthful years, “tumbled into a spacious closet of good old English reading, and browsed at will on that fair and wholesome pasturage:” thus already so early drawn together by kindred tastes and studies, even as they were already at one in their joint heritage of the father’s latent mental malady. They had learned their letters, and picked up crumbs of rudimentary knowledge, at a small school in Fetter Lane, hard by the Temple; the boys being taught in the mornings, the girls in the afternoons. It stood on the edge of “a discoloured, dingy garden in the passage leading into Fetter Lane from Bartlett’s buildings. This was near to Holborn.” Bartlett’s name is still kept alive in Bartlett’s Passage, right there; but no stone of his building now stands; and the only growth of any garden in that turbulent thoroughfare to-day is pavement and mud and obscene urchins.

The inscription painted over their school-door{12} asserted that it was kept by “Mr. William Bird, Teacher of Mathematics and Languages.” “Heaven knows what languages were taught in it, then! I am sure that neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it, but a little of our native English”—so Charles wrote nearly fifty years after to William Hone, the editor of the Every Day Book. In its pages had just appeared a woful narrative of the poverty and desolation of one Starkey, who had been “a gentle usher” in that school. In the letter written by Lamb as a pendant to that paper, he gossips characteristically about the memories of those school-days thus awakened in him and in his sister. He vividly portrays that down-trodden and downcast usher, who “was not always the abject thing he came to;” and who actually had bold and figurative words for the big girls, when they talked together, or teased him during his recitations. “Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those uncomfortable sloping desks, where we sat elbowing each other; and the injunctions to attain a free hand, unattainable in that position!”{13}

They had, also, an aged school-dame here, who was proud to prattle to her pupils about her aforetime friend, Oliver Goldsmith; telling them how the good-natured man, then too poor to present her with a copy of his “Deserted Village,” had lent it to her to read. He had become famous now, and so affluent—by the success of “The Good Natur’d Man,” indeed!—that he had bought chambers on the second floor of No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple. This was but a biscuit toss from Crown Office Row, and perchance little Mary Lamb sometimes met, within the grounds, the short, stout, plain, pock-marked Irish doctor. He died in those chambers, only ten months before the birth of Charles; and was buried somewhere in the burying-ground of the Temple church. Within it, the Benchers put up a tablet to his memory. It is now in their vestry, wherein you shall also find the baptismal records of nearly all the Lamb children. The inscription on the tablet may have been first spelled out by Mary to her small and eager brother. Doubtless the two children knew the exact spot of his grave—{14}known exactly to none of us to-day—even as they knew every corner and cranny of the Temple grounds and buildings. They played in its gardens, and looked down on them from these same upper windows of No. 2 Crown Office Row, which have been selected by Mr. Fulleylove for his point of view. Then these gardens were as Shakespeare saw them, when he, by a blameless anachronism, caused to be enacted in them the famous scene of the Roses; really rehearsed there, years before, when Warwick assigned the rose to Plantagenet. Now, the grounds have been extended riverwards by the construction of the Embankment; and the ancient historic blocks of buildings about them have been vulgarized into something new and fine.

Mary and Charles were always together during these early days. Of the seven children born into the family, only three escaped death in infancy: our two, and their brother John, elder by two years than Mary. Their mother loved them all, but most of all did she love “dear, little, selfish, craving John;” who, as was well written by Charles in later life, was{15}

THE TEMPLE GARDENS, FROM CROWN OFFICE ROW.

not worthy of one-tenth of that affection which Mary had a right to claim. But the mother, like the father, was fond of fun, and found her favourite in her handsome, sportive, noisy boy; showing scant sympathy with and no insight into the “moythered brains”—her own phrase—of her sensitive, brooding daughter, who already gave unheeded evidence of the congenital gloom by which her mind was to become so clouded. Another member of the small household was the father’s queer old-maiden sister, Aunt Hetty, who passed her days sitting silently or mumbling mysteriously as she peered over her spectacles at the two children, huddled together in their youthful fear of her.

So it came to pass that Mary took charge of the “weakly but very pretty babe”—as she recalled him, long years after, when he lay dead at Edmonton, and she, in the next room, was rambling disjointedly on about all their past. With a childish wisdom, born, surely, not of her years, but rather of her loneliness and her unrequited caresses and her craving for companionship, she became at once his big sister,{16} his little mother, his guardian angel. She cared for him in his helpless babyhood, she gave strength to his feeble frame, she nurtured his growing brain, she taught him to talk and to walk. We seem to see the tripping of his feet, that

trying to keep pace with her steps then; even as they always all through life tried to do, wheresoever she walked, until they stopped at the edge of his grave. The story of these two lives of double singleness, from these childish footprints to that grave, is simply the story of their love. He, like his own Child-Angel, was to know weakness and reliance and the shadow of human imbecility; and he was to go with a lame gait; but, in his goings, he “exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness.” And so pity springs up in us, as in angelic bosoms; and yearnings touch us, too, at the memory of this “immortal lame one.”

The boy’s next school, to which he obtained a presentation through the influence of Mr. Salt, is known officially as Christ’s Hospital, and is{17} commonly called the Blue-Coat School. It still stands, a stately monument of the munificence of “that godly and royal child, King Edward VI., the flower of the Tudor name—the young flower that was untimely cropped, as it began to fill our land with its early odours—the boy-patron of boys—the serious and holy child, who walked with Cranmer and Ridley.” To-day, as we stay our steps in Newgate Street, and peer through the iron railings at the dingy red brick and stone facings of the ancient walls; or, as we pause under the tiny statue of the boy-king—founder, only ten days before his death, of this noble hospital for poor fatherless children and foundlings—we may look at the out-of-school games going on in the great quadrangle: the foolish flapping skirts of the striplings tucked into their red leathern waistbands to give fair and free play to their lanky yellow legs, their uncapped heads taking sun or shower with equal unconcern.

Among them, unseen of them, seem to move the forms of those other boys, Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt—all students here about this time. Our boy{18} was then a little past seven, a gentle, affectionate lad, “terribly shy,” as he said of himself later, and made all the more sensitive by his slight stammer, which lapsed to a stutter when his nerves were wrought upon and startled. Yet he was no more left alone and isolated now than he was in after life; his schoolfellows indulged him, the masters were fond of him, and he was given special privileges not known to the others. His little complaints were listened to; he had tea and a hot roll o’ mornings; his ancient aunt used to toddle there to bring him good things, when he, schoolboy-like, only despised her for it, and, as he confessed when older, used to be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps near where they went into the grammar-school, and open her apron, and bring out her basin, with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for him. And he was allowed to go home to the Temple for short visits, from time to time, so passing his young days between “cloister and cloister.”

As he walks down the Old Bailey, or through Fleet Market—then in the full foul odour of{19}

A CORNER IN THE BLUE-COAT SCHOOL.

its wickedness and nastiness—and so up Fleet Street on his way home, we may be sure that his eager eye alights on all that is worth its while, and that the young alchemist is already putting into practice that process by which he transmuted the mud of street and pavement into pure gold, and so found all that was always precious to him in their stones. After treading them for many years, as boy and as man, he asks: “Is any night-walk comparable to a walk from St. Paul’s to Charing Cross for lighting and paving, for crowds going and coming without respite, the rattle of coaches, and the cheerfulness of shops?”

Among his schoolfellows, Charles formed special friendships with a few select spirits; and in Coleridge—“the inspired charity-boy,” who entered the school at the same time, though three years older—he found a life-long companion. He looked up to the elder lad—dreamy, dejected, lonely—with an affection and a reverence which never failed all through life, though in after years subject to the strain of Coleridge’s alienation, absence, and silence. “Bless you, old sophist,” he wrote once to Coleridge,{20} “who, next to human nature taught me all the corruption I was capable of knowing.”

The two lads—along with Middleton, then a Grecian in the school, afterward Bishop of Calcutta—figure together in the fine group in silver which passes from ward to ward each year, according to merit in studies and in conduct. There is a Charles Lamb prize, too, given every year, as fittingly should be, to the best English essayist among the Blue-Coat boys, consisting of a silver medal: on one side a laurel wreath enwrapped about the hospital’s arms; on the reverse, Lamb’s profile, his hair something too curly, his aspect somewhat smug. It would be a solace to his kindly spirit could he know that his memory is thus kept green in the school which he left with sorrow, and to which he always looked back fondly. When a man, he used to go to see the boys; and Leigh Hunt—who entered a little later—has left us a pleasant picture of one of these visits. Charles had been a good student in the musty classical course of the school; not fonder of his hexameters than of his hockey, however; and when he left, in November, 1789, aged nearly fifteen,{21} he had become a deputy Grecian, he was a capital Latin scholar, he probably had a firm conviction that there was a language called Greek, and he had read widely and well in the English classics. Doubtless he was, even then, already familiar with the Elizabethan dramatists, his life-long “midnight darlings;” above all, he had nurtured himself upon the plays of Shakespeare, which were “the strongest and sweetest food of his mind from infancy.”

The somewhat sombre surroundings of his summer holidays, too, helped to form him into an “old-fashioned child.” The earliest thing he could remember, he once wrote, was Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is spelled, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire. He could just recall his visit there, under the care of “Bridget Elia”—as he named his sister in his essays. This youthful visit had been made to a farmer, one Gladman, who had married their grandmother’s sister; and his farm-house was delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. Charles describes his return thither with Mary, more than forty years after; and how, spite of their{22} trepidation as to the greeting they might get, they were joyfully received by a radiant woman-cousin, “who might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome.”

Mainly, however, were the boy’s holidays passed with his grandmother Field, the old and trusted housekeeper of the Plumer family at Blakesware, in Hertfordshire: an ancient mansion, topped by many turrets, gables, carved chimneys, guarded all about by a solid red-brick wall and heavy iron gates. He was not allowed to go outside the grounds, and was content to wander over their trimly-kept terraces and about the tranquil park, wherein aged trees bent themselves in grotesque shapes. Beyond, he fancied that a dark lake stretched silently, striking terror to the lad’s imagination.

“So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though there lay—I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion—half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts,{23} that the idle waters lay unexplored for me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy.” It was the placid tiny Ashe, which, curving about through this valley, here brawls over one of the wears that have given the place its name, and his lake proved to be only one of its little inlets.

Within doors he would wander through the wainscoted halls and the tapestried bedrooms—“tapestry so much better than painting, not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots ... all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Actæon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more provoking, and almost culinary, coolness of Dan Phœbus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas.” He would gaze long in wonder on the busts of the Twelve Cæsars ranged around the marble hall, and would study the prints of Hogarth’s Progress of the Rake and of the Harlot hung on the walls. “Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it,” he says in the {24}essay on “Blakesmoor in H——shire;” under which name he disguises the place. That is a delightful paper, ending with this most musical passage: “Mine too—whose else?—thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood-pidgeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery.”

Lamb went back in 1822 to revisit these boyhood scenes, only to find that ruin had been done with a swift hand, and that brick-and-mortar knaves had plucked every panel and spared no plank. The ancient mansion entirely disappeared during that year, and a{25} new Blakesware House soon after rose on its site: “worthy in picturesque architecture and fair proportions of its old namesake,” in the words of Canon Ainger.

The boy used to go to church of a Sunday with his grandmother, to Widford; nearer to their place than their own parish church at Ware. On a stone under the noble elms many a transatlantic visitor has read the simple inscription, “Mary Field, August 5th, 1792.” Beneath it lies the grandmother.{26}

II.

Until lately, in the year 1889, when the frenzy for Improvement and the rage for Rent wiped it out, I could have shown you a queer bit of cobble wall, set in and thus saved from ruin by the new wall of the Metal Exchange. These few square feet of stone were the sole remaining relic of the chapel of the old manor-house of Leadenhall—so named from its roofing of lead, rare in those days—which house had been presented to the City of London by the munificent Richard Whittington in 1408, to be used as a granary and market. It escaped the Great Fire, and its chapel was not torn down until June, 1812. This piece of its wall, having been preserved then, was built in with, and so formed part of, the old East India House. That famous structure stretched its stately and severe façade along Leadenhall Street just beyond Gracechurch Street, and so around the corner into Lime Street. It was, withal, a gloomy{27}

THE EAST INDIA HOUSE.

[From an old print in the British Museum.

]

pile, with its many-columned Ionic portico. Its pediment contained a stone sovereign of Great Britain, holding an absurd umbrella-shaped shield over the sculptured figures of eastern commerce; its front was dominated by Britannia comfortably seated, at her right Europe, on a horse, and at her left Asia, on a camel.

Within its massive walls—holding memories of Warren Hastings and of Cornwallis, of Mill, gathering material for his history of India, and of Hoole, translating Tasso in leisure hours—were spacious halls and lofty rooms, statues and pictures, a museum of countless curiosities from the East. Beneath were vaults stored with a goodly share of the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, and dungeons wherein were found—on the downfall of John Company, in 1860, and the destruction of his fortress a little later—chains and fetters, and a narrow passage leading to a concealed postern: these last for the benefit of the victims of John’s press-gang, entrapped, drugged, shipped secretly down the river, and so sent across water to serve Clive and Coote as food for powder.{28}

Upstairs, at a desk, sat Charles Lamb, keeping accounts in big books during “thirty-three years of slavery,” as he phrased it: of unfailing and untiring—albeit not untired—devotion to his duties, as his employers well knew. It was in April, 1792, just as he became seventeen, that he was first chained to this hard desk; and it came about in this way.

John Lamb, the father, had got nearly to his dotage and quite to uselessness, and was pensioned off by his master about this period. The elder brother, dear little selfish, craving John, had grown into a broad, burly, jovial bachelor, wedded to his own ways; living an easy life apart from them all; “marching in quite an opposite direction,” as his brother kindly puts it—speaking, as was his wont, not without tenderness for him. He contributed nothing to the support of the family, and Mary added but little, beyond her own meagre maintenance by dress-making on a small scale—a trade she had taught herself. In her article on needlework, written in 1814, for the British Lady’s Magazine, she says: “In early life I passed eleven years in the exercise of my needle for a livelihood.{29}” And so it seemed needful that the boy, not yet fifteen years old on leaving Christ’s, should get to work to eke out the family’s scanty income.

John Lamb had a comfortable position in the South Sea House. It stood where now stands the Oriental Bank, at the end of Threadneedle Street, as you turn up into Bishopsgate Within: “its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars.” In his essay entitled “The South Sea House,” Lamb has drawn the picture of the place within: its “stately porticos, imposing staircases, offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces; ... the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors; ... huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated; dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams; and soundings of the Bay of Panama!” All “long since dissipated or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous Bubble.”

Here Charles was given a desk, and here he worked, but at what work and with what wage we do not know. It was not for many{30} months, however, for he soon received his appointment in the East India House through the kindness of Samuel Salt—the final kindness that came to the family from their aged well-doer; for he died during that year, 1792. The young accountant had but little taste for, and still less knowledge of, the mercantile mysteries over which he was set to toil. He knew less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks’ standing, he said in mature manhood; and a map of old Ortelius was as authentic as Arrowsmith to him. Of history and chronology he possessed some vague points, such as he could not help picking up in the course of his miscellaneous reading; but he never deliberately sat down to study any chronicle of any country! His friend Manning once, with great painstaking, got him to think that he understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave him over in despair at the second. And, toil as toughly as he might over his accounts, he had to own, after years of adding, that “I think I lose £100 a year at the India House, owing solely to my want of neatness in making up my accounts.”{31}

And yet, just the more uncongenial as was his labour, by just so much more did it tend in all ways to his good. Wordsworth said truly, with admirable acumen, that Lamb’s submission to this mechanical employment placed him in fine contrast with other men of genius—his contemporaries—who, in sacrificing personal independence, made a wreck of their morality and honour. No such wreck did Charles Lamb make, and his peculiar pride prevented his sacrificing ever one iota of his independence. He could be no man’s debtor nor dependant, and was content to cut his coat to suit his cloth, all his life long. His sole hatred, curiously enough, was for bankrupts; and he has portrayed with delicious irony, in his essay, “The Two Races of Men”—the men who borrow and the men who lend—the contempt of the former for money, “accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross!”

The new clerk began with an annual salary of £70, to be increased by a small sum each year. Many huge account-books were filled with his figures—who knows what has become of them?{32}—and these he used to call his real works, filling some hundred folios on the shelves in Leadenhall Street. His printed books, he claimed, were the solace and the recreations of his out-of-office hours at home.

NO. 7 LITTLE QUEEN STREET.

That home was no longer in the Temple. The home there, of “snug firesides, the low-built roof, parlours ten feet by ten, frugal board, and all the homeliness of home,” had been given up, on the death of Mr. Salt; or, it may be, even earlier, for I am unable to fix the date. The family had moved into poor lodgings, at No. 7 Little Queen Street, Holborn, where we find them during the year 1795. The site of this house, and of its adjoining neighbours on both sides, Nos. 6 and 8, is now occupied by Holy Trinity Church of Lincoln’s Inn{33} Fields. The first house of the old row still standing is No. 9, and the side entrance of the Holborn Restaurant is No. 5; so that, you see, the windows of the Lamb lodgings looked out directly down Gate Street, their house exactly facing the western embouchure of that short and narrow street.

I pass in front of the little church a score of times in a month, and each time I look with gladness at its ugly front, content that it has replaced the walls within which was enacted that terrible tragedy of September, 1796. The family was straitened direfully in means, and in miserable case in many ways; the mother ailing helplessly, the father decaying rapidly in mind and body; the aged aunt, more of a burden than a help, despite the scanty board she paid; and the sister, suffering almost ceaselessly from attacks of her congenital gloom, submitting to the constant toil of her household duties, of her dressmaking, and of nursing her parents. Early in 1796 Charles wrote to Coleridge: “My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble{34} servant spent very agreeably in a mad-house at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite any one. But mad I was!” This was his only attack; there was no more such agreeable diversity in his life, and he was cured by the most heroic of remedies.

