; LIBRARY j 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO \
 
 CHAELES LAMB
 
 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED AINGER 
 
 HonDon 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 
 1888 
 
 The right of translation and reproduction is reserved.
 
 PREFACE TO NEW EDITION 
 
 THIS Memoir was originally published in the " Men 
 of Letters Series," edited by Mr. John Morley. In 
 revising it for the present Edition, I have not materi- 
 ally altered its form and scale, but in the six years 
 that have elapsed since its first appearance new facts 
 have come to light, especially affecting the earlier 
 and more obscure years of Charles Lamb's life. The 
 archives of the Inner Temple, the Burial Registers 
 of various churches, the Will of Samuel Salt, the 
 more careful arrangement of Lamb's Letters, besides 
 information from private sources, have enabled me 
 to make additions to the second and third chapters 
 of this book, whereby the early career of Lamb is 
 now told more fully and accurately than before. 
 Some footnotes have also been added. References 
 in the book to Lamb's Letters are to my Edition 
 of his Correspondence, in two volumes, uniform with 
 the present. 
 
 A. A. 
 
 TtTLLIBELTON, PEKTH, 
 
 September 1888.
 
 AUTHOEITIES CONSULTED 
 
 1. The Essays of Elia, and other writings, in prose and 
 
 verse, of Charles Lamb. 
 
 2. Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of his Life 
 
 by Thomas Noon Talfourd 1837 
 
 3. Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, etc., by Thomas 
 
 Noon Talfourd 1848 
 
 4. Charles Lamb : A Memoir, by Barry Cornwall . 1866 
 
 5. Charles and Mary Lamb : Poems, Letters, and 
 
 Remains, by W. Carew Hazlitt .... 1874 
 
 6. Gillman's Life of Coleridge, vol. i 1838 
 
 7. Cottle's Early Recollections of Coleridge . . . 1837 
 
 8. Alsop's Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of 
 
 Coleridge 1836 
 
 9. My Friends and Acquaintance, by P. G. Patmore . 1854 
 
 10. Autobiography of Leigh Hunt .... 1850 
 
 11. Memoirs of William Hazlitt, by W. Carew Hazlitt . 1867 
 
 12. Literary Reminiscences, by Thomas Hood (in Hood's 
 
 Own) 1839 
 
 13. Haydon's Autobiography and Journals . . . 1853 
 
 14. Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson .... 1869 
 
 15. Memoir of Charles Mathews (the elder), by Mrs. 
 
 Mathews 1838 
 
 16. Life and Correspondence of Robert Sou they . . 1849 
 
 17. Obituary Notices, Reminiscences, Essays, etc., in 
 
 various magazines and reviews.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 DATE PAGK 
 
 BOYHOOD THE TEMPLE AND CHRIST'S 
 
 HOSPITAL 17751789 . 1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 FAMILY STRUGGLES AND SORROWS . . 1789 1797 . 20 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE . 1797 1800 . 41 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND DRAMATIC 
 
 CRITICISM 18001809 . 62 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 INNER TEMPLE LANE PERSONAL CHAR- 
 ACTERISTICS 18091817 . 91 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 RUSSELL STREET, COVENT GARDEN THE 
 
 ESSAYS OF ELIA . . 18171823 . 118
 
 X CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 DATE PAGE 
 
 COLEBKOOK ROW, ISLINGTON THE CON- 
 TROVERSY WITH SOUTHEY, AND RE- 
 TIREMENT FROM THE INDIA HOUSE . 18231826 . 153 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 ENFIELD AND EDMONTON .... 18261834 . 183 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 LAMB'S PLACE AS A CRITIC . . 209
 
 CHAKLES LAMB 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 BOYHOOD THE TEMPLE AND CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 
 
 (17751789) 
 
 " I WAS born and passed the first seven years of my 
 life in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, 
 its fountain, its river, I had almost said for in those 
 young years what was this king of rivers to me but a 
 stream that watered our pleasant places ? these are 
 of my oldest recollections." In this manner does 
 Charles Lamb, in an essay that is one of the master- 
 pieces of English prose, open for us those passages of 
 autobiography which happily abound in his writings. 
 The words do more than fix places and dates. They 
 strike the key in which his early life was set and 
 the later life, hardly less. The genius of Lamb was 
 surely guided into its special channel by the chance 
 that the first fourteen years of his life were passed, 
 as has been said, "between cloister and cloister," 
 J & B
 
 2 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 between the mediaeval atmosphere of the quiet Temple 
 and that of the busy school of Edward VI. 
 