In the London Times of Monday, September 26, 1796—in which issue the editors “exult in the isolation and cutting off” of the various armies of the French Republic in Germany, and doubt the “alleged successes of the army in Italy reported to the Directory by General Buonaparte;” in which the Right Honourable John, Earl of Chatham, is named Lord President of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council; and in which “Mr. Knowles, nephew and pupil of the late Mr. Sheridan,” advertises that he has “opened an English, French, and Latin preparatory school for a limited number of young gentlemen at No. 15 Brompton Crescent”—in this journal appeared the following:

“On Friday afternoon, the coroner and a jury sat on the body of a lady in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day.{35} It appeared, by the evidence adduced, that, while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case-knife lying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, around the room. On the calls of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks, approached her parent. The child, by her cries, quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too late. The dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife, and the old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a severe blow he had received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling about the room.

“For a few days prior to this, the family had observed some symptoms of insanity in her, which had so much increased on the Wednesday evening that her brother, early the next morning, went to Dr. Pitcairn: but that gentleman was not at home.

“It seems that the young lady had been once{36} before deranged. The jury, of course, brought in their verdict—Lunacy.”

The True Briton said: “It appears that she had been before in the earlier part of her life deranged, from the harassing fatigues of too much business. As her carriage toward her mother had always been affectionate in the extreme, it is believed her increased attachment to her, as her infirmities called for it by day and by night, caused her loss of reason at this time. It has been stated in some of the morning papers that she has an insane brother in confinement; but this is without foundation.”

I ask you to notice with what decent reticence, so far from the ways, and so foolish in the eyes, of our modern journalistic shamelessness, all the names are suppressed in this report. It is certain that it would not be looked on with favour in the office of any enterprising journal, nowadays! One error the reporter did make; it was not the landlord, but Charles, who came at the child’s cries; luckily at hand just in time to disarm his sister, and thus prevent further harm.

So he was at hand from that day on, all{37} through his life, holding her and helping her in the frequent successive returns of her wretched malady. His gentle, loving, resolute soul proved its fine and firm fibre under the strain of more than forty years of undeviating devotion to which I know no parallel. He quietly gave up all other ties and cares and pleasures for this supreme duty; he never for one hour remitted his vigil; he never repined or posed, he never even said to himself that he was doing something fine. And such is the potency of this intangible tonic of unselfish self-sacrifice, that his tremulous nerves grew tenser under its action, and his reason relaxed her rule thenceforward never any more. The poor guiltless murderess was sent by the authorities to an asylum at Hoxton. There John Lamb and their friends thought it best to isolate her, safely and quietly, for life, spite of her intervals of sanity; but, from the outset, Charles fought against this, offered his life-long personal guardianship—this boy of twenty-two, with only £100 a year!—and at length succeeded in squeezing consent from the crown officials. He counts{38} up, in a letter to Coleridge, the coin “Daddy and I” can spare for Mary, and computes all the care she will bring: “I know John will make speeches about it, but she shall not go into an hospital.” So he meets her as she comes out, and they walk away through life hand in hand, even as they used to walk through the fields many a time in later years on the approach of one of her repeated relapses; he leading her back to temporary retirement in the asylum, hand in hand together, both silently crying!

The mother’s body is laid in the graveyard of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, the aunt is sent to other relatives, and the father’s wound having speedily healed, Charles removed with him to lodgings at No. 45 Chapel Street, Pentonville, on the corner of Liverpool Road. It was a plain little wooden house, as you may see it portrayed in the cut copied from W. Carew Hazlitt’s “Charles and Mary Lamb.” Now, there stands in its place a blazing brazen “pub,” quite in keeping with the squalid street. Its bar, like that favourite bar of Newman Noggs, “faces both ways,” in a hopeless attempt to{39} cope all around with the unquenchable thirst of that quarter!

THE HOUSE IN PENTONVILLE.

The new home, however, brought but slight brightening to the gloom and horror from which Charles had fled in the old home. It was shadowed by the almost actual presence of the dead mother, and made even more dismal by the living ghost of the aged father, now “in the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of human weakness, a remnant most forlorn of what he was.” He was released by death early in 1799, and laid by his wife’s side in the burying-ground of St. Andrew’s, Holborn; the ground since then having been cut through and{40} wiped out by the construction of the Holborn viaduct.

Old Aunt Hetty, “the kindest, goodest creature,” had come back to them, but only to die; and their faithful servant, who had followed their fortunes and their misfortunes, sickened slowly unto death. Mary had been allowed to return home for a while, from the rooms at Hackney, where Charles had placed her on her release from the asylum, and where he passed his Sundays and holidays with her. Now, she again broke down, and was forced to go back into seclusion at Hoxton. Then, for the one time in all his life, Charles gave way under these successive strokes, and made his only moan in a letter to Coleridge, early in 1800: “Mary, in consequence of fatigue and anxiety, is fallen ill again, and I was obliged to remove her yesterday. I am left alone in a house, with nothing but Hetty’s dead body to keep me company. To-morrow I bury her, and then I shall be quite alone, with nothing but a cat to remind me that the house has been full of living beings like myself. My heart is quite sunk, and I don’t know where to look for{41} relief. Mary will get better again, but her constantly being liable to these attacks is dreadful; nor is it the least of our evils that her case and all our story is so well known around us. We are in a manner marked.... I am going to try and get a friend to come and be with me to-morrow—I am completely shipwrecked.”

No, he was not completely wrecked, but terribly tempest-tossed for a time; and so at last—in the high phrase of Coleridge—“called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness.”

But “marked” cruelly was the little family in very truth. Soon they were forced to make one more of their many repeated removes. Other quarters were offered them just then in the house of one John Mathew Gutch, who had been a schoolmate at Christ’s of Lamb’s, and was at that time a law stationer in Southampton Buildings, Holborn. It was a most friendly and even generous offer, for Gutch knew the whole sad story, and the dangers, in all probability, portending. His house has been torn down only lately, along with the one hard by in which lived Hazlitt, twenty years later.{42}

It would be but the dreariest of records of the young clerk’s three years at Pentonville, and of his earlier life in Little Queen Street, if one could point to nothing brighter than his anxiety, poverty, loneliness; his dull days at his desk, his duller evenings at cribbage with his almost imbecile father. “I go home at night over-wearied, quite faint, and then to cards with my father, who will not let me enjoy a meal in peace.” For he says—and to the son this is unanswerable!—“If you won’t play with me, you might as well not come home at all.” He is not allowed to write a letter, he can go nowhere, he has no acquaintance. “No one seeks or cares for my society, and I am left alone.” The only literary man he knew was George Dyer; who was “goodness itself,” indeed, but not a stimulating companion. Sometimes he succeeded in slipping out to the theatre, of which he was as fond as, when a boy, he felt the delights he has delineated in “My First Play.” These came back with added keenness to him now, after a long interval; for the scholars at Christ’s had not been allowed to enter any play-house.{43}

And there was solace for all his privations to be found in his beloved books, and he “browsed” in many a field. “I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I call a book. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.” He had a spiritual kinship with the Elizabethans, and was worthy, in his own words, of listening to Shakespeare read aloud one of his scenes hot from his brain. Yet he was fond of the writers of the last century, and wished that he might be able to forget Fielding and Swift and the rest for the sake of reading them anew. For modern literature, save for a few favourite poems and for the works of his personal friends, he cared but little. For modern affairs he cared nothing, and knew nearly nothing about them. There is hardly a hint in his letters of the grim Napoleonic drama which was enacted during the younger years of the century; he only grieved that War and Nature and Mr. Pitt should have conspired to increase the cost of coals and bread and beer! He once heard a butcher in the market-place of Enfield say{44} something about a change of ministry; and it struck him that he neither knew nor cared who was in and who was out. Indeed, he could not make these present times present to himself, and lived in the past, so that the so-called realities of life seemed its mockeries to him. “Hang the age! I will write for antiquity,” he told the able editor who criticised his style as not in keeping with the taste of the age. In truth, he was a walking anachronism, and beneath his nineteenth-century waistcoat pulsated a heart of the seventeenth century—that of Sir Thomas Browne, perchance.

Lamb’s first appearance in print was made anonymously during these dreary days, in the Morning Chronicle, and consisted of a sonnet to Mrs. Siddons, whom he had seen for the first time, and who had profoundly impressed him. This sonnet and three others formed his share of a small volume of “Poems on Various Subjects,” mainly by Coleridge, issued under the latter’s name in the spring of 1796. His preface says: “The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House. Independently of the signature, their{45} superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them.” In the summer of 1797 appeared a second edition, “to which are now added poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd”—the former contributing about fifteen short poems. This Lloyd was the son of a Birmingham banker, a morbid young man addicted to rhyme and to melancholy—a recent acquaintance of Lamb’s, and one who could not have been a cheerful comrade for him, just then.

In 1798 appeared “A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret,” as its original title ran. It is the best known of his works after his essays, and we all echo Shelley’s words to Leigh Hunt: “What a lovely thing is ‘Rosamund Gray’! How much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest part of our nature in it!” And yet this “miniature romance,” as Talfourd well named it, surely seems somewhat unreal and artificial, for all its charm!

Lamb found constant comfort, too, during these dark years, in his only two intimate friends: Coleridge, with whom he had renewed his companionship, broken by Coleridge’s visit to Germany, and by his six months’ service in the{46} Light Dragoons; and Southey, whose healthy and wholesome common-sense was just then a timely tonic for Lamb. These three youthful dreamers used to sit and smoke and speculate of nights in a little den at the back of the Salutation and Cat—a tavern at No. 17 Newgate Street, nearly opposite the old School. Two of them may haply have learned their way there while still scholars! “I image to myself that little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat, where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with poesy,” Lamb wrote, later; and he refers more than once to “that nice little smoky room at the Salutation, which is even now continually presenting itself to my recollection, with all its associated train of pipes, tobacco, egg-hot, welsh-rabbit, metaphysics, and poetry.” They say that the wary landlord, to whom Coleridge’s rhapsodies were quite unintelligible, yet who fully understood their value in drawing a knot of thirsty listeners, offered the Talker free quarters for life, if he would stay and talk!

The men who sit and smoke and soak in tap-rooms, and who never know when they are{47} full in any sense, are just the sort to find copious refreshment in such eternal monologue. Carlyle’s concise dictum thereanent would have fallen flat on their pendulous ears: “To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether one like it or not, can in the end be exhilarating to no creature!”

The old tavern—so old, that within its walls Sir Christopher Wren used to sit often with his pipe, coming in tired from the rebuilding of St. Paul’s, just around the corner—has itself been rebuilt, the little smoky room is wiped out, the Cat has vanished, and the Salutation greets us as a slap-bang City eating-house and bar. Before the destruction of the original inn, an old fellow, who had been a Grecian in Lamb’s time, used to hobble up the entrance-way, once a year, when he came to some great function of the Blue-Coats, and look longingly into that once “murmurous haunt” through the glass door. Invited to enter one day, he stood in the smoking-room for a while, his eyes wet and his voice husky; then he went away, never to reappear. Doubtless he had drunk and smoked through many of those “O noctes cœnœque{48} Deûm! Anglice—Welsh rabbit, punch, and poesy,” in Lamb’s words.

Another favourite resort of the three cronies was The Feathers, a dirty, dingy, delightful tavern, as I have seen it, in Hand Court, Holborn, nearly opposite the Great Turnstile leading into Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was only two minutes’ walk from the lodgings in Little Queen Street, and but a few houses distant from the oil-shop of Charles’s godfather, at the corner of Featherstone Buildings and Holborn. The Feathers has gone to its own place, a modern something maddens me on its site, and all that I have been able to rescue is the quaint sign which hung until lately above the entrance of the court in Holborn, and looked down on the frequent goings in and out of our friends.

It was while living in Pentonville that Lamb passed through his second, and his final, love-sickness. His first attack had been caused by undue exposure, when a guileless youth, unprotected by proper prophylactics, to the provocative charms of the “Alice Winterton” of his later writings. It is believed that her real name was Ann Simmons, and that he used to meet{49}

THE FEATHERS TAVERN.

her during his holidays at his grandmother’s place. For, with all his delightful egoistic frankness in prattling about himself, this was the one point too tender to be touched on, seriously or jocularly, ever to any one. It is of her, surely, that he is thinking in two of his four sonnets in the Coleridge collection, wherein he speaks of his “fancied wanderings with a fair-haired maid.” He placed the scene of “Rosamund Gray” in the cottage where lived Ann Simmons, near Widford, not far from Blakesware; and they show to sentimental strangers that portion of the cluster of cottages still left. They claim that it is her portrait which he drew for that of his heroine, even as he is the Allan Clare of the little story. He certainly hints, just for once, at this love scrape in that letter to Coleridge in which he speaks of his six weeks’ stay in the Hoxton Asylum: “It may convince you of my regard for you when I tell you that my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.” But his recovery from{50} both derangements was radical and permanent, and he was able to say, only a little later: “I am pleased and satisfied with myself that this weakness troubles me no longer. I am wedded, Coleridge, to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father.” That wedding to the fortunes of his sister was his life-long union, and haply saved him from any other, which would have harmed, rather than have helped, this man; and would have sacrificed deplorably this vivid personality on the altar of the greatly-glorified god, the infestive Humdrum.

His serene good sense asserted its strength, at no time and in no way, so signally as in his absolute emancipation from this transient enslavement; and in his sedate statement of the fact—true in so many cases where the victim is too stupid to know it or too timorous to own it—that, “if it drew me out of some vices, it also prevented the growth of many virtues.”

As is usual, however, with the amatory infirmity, he suffered from that slight and superficial relapse, later in life, to which I have already referred. In his daily goings to and fro in Islington, he used to meet the lovely{51} Quakeress, to whom he never spoke, and whom he adored silently and from afar. He only knew that she was named Hester, and it is her name which he has made immortal and her sweet memory which he has embalmed imperishably in his exquisite verses:

And his first, his serious, affair may have justified its existence by recalling to us his well-known wish that no incident, no untoward accident even, of his life might have been reversed. So it is, that in his “New Year’s Eve” he avers that “it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair and fairer eyes of Alice W——n, than that so passionate a love-adventure should be lost.”{52}

III.

“I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be agreeable, at Our Lady’s next feast. I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms, which look out (when you stand a-tiptoe) over the Thames and Surrey Hills, at the upper end of King’s Bench Walk, in the Temple. There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance, and shall be able to lock my friends out, as often as I desire to hold free converse with any immortal mind—for my present lodgings resemble a minister’s levée, I have so increased my acquaintance (as they call ’em) since I have resided in town.” In this letter, written to Manning early in 1801, three significant points call for comment. The phrase “in town,” referring to his residence in Southampton Buildings, shows how his previous abode in Islington was then in the country, and how the squalid houses of the foul Chapel Street of to-day have supplanted{53} those pleasant cottages set in gardens, with rural lanes cutting the fields between. His curt reference to their “having received a hint” to move, proves how pitifully they were “marked,” as he had already put it, and how soon even the kindly Gutch withdrew his offer of shelter. The few words, “I have so increased my acquaintance” give a wide suggestion of the already growing attraction of this odd, original young character to all bright minds and sweet natures with whom he came in contact.

And so, on Lady Day, March 25, 1801, he and Mary moved into the Temple, there to begin, near their childhood home, that life of “dual loneliness,” never again broken in upon: consoled by their mutual affection, cheered by their common tastes, brightened by the companionship of congenial beings. In the Temple they remained for seventeen years, living in two sets of chambers during that period. After eight years’ abode at No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, they were compelled to quit, their landlord wanting the rooms for himself. Towards the end of March, 1809, in a letter to Manning, then{54} in China, Lamb wrote as if he were in the next street: “While I think of it, let me tell you we are moved. Don’t come any more to Mitre Court Buildings. We are at 34 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, and shall be here till about the end of May, when we remove to No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, where I mean to live and die.”

Their home in Southampton Buildings during these few months while changing chambers still stands intact; a delightful old square, solid, brick house, just in front of the tiny garden of Staple Inn. But both blocks of buildings in which he lived during those seventeen years in the Temple have been torn down and replaced by modern structures.

Although he disliked leaving the old chambers, he found the new set, on the third and fourth floors of No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, “far more commodious and roomy.... The rooms are delicious, and the best look back into Hare Court, where there is a pump always going. Just now it is dry. Hare Court trees come in at the window, so that it is like living in a garden!” This was written to Coleridge,{55} in June, 1809; and to Manning, in letters during this period, Lamb spoke of the churchyard-like court having “three trees and a pump in it. Do you know it? I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old ... the water of which is excellent cold, with brandy, and not very insipid without. Here I hope to set up my rest and not quit till Mr. Powell, the undertaker, gives me notice that I may have possession of my last lodging. He lets lodgings for single gentlemen.... I should be happy to see you any evening. Bring any of your friends, the Mandarins, with you.”

He did, indeed, as he often complained, hate and dread unaccustomed places, but he was well content to discover that this new habitation had “more aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see.”

It was here that Mary made the memorable find of an empty adjoining garret of four untenanted, unowned rooms; of which they took possession by degrees, and to which Charles could escape from his too frequent friends, who had more leisure than himself. Here he did{56} his literary work in secrecy and silence, “as much alone as if he were in a lodging in the midst of Salisbury Plain.” They never knew to whom these chambers rightly belonged, and they were never dispossessed. So all was well with him, and even in his whimsical perversity he was able to complain only that there was another “Mr. Lamb” not far from him; “his duns and his girls frequently stumble up to me, and I am obliged to satisfy both in the best way I am able.”

The staircase of the new building is still stumbled up by duns and girls, you may drink from that same pump to-day, you may see those trees still in that court, but his windows no longer look out on trees and pump and court.

Talfourd and Procter have left vivid pictures of the memorable Wednesday evenings in the Temple, the former contrasting them with the stately assemblages of Holland House. “Like other great men, I have a public day,” Lamb wrote. He loved men, and he had a rare capacity for getting at the best they had in them, a real reverence for their abilities, a kindly sympathy with their diverse tastes, and a most friendly frankness as to all their foibles. “How{57} could I hate him?” he asked of some one: “Don’t I know him? I never could hate any one I knew.” He looked so constantly and so closely into the strange faces of calamity, that he yearned always for the nearness of friendly features. Above all, he understood, as Goethe did, “how mighty is the goddess of propinquity;” and although he was so untiring and prolific and delightful in his letters to absent friends, he insisted that “one glimpse of the human face and one shake of the human hand is better than whole reams of this thin, cold correspondence; yea, of more worth than all the letters that have sweated the fingers of sensibility from Madame Sévigné and Balzac to Sterne and Shenstone.”

So it came to pass that his little rooms in the Temple held a motley crowd. Low-browed rooms they were, set about with worn, homely, home-like furniture; his favourite books—his sole extravagance—in their shelves all about. His ragged veterans, he called them; “the finest collection of shabby books I ever saw; such a number of first-rate works in very bad condition is, I think, nowhere to be found,” is{58} Crabb Robinson’s caustic comment on them. In narrow black frames, on the walls of his best room, hung “a choice collection of the works of Hogarth, an English painter of some humour.” The sideboard was already spread by Mary with cold beef, porter, punch; tobacco and pipes were at hand, and tables made ready for whist. This is Charles’s invitation: “Swipes exactly at nine, punch to commence at ten, with argument; difference of opinion expected to take place about eleven; perfect unanimity with some haziness and dimness before twelve!” He used to play right through his programme. His old cronies came, “friendly harpies,” he named many of them: for, as he said of the pretended dead Elia, his intimados were, to confess a truth, in the world’s eye, a ragged regiment. He never forsook a friend, ragged or rich in raiment or in repute, and “the burrs stuck to him; but they were good and loving burrs for all that.” It was the simple statement of a truth which he had made, long before this: “I cannot scatter friendships like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand, like hour-glass sand.”{59}

New acquaintances came, too; never men of fame or fortune or fashion, but men of mark, you may be sure. And many among them notable only for some tincture of the absurd in their characters: for “I love a Fool,” he said, “as naturally as if I were of kith and kin to him.” Crabb Robinson has left us his reminiscence of this place and these people, when speaking of his first acquaintance with the Lambs: “They were then living in a garret in Inner Temple Lane. In that humble apartment I spent many happy hours, and saw a greater number of excellent persons than I had ever seen collected together in one room.” Thus has he summed up, in his sedate way, all that need be said on that score.

The capricious Coleridge had once more become constant, after his refusal for two years to write, and his needless estrangement, which had called forth Lamb’s lines, “I had a friend, a kinder friend had no man;” and of whom, after many years, he yet was able to say: “The more I see of him in the quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind, the more cause I see to love him and believe him a very good man.”{60} There was Hazlitt—trying to paint when Lamb first met him, finding later his true calling as art critic and essayist; easily first of all in that field, before or after him, in insight, breadth, and vigour; arrogant, intense, bitter, brooding forever over the fall of Napoleon: the only male creature he reverenced except Coleridge. He must needs respect, in Coleridge, the one man known to him who alone could surpass him in untiring fluency, even under the influence of strongest tea—sole stimulus allowed himself by Hazlitt at that time. Him, Lamb finds to be, “in his natural state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing.” And he, too, had tried to quarrel with the Lambs, and had failed, as did all who made the sorry attempt! There was William Wordsworth, ascetic, self-centred, quite sure of himself; whose true powers, and all that was genuine in his genius, Lamb was one of the first to recognize and to celebrate. There was Godwin, so bold in his speculations, so daring with his pen, so placid in person, and so mild of voice. This terrifying radical used to prattle on trivial topics till after supper, and then {61}invariably fall fast asleep. “A very well-behaved decent man, ... quite a tame creature, I assure you; a middle-sized man, both in stature and understanding,” wrote his keen-eyed host. There was old Captain Burney, afterward admiral, son of the famous organist, brother of the more famous writing-woman, Fanny, Madame d’Arblay. He had been taught by Eugene Aram, he had sailed all around the globe with Captain Cook, and was still young and tender in heart under his rough exterior. There was his son, Martin, of whom Lamb said, “I have not found a whiter soul than thine;” Leigh Hunt, airy, sprightly, full of fine fancies; Charles Lloyd, poetic and intense; Tom Hood, slight of figure, feeble of voice, face of a Methodist parson, silent save for his sudden puns; Thomas Manning, the Cambridge mathematical tutor, “a man of a thousand;” Basil Montagu, the philanthropized courtier; stalwart Allan Cunningham; Haydon, the painter, eager everywhere for controversy; the preacher, Edward Irving, content to listen, there; Bernard Barton, Quaker poet, bank drudge; gentle and genial Barry Cornwall;{62} Talfourd, the sympathetic chronicler of these scenes; constant and trusty Crabb Robinson; De Quincey, self-involved and sometimes spiteful, yet not behind any one of that brilliant band in his love for Lamb, whom he earnestly attests to be “the noblest of human beings.”

There appeared sometimes at these gatherings a most curious character, hardly known now as one of this group, but remembered rather from the parts he plays in the pages of Bulwer and of Dickens. This was Thomas Wainewright, the “Janus Weathercock” of the London Magazine; a flimsy, plausible, conceited scoundrel, in whom Lamb good-naturedly found something to like. It was after our friend’s death that Wainewright’s thefts and poisonings brought him to trial, and sent him to Van Diemen’s land, where the dandy convict died in madness, raving and unrepentant.

And Charles Lamb, the central and dominating personality of all these strong characters, towers above them all, not only and not so much by the greatness of his gifts as by that of his character. For simplicity, sincerity,{63} singleness of soul—all that is childlike in genius—all those qualities which go to make up greatness of character—these were his. He was always young. To that scoffer who, sneering at Lamb’s habits, said that no man ought to be a Bohemian after the age of thirty, as to all the scoffers since, there is only the one old answer—Lamb never got to be thirty.

“Of all men of genius I ever knew,” said Crabb Robinson—and he knew all that were going in his day!—“Charles Lamb was the one most intensely and universally to be loved.” Among them all, he alone was known by his first name; just as, at school, he had been, as he always best liked to be, “Charles” to the other boys: “so Christians should call one another,” he used to say. Reason revolts and imagination cowers appalled before the forlorn and hopeless conception of Wordsworth addressed as “Willie,” or Coleridge as “Sam”! For, you see, this man never posed, never paraded himself, had no jealousy, nor petulance, nor pettiness. He never lied for effect, nor harboured hypocrisies, big or little. He was lucky in possessing that supreme antidote{64} to the pernicious poison of conceit—an abiding sense of humour—“a genius in itself, and so defends from the insanities,” in Emerson’s wise words. Your solemn ass must needs take himself seriously; the man of deep, keen, quick perception of the ludicrous can never do so. When Coleridge, during a visit of the brother and sister to him at Nether Stowey, addressed to Lamb his maudlin lines, entitled “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” in which he gushes over “my gentle-hearted Charles,” the victim of these verses rebelled. “For God’s sake, don’t make me ridiculous by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verse! Substitute drunken dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, and any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.”

“Stat magni nominis umbra” is Lucan’s stately phrase, to be aptly applied, in its best and original sense, to almost every one of this illustrious group. Yet, lofty as they loom in the distance, far above our power as well as our desire to belittle them, it may be not beyond belief that too close and too constant contact{65} with some of them might have brought at the last a certain satiety. It may even be breathed, without irreverence and therefore without offence, that we might have been just a bit bored if allowed to listen without rest to Coleridge, with his rhetorical preachments and his melancholy, both born of rheumatism, rum, and opium; or to Hazlitt, with his ingrained selfishness, his petulance, his tea-inspired turgidity; or to Wordsworth, solemnly weighted with the colossal conviction of his own mission, and tireless in his tenacity to attest the truth thereof to all listeners. These, and all those lesser ones, seem to me petty and tiresome beside this spare, silent, stammering little fellow, who loved them all and laughed at them all; who gave them fitting reverence, and yet, with affectionate adroitness, found fun in their foibles!

How direct and delicate was his gibe when Coleridge had been longer even than usual in his endless endeavours to spin serviceable ropes with his metaphysical sands: “Oh, you mustn’t mind what Coleridge says; he’s so full of his fun.” I can see his twinkling eyes—{66}those wonderfully sparkling eyes—as he answered Coleridge’s question, “Charles, did you ever hear me preach?” “I never heard you do anything else!” Coleridge was, indeed, quite capable, in Hazlitt’s sarcastic phrase, of taking up the deep pauses of conversation between seraphs and cardinals; and could have argued—with the same ready confidence with which, according to mocking Sydney Smith, Lord John Russell would have assumed command, at half an hour’s notice, of the channel fleet—on either side of the theses sent him by Lamb just before he went to Germany. These questions—“to be defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Göttingen,” by Coleridge—are deliciously sly and sharp in their stab at the complacent superiority over lesser gifted mortals felt and shown by that “archangel a little damaged.” I can hear the falsetto tone of his moralities growing shriller before these two questions, especially, among the others: “Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?” “Whether the higher order of seraphim illuminati ever sneer?”{67}

How deftly he punctured Wordsworth’s sublime conceit, on his hinting that other poets might have equalled Shakespeare if they cared. “Oh, here’s Wordsworth says he could have written ‘Hamlet’ if he’d had the mind. It is clear that nothing is wanting but the mind!” Even the Infallible One not only tolerated, but valued, the acute criticisms with which Lamb leavened his discerning praise of all his friends’ work; but when he, with kindly frankness, rated a little lower than did their author the “Lyrical Ballads,” that author got into quite a state of mind. He “wrote four sweating pages” to inspire Lamb with a “greater range of sensibility;” and the tormented critic bursts out: “After one’s been reading Shakespeare for twenty of the best years of one’s life, to have a fellow start up and prate about some unknown quality possessed by Shakespeare less than by Milton and William Wordsworth!... What am I to do with such people? I shall certainly write ’em a very merry letter.” I wish that letter had been saved for our delectation.

Then there was Manning, with his slight sense of humour, and to him—then in China,{68} to his friend’s loss—Lamb loved to write the maddest inventions, and let loose his wildest whims about their friends. To Coventry Patmore, on his way to Paris, he wrote, in an amazing letter: “If you go through Boulogne, inquire if old Godfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now.”

Good, honest barrister Martin Burney—of the “If dirt were trumps” story—gave infinite fun to Lamb by his oddities. Once he read aloud, in their rooms, the whole Gospel of St. John, because biblical quotations are very emphatic in a court of justice. At another time he insisted on carving the fowl—and did it most ill-favouredly—because it was indispensable for a barrister to do all such things well. “Those little things were of more consequence than we thought!” Burney quite approved of Shakespeare, “because he was so much of a gentleman;” and he said and did so many queer things that Lamb wrote: “Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one; maybe he has tired him out!”

It was George Dyer, above all, in whom{69} Lamb revelled, and who was meat and drink to him. Dyer was the son of a Wapping watchman and butcher, had been a charity-school boy at Christ’s, and had become a publisher’s harmless drudge. He was a true bookworm, eating his way through thick tomes, but digesting little. He seemed to find all the nourishment he needed in the husks of knowledge, while Lamb, in radical contrast, bit to the kernel with his incisive teeth. As to Dyer’s heart, however, his friend was sure that God never put a kinder into the flesh of man; and his was a simple, unsuspecting soul. He was so absent-minded that he would sometimes empty his snuff-box into his teapot, when making tea for his guests; and so near-sighted that he once walked placidly into the river, as I shall hereafter relate. He used to keep his “neat library” in the seat of his easy-chair. Mary Lamb and Mrs. Hazlitt, going to his chambers one day in his absence, “tidied-up” the rooms and sewed fast that out-of-repair easy-chair, with his books within it: whereat, to use his own violent language, he was greatly disconcerted!{70}

Lamb gives a ludicrous description of his visit to these same chambers in Clifford’s Inn, where he found Dyer, “in mid-winter, wearing nankeen pantaloons four times too big for him, which the said heathen did pertinaciously affirm to be new. These were absolutely ingrained with the accumulated dirt of ages, but he affirmed ’em to be clean. He was going to visit a lady who was nice about those things, and that’s the reason he wore nankeen that day!” It was to this credulous creature that Lamb confided that the secret author of “Waverley” was Lord Castlereagh! And once he sent the guileless one to Primrose Hill at sunrise, to see the Persian Ambassador perform his orisons! No one but Dyer could have said that the assassin of the Ratcliffe Highway—painted so luridly by De Quincey in his “Three Memorable Murders”—“must have been rather an eccentric character!”

Haydon, the painter, has told of one memorable evening in his own studio, when Lamb was in marvellous vein, and met that immortal Comptroller of Stamps who had begged to be introduced to Wordsworth, and who insisted{71} on having the latter’s opinion as to whether Milton and Newton were not great geniuses. Lamb took a candle and walked over to the poor man, saying, “Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?” Haydon and Keats got him away, but he persisted in bursting into the room, shouting, “Do let me have another look at that gentleman’s organs.” Edgar Poe’s Imp of the Perverse took entire possession of Lamb when thrown with uncongenial men, and forced him to give the impression of “something between an imbecile, a brute, and a buffoon.” Writing of himself after the imaginary death of Elia, he says, truly: “He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalized (and offences were sure to arise) he could not help it.”

No, nor did he try to help it, and we love him all the more for this antic disposition he was so fond of showing unshamed. And I think that we need not grieve greatly because his vagaries were not kept always “within the limits of becoming mirth,” when he had to deal with prigs, pedants, or poseurs. Tom Moore,{72} tiptoe with toadyism, tried to look down on Lamb, doubtless feeling that he had accurately sounded the shoals of his shallow insincerity. The portentous Macready has left on record his unfavourable impression of the irreverent creature who stood in no awe of superior persons on pasteboard pedestals. That impression pains us no more than does the ungentle judgment of Thomas Carlyle. He found Lamb’s talk to be but “a ghastly make-believe of wit,” “contemptibly small;” and in all that was said and done he saw, from his own humane point of view, nothing but “diluted insanity.” Curtly and cruelly he labelled this brother and sister, “two very sorry phenomena.”

If our friend laughed at others, he was just as ready to laugh at himself; and his hissing his own play is historic. It is strange that, with his keen critical sense, he should have hoped for the success of this “Mr. H., A Farce in Two Acts;” produced at Drury Lane, in 1806, with the great Elliston in the title-rôle. Yet he had written to Manning in boyish glee: “All China shall ring with it—by and by.” In the same{73} letter, he made fanciful designs for the orders he was to give for admission, elate with anticipation of the long run his piece was to have. He sat on the opening night with Mary and Crabb Robinson in the front of the pit (his favourite place), and joined with the audience in applauding his really witty prologue. Then, as the luckless farce fell flat and flatter, he was louder than any of them in their hisses. “Damn the word, I write it like kisses—how different!” he growled, in grotesque wrath, in his letter announcing the failure to Wordsworth. Hazlitt, who was present, dreamed of that dreadful damning every night for a month, but Lamb only wrote to him: “I know you’ll be sorry, but never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces.” He and Mary were “pretty stout” about it, but, after all, they would rather have had success, he had to own. For he not only longed for the fame, but he needed the money, which that success in dramatic authorship would have brought.{74}

He delighted in playing all sorts of pranks on his sister, and was quick to improve any occasion to tease her. Such a scene is described by N. P. Willis, in his “Pencillings by the Way;” where he relates his meeting and making acquaintance with them, at a friend’s rooms in London. He and Lamb were chatting, and Mary, not quite catching all their words—she was then slightly deaf—asked, “What are you saying of me, Charles?” Instantly he answered: “Mr. Willis admires your ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ very much, and I was saying that it was no merit of yours that you understood that subject!” She took all his freaks in good part, translating them in the light of her affection for him, and of her fondness for his sweet and stingless banter.

His sense of fun bubbled up at most inapt times. He had been asked once to stand as godfather for a friend’s child, and feared he would disgrace himself at the very font. “I was at Hazlitt’s wedding and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh; I misbehaved once at a funeral.” In all this{75} wayward whimsicality, one can detect that same depth and intensity of feeling which moved Abraham Lincoln to tell trivial stories at the most solemn crises; which suggests a sob beneath the maddest mirth of Sterne, Molière, Cervantes; which drove Charles Lamb to seize the kettle from the hob and hold it on his sister’s head-dress, like the clown in a pantomime, to hide the breaking of his great heart at the signs of the coming mania he had detected in her. He accounted it an excellent thing to play the buffoon sometimes, and was willing to seem supremely silly, that he might save his own sanity.

Acting conversely, this trembling sensibility set the tears trickling down his cheeks, while he was writing a playful paper; and made him even “shed tears in the motley Strand, for fulness of joy of so much life.”

His largeness of soul was never shown in a grander way than in his letter to, and his whole conduct toward, Robert Southey, when the latter attacked, in the Quarterly Review, the first collected “Essays of Elia”—“a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be{76} as delightful as it is original.” In the same paper, he spoke arrogantly and offensively of Leigh Hunt, his own political enemy, and Lamb’s most dear and most unjustly persecuted friend. From so close a companion as Southey had been, and one who knew him so thoroughly, this hurt Lamb deeply, and he wrote to Bernard Barton: “But I love and respect Southey, and will not retort. I hate his review and his being a reviewer.” And in the London Magazine he put forth the manly “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esq.;” of which the latter said that “no resentful letter was ever written less offensively.” Then Southey—an exemplary if over-righteous mortal—sent Lamb a line of regret and affection, and Lamb wrote generously back, and the mists were melted away, and their friendship shone more steadfastly than ever. Indeed, it seems to me that Southey eclipsed Lamb in the spirit he showed in this reconciliation, forasmuch as he proved himself fine enough to forgive the man whom he had outraged. We may commend his conduct; “For right, too rigid, hardens into wrong.”{77}

It is no part of my plan to dwell on Lamb’s religious belief. Suffice it to say that it was, like that of most Unbelievers, too large to be labelled by a set of dogmas, too spacious to be packed within church or cathedral walls. It is a stale truism that credence, less than character, is the criterion of conviction; and all history shows that the doubters are, in nearly all cases, the most deeply devout. “He prayeth well who loveth well,” Coleridge had learned; and it is my fancy that those lives, where love with voluntary humility waited on self-sacrifice, had taught him the immanent truth—“He prayeth best, who loveth best.”