 Charles Lamb was born on the 10th of February 
 1775 in Crown Office Row in the Temple, the line 
 of buildings facing the garden and the river he has 
 so lovingly commemorated. His father, John Lamb, 
 who had come up a country boy from Lincolnshire to 
 seek his fortune in the great city, was clerk and 
 servant to Mr. Samuel Salt, a Bencher of the Inner 
 Temple. He had married Elizabeth Field, whose 
 mother was for more than fifty years housekeeper at 
 the old mansion of the Plumers, Blakesware in Hert- 
 fordshire, the Blakesmoor of the Essays of Elia. The 
 issue of this marriage was a family of seven children, 
 only three of whom seem to have survived their early 
 childhood. The registers of the Temple Church 
 record the baptisms of all the seven children, ranging 
 from the year 1762 to 1775. Of the three who lived, 
 Charles was the youngest. The other two were his 
 brother John, who was twelve years, and his sister 
 Mary Anne (better known to us as Mary), who was 
 ten years his senior. The marked difference in age 
 between Charles and his brother and sister must 
 never be overlooked in estimating the difficulties, and 
 the heroism, of his later life. 
 
 In the essay already cited that on the Old Benchers 
 of the Inner Temple Charles has drawn for us a touch- 
 ing portrait of his father, the barrister's clerk, under 
 the name of Lovel. After speaking of Samuel Salt, the 
 Bencher, and certain indolent and careless ways from
 
 I BOYHOOD 3 
 
 which he " might have suffered severely if he had not 
 had honest people about him," he digresses character- 
 istically into a description of the faithful servant who 
 was at hand to protect him : 
 
 Lovel took care of everything. He was at once his 
 clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his 
 " flapper," his guide, stopwatch, auditor, treasurer. He 
 did nothing without consulting Lovel, or failed in any- 
 thing without expecting and fearing his admonishing. He 
 put himself almost too much in his hands, had they not 
 been the purest in the world. He resigned his title 
 almost to respect as a master, if Lovel could ever have 
 forgotten for a moment that he was a servant. 
 
 I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible 
 and losing honesty. A good fellow withal, and u would 
 strike." In the cause of the oppressed he never con- 
 sidered inequalities, or calculated the number of his 
 opponents. He once wrested a sword out of the hand of 
 a man of quality that had drawn upon him, and pommelled 
 him severely with the hilt of it. The swordsman had 
 offered insult to a female an occasion upon which no 
 odds against him could have prevented the interference of 
 Lovel. He would stand next day bare-headed to the 
 same person, modestly to excuse bis interference, for 
 Lovel never forgot rank, wbere something better was not 
 concerned. 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, by the dint of natural genius merely; turned
 
 4 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 cribbage-boards, and sucli 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. 
 
 I saw him in his old age, and the decay of his faculties, 
 palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of human weakness 
 "a remnant most forlorn of what he was" yet even 
 then his eye would light up upon the mention of his 
 favourite Garrick. He was greatest, he would say, in 
 Bayes " was upon the stage nearly throughout the whole 
 performance, and as busy as a bee." At intervals, too, he 
 would speak of his former life, and how he came up a 
 little boy from Lincoln to go to service, and how his 
 mother cried at parting with him, and how he returned 
 after some few years' absence in his smart new livery, to 
 see her, and she blessed herself at the change and could 
 hardly be brought to believe that it was " her own bairn." 
 And then, the excitement subsiding, he would weep, till 
 I have wished that sad second-childhood might have a 
 mother still to lay its head upon her lap. But the 
 common mother of us all in no long time after received 
 him gently into hers. 
 
 I have digressed, in my turn, from the story of 
 Charles Lamb's own life, but it is not without interest 
 to learn from whom Charles inherited, not only 
 something of his versatility of gift, but his chivalry 
 and tenderness.
 