As to Lamb’s utterances about these mighty matters, we may be sure that they took the tone of the man’s utterances concerning all matters; and to them we may apply Hazlitt’s phrase: “His jests scald like tears, and he probes a question with a play upon words.” Or, as Haydon put it, “He stuttered out his quaintness in snatches, like the fool in ‘Lear’.”{78}

IV.

In the midst of the vast Covent Garden property of the Duke of Bedford is wedged a small piece of alien land, on the corner of Bow and Russell streets. It belongs to a certain Clayton estate, and is covered by three houses, which are worth more to us than all the potentialities of marketable wealth hereabout. These three houses formed but one building, at the time of erection; which was late in the last or early in the present century, as we may be convinced by every architectural point of proof without and within. It was built on the site of that famous ancient structure whose upper floor was occupied by Will’s Coffee-House; its cellars and foundations still to be traced under the estimable Ham and Beef Shop on that corner. To-day, this popular establishment is thronged for us, not with its actual eager buyers of cold baked meats, but with the shades of Addison, Swift, Smollett, Steele, Dryden, Cibber, Gay,{79}

NO. 20 RUSSELL STREET, COVENT GARDEN.

Pepys, Johnson, revisiting their once favourite foregathering place.

Of the three houses into which this block of buildings has been divided, the corner house remains entirely unaltered. Its neighbour, in Bow Street—now a swarming tavern—has suffered somewhat at the hand of the modern restorer. It retains, on its upper floor, a small barred cell, formerly set apart for some exclusive or elusive prisoner from Bow Street station, just at hand.

The house which chiefly concerns us, No. 20 Russell Street, has been made higher by one story, re-roofed, and re-faced with stucco; but it has not been distinctly disfeatured.

Such as it was, it became the next home of the Lambs, in 1817. At that time they had lived for nine years in their chambers in Inner Temple Lane, and it is strange that they should have been willing to leave their beloved Temple, after having been born into it again, and after having grown up in it again. For Lamb’s household gods planted a terrible fixed foot, as he put it, and were not rooted up without blood. “I thought we could never{80} have been torn up from the Temple,” he wrote; yet they did so tear themselves up, and we are left to conjecture, for their reasons. Mary told Dorothy Wordsworth that the rooms had got dirty and out of repair, and that the cares of living in chambers had grown more irksome each year. More weighty among their motives, no doubt, was the desire to escape the incessant invasion of their privacy by welcome, and yet unwelcome, friends. From this wear and tear they were not freed by their flight, however.

In November, 1817, Lamb wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth: “We are in the individual spot I like best in all this great city. The theatres with all their noises; Covent Garden, dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinous, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and ’sparagus; Bow Street, where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and, casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way, with a constable to conduct the ceremony. These{81} little incidents agreeably diversify a female life.”

Besides these novel sights, they found strange sounds in their new abode. A brazier’s hammers were rankling all day long within, and by night without—but let Mary tell it, in her letter to Dorothy Wordsworth: “Here we are living at a brazier’s shop, No. 20, in Russell Street, Covent Garden—a place all alive with noise and bustle; Drury Lane Theatre in sight from our front, and Covent Garden from our back windows.... The hubbub of the carriages returning from the play doesn’t annoy me in the least—strange that it doesn’t, for it is quite tremendous. I quite enjoy looking out of the window, and listening to the calling up of the carriages, and the squabbles of the coachmen and link-boys.”

They squabble still of a foggy night—“a real London partic’ler”—and the noise is even greater now than it was then, and Covent Garden is filthier than ever, and the thieves go by escorted by a “bobby,” and attended by a crowd; but the brazier no longer brazes,{82} and his discordant shop is now inoffensive with noiseless fruits.

Here they lived until 1823, these six years filled with increasing prosperity, with comparative comfort, with happy friendships, with his best work, with sudden fame. His income had slowly increased with each added year of service in the East India House, and the earnings of his literary work swelled it slightly. That work had never yet received its recognition. It was collected and published in two handsome volumes in 1818, and the reading world of that day suddenly awakened to see in the obscure clerk, plodding daily to his desk in Leadenhall Street, its most delicate humourist, its most acute critic, its most perfect essayist. A little later, inspired by this success, he set to work in these rooms in Russell Street on his “Elia” papers, begun in the new London Magazine for August, 1820.

So he outgrew his gloom and grew gayer, although he was never for one hour out of the shadow of Mary’s constant imminent danger of a relapse. He drew around him many new acquaintances, especially the theatrical folk of{83} this quarter, and more and more of the “friendly harpies” he was fond of, on whom he spent his time and squandered his strength. He needed all he could save of time and strength for his evening work on his Essays, after his day’s work at his desk. Yet he not only was not allowed to attend to literary labour, but he complained that he could not even write letters at home, because he was never alone; and had to seize odd moments for all such writing at his office and from his work in East India House. Stationery, too, he seized there; and some of his unapproachable letters were written on printed official forms concerning “statements of the weights and amounts of the following lots”! His task-masters there would have gone out of their mercantile minds could they have made accurate estimates of the hard money value to be put by posterity on those “following lots” which he thus unofficially filled in!

Even there he was not unmolested, but was constantly “called off to do the deposits on cotton wool,” he complained when writing to Wordsworth. “But why do I relate this to{84} you, who want faculties to comprehend the great mystery of deposits, of interest, of warehouse rent, and of contingent fund?”

So his growing need and his growing want to be alone were never gratified. “Except my morning’s walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so—I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered—evening company I should always like, had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (divine, forsooth) and voices all the golden morning.... I am never C. L., but always C. L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself.” He could not even eat in peace, for his familiars were with him putting questions—presumably inopportune questions—asking his opinions, and interrupting him in every way. “Up I go, mutton on table, hungry as a hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication. Knock at the door; in comes Mr.{85} Hazlitt, or Mr. Burney, or Morgan Demi Gorgon, or my brother, or somebody to prevent my eating alone—a process absolutely necessary to my poor, wretched digestion. Oh, the pleasure of eating alone!—eating my dinner alone! let me think of it.”

He did think of it, but to no practicable remedial end; for, if he hated to have the intruders come, he hated still more to have them go; and he had to avow, “God bless ’em! I love some of ’em dearly!”

All this was a ceaseless drain on his vitality, and a ceaseless strain on the nerves already so overstrung. He wondered how “some people keep their nerves so nicely balanced as they do, or have they any? or are they made of pack-thread? He” (I know not of whom he spoke) “is proof against weather, ingratitude, meat underdone, every weapon of fate.” Lamb was not proof against good friends, his sympathetic nature going out perpetually to them to his own loss. Of Coleridge he said: “The neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons.... If I lived with him, or with the author of ‘The{86} Excursion,’ I should in a very little time lose my own identity.” Only those of his susceptible temperament can comprehend this confession, or his characteristic commendation of John Rickman, Clerk of the House of Commons, a newly made and highly valued friend: “He understands you the first time. You need never twice speak to him.”

Such were the tremulous nerves which seemed to need the stimulus of alcohol, and which were so easily swayed and upset by it. The lachrymose and dolorous tones of Respectability are forever croaking loud in lamentation that Lamb was a Drunkard. It is not true. He was no drunkard. He could not have been a drunkard with his delicate organization. I believe that he suffered, unknowingly withal, from the malady now named nervous dyspepsia; to which he was a victim, partly by inheritance, largely by his own indiscretions. He was careless in his habits, in his diet, in his exercise—walking often at unfitting hours and for excessive hours—and he had no regard at all for any sort of proper precautions. Although habitually{87} given to plain fare, and no gormandizer, he was at times fond of outrageous dishes, and fearless in his appalling experiments on his digestive machinery. He audaciously claimed for himself the stomach of Heliogabalus! Like Thackeray, he had the courage of his gastronomic convictions, and he has left an imperishable record of his love for roast pig, cow-heel, and brawn. “I am no Quaker at my food—I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it.... I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is eating; I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal”—admirable appreciation! “C—— holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings—I am not sure but he is right.” And about a pig, just then roasting, he wrote to Wordsworth: “How beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my nose!” He could snatch a fearful joy even from that baleful refection, cold brawn; and only at the thought thereof, as he is writing, he glows with esurient unction. “’Tis, of all my hobbies, the supreme in the eating way....{88} It is like a picture of one of the old Italian masters; its gusto is of that hidden sort.”

Conscientious in his cultivation of these admirably abnormal appetites; fond of heavy, late suppers; addicted to too much tobacco; with friends forever to the fore to interest, stimulate, and thus unnerve him; and with the unceasing terror that hung over their home and gave it its profound depression, it is small wonder that he found in alcohol just what he needed, and just what he should not have depended upon! He would tipple at times, and now and then he did get drunk, I do not deny; but never twice in the same house, as he truthfully assured a lady! That was a redeeming habit, surely. The fact, put in a word, is that he was affected by incredibly small quantities of stimulants, and as high as they pulled up his spirits, even so correspondingly low did his spirits sink afterward. His agonies of remorse, following a slight excess, were morbid, fantastic, never to be taken as true to the letter. After a trifling tipsy quarrel with Walter Wilson, he sent an apology, and added: “You knew well enough before that a very little liquor will cause a considerable{89} alteration in me.” Mary wrote frequently: “He came home very smoky and drinky last night;” and then he would reproach himself the day after for “wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my cursed drinking and ways of going on.” His spasmodic efforts at reform were born of these extravagant self-accusings, and were equally needless and fruitless. “I am afraid I must leave off drinking. I am a poor creature, but I am leaving off gin.” And he did leave it off, with a moral certainty of his abstinence lasting until his feeble stomach clamoured for so much porter in its place that Mary herself had to beg him “to live like himself once more.”

His “Farewell to Tobacco” was more successful, and more permanent; it was not only “his sweet enemy,” but really his worst enemy. “Liquor and company and wicked tobacco, o’ nights, have quite dis-pericraniated me, as one may say;” and of these three delights wicked tobacco was to him the most delightful, and withal the most dangerous. And so we must not consider too curiously his famous{90} “Confessions of a Drunkard,” with its terrible, eloquent passage, beginning with this unfair and unfounded introspection: “To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes; to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools.” We are glad and proud to take him as we find him—full of frailties, just as we poorer mortals are; it is not for us to sit in judgment on him; we say to the Philistines, in Wordsworth’s benignant words, “Love him or leave him alone.”

It was during the latter period of their residence in the Temple, and during their six years in Russell Street, that Lamb produced the greater part of the work he has left—small in sum but great in achievement. It is not the province of this study to dwell on his various literary performances, but it comes within my scope to speak of his sister’s assistance in that literary labour. In all matters he depended greatly upon her. “She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness.” During each frequent recurrence of her pitiful craze—when she was{91} forced to be “from home,” as he lovingly and tenderly phrased it—he was lost and helpless. “I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the least as in the biggest perplexity.”

He did not overrate her. She was no commonplace creature, and she impressed all who knew her well as a woman of fine judgment, of noteworthy good sense, full of womanly sympathies, sweet and serene. Hazlitt commended her as the wisest and most rational woman he had ever known. With strangers she was unpretentious, mild of manner, reticent rather than loquacious. In her bearing towards her brother she was gentle and gracious always, and she had a way of letting her eyes follow him everywhere about the room, in company. When looking directly at him she had often an upward, pleading, peculiar regard. Mrs. Anne Gilchrist, in her admirable monograph, has called attention to the rare tact—excellent thing in woman!—shown by Mary in dealing with her brother’s caprices and foibles, all{92} through his life. Indeed, there was absolute inspiration in her way of looking at, and acting upon, these matters. It seemed to her to be a vexatious kind of tyranny, which women use towards men, just because the women have better judgment—the italics are her own! She pours forth profuse strains of unpremeditated wisdom, in this same letter to Sarah Stoddart: “Let men alone, and at last we find they come around to the right way, which we, by a kind of intuition, perceive at once. But better, far better that we should let them often do wrong, than that they should have the torment of a monitor always at their elbows.” Guided by such priceless principles, it is no wonder that she succeeded in never crossing that thin line which divides the domain of the judicious adviser, the opportune helper, from that of the untimely, incessant, ineffective Nagger. She once said, “Our love for each other has been the torment of our lives”—torment and assuagement together, as we know, and made sweet mainly by her simple sagacity.

Regarding her personal appearance, Barry Cornwall has told us that “her face was pale,{93} and somewhat square, very placid, with gray intelligent eyes;” and De Quincey called her “that Madonna-like lady.” Her smile was as winning as Charles’s own, and when she spoke, there came a slight catch in her soft voice, unconscious sisterly reflex of his stammer. She was below the medium stature, strongly and somewhat squarely built.

To this slight sketch of her looks and bearing may be added these, not too trivial fond records, of her manner of dressing. Her gown was usually plain, of black stuff or silk; but, on festive occasions, she came out in a dove-coloured silk, with a kerchief of snow-white muslin folded across her bosom. She wore a cap of the kind in fashion in her youth, its border deeply frilled, and a bow on the top.

I cannot finish more fitly than with Barry Cornwall’s dainty touch, about her habit of snuff-taking, in common with Charles: “She had a small, white, delicately formed hand, and, as it hovered above the tortoise-shell snuff-box, the act seemed another link of association between the brother and sister, as they sat over their favourite books.”{94}

These favourite books were almost all the same, chiefly the Elizabethan dramatists, notably Shakespeare; but, unlike Charles—“narrative teases me,” he owned—she was fond of modern romance and read many novels. “She must have a story—well, ill, or indifferently told—so there be life stirring in it,” Elia wrote of Bridget, in his subtle portraiture of her in “Mackery End.” Otherwise their intellectual tastes were in entire accord; and she was but a little behind him in having almost a tinge of genius in her keen critical faculty. She came naturally to a happy command of pure limpid English, which gave to her style the charm of her own personal flavour. This flavour was made the more racy by a delicate humour, exceptional in her sex.

These genuine literary qualities first had a chance to show themselves in the year 1806, while they were living in the Temple. Charles writes: “Mary is doing for Godwin’s book-seller twenty of Shakspeare’s plays, to be made into children’s tales.... I have done ‘Othello’ and ‘Macbeth,’ and mean to do all the tragedies. I think it will be popular{95} among the little people, besides money. It’s to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done them capitally, I think you’d think.” And again: “Mary is just stuck fast in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well.’ She complains of having to set forth so many female characters in boy’s clothes. She begins to think Shakspeare must have wanted—imagination!” And she, too, has left a pretty picture of their common work: “You would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while, and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out he has made something of it.”

She certainly had the more difficult task in dealing with the comedies, and it was she who wrote the greater part of the preface, an admirable piece of musical English, ending thus: “ ... pretending to no other merit than as faint and imperfect stamps of Shakespear’s matchless imagination, whose plays are strengtheners{96} of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity.” The little book—“Tales from Shakespear, Designed for the Use of Young Persons, Embellished with Copper-plates,” (by Mulready)—came out in 1807, and was such a sudden and assured success with older persons as well, that a second edition was soon called for. Frequent editions are still in demand. The new preface stated that, though the tales had been meant for children, “they were found adapted better for an acceptable and improving present to young ladies advancing to the state of womanhood.”

She also did the larger share of “Mrs. Leicester’s School”—a collection of charming tales for children, over some of which Coleridge used to gush, and Landor roar in admiration, in his best Boythorn manner. A volume of “Poetry for Children, by the Author of ‘Mrs. Leicester’s School,’” was published later. After this her literary productions consisted only of occasional magazine articles, to one of which, “On Needle-Work,” I have already referred.{97}

THE COTTAGE IN COLEBROOK ROW.

For the stories in prose, their authoress found the local scenery and colour in her memories of her youthful visits to Mackery End and to Blakesware. Indeed, the stories are supposed to be told to each other by the young ladies in a school at Amwell—the rural village which slopes up from the Lea and the New River, only one mile from Ware.

At intervals during these years, there had been short excursions out of town, longer country trips, and journeys to visit friends far from London. Charles had spent a fortnight at Nether Stowey with Coleridge, in the summer of 1797, and there had made the acquaintance of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. She was, of all women he had known, Coleridge said, “the truest, most inevitable and, at the same time, the quickest and readiest in sympathy with either joy or sorrow, with laughter or with tears, with the realities of life, or the larger realities of the poets.” She formed a warm friendship for Mary, and, like her, she had clouds come over her reason, though not till very late in life.

During another vacation, Lamb spent a few{98} days with Hazlitt in Wiltshire, and in other summer holidays he visited Oxford and Cambridge. He bore the country always very bravely for the sake of the friends with whom he was staying.

He had taken Mary to Margate in early years—or, maybe, she took him, for she was then twenty-six and he only fifteen—and he has told us, in “The Old Margate Hoy,” of this their first seaside experience, and how many things combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of his life. Neither of them had ever seen the sea, then, and had never been so long together alone and from home. Many years after, during his holidays, they went together again to the seaside at Brighton and at Hastings. In 1802, he was seized with a strong desire to go to remote regions, and hurried Mary off for a stay with Coleridge at the Lakes. There they passed three delightful weeks, although not in the fairy-land which their first sunset made them think they had come into.

Then they had a “dear, quiet, lazy, delicious month” with the Hazlitts, at Winterslow, near Salisbury, in 1809. This visit, but not its pleasure,{99} they repeated in the following year; and journeyed from there to Oxford, Hazlitt accompanying them, and adding to their delight in the noble university town, and in the Blenheim pictures.

This trip, like most of their trips, was dearly paid for by Mary’s illness. The fatigues, the changes, and the reaction after the excitement of society, disturbed her accustomed balance, nearly always; sometimes even before they reached home. So surely was this foreseen that she used to pack a strait waistcoat among her effects, on starting on any journey, however short. Her most distressing attack occurred on their way to Paris; a tour taken with needless rashness in the summer of 1822. She was seized with her mania in the diligence, not far from Amiens, and had to be left there in charge of the nurse, whom they had taken with them for just this emergency. It pleases us to learn that the friend who met and helped them there was an American, John Howard Payne. He escorted Mary to Paris, when she was fit to travel, two months later. There Crabb Robinson met them, and says: “Her only male{100} friend is a Mr. Payne, whom she praises exceedingly for his kindness and attention to Charles. He is the author of ‘Brutus,’ and has a good face.”

In the following year, the Lambs were able to make partial requital for Payne’s good services then, by helping him in his attempts to produce his plays and adaptations on the London and Paris boards.

With but a short holiday before him, and friends awaiting him at Versailles, Charles had gone on from Amiens as soon as he could be spared; and had to leave Paris before Mary’s arrival. She found there a characteristic note from him for her guidance. After pointing out a few pictures in the Louvre for her scrutiny—he had a pretty taste in painting as well as in engraving—he told her: “You must walk all along the borough side of the Seine, facing the Tuileries. There is a mile and a half of print-shops and book-stalls. If the latter were but English! Then there is a place where Paris people put all their dead people, and bring them flowers and dolls and gingerbread nuts and sonnets, and such trifles. And that{101} is all, I think, worth seeing as sights, except that the streets and shops of Paris are themselves the best sight.” This was about all—these sights, the folios he loved, the fricasseed frogs he learned to love, and his meeting with Talma—that he brought away from Paris. Nor has he left any record of his visit, or of its impressions on him, such as we should have cherished.{102}

V.

“When you come Londonward you will find me no longer in Covent Garden; I have a cottage in Colebrook Row, Islington; a cottage, for it is detached; a white house with six good rooms; the New River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if a moderate walking pace can be so termed) close to the foot of the house; and behind is a spacious garden with vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight the heart of old Alcinous.” Thus Lamb wrote on September 2, 1823, to Bernard Barton.

As early as in 1806, while living in Mitre Court Buildings, and anxious to finish his farce, Lamb had hired a room outside the Temple. Here he could work in quiet, free from his nocturnal visitors—knock-eternal, he called them, in one of his poorest puns. He had tried the same experiment in Russell Street, and when that refuge failed to secure privacy, he and{103}

LAMB’S TWO HOUSES AT ENFIELD.

Mary used to slip away for a few days at a time to furnished lodgings at Dalston. But all these strategic devices brought only double discomfort, and they finally resolved to go away from town altogether. Also they thought that they would like to have a whole house of their own, all to themselves. Thus it came that the letter quoted above was written. To that new home I now invite you to go with me.

As we turn from the City Road into Colebrook Row, we find an almost country road to-day, broad, tree-lined, a strip of grass running down its middle, and bordered by large, old-fashioned houses. Beneath it flows that same New River to its reservoir near Sadler’s Wells, hard by. From the top of the hill we catch a glimpse on either hand of the Regent’s Canal, as it comes out from the tunnel underneath; through the mouth of which wheezes and jangles laboriously the round-topped tug, with its chain of canal-boats. It is a pleasant approach to “Elia”—as the present owner has re-christened No. 19 Colebrook Row—for the many pilgrims from all over the English-speaking world to whom it has become a shrine.{104} For these walls hold more memories of the brother and sister than do any of the spots we have yet seen. It stands nearly as when they lived in and left it, though no longer detached; a simple cottage of two stories and an attic, with stone steps mounting sideways. Its tiny front garden, flagged and flower-filled, is fenced off discreetly from the road, a Virginia creeper climbing over the railings.

The New River before it has been sodded over, and even the wool-gathering George Dyer, with his head in the clouds, could not tumble into it now. That was one of the most madly ludicrous scenes ever conceived, and was thus described by Lamb: “I do not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation than on seeing my old friend G. D., who had been paying me a morning visit, a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right-hand path, by which he had entered, with staff in hand and at noon-day, deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear.” B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall) happened to call soon after{105} and “met Miss Lamb in the passage, in a state of great alarm—she was whimpering, and could only utter, ‘Poor Mr. Dyer! poor Mr. Dyer!’ in tremulous tones. I went upstairs aghast, and found that the involuntary diver had been placed in bed, and that Miss Lamb had administered brandy and water as a well-established preventive against cold. Dyer, unaccustomed to anything stronger than the ‘crystal spring,’ was sitting upright in bed, perfectly delirious. His hair had been rubbed up, and stood up like so many needles of iron-gray. He did not (like Falstaff) ‘babble o’ green fields,’ but of the ‘watery Neptune.’ ‘I soon found out where I was,’ he cried to me, laughing; and then he went wandering on, his words taking flight into regions where no one could follow.”

The “cheerful dining-room, all studded over, and rough, with old books,” is level with the front garden, and unchanged except that its several windows have now been cut into one large one: as also has been done above, in the “lightsome drawing-room, three windows, full of choice prints.” The prints and the old{106} books are gone, and rigid rows of decorous volumes stare stonily from their shelves; grim horsehair chairs refuse the aforetime free and unforced invitation; and the stuffed corpses of dead birds, and other framed horrors of the period all about, strike terror to our souls. Against the wall, rears itself rigourously a prim piano, from which he would have fled aghast; for, in her goodness, nature had given him no taste for music, and he never had to pretend to care for it. He was constitutionally susceptible of noises, and a carpenter’s hammer, in a warm summer noon, would fret him into more than midsummer madness; but these single strokes brought no such anguish to his ear as did the “measured malice of music.” He affirmed that he had been goaded to rush out from the Opera, in sheer pain, seeking solace in street sounds!

However disfurnished may be this interior, its tiny hall, its narrow stairway, its walls—on which the Lambs may have put this very same queer marbled paper—all are in the same state as then, when they lived within and loved them. The most marked alteration has been in his once “spacious garden”—around which he challenged{107} that professional jester, the obese, red-nosed Theodore Hook, to race him for a wager. That diminutive domain has dwindled now to an exiguous back yard, and a soda-water factory is built over its vines and vegetables.

Here the little household was enlarged and enlivened by the presence of Emma Isola, the orphaned grandchild of an Italian exile, who taught his own tongue in Cambridge, and who had been the Italian teacher of Gray and of Wordsworth. To her the Lambs, then visiting Cambridge, took a strong fancy; Mary especially pouring out on her the bounteous sympathy with which she flowed over for young people, and which won from all of them an equal fondness. They invited the lonely girl to visit them during her holidays, and finally they made her their adopted daughter, and their home her own. Mary helped her with French, Charles taught her Latin, that she might become a governess. Lamb was always quick to serve those who were poorer than himself, and, giving greatly all his life long, in Procter’s words, he always had protégés and pensioners on his bounty. Yet he was curiously provident, and{108} never lived beyond his simple income, never ran into debt. He could and did practise economy with himself, but he was incapable of parsimony in his dealings with others.

These are De Quincey’s words about this side of the man: “Many liberal people I have known in this world ... many munificent people, but never any one upon whom, for bounty, for indulgence and forgiveness, for charitable construction of doubtful or mixed actions, and for regal munificence, you might have thrown yourself with so absolute a reliance as upon this comparatively poor Charles Lamb.”

But of all this the subject of this fervent, true tribute tells us no word. He prattled in print as freely and as frankly as Montaigne, though with none of the sentimental shamelessness of Jean Jacques Rousseau; and his delightful egotism has made plain to us his foibles and his follies. Yet, with all the rest of his life in evidence, we know nothing from him of

{109}

They had need, just then, of the brightness of the young girl’s presence, for they were saddened—albeit needlessly so for all the comfort he had brought to them—by the death of their brother John. Mary’s illnesses were growing more frequent and more prolonged; and Charles was chafing more and more under his unending drudgery at the desk. In 1822 he had already written to Wordsworth: “I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don’t know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls, without relief, day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four, without ease or interposition.” And once he gave irate vent to a great outburst, dear to all but to the shop-keeping soul: “Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization, and wealth, and amity, and links of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and getting a knowledge of the face of the globe; and rotting the very firs of the forest that look so romantic{110} alive, and die into desks! Vale.” And again: “Oh, that I were kicked out of Leadenhall, with every mark of indignity, and a competence in my fob! The birds of the air would not be so free as I should. How I would prance and curvet it, and pick up cowslips and ramble about purposeless as an idiot!”

It was in April, 1825, that his wish was gratified, and his waiting brought to an end, in this very Colebrook cottage. He had nerved himself at length to offer his resignation to the Directors of the East India Company, and was surprised and delighted—having been kept a few weeks in suspense—by the proposal “that I should accept from the house, which I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my accustomed salary—a magnificent offer. I do not know what I answered between surprise and gratitude, but it was understood that I accepted their proposal, and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave their service. I stammered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home—forever.” To Wordsworth he wrote, on April 6, 1825: “I came{111} home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me; it was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three—to have three times as much real time—time that is my own—in it!”

He compared his sensations to those of Leigh Hunt on being released from prison. Indeed, the change proved to be too sudden and too great for his happiness, and he yearned for the “pestilential clerk-faces” which had so long bored him: so one day, soon after, he went back to the office, and sat amid “the old desk companions, with whom I have had such merry hours,” and tried to feel really sorry that he had left them in the lurch! He has told us of all his feelings, good and bad, at this period, in “The Superannuated Man.” He could not quite thoroughly enjoy his freedom, and was put to all sorts of devices to waste his cherished time! He re-hung his Titians, his Da Vincis, his Hogarths, and his other beloved prints. He marshalled his Chelsea China shepherds and shepherdesses in groups and singly all about the rooms. He rearranged the ragged{112} veterans of his library; not longing overmuch for the good leather that would comfortably clothe his shivering folios. Few of them were lettered on the back, and his reply to a silly somebody, who asked how he knew them, was: “How does a shepherd know his sheep?” It was his fantastic humour that, the better a book is the less it demands from binding!

Out of doors, he planted and pruned and grafted; and got into a row with an irascible old lady who owned the next garden. He sat under his own vine and contemplated the growth of vegetable nature. He explored his new neighbourhood, hunted up ancient hostelries, and made comparisons of their sundry and divers taps. He prowled about Bartholomew Fair, drinking in delight of its penny puppet-shows, and its other “celebrated follies,” as they had been contumeliously called by sedate John Evelyn, a visitor there nearly two centuries earlier. He took long walks into the country, with Tom Hood’s erratic dog, Dash, who imposed outrageously on Lamb’s good-nature; and went on excursions with Mary, farther afield—notably to Enfield, where they{113} made short stays with a Mrs. Leishman, into whose house they finally removed in 1827.

“I am settled for life, I hope, at Enfield. I have taken the prettiest compacted house I ever saw,” he wrote. No health in Islington, was his complaint to Tom Hood; and yet, “’twas with some pains that we were evulsed from Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh sticking to the door-posts. To change habitations is to die to them, and in my time I have died seven deaths.” He hoped for benefit to Mary from the quiet, and to himself from the change, and yet he looked forward to casual trips to town, mainly “to breathe the fresher air of the metropolis.”

In those days they went to Enfield by coach twice a week or so, from one or another of the old inns, left standing to-day in Aldgate or Bishopsgate. No coaches run now, but it is a pleasant walk, up through the long northern suburb, still showing, spite of its being so citified, traces of its old-time gentility in the square, stately, stolid brick mansions, the rural homes of rich city merchants a century since. We pass the High Cross at Tottenham, and{114} beside it the Swan Inn, descendant of that Swan in front of which, within sight of their beloved Lea, Anceps and Piscator rested “in a sweet, shady arbour which nature herself has woven with her own fine fingers:” but the stream is polluted now, and the arbour has gone, and Izaak Walton would not care for the new Swan. So we pass by Bruce Castle, thus named because it was owned by Robert Bruce, father of the Scotch king—now a boys’ school—and come into that bit of road famous for John Gilpin’s ride, and so on into Edmonton. Here we turn from the highway—by which the stage-coaches kept on northward to Ware and Hatfield—and going three miles farther, along the cross road, we reach Enfield.

By rail it is ten miles from Liverpool Street Station, and we whisk there in forty minutes by many trains each day; underground, behind houses, over their roofs; along by Bethnal Green and Hackney Downs and London Fields—where now can be seen no green nor downs nor any fields—past Silver Street and Seven Sisters and White Hart Lane, and many such prettily named places; and last of all through{115} a stretch of real country into the dapper little station of Enfield.

“Enfield Chase” was a favourite hunting-ground of royalty until it was divided into parcels and sold after the execution of Charles I. Some of the old hunting-lodges still stand in gardens, one of them once tenanted by William Pitt. I have talked with aged men in the village who have seen, when they were boys, the “King’s red deer” come into “The Chase” to drink from the New River: which winds through the land here, its waters drawn from the springs of Amwell and Chadwell, and from slopes with sunshine on them, and led later underground through pipes to supply London town. This new river was cut and engineered by Mr. Hugh Myddelton, citizen and goldsmith, who, “with his choice men of art and painful labourers set roundly to this business,” in the year of grace 1609, and was knighted by the first James for his enterprise and success in his stupendous work. Tom Hood got out “Walton Redivivus, a New River Eclogue,” and Lamb wrote a preface for it, in which he referred to his new home having the same{116} neighbour as his cottage at Colebrook. Doubtless he recalled, too, his out-of-town bathing-excursions with the other boys at Christ’s, and how they would wanton like young dace in this same stream. “My old New River has presented no extraordinary novelties lately. But there Hope sits, day after day, speculating on traditionary gudgeons. I think she hath taken the fisheries. I now know the reason why our forefathers were denominated the East and West Angles.”

We pass the town’s old inns, with steep-sloping roofs, and many a stately mansion set in great gardens; among them the ancient manor-house, renovated by Edward VI. for the residence of his sister, the Princess Elizabeth. From here she wrote letters which you may see in the British Museum; and in the Bodleian at Oxford is the MS. translation, in her own hand, of an Italian sermon preached here by Occhini. This building—now The Palace School—contains one of her rooms, oak-panelled and richly ceilinged; and in the grounds is a noble cedar of Lebanon, planted in 1670. We look up at the swinging signs of the Rising Sun and the{117} Crown and Horseshoes, past all of which Lamb often went, and, doubtless, too often did not get past without going in. It tickled him to urge truly proper people to tipple with him in these two taverns; and even lady-like Miss Kelly—the actress with the “divine, plain face”—and the austere Wordsworth were enticed to enter, and persuaded to have “a pull at the pewter!”

And so, through a leafy lane bordered by stately elms, with cosey cottages on either hand, across a cheerful green, alongside the rippling stream, we reach the “Manse,” as Lamb’s home was called for many years—a name it has only lately lost, when it was newly stuccoed and painted. It has been re-christened “The Poplars,” from the four tall trees of that species which rear themselves in its front garden. In the garden behind, the old yew and the bent apple-trees, and beyond the pleasant fields stretching away, are all as they were when he looked through and over them to the Epping Hills. The house has been enlarged and changes have been made inside, and all is hideously and shamelessly “smart.”{118}

Nothing in this interior speaks to us of its old tenants. They were seen, on their coming to take the house, by a schoolboy next door, who has given this pleasing description of them: “Leaning idly out of a window, I saw a group of three issuing from the ‘gambogy-looking cottage’ close at hand—a slim, middle-aged man in quaint, uncontemporary habiliments, a rather shapeless bundle of an old lady, in a bonnet like a mob-cap, and a young girl; while before them bounded a riotous dog [Hood’s immortal ‘Dash’], holding a board, with ‘This House To Let’ on it, in his jaws. Lamb was on his way back to the house-agent’s, and that was his fashion of announcing that he had taken the premises.”

In the summer of 1829, the family of three left this home, the care of which was wearing too heavily on Mary. “We have taken a farewell of the pompous, troublesome trifle called housekeeping, and are settled down into poor boarders and lodgers, at next door, with an old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield.... Our providers are an honest pair, Dame Westwood and her husband; he, when{119} the light of prosperity shined on them, a moderately thriving haberdasher within Bow Bells, retired since with something under a competence ... and has one anecdote, upon which, and about £40 a year, he seems to have retired in green old age.” It was “forty-two inches nearer town,” Lamb wrote, and it still is there, next door to their first Enfield home, as you see it in our cut: a comfortable cottage set back from the road, vines clambering over its small entrance-porch and hiding all the walls. In its little back sitting-room were written the “Last Essays of Elia.” In this house he remained for almost four years, and in 1833 he made his last remove—except the final one we all must make—to Edmonton.{120}

VI.

These years at Enfield were not happy years. They were both getting old; Mary’s malady was growing on her, taking her more frequently from home; and even the visits of their child, Emma Isola—she was now a governess—mitigated his loneliness but slightly. His removal to the country had left his friends a long way behind, and, for all his urging, they could not come often so far afield for informal calls. “We see scarce anybody,” he laments. Hazlitt and Hood and Hunt came occasionally; faithful Martin Burney fetched forth his newest whim for their amusement; and loyal Crabb Robinson often walked out to take tea or to play whist, or for a stroll in the fields with Charles. Once, as he has recorded in his “Diary,” he brought the mighty Walter Savage Landor for a call: “We had scarcely an hour to chat with them, but it was enough to make both Landor and Worsley{121} express themselves delighted with the person of Mary Lamb, and pleased with the conversation of Charles Lamb; though I thought him by no means at his ease, and Miss Lamb was quite silent. Nothing in the conversation recollectable. Lamb gave Landor White’s ‘Falstaff’s Letters.’ Emma Isola just showed herself. Landor was pleased with her, and has since written verses on her.” Only this once did Lamb and Landor come face to face.

Lamb had always hated the country. “Let not the lying poets be believed, who entice men from the cheerful streets,” he querulously complains; and he asks, “What have I gained by health? Intolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate meals? A total blank.... Let no native Londoner imagine that health and rest, innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.”

He was unable to read or write to any extent{122} in hot weather; “what I can do, and do over-do, is to walk; but deadly long are the days, these summer all-day days, with but a half-hour’s candle-light, and no firelight.” Sometimes, of a “genial hot day,” he would do his twenty miles and over. Once he took charge of a little school during the master’s short absence; and his first exercise of authority was to give the boys a holiday! But nothing abated his boredom, and even in his bed he repined: “In dreams I am in Fleet Street, but I wake and cry to sleep again.” And when he went to town, and sought in Fleet Street fresh sights and fresher air, he found no content: “The streets, the shops, are left, but all old friends are gone.... Home have I none, and not a sympathizing house to turn to in the great city.”