 I BOYHOOD 5 
 
 The household in Crown Office Eow were from 
 the beginning poor of that we may feel certain. 
 An aunt of Charles, his father's sister, formed one of 
 the family, and contributed something to the common 
 income, but John Lamb the elder was the only other 
 bread-winner. And a barrister's clerk with seven 
 children born to him in a dozen years, even if lodg- 
 ing were found him, could not have had much either 
 to save or to spend. Before seven years of age 
 Charles got the rudiments of education from a Mr. 
 William Bird, whose schoolroom looked "into a 
 discoloured dingy garden in the passage leading from 
 Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings." We owe 
 this, and some other curious information about the 
 academy, to a letter of Lamb's addressed in 1826 to 
 Hone, the editor of the Every Day Book. In that 
 periodical had appeared an account of a certain 
 Captain Starkey, who was for some time an assistant 
 of Bird's. The mention of his old teacher's name in 
 this connection called up in Lamb many recollections 
 of his earliest schooldays, and produced the letter 
 just named, full of characteristic matter. The school, 
 out of Fetter Lane, was a day school for boys, and 
 an evening school for girls, and Charles and Mary had 
 the advantages, whatever they may have been, of its 
 instruction. Starkey had spoken of Bird as "an 
 eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathe- 
 matics," etc. ; upon which Lamb's comment is, 
 "Heaven knows what languages were taught in it 
 then ! I am sure that neither my sister nor myself
 
 6 CHAELES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 brought any out of it but a little of our native 
 English." Then follow some graphic descriptions of 
 the birch and the ferule, as wielded by Mr. Bird, 
 and other incidents of school-life : 
 
 Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those un- 
 comfortable sloping desks, where we sat elbowing each 
 other ; and the injunctions to attain a free hand, unat- 
 tainable in that position ; the first copy I wrote after, 
 with its moral lesson, "Art improves nature;" the still 
 earlier pot-hooks and the hangers, some traces of which I 
 fear may yet be apparent in this manuscript. 
 
 When Charles had absorbed such elementary 
 learning as was to be acquired under Mr. Bird and 
 his assistants, his father might have been much per- 
 plexed where to find an education for his younger 
 son, within his slender means, and yet satisfying his 
 natural ambition, had not a governor of Christ's 
 Hospital, of the name of Yeates, probably a friend of 
 Samuel Salt, offered him a presentation to that 
 admirable charity. And on the 9th of October 1782, 
 Charles Lamb, then in his eighth year, entered the 
 institution, and remained there for the next seven 
 years. 
 
 There is scarcely any portion of his life about 
 which Lamb has not himself taken his readers into 
 his confidence, and in his essay on Witches and other 
 Night-fears he has referred to his own sensitive and 
 superstitious childhood, made more sensitive by the 
 books, meat too strong for childish digestion, to which
 
 I BOYHOOD 7 
 
 he had free access in his father's collection. " I was 
 dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time 
 solitude and the dark were my hell. The sufferings 
 I endured in this nature would justify the expression. 
 I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from 
 the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life 
 so far as memory serves in things so long ago 
 without an assurance, which realised its own prophecy, 
 of seeing some frightful spectre." Lamb was fond 
 both of exaggeration and of mystification, as we shall 
 see farther on, but this account of his childhood is not 
 inconsistent with descriptions of it from other sources. 
 There was a strain of mental excitability in all the 
 family, and in the case of Charles the nervousness of 
 childhood was increased by the impediment in his 
 speech which remained with him for life, and made so 
 curious a part of his unique personality. " He was 
 an amiable, gentle boy," wrote one who had been at 
 school with him, " very sensible and keenly observing, 
 indulged by his school-fellows and by his master on 
 account of his infirmity of speech. I never heard his 
 name mentioned," adds this same school -fellow, 
 Charles Valentine Le Grice, " without the addition of 
 Charles, although, as there was no other boy of the 
 name of Lamb, the addition was unnecessary; but 
 there was an implied kindness in it, and it was a proof 
 that his gentle manners excited that kindness." Let 
 us note here that this term "gentle" (the special 
 epithet of Shakspeare) seems to have occurred naturally 
 to all Lamb's friends, as that which best described
 
 8 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 him. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, and Gary, 
 recall no trait more tenderly than this. And let us 
 note also that the addition of his Christian name 
 (Lamb loved the use of it : "So Christians," he said, 
 " should call one another ") followed him through life 
 and beyond it. There is perhaps no other English 
 writer who is so seldom mentioned by his surname 
 alone. 
 