He took lodgings for a while at No. 24 Southampton Buildings, within sight of his former quarters at No. 34 of the same street—a house in which Hazlitt frequently had put up, not far from the house famed for his “ancillary affection!” The numbers remain unchanged; and you may look at the queer old{123}

NO. 34 SOUTHAMPTON BUILDINGS.

stuccoed front on any day you choose to turn out from Chancery Lane. The house has a strange, sloping roof of tiles, and altogether it is quite unlike any of its neighbours.

But this impermanent residence in town brought no real relief, for he found that the bodies he cared for were in graves or dispersed. He sought solace in work, and made extracts for Hone’s Table Book from among the two thousand old plays left by Garrick to the British Museum. Hone had been grateful to Lamb for having contributed already to his Every Day Book; and had dedicated the issue for 1826 to him and to Mary. In doing so, he published his gratitude, most distastefully to them, saying in his preface that he could not forget “your and Miss Lamb’s sympathy and kindness when glooms outmastered me; and that your pen spontaneously sparkled in the book when my mind was in clouds and darkness. These ‘trifles,’ as each of you would call them, are benefits scored upon my heart.”

Forgiving this fulsome gush, Lamb set his pen to sparkling again in the following year, and found relief in it. “It is a sort of office-work{124} to me—hours ten to four, the same. It does me good.” The reading-room wherein he worked is now the print-room, a venerable and musty chamber, famous in those days for its fine specimens of the Pulex literarius, or Museum flea; and doubtless infested, too—for Lamb’s irritation, as for Carlyle’s, since the latter has left it on record—by that reader, still startling us there to-day, who blows his nose “like a Chaldean trumpet in the new moon;” and by that other, who slumbers peacefully with his head in a ponderous tome, and wakes suddenly, snorting.

The assistant-librarian of the Museum at that time was the Reverend Mr. Cary—“the Dante man”—a friend of the Lambs of recent years; and Charles found congenial companionship at his table, where he was frequently invited to dine. Near the Museum, in Hart Street, F. S. Cary, the son of the librarian, had his studio; and there Charles would wander, on Thursdays, during the summer of 1834, and sit for his portrait, with Mary. He is portrayed seated in a chair, and Mary stands behind him; the figures full length and half-life size. This{125} painting was never completed, and from it the artist made a copy of Charles alone, after death. Of this, Crabb Robinson said, a few years later: “In no one respect a likeness; thoroughly bad; complexion, figure, expression unlike. But for ‘Elia’ on a paper, I should not have thought it possible that it could have been meant for Charles Lamb.”

Another portrait of him had been painted in 1805 by William Hazlitt; his last work with the brush, we are told by his grandson. This figure, in the costume of a Venetian senator, is well known in its engravings, and is considered an interesting presentation of the man. But, beyond the fine and forcible poise of the head—the noble head which resembled that of Bacon, said Leigh Hunt, except that it had less worldly vigour and more sensibility—this is to me an unpleasing picture. It robs Lamb of just that sensibility, and transforms him into a burly, truculent, ill-conditioned creature! He was thirty years old at the time this was painted. When he was twenty-three, an admirable drawing in chalk had been made by Hancock; a profile likeness, in which the superb sweep of{126} the cranial arch and the subtle sweet lines about the mouth are most noticeable. This, the first portrait known of him, was engraved on steel for Cottle’s “Early Recollections of Coleridge.”

A striking piece of portraiture of his mature manhood has been found within a few years. It is a water-colour sketch by Mr. Joseph, A. R. A., and had been inserted, along with many other portraits, in a copy of Byron’s “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.” This volume had been thus enlarged, in 1819, by Mr. William Evans, Lamb’s desk-companion in the East India House, and he had doubtless induced Lamb to sit for this portrait with this intent. Another admirable likeness was painted in oil, in 1827, by Henry Meyer, and this was engraved for the quarto edition of Leigh Hunt’s “Lord Byron and his Contemporaries,” published by Colburn, in 1828.

The frontispiece of our volume is a reproduction of the portrait first engraved for Talfourd’s “Letters,” published in 1837. It is known as the Wageman portrait, engraved by Finden, and is perhaps the most noted and{127}

THE MACLISE PORTRAIT.

the most attractive of any likeness we have. Our Maclise portrait is made from an etching done by Daniel Maclise, R. A., for Fraser’s Magazine; in which pages it appeared, as one of “A Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters,” published from the year 1830 to 1838. Of all the portraits of Lamb, however, it was always held by those who had seen him that Brook Pulham’s etching on copper was the most life-like in every way ever done. We are fortunate in having so many portraits, some of them so good; for Lamb never liked to sit, regarding the desire to pose for a picture as an avowal of personal vanity.

Of serious literary work, during this period, Lamb did but little; his main pen product being his letters to his many absent friends, which give us such valuable and characteristic glimpses into the man’s lovable nature. He wrote a series of short essays, with the title “Popular Fallacies,” for the New Monthly Magazine in 1828; and a little prose miscellany—chat and souvenirs of the Royal Academy—called “Peter’s Net,” for the Englishman’s Magazine in 1831. The year before, Moxon{128} had published a small volume of small poems by Lamb—“Album Verses”—concerning which a curious secret has only lately come to light. The critics found little to praise in these verses—and with good reason—and a review was sent to the Englishman’s Magazine, with a line to Moxon from Lamb: “I have ingeniously contrived to review myself. Tell me if this will do.” He did not praise or puff his own work, let me hasten to say; but his paper is rather a protest against the errors and carelessness of those same “indolent reviewers.” Still, it is a clear case of surreptitious self-reviewing, and of it we may say, in the words of the coy Quakeress—not Lamb’s Islington Quakeress—when she reluctantly consented to let her ardent wooer enforce his threat to kiss her—“it must not be made a practice of.”

In 1833 appeared the “Last Essays of Elia,” collected in one volume, from the London, the Englishman’s, and the New Monthly Magazines, and the Athenæum. This work closed his literary life, not long before the closing of his bodily life.

{129}For the scene darkens swiftly now. “Mary

FAC-SIMILE OF A RECEIPT FOR A LEGACY, SIGNED BY CHARLES LAMB AS GUARDIAN FOR HIS SISTER MARY.

[By permission of Charles B. Foote, Esq., the owner of the original.]

is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months, followed by two of depression most dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing. Nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration, shocking as they were to me, then. In short, half her life is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious with fears and lookings-forward to the next shock.” This was in May, 1833, when he decided to remove to Edmonton: “With such prospects it seemed to me necessary that she should no longer live with me, and be fluttered with continual removals; so I am come to live with her at a Mr. Walden’s and his wife, who take in patients, and have arranged to lodge and board us only.”

To lay a little more load on him, he lost Emma Isola, one month later, in July, 1833, by her marriage with Edward Moxon: their betrothal having been entered into “with my perfect approval and more than concurrence,” he writes. In the same letter he says, as unselfishly as always: “I am about to lose my only walk companion, whose mirthful spirits were the youth of our house.” He gave her, for a{130} marriage gift, his most cherished possession, a portrait of John Milton. Mary’s reason was too clouded, at the time, to take interest in this affair, or even to understand it; but on the day of the wedding, being at table with them all, Mrs. Walden proposed the health of Mr. and Mrs. Moxon. The utterance of the unwonted name restored Mary to her composedness of mind, as if by an electrical stroke; she wrote afterward to the young couple: “I never felt so calm and quiet after a similar illness as I do now. I feel as if all tears were wiped from my eyes, and all care from my heart.”

Amid all these added adversities, he tried, with his cheerful and cheering courage, to make the best of it all. He found compensation in that they were “emancipated from the Westwoods,” and were settled “three or four miles nearer the great city, coaches half-price less, and going always, of which I will avail myself. I have few friends left there, but one or two most beloved. But London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though not one known of the latter were remaining.” And yet he struggled to town still more{131}

THE WALDEN HOUSE AT EDMONTON.

infrequently, and then only to find that, “with all my native hankering after it, it is not what it was.... The streets and shops entertaining as ever, else I feel as in a desert, and get me home to my care.” It is a touching sight, as we may picture it, that of the lonely man, with worn face and wistful eyes, wandering forlornly up and down his once familiar streets, seeing so seldom any of the once familiar faces. One day he met Mrs. Shelley in the Strand, and was—she wrote to Leigh Hunt—very entertaining and amiable, though a little deaf. He asked her if they made puns in Italy, and told her that Captain Burney once made a pun in Otaheite, the first that was ever made in that country. The natives could not make out what he meant; but all at once they discovered the pun, and danced round him in transports of joy!

During these lamentable days he saw his sister but seldom: “Alas! I too often hear her!... Her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world.” That is to me the most tender and touching utterance in all the letters since letters were invented.{132}

At times, when her mind was not too turbid, she played piquet with him, and they talked of death; which they did not fear, nor yet wish for. Neither had been ever quite able to say with Sir Thomas Browne, in Lamb’s favourite “Religio Medici”: “I thank God I have not those strait ligaments, or narrow obligations to the world, as to dote on life, or be convulsed and tremble at the name of death.” Both wished that Mary should go first. Mrs. Cowden Clarke has told us how he said abruptly, one day—his blunt words covering his intense tenderness—“You must die first, Mary.” And she replied, with her little quiet nod and kindly smile: “Yes, I must die first, Charles!”

Death was much in their thoughts during these days. Hazlitt had died in 1830, Lamb being with him at the last; and in July, 1834, Coleridge ended, after long suffering, a life of “blighted utility,” as he himself truly put it. The passing away of this dearest of the old familiar faces profoundly affected Lamb. “His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual turning{133} and reference to him.” Nor did he linger long alone. One day, in the winter of that year, taking his customary walk, he stumbled, fell, and bruised his face. The wound did not seem serious, until erysipelas suddenly set in, and rapidly drained him of his insufficient vitality. So, on the 27th of December, 1834, the Festival of St. John and the Eve of the Innocents, sank to sleep forever, in the fine words of Archbishop Leighton, “this sweet diffusive bountiful soul, desiring only to do good.” He was happy in not living, as he had said long before, “after all the strength and beauty of existence is gone, when all the ‘life of life is fled,’ as poor Burns expresses it.”

It was a peaceful and painless ending, yet infinitely pitiful in its loneliness for one so essentially social in his life; his sister’s mind being too clouded to comprehend what was passing, and his only two friends who happened to be within reach—Talfourd and Crabb Robinson—arriving too late for his recognition. They heard him murmuring, with his faint voice, the names of his dear old companions. Only a few days before he had shown to a{134} friend the mourning-ring left him by Coleridge, crying out, as he was wont to do, “Coleridge is dead.” And it had been but two weeks since, when, during a walk, he had pointed out to his sister the spot in the churchyard where he would like to lie.

They laid him there, and she loved to walk to the grave of an evening, so long as she stayed in Edmonton. Indeed, she was with difficulty induced to go away for short visits to the Moxons and other friends. She was still at the Waldens in July, 1836, for an indenture has been shown to me lately, of that date and of that place, by which she disposes of the copyright of the “Tales from Shakespear” and of “Mrs. Leicester’s School.” This document was witnessed by Edward Moxon and Frederick Walden. Her signature to it is in distinct and unshaken characters, and her middle name is written without the final e, thus, curiously enough, spelling it Ann; for it was always elsewhere and by every one spelled Anne.

Later, her lucid intervals becoming less frequent and less prolonged, and her malady growing{135} so nearly chronic that there was only “a twilight of consciousness in her,” she was kept under care and restraint in St. John’s Wood until her death, thirteen years after his. She rests by his side, in the same grave, as they both wished. His pension had been, with rare generosity, continued to her by the East India Company, and, in addition, she enjoyed the income of his small savings (£2,000) during her life; at her death it went to Emma Isola Moxon. This was the sum total of coin which he had gathered together; his real riches were lavishly dispensed during his life, and are hoarded now by all of us who love his memory.

We walk from Enfield by the same path across the fields through which Lamb escorted Wordsworth and his other visitors to the Bell at Edmonton, there to take a parting glass with them, before the return coach to town should come along. That famous inn is no longer as it was in his day, even then still in the same state as it was when Cowper laughed all night at the diverting history of John Gilpin, just heard from Lady Austen, and said that he “must needs turn it into a ballad when he{136} got up,” to relieve his reaction of melancholy. The balcony from which the thrifty wife gazed on Johnny’s mad career is gone, the very walls are levelled, a vilely vulgar gin-palace rises in their place, and the ancient sign, bearing the legend, The Bell and John Gilpin’s Ride, is now replaced by a great aggressive gilt emblem.

From here we turn, following Lamb’s last footsteps, perchance none too steady, along the London Road, past the old wooden taverns, steep-roofed and dormer-windowed, set well back from the highway, and on the green in front a mighty horse-trough—relic of ancient coaching conveniences. The Golden Fleece and the Horse and Groom are all unchanged; in his odd irony the modern builder has left them untouched, because they have no historic memories! Then we wind around under the railway arch, and so through dull, straggling Church Street; passing the little shop in which—then a surgery—John Keats served his apprenticeship, and wrote his “Juvenile Poems;” and by the one-storied Charity School, “A structure of Hope, Founded in{137}

EDMONTON CHURCH, FROM LAMB’S GRAVE.

Faith, on the basis of Charity, 1784,” as the legend reads over the head of the queer little female figure in the niche. Its mistress, drawn by Lamb’s cheery voice as he came out, used to run to her window to look at the “spare, middle-sized man in pantaloons,” as she described him.

For Bay Cottage—so called in his day, now well re-named Lamb’s Cottage, next to the rampant lions on the gate-posts of Lion House—stands nearly opposite the small school; and it was through this long, narrow strip of front garden, cut by a gravelled footpath, and railed in by iron palings, that Charles Lamb walked for the last time, and was carried to his final resting-place. At its farther end squats the small cottage, darkened and made more diminutive by the projecting houses on both sides. On the left of the hall—large by contrast—is their snug sitting-room, not more than twelve feet square, low-ceilinged, deep-windowed, with a great beam above. Mounting by a narrow, winding, tiny staircase, with its Queen Anne balustrade—under which partly lies the dingy dining-room—we find ourselves in his front{138} bedroom, his death-room, with one window only, as in the sitting-room beneath. Mary’s large bedroom is behind, with two good windows, looking out on the long strip of back garden, wherein are aged trees and young vegetables. Nothing within these walls has suffered any change.

It is but two minutes’ walk to the great, desolate graveyard, encircling all about the ancient church; whose square, squat, battlemented tower shows its mellow tints through dark masses of ivy. Service was going on when I went for the first time to this spot, a few years since, and I waited until the officiating clergyman had finished his functions, that I might learn from him the location of the grave I had come so far to see. He could not tell me! He had heard that Charles Lamb was buried in his churchyard, but he had never seen the grave, nor had he been unduly inquisitive about it. After we had found it, a crippled impostor, lounging on the lookout for stray pence, scrambled up with affectation of mute sympathy, and swarmed down with scissors on the long grass about the small mound. That{139} parson’s ignorance, the obscurity and desolation of the grave, the shocking structure of the stone-mason order of architecture dominating it, well-cared for, and aggressively commemorating one “Gideon Rippon, of the Eagle House, Edmonton, and of the Bank of England”: all this is typical of the relation borne by literature to Genteel Society in England. Its combined cohorts of The Nobility, Clergy, and Gentry do not know, and do not want to know, about the burial-place of their only Charles Lamb; but they do due reverence, with naïve and unconscious vulgarity, to the memory of the bank official who kept Books or handled Money. Lamb himself, with his large sense of the ludicrous and his small sense of the decorous, would have been tickled by the harmony between this state of affairs and his whole life. To this grave—a peopled solitude it is to us—come pilgrims from the other side of the ocean, and sometimes the Blue-Coat boys in small groups. The dreary and tasteless head-stone bears Cary’s feeble lines, affectionate enough, no doubt; but who cares to wade through a deluge of doggerel, to learn that{140} Lamb’s “meek and harmless mirth no more shall gladden our domestic hearth”? The acutest criticism on this epitaph was made by a knowing “navvy,” who, having spelled it through painfully, said to his companion: “I’m blest if it isn’t as good as any in the churchyard; but a bit too long, eh, mate?”

They have quite lately put up, in the church’s single aisle, a mural monument, in which, under twin arches, perked up with crocketed commonplaces, are the medallion busts of Charles Lamb and William Cowper. Under the former—the only one which concerns us now—is cut this inscription, fitly followed by Wordsworth’s impressive lines: “In Memory of Charles Lamb, the gentle Elia, and author of the Tales from Shakespeare. Born in the Inner Temple, 1775, educated at Christ’s Hospital, Died at Bay Cottage, Edmonton, 1834, and buried beside his sister Mary in the adjoining churchyard—

{141}

THE GRAVE OF CHARLES AND MARY ANNE LAMB AT EDMONTON.

INDEX.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W.

“A Farewell to Tobacco,” 89.
Addison, Joseph, 78.
Ainger, Canon, 25.
“Album Verses,” 128.
Aldgate, 113.
“All’s Well That Ends Well,” 95.
Amiens, 99, 100.
Amwell river, 97, 115.
Anceps, 114.
Aram, Eugene, 61.
Aristotle, 4.
Ashe river, 23.
Athenæum, The, 128.
Aunt Hetty, 15, 40.
Austen, Lady, 135.

Bacon, Francis, 125.
Balzac, Honoré de, 57.
Bank of England, 139.
Bartholomew Fair, 112.
Bartlett’s Passage, 11.
Barton, Bernard, 61, 76, 102.
Bay Cottage, 137, 140.
Bedford, Duke of, 78.
Bentham, Jeremy, 4.
Bethnal Green, 114.
Bird, William, 12.
Bishopsgate, 29, 113.
Blakesware, 22, 25, 49, 97.
Blue-Coat School, The, 17, 20, 46, 47, 139.
Bodleian Library, 116.
Boswell, James, 5.
Boulogne, 68.
Bow Bells, 119.
Bow Street, 78, 79, 80.
Boythorn, 96.
Braham, J., 5.
Brick Court, 13.
Brighton, 98.
British Ladies’ Magazine, 28.
British Museum, 116, 123, 124.
Brompton Crescent, 34.
Browne, Sir Thomas, 44, 132.
Bruce Castle, 114.
Bruce, Robert, 114.
“Brutus,” 100.
Buildings, Bartlett’s, 11.
Buildings, Featherstone, 48.
Buildings, Mitre Court, 53, 54, 102.
Buildings, New, 7.
Buildings, Ram Alley, 8.
Buildings, Southampton, 41, 52, 54, 122.
Bulwer, Lytton, 62.
Buonaparte, General, 34.
Burney, Captain, 61, 131.
Burney, Fanny, 61.
Burney, Martin, 61, 68, 85, 120.
Burns, Robert, 133.
Byron, Lord, 3, 126.

Cambridge, 98, 107.
Carlyle, Thomas, 47, 72, 124.
Cary, Rev’d H. F., 124, 139.
Cary, F. S., 124.
Castlereagh, Lord,{142} 70.
Cervantes, 75.
Chadwell river, 115.
Chancery Lane, 54, 123.
Chapel Street, 38, 52.
Charing Cross, 6, 19.
Charles I., 115.
Chatham, Earl of, 34.
Chelsea China, 111.
Christ’s Hospital, 16, 29, 41, 42, 69, 116, 140.
Church Street, 136.
Cibber, Colley, 78.
City, The, 6, 26, 47.
City Road, 103.
Clare, Allan, 49.
Clarke, Mrs. Cowden, 132.
Clifford’s Inn, 70.
Clive, Robert, 27.
Colburn, H., 126.
Colebrook Cottage, 110, 113, 116.
Colebrook Row, 102, 103.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 17, 19, 20, 33, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 54, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 77, 85, 96, 97, 98, 132, 134.
“Coleridge, Early Recollections of,” 126.
Colman, George, Jr., 5.
Congreve, William, 5.
Cornwall, Barry (See Procter).
Cornwallis, Lord, 27.
Cook, Captain, 61.
Coote, Sir Eyre, 27.
Cottle, Joseph, 126.
Covent Garden, 78, 80, 81, 102.
Cowper, William, 5, 135, 140.
Cranmer, Archbishop, 17.
Crown Office Row, 7, 8, 13, 14.
Cunningham, Allan, 61.

Dalston, 103.
Dante, 124.
D’Arblay, Madame, 61.
Da Vinci, 111.
De Quincey, Thomas, 62, 70, 93, 108.
“Deserted Village, The,” 13.
Dickens, Charles, 6, 62.
Drury Lane Theatre, 72, 81.
Dryden, John, 3, 78.
Dyer, George, 42, 68, 69, 70, 104, 105.

Eagle House, 139.
East India Company, 110, 135.
East India House, 5, 26, 30, 44, 82, 83, 126.
Edward VI., 17, 116.
Edmonton, 15, 114, 119, 129, 134, 135, 139, 140.
“Elia,” 9, 58, 71, 75, 76, 82, 94, 103, 125, 140.
“Elia, Bridget,” 21, 94.
“Elia, Last Essays of,” 119, 128.
Elizabeth, Princess, 116.
Elliston, R. W., 72.
Embankment, The, 14.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 64.
Enfield, 43, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 135.
Enfield Chase, 115.
“English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” 126.
Englishman’s Magazine, The, 127, 128.
Epping Hills, 117.
Essays of Charles Lamb:
Blakesmoor in H——shire, 24.
Child Angel, The, 16.
Confessions of a Drunkard, 74, 90.
Mackery End, 94.
My First Play, 42.
New Year’s Eve, 51.
Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,{143} 9.
Old Margate Hoy, The, 98.
Peter’s Net, 127.
Popular Fallacies, 127.
South Sea House, The, 29.
Superannuated Man, The, 111.
Two Races of Men, The, 31.
Evans, William, 126.
Evelyn, John, 5, 112.
Every Day Book, The, 12, 123.
“Excursion, The,” 86.
Exeter Exchange, 6.

Falstaff, 105.
“Falstaff’s Letters,” 121.
Fetter Lane, 3, 11.
Field, Mrs., 22, 25.
Fielding, Henry, 5, 43.
Finden, W., 126.
Fleet Market, The, 18.
Fleet Street, 19, 122.
Forster, John, 5.
Franklin, Benjamin, 3.
Fraser’s Magazine, 127.
Fulleylove, John, 14.

Gardens, The Temple, 14.
Garrick, David, 9, 123.
Gate Street, 33.
Gay, John, 78.
Gilchrist, Mrs. Annie, 91.
Gilpin, John, 114, 135, 136.
Gladmans, The, 21.
Godwin, William, 60, 94.
Goethe, 57.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 5, 13.
“Good-Natur’d Man, The,” 13.
Göttingen, 66.
Gracechurch Street, 26.
Gray, Thomas, 107.
Great Fire, The, 26.
Great Turnstile, The, 48.
Gutch, John Mathew, 41, 53.

Hackney, 40.
Hackney Downs, 114.
“Hamlet,” 67.
Hancock, ——, 125.
Hand Court, 48.
Hare Court, 54.
Hart Street, 124.
Hastings, 98.
Hastings, Warren, 27.
Hatfield, 114.
Haydon, Benjamin R., 61, 70, 71, 77.
Hazlitt, William, 4, 41, 60, 65, 66, 73, 74, 77, 85, 91, 98, 99, 120, 122, 125, 132.
Hazlitt, Mrs., 69, 98.
Hazlitt, W. Carew, 38.
Helena, 95.
Heliogabalus, 87.
Helvellyn, 6.
Hermia, 95.
Hertfordshire, 21, 22.
“Hester,” 51.
Hogarth, William, 23, 58, 111.
Holborn, 11, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 48.
Holland House, 56.
Hollis Street, 3.
Holy Trinity Church, 32.
Hone, William, 12, 123.
Hood, Thomas, 4, 61, 112, 113, 115, 118, 120.
Hook, Theodore, 107.
Hoole, John, 27.
House of Commons, The, 86.
Hoxton, 34, 37, 40, 49.
Hunt, Leigh, 4, 17, 20, 45, 61, 76, 111, 120, 125, 126, 131.

Inner Temple Lane, 8, 9, 54, 59, 79.
Irving, Edward, 61.
Irving, Washington, 3.
Islington,{144} 50, 52, 102, 104, 113, 128.
Isola, Emma, 107, 120, 121, 129.
Italy, 34, 131.

James I., 115.
Johnson, Samuel, 5, 6, 79.
Joseph, G. F., 126.
“Juvenile Poems,” 136.

Keats, John, 71, 136.
Kelly, Miss, 117.
King’s Bench Walk, 52.
Knowles, Mr., 34.

Lakes, The, 98.
Lamb, Charles (mentioned), 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 28, 29, 31, 33, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 85, 86, 90, 93, 94, 97, 100, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109, 112, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140.
Lamb, John (the father), 9, 10, 28.
Lamb, John (the son), 14, 28, 29, 37, 38, 109.
Lamb, Mary (mentioned), 5, 11, 13, 14, 15, 21, 28, 38, 40, 41, 53, 55, 58, 69, 73, 74, 80, 81, 82, 89, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 105, 107, 109, 112, 113, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 128, 130, 132, 138, 140.
Landor, Walter Savage, 96, 120, 121.
Lea river, 97, 114.
Leadenhall Street, 26, 32, 82, 110.
“Lear, King,” 77.
Leighton, Archbishop, 133.
Leipsic, 66.
Leishman, Mrs., 113.
Lime Street, 26.
Lincoln, Abraham. 75.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 32, 33, 48.
Lion House, 137.
Little Britain, 3.
Little Queen Street, 32, 42, 48.
Liverpool Road, 38.
Liverpool Street, 114.
Lloyd, Charles, 45, 61.
London, 3, 6, 7, 26, 74, 81, 97, 100, 115, 130.
London Fields, 114.
London Magazine, The, 62, 76, 82, 128.
London Road, 136.
“Lord Byron and His Contemporaries,” 126.
Louvre, The, 100.
“Lovel,” 9.
Lucan, 64.
“Lyrical Ballads,” 67.

“Macbeth,” 94.
Mackarel End, 21.
Mackery End, 21, 97.
Maclise, Daniel, 127.
Macready, W. C., 72.
Manning, Thomas, 30, 52, 53, 55, 61, 67, 72.
Manse, The, 117.
Margate, 98.
Metal Exchange, The, 26.
Meyer, Henry, 126.
Middleton, Bishop, 20.
“Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 95.
Mill, John Stuart, 27.
Milton, John, 3, 4, 67, 71, 130.
Molière, 75.
Montagu, Basil,{145} 61.
Montaigne, 108.
Moore, Thomas, 71.
Morning Chronicle, The, 44.
Moxon, Edward, 127, 128, 129, 130, 134.
Moxon, Mrs., 130, 134, 135.
“Mr. H——, a Farce,” 72.
“Mrs. Leicester’s School,” 96, 134.
Mulready, William, 96.
Myddleton, Hugh, 115.

Napoleon, 60.
Nether Stowey, 64, 97.
New Monthly Magazine, The, 127, 128.
New River, 97, 102, 103, 104, 115, 116.
Newgate Street, 17, 46.
Newton, Isaac, 71.
Noggs, Newman, 38.

Occhini, 116.
Old Bailey, The, 18.
“On Needle-work,” 96.
Oriental Bank, The, 29.
Otaheite, 131.
“Othello,” 94.
Ovid, 23.
Oxford, 98, 99, 116.

Palace School, The, 116.
Paris, 68, 99, 100, 101.
Patmore, Coventry, 68.
Payne, John Howard, 99, 100.
“Pencillings by the Way,” 74.
Pentonville, 38, 39, 42, 48.
Pepys, Samuel, 79.
Petty France, 3.
Piscator, 114.
Pitt, William, 43, 115.
Plantagenet, 14.
Plumer Family, The, 22.
Poe, Edgar Allan, 71.
“Poems on Various Subjects,” 44.
“Poetry for Children,” 96.
Poplars, The, 117.
Portraits, of Charles Lamb, 124, 125, 126, 127;
of Mary Lamb, 124.
Primrose Hill, 70.
Prior, Matthew, 9.
Procter, B. W. (Barry Cornwall), 5, 56, 61, 62, 92, 93, 104, 107.
Pulham, Brook, 127.

Quarterly Review, The, 75.

Ratcliffe Highway, 70.
Regent’s Canal, The, 103.
“Religio Medici,” 132.
Rickman, John, 86.
Ridley, Bishop Nicholas, 17.
Rippon, Gideon, 139.
Robinson, Crabb, 58, 59, 62, 63, 73, 99, 120, 125, 133.
Rousseau, 108.
Royal Academy, The, 127.
Russell, Lord John, 66.
Russell Street, 78, 79, 81, 82, 90, 102.

Sadler’s Wells, 103.
St. Andrews, 38, 39.
St. John’s Wood, 135.
St. Martin’s Lane, 6.
St. Paul’s, 19, 47.
St. Paul’s Churchyard, 6.
Salisbury, 98.
Salisbury Plain, 56.
Salt, Samuel, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 30, 32.
Seine river, 100.
Seven Sisters, The, 114.
Sévigné, Madame de, 57.
Shaftesbury, Lord,{146} 43.
Shakespeare, 14, 21, 43, 67, 68, 94, 95, 134, 140.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 45.
Shelley, Mrs., 131.
Shenstone, William, 57.
Siddons, Mrs., 44.
Silver Street, 114.
Simmons, Ann, 48, 49.
Skiddaw, 6.
Smith, Sydney, 66.
Smollett, Tobias, 78.
South Sea House, The, 29.
Southey, Robert, 46, 75, 76.
Spenser, Edmund, 5.
Staple Inn, 54.
Starkey, ——, 12.
Steele, Richard, 78.
Sterne, Laurence, 57, 75.
Stoddart, Sarah, 92.
Strand, The, 6, 75, 131.
Surrey Hills, The, 52.
Swift, Jonathan, 9, 43, 78.
Swinburne, Algernon, 5.

Table Book, The, 123.
“Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret,” 45, 49.
“Tales from Shakespear,” 96, 134, 140.
Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 45, 56, 62, 126, 133.
Talma, 101.
Tasso, 27.
Taverns:
Bell, 135;
Bell and John Gilpin’s Ride, 136;
Crown and Horseshoes, 117;
Feathers, 48;
Golden Fleece, 136;
Horse and Groom, 136;
Rising Sun, 116;
Salutation and Cat, 46, 47;
Swan, 114.
Temple, The, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 18, 32, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 79, 80, 90, 94, 102, 140.
Thackeray, W. M., 87.
Thames river, 52.
“This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” 64.
Threadneedle Street, 29.
“Three Memorable Murders,” 70.
Times, The London, 34.
Titian, 5, 11.
Tottenham, 113.
True Briton, The, 36.
Tuileries, The, 100.

Van Diemen’s Land, 62.
Versailles, 100.

Wageman, ——, 126.
Wainewright, Thomas, 62.
Walden, Mr. and Mrs., 129, 130, 134.
Walton, Izaak, 10, 114.
“Walton Redivivus,” 115.
Ware, 25, 97, 114.
Warwick, Earl of, 14.
“Waverley,” 70.
Westminster, 3.
Westwoods, The, 118, 130.
Wheathampstead, 21.
White Hart Lane, 114.
White, James, 121.
Whittington, Richard, 26.
Widford, 25, 49.
Wild, Jonathan, 43.
Willis, N. P., 74.
Will’s Coffee House, 78.
Wilson, Walter, 88.
Wiltshire, 98.
Winterslow, 98.
Winterton, Alice, 48, 51.
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 80, 81, 97.
Wordsworth, William, 6, 31, 60, 63, 65, 67, 70, 73, 83, 87, 90, 97, 107, 109, 110, 117, 135, 140.
Worsley, P., 120.
Wren, Sir Christopher, 47.

{147}

BIBLIOGRAPHY,

BY

Ernest D. North.

{148}

The measurements given of the First Editions are for uncut copies, unless otherwise stated.

The edition of the Works and Letters of Lamb referred to is Canon Ainger’s.

In giving the title-pages no attempt has been made to reproduce the various types used.

{149}

I. LEADING EVENTS IN LAMB’S LIFE.

II. FIRST EDITIONS.

[Arranged Chronologically.]

1796.

[1]

Title: POEMS | ON | VARIOUS SUBJECTS, | by S. T. COLERIDGE, | late of Jesus College, Cambridge | [Quotation]. London: | Printed for G. G. and J. Robinsons, and | J. Cottle, Bookseller, Bristol. | 1796. 16mo.

Collation: Bastard Title, 1 page. Title, 1 page. pp. xvi. pp. 188. “Errata,” 1 unnumbered page of Advertisement, “Published by the same author.” Size 6½ × 4.{151}

Price. Johnson Sale, N. Y., 1890, $9.50 [calf, gilt]. Sotheby’s, 1887 [morocco, gilt top], £3 15s.

1797.

[2]

Title: POEMS, | BY | S. T. COLERIDGE | Second edition |, to which are now added | Poems | by Charles Lamb | and | Charles Lloyd | [Quotation]. Printed by N. Biggs, | for J. Cottle, Bristol, and Messrs. | Robinsons, London. | 1797. 16mo.

Collation: Title, 1 page. pp. xx. pp. 278. Size 6-11/16 × 4⅛.

Price. Johnson Sale, N. Y., 1890 [calf, gilt top], $8.00. Sotheby’s, 1887 [calf], £1 18s. Sotheby’s, 1888 [calf, gilt], £1 5s. Sotheby’s, 1887 [calf], £1 10s.

1798.

[3]

Title: BLANK VERSE, | by | CHARLES LLOYD | {152}AND CHARLES LAMB. | London: | Printed by T. Bensley, | for John and Arthur Arch, No 23, Grace-| church Street | 1798. 12mo

Collation: Title, 1 page, Double Title, 1 page, Dedication, 1 page. pp. 95. Index, 1 page. Size 6⅝ × 4⅜.

Price. Johnson Sale, N. Y., 1890 [morocco uncut, gilt top], $28.00. Sotheby’s, 1890 [original boards, uncut], £9.

1798

[4]

Title: A TALE | of | ROSAMUND GRAY | and | OLD BLIND MARGARET. | by CHARLES LAMB. | London, | Printed for Lee and Hurst, | No. 32. Pater-noster Row, | 1798. Small 8vo

Collation: Title, 1 page, Dedication, 1 page. pp. 134. Size 6⅝ × 4⅛.

Price. Dodd & Mead [morocco, gilt. Title in fac-simile], $50.00. New York, 1885 [Full calf, by Bedford], $25.00.

1799

[5]

Title: THE | ANNUAL ANTHOLOGY, | Volume I | Bristol: Printed by Biggs and Co, For | T. N. Longman and O. Rees, Paternoster-Row, | London | n,d. 16mo

Collation: Title, 1 page, Advertisement, 1 unnumbered leaf, Contents, 4 unnumbered pages, pp. 300. Size 6⅞ × 4½.

Price. Sotheby’s, 1888 [original boards, uncut], £1. [calf] £1 5s.

1800

[6]

Title: ANTONIO: | A TRAGEDY | in Five Acts | by WILLIAM GODWIN |, London: Printed by Wilks and Taylor, Chancery Lane | For G. G. and J. Robinsons, Paternoster Row | 1800. 8vo

Collation: Title, 1 page, Advertisement, 1 page. (Dramatis Personæ, reverse.) pp. 73. Size 8⅜ × 5.

Price. $3.50.

1802

[7]

Title: JOHN WOODVIL, | a TRAGEDY | by | C. LAMB. | to which are added, | Fragments of Burton, | the author of | The Anatomy of Melancholy. | London: | Printed by T. Plummer, Seething-Lane: | For G. and J. Robinson, Paternoster-Row | 1802. 16mo

Collation: Title, 1 page, Dramatis Personæ, 1 page. pp. 128. Size 6½ × 4⅛.

Price. Johnson Sale, N. Y., 1890 [calf, gilt top, uncut], $19.00. Scribner & Welford, 1889 [boards, uncut], $30.00. Dodd & Mead [half morocco, yellow edges], $25.00. Sotheby’s,{154} 1889 [autograph from author], £11 15s. Pearson, 1889 [uncut, original boards], £5 10s.

1807

[8]

Title: MRS. LEICESTER’S SCHOOL. | or, | The History | of | several Young Ladies, | related by themselves. | London: | Printed for M. J. Godwin, at the Juvenile | Library, No. 41, Skinner Street | 1807. 16mo

Collation: Frontispiece, 1 page, Title, 1 page, Contents, 1 unnumbered page. pp. viii. pp. 178. Advertisement on reverse of last page.

Price. The Second Edition, 1809, fetched at Sotheby’s, 1888 [original boards], £16 10s. [No quotation found on the First Edition.]

1807

[9]

Title: FAULKENER: | A | TRAGEDY. | as it is performed | at | the THEATRE ROYAL, DRURY LANE | By WILLIAM GODWIN | London: | Printed for Richard Phillips, 6, Bridge-Street, | Black-Friars, | By Richard Taylor and Co, Shoe Lane, | 1807. 8vo

Collation: Title, 1 page, Preface, 1 page, Prologue, 1 page, Dramatis Personæ, 1 page. pp. 80. Size 8½ × 5.

Price. Spencer, 1890 [half morocco], £2 5s.{155}

1807

[10]

Title: TALES | FROM | SHAKESPEAR. | Designed | for the use of young Persons. | by CHARLES LAMB. | Embellished with Copper-Plates. | In two volumes. | Vol I | (Vol II) | London: | Printed by Thomas Hodgkins, at the Juvenile Li-| brary, Hanway-Street (opposite Soho-Square), | Oxford-Street; and to be had of all | Booksellers |. 1807. | 2 vols 12mo. Size 6⅞ × 4.

Collation: Vol I. Frontispiece, 1 page, Title, 1 page. pp. ix. Contents, 1 page, 1 unnumbered page. pp. 235. 10 illustrations. Vol. II. Frontispiece, 1 page, Title, 1 page, Contents, 1 page, 1 unnumbered page. pp. 261. 3 pages of advertisements. Colophon: Printed by T. Davison, Whitefriars.

Price. Spencer Catalogue, 1890, in the original calf, £22. Dodd & Mead, 1886 [morocco, gilt top], $75. W. E. Benjamin, 1887 [morocco, gilt], $50.00. Sotheby’s, 1888 [morocco, gilt edge], £10. Pickering & Chatto [original calf], £14 14s.

1808

[11]

Title: THE | ADVENTURES | of | ULYSSES | by | CHARLES LAMB | London: | Printed by T. Davison, Whitefriars | for the Juvenile Library, No. 41 Skinner-| Street, Snow Hill | 1808 16mo

Collation: Engraved Frontispiece, 1 page, Vignette Title,{156} 1 page, Title, 1 page. pp. vi. pp. 203. Advertisement on reverse of page 203. Size 6⅞ × 4⅛.

Price. Johnson Sale, New York, 1890 [morocco, gilt], $20. Sotheby’s, 1888 [calf], £3 7s. 6d.—uncut original boards, £3 3s. Sotheby’s, 1889 [calf], £5 12s. 6d. Robson & Kerslake, 1889 [calf, gilt], £8 8s. Sotheby’s, 1889 [calf], £2 6s. J. Pearson [calf, by Bedford], £6 6s. Scribner & Welford [original boards, uncut], $16.00.

1808

[12]

Title: SPECIMENS | of | ENGLISH DRAMATIC POETS, | who lived | about the time of SHAKESPEARE: | with Notes. | By Charles Lamb. | London: | Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, | Paternoster-Row. | 1808, small 8vo

Collation: Bastard Title, 1 page, Title, 1 page. pp. xii. pp. 484. Size 5 × 7¾.

Price. Johnson Sale, N. Y., 1890 [morocco, gilt], $7.00. Sotheran, 1890 [uncut], £2 2s. J. Pearson, 1890 [half calf, gilt top, uncut], £3 15s. Scribner & Welford [boards, uncut], $16.50.

1809

[13]

Title: POETRY | for | CHILDREN | ENTIRELY ORIGINAL | By the Author of | “Mrs. Leicester’s School” | In Two volumes | vol I | (vol II) | London: | Printed for M.{157} J. Godwin, | At the Juvenile Library, No. 41, Skinner Street, | 1809. 2 vols 18mo

Collation: Vol. I. Frontispiece, 1 page, Title, 1 page, Table of Contents 1 page. pp. 103. 1 page of Advertisement. Colophon: Mercier and Shervet, Printers, No. 32, Little Bartholomew Close, London. Vol. II. Frontispiece, 1 page, Title, 1 page, Table of Contents, 1 page. pp. 104. Colophon: Printed by Mercier and Chervet, No. 32, Little Bartholomew Close, London. Bound in gray paper with green leather backs.

Price. Sotheby’s, 1888, £35 [Leycester’s Sale, November 12-14].

1811

[14]

Title: PRINCE DORUS: | or, | Flattery put out of Countenance. | A Poetical Version of an Ancient Tale. | Illustrated with a series of Elegant Engravings. | London: | Printed for M. J. Godwin, | at the Juvenile Library, No 41 Skinner St; | and to be had of all Booksellers and Toymen in the | United Kingdom. | 1811. 12mo

Collation: Frontispiece, 1 page, Title, 1 page. pp. 31. Illustrations: Frontispiece to face Title, “The Enchanted Cat;” p. 6, “Minon Asleep;” p. 7, “The Transformation;” p. 10, “Prince Dorus and his Maids;” p. 19, “Claribel Carried Off;” p. 21, “Visit to the Beneficent Fairy;” p. 23, “Prince Dorus Offended;” p. 29, “Truth Brought{158} Home;” p. 31, “Self Knowledge obtains its Reward.” Size 5½ × 4⅜.

Price. Dodd & Mead [1888], $175; colored [1888], morocco, $300. Sotheby’s, 1888, £30. Sotheby’s, 1889 [colored, dated 1818], £45. Sotheby’s, 1890, £29 10s. [original boards].

1811 (?).

[15]

Title: BEAUTY | AND | THE BEAST: | or | A rough outside with A | Gentle heart | A Poetical version of an Ancient Tale | Illustrated with a | Series of Elegant Engravings | And Beauty’s Song at Her Spinning Wheel | Set to Music by Mr Whitaker | London: | Printed for M. J. Godwin, | At the Juvenile Library, 41, Skinner Street; | and to be had of all Booksellers and Toymen | throughout the United Kingdom. | Price 5s. 6d. coloured, or 3s. 6d. plain | Square 16mo, n.d.

Collation: Frontispiece, 1 page, Title, 1 page. pp. 32. Colophon, London: Printed by B. M‘Millan, | Bow Street, Covent Garden |. Illustrations: Frontispiece, “Beauty in her prosperous state.” Face page 4, “Beauty in a State of Adversity.” Page 11, “The Rose Gather’d.” Page 16, “Beauty in the Enchanted Palace.” Page 19, “Beauty visits her Library.” Page 21, “Beauty entertained with invisible music.” Page 28, “The absence of Beauty Lamented.” Page 29, “The Enchantment Dissolved.” Music: Beauty’s Song [music and second verse on reverse]. Size 5⅞ × 4½.

{159}

Price. Sotheby’s, July 9, 1889 [“Sale of Original Drawings to Martin Chuzzlewit”], etc., fetched £34. Sotheby’s [plates misplaced], 1890, £20.

1813

[16]

Title: REMORSE. | A TRAGEDY, | in FIVE ACTS. | By S. T. COLERIDGE |. [Quotation] London: | printed for W. Pople, 67, Chancery Lane. | 1813 | Price three shillings. | 8vo.

Collation: Title, 1 page. pp. viii. Prologue, 1 unnumbered page, Dramatis Personæ, 1 unnumbered page. pp. 72. Size 5½ × 8¾.

Price. Scribner & Welford [half calf], $6.50.

1814

[17]

Title: SOME | ENQUIRIES | INTO | THE EFFECTS | of | FERMENTED LIQUORS. | By a Water Drinker. | London: | Printed for J. Johnson and Co. | St. Paul’s Church yard | 1814. 8vo

Collation: Frontispiece, 1 page, Title, 1 page, Table of Contents, 1 page. pp. xxxii. pp. 368. Five illustrations, including Frontispiece. Size 8⅛ × 5½.

Price. Sotheby’s, 1888 [calf gilt], £2, 10s. Hitchman’s, 1890 [boards, uncut], 21s. Sotheran’s [calf, by Bedford], £3 10s.{160} Pearson’s, 1889 [boards, uncut], £1 5s. Scribner & Welford, $25.00 [calf].

1818

[18]

Title: THE | WORKS | OF | CHARLES LAMB. | In two volumes. | vol I | (vol II) | London: | Printed for C. and J. Ollier, | Vere-street, Bond-street | 1818. 2 vols 16mo

Collation: Vol. I. Title, 1 page. pp. ix. 1 unnumbered page. pp. 291. Vol. II. Title, 1 page, Contents, 1 unnumbered page, Inscription, 1 unnumbered page. pp. 259. Advertisement, 2 pages. Size 6⅞ × 4⅛.

Price. Sotheby’s, 1887 [half calf], £1 5s. [calf, uncut], £2. Sotheran [original boards, with book label of Wm. Hazlitt], £5 5s. Sotheby’s, 1889 [original boards], £2 10s. J. Pearson, 1889 [original boards, uncut], £4 4s. Scribner & Welford [original boards, uncut], $25.00.

1823

[19]

Title: ELIA. | Essays which have appeared under that signature | in the | London Magazine. | London: | Printed for Taylor and Hessey, | 93, Fleet Street, | and 13, Waterloo Place. | 1823. 12mo

Collation: Bastard Title, 1 page, Title, 1 page, Contents, 2 unnumbered pages, pp. 341. Size 7¾ × 5.

Price. Sotheby’s, 1887 [calf], £1. [Elia and Last Essays together] Sotheby’s, 1888 [russia, uncut], £11 15s.{161}

1825-6.

[20]

Title: THE | EVERY-DAY BOOK: | or, the | Guide to the Year; | relating the | Popular Amusements, | Sports, Ceremonies, Manners, Customs, and Events, | incident to | the 365 Days | in past and present Times; | being | A Series of 5000 Anecdotes and Facts; | forming | a History of the Year, | A calendar of the Seasons, | and | a chronological Dictionary of the Almanac; | with a variety of | important and diverting information, | for daily use and Entertainment, | Compiled from authentic sources | by William Hone | [Quotation from Herrick] | Illustrated by Numerous Engravings | London: | Printed for William Hone, 45, Ludgate Hill, | (to be published every Saturday, price Threepence,) | and sold by All booksellers in Town and Country. | 1825. 2 vols. 8vo.

Collation: Vol. I. Title, 1 page, Double Title, 1 page, Explanatory Address, 1 page, Dedication, 1 unnumbered page. Preface, 1 unnumbered page, Illustration, “Bona Dea,” 1 page. pp. 852. Vol. II. Frontispiece, 1 page, Title, 1 page, Dedication, 1 page, Preface, 1 unnumbered page. pp. viii. pp. 832. General Index, 19 pages.

Price. Sotheby’s, 1889, £2 8s.

1827

[21]

Title: THE | TABLE BOOK; | by William Hone. | with Engravings. [Motto] Every Saturday. | London: | Published{162} for William Hone, | by Hunt and Clarke, York-Street, | Covent-Garden, | 1827, 8vo

Collation: Frontispiece [Petrarch’s Inkstand], 1 page, Title, 1 page, Preface, 1 unnumbered page. pp. 870.

Price. £1 10s.

1830

[22]

Title: MEMOIRS | of | THE LIFE AND TIMES | of | DANIEL DEFOE: | containing | a review of his writings, | and | his opinions upon a variety of important matters, civil and | ecclesiastical. | By Walter Wilson, Esq. Of the Inner Temple. | In Three volumes. | London: | Hurst, Chance, and Co. | 1830. 3 vols 8vo

Collation: Vol. I. Bastard Title, 1 page, Frontispiece, 1 page, Title, 1 page, 1 unnumbered page. pp. lxii. Errata, 1 page. pp. 482.—Vol. II. Bastard Title, 1 page, Title, 1 page, pp. xviii. Errata, 1 unnumbered page. pp. 527.—Vol. III. Bastard Title, 1 page, Title, 1 page. pp. xviii. Errata, 1 unnumbered page. pp. 685.

Price. Scribner & Welford [Full calf], $18.00.

1830

[23]

Title: ALBUM VERSES, | WITH A FEW OTHERS, | by Charles Lamb, | [vignette] London: | Edward Moxon, 64, New Bond Street. | 1830 12mo

Collation: Title, 1 page. pp. vii. pp. 150. Size 7⅝ × 4¾.

Price. Scribner & Welford [uncut, original boards], $15.00. Sotheby’s, 1889 [calf], £1 5s. Sotheby’s, 1890 [original boards], £1 10s.

1831

[24]

Title: SATAN IN SEARCH OF A WIFE; | with the Whole Process of | his Courtship and Marriage, | and who Danced at the Wedding. | by | an Eye Witness [Engraved Title] London: | Edward Moxon, 64 New Bond Street. | M.DCCC.XXXI.

Collation: Engraved (wood) Frontispiece, 1 page, Engraved (wood) Title, 1 page, Dedication, 1 unnumbered page. pp. 36. [Frontispiece and four illustrations.] Size 6¼ × 3¾.

Price. Sotheby’s, 1888 [calf, gilt edge], £2 3s. Sotheby’s, 1890 [original wrappers], £8.{164}

1833

[25]

Title: THE WIFE: | A Tale of Mantua, | A Play, In Five Acts, | By | James Sheridan Knowles, | Author of “Virginius” “The Hunchback” &c. | London: | Edward Moxon, Dover Street. | 1833. 8vo

Collation: Advertisement, 1 page, Title, 1, Dedication, 1 page, Preface, 1 page, Prologue, 1 page, Dramatis Personæ, 1 page. pp. 120. Size 8¼ × 5.

Price. $2.50.

1833

[26]

Title: THE LAST ESSAYS | of | ELIA. | Being | a sequel to Essays published under | that Name. | London: | Edward Moxon, Dover Street. | 1833. | 12mo

Collation: Bastard Title, 1 page, Title, 1 page. pp. xii. pp. 283. Size 8 × 5.

Price. Johnson Sale, New York, 1890 [Full morocco, uncut, with First Series], $42.00. Sotheran, London, 1890 [Full calf], £5 10s. [Both Series, half morocco,] £2 10s. J. Pearson, 1890, Both Series [original boards, uncut], £10 10s. Scribner & Welford [morocco gilt on the rough], $60.00.

1796

[27]

Title: ORIGINAL LETTERS, Etc. | of | SIR JOHN FALSTAFF | AND | HIS FRIENDS: | now first made public by a Gentleman, | a descendent of Dame Quickly, | from | genuine manuscripts | which have been in the possession | of the Quickly family | near four hundred years. | London: |{165} Printed for the author; | and published by | Messrs. G. G. & J. Robinsons, Paternoster-Row: | J. Debrett, Piccadilly: and Murray and | Highley | No. 32, Fleet Street, | 1796 Small 8vo

Collation: Frontispiece, 1 page, Title, 1 page. pp. xxiv. pp. 123. Size 6¼ × 4.

Price. New York, 1886, [calf, gilt,] $15.00. Robson & Kerslake [calf, uncut], £3 3s. 1888.

III. THE “ELIA” ESSAYS.

{168}

IV. REVIEWS, POEMS, ESSAYS, Etc.

{170}

V. COLLECTED WORKS.

VI. SINGLE WORKS.

[Arranged Alphabetically.]

{181}

VII. LETTERS.

1837. The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of his Life, by Thomas Noon Talfourd, one of his executors. In two volumes. [Portraits.] London, Edward Moxon, 1837. 2 vols. 8vo.

1848. The Final Memorials of Charles Lamb: consisting chiefly of his Letters not before published, with Sketches by some of his contemporaries, by Thomas Noon Talfourd, one of his executors. In two volumes. London, Edward Moxon, 1848.

1849.—— Another edition. London, Moxon, 1849. 12mo.

—— Another Edition. Appleton, New York. 1849. 12mo.

1850.—— Another edition. London, 1850. 12mo.

1854.—— The Same. Life and Letters, etc., etc. Philadelphia, W. P. Hazard, 1854. 12mo.

1886. Letters of Charles Lamb, with some account of the writer, his friends and correspondents, and explanatory notes, by the late Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, one of his executors. An entirely new edition. Carefully revised and greatly enlarged by W. Carew Hazlitt. London, George Bell & Sons, 1886. 2 vols. 12mo.

1888. The Letters of Charles Lamb, newly arranged, with additions, edited, with Introductions and Notes, by Alfred Ainger. [Portrait.] London, Macmillan & Co., 1888. 2 vols. 12mo.

{182}

VIII. POETICAL WORKS.

1836. The Poetical Works of Charles Lamb. A new edition. London, Edward Moxon, 1836. 8vo.

The first edition in separate form. Those in italics are by Mary. Contents: Poems, Sonnets, Blank Verse, Album Verses.

1838. The Poetical Works of Charles Lamb. Third Edition. London, Moxon, 1838. 16mo.

An exact reprint of the edition of 1836.

1839.—— The Same. London, 1839. Medium 8vo.

1840.—— The Same. London, 1840. 12mo.

1842.—— The Same. London, Bohn, 1842. 12mo.

1849.—— The Same. London, 1848. 8vo.

1852.—— The Same. Philadelphia, 1852. 8vo.

1884. Poems, Plays, and Miscellaneous Essays, with Notes and Introduction by Alfred Ainger. London, Macmillan & Co., 1884. 12mo.

IX. LAMBIANA.

BIOGRAPHY, CRITICISMS, ETC.

MAGAZINE ARTICLES.

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