 Of Lamb's experience of school-life we are fortunate 
 in having a full description in his essay, entitled 
 Recollections of Christ's Hospital, published in 1818, and 
 the sequel to it, called Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty 
 years ago (one of the Elia essays), published two years 
 later. But it requires some familiarity with Lamb's 
 love of masquerading, already referred to, to disengage 
 fact from fancy, and extract what refers to himself 
 only, in these two papers. The former is, what it 
 purports to be, a serious tribute of praise to the 
 dignified and elevating character of the great Charity 
 by which he had been fostered. It speaks chiefly of 
 the young scholar's pride in the antiquity of the 
 foundation and the monastic customs and ritual which 
 had survived into modern times; of the Founder, 
 "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 Eidley," 
 with many touching reminiscences of the happy days 
 spent in country excursions or visits to the sights of
 
 I THE TEMPLE AND CHRIST S HOSPITAL 
 
 London. But in calling up these recollections it seems 
 to have struck Lamb that his old school, like other 
 institutions, had more than one side, and that the 
 grievances of schoolboys, real and imaginary, as well 
 as the humorous side of some of the regulations and 
 traditions of the school, might supply material for 
 another picture not less interesting. Accordingly, 
 under the disguise of the signature Elia, he wrote a 
 second account of his school, purporting to be a 
 corrective of the over-colouring employed by "Mr. 
 Lamb " in the former account. The writer affects to 
 be a second witness called in to supplement the 
 evidence of the first. " I remember L. at school," 
 writes Lamb, under the signature of Elia. "It 
 happens very oddly that my own standing at Christ's 
 was nearly corresponding to his ; and with all grati- 
 tude to him for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I 
 think he has contrived to bring together whatever can 
 be said in praise of them, dropping all the other side 
 of the argument most ingeniously." This other side 
 Lamb proceeds, with charming humour, to set forth, 
 and he does so in the character of one, a "poor 
 friendless boy," whose parents were far away at 
 "sweet Calne, in Wiltshire," after which his heart 
 was ever yearning. The friendless boy whose per- 
 sonality is thus assumed was young Samuel Taylor 
 Coleridge, who had entered the school the same year 
 as Lamb, though three years his senior. Coleridge 
 and Lamb were school-fellows for the whole seven 
 years of the latter's residence, and from this early
 
 10 CHAELES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 association arose a friendship as memorable as any in 
 English Literature. "Sweet Calne, in Wiltshire," 
 was thus one of Lamb's innocent mystifications. It 
 was to the old home at " sweet Ottery St. Mary," in 
 Devonshire, that young Samuel Taylor's thoughts 
 turned, when he took his lonely country rambles, or 
 shivered at the cold windows of the print-shops to 
 while away a winter's holiday. 
 
 In the character of Coleridge though even here 
 the dramatic position is not strictly sustained Lamb 
 goes on to relate, in the third person, many incidents 
 of his own boyish life, which differed of necessity 
 from his friend's. Charles Lamb was not troubled 
 how to get through a winter's day, for he had shelter 
 and friendly faces within easy reach of the school. 
 " He had the privilege of going to see them, almost as 
 often as he wished, through some invidious distinction 
 which was denied to us. The present worthy sub- 
 treasurer to the Inner Temple can explain how that 
 happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in the morn- 
 ing, while we were battening upon our quarter of a 
 penny-loaf moistened with attenuated small-beer, in 
 wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack 
 it was poured from." And the writer proceeds to 
 draw a charming picture of some emissary from 
 Lamb's home, his " maid or aunt," bringing him some 
 home-cooked dainty, and squatting down on "some 
 odd stone in a by -nook of the cloisters," while he 
 partook of it. It suggests a pleasant and happy side 
 to this portion of Charles Lamb's life. Humble as his
 
 I THE TEMPLE AND CHKIST'S HOSPITAL 11 
 
 home was, still home was near, and not unmindful of 
 him; and even taking into account the severities of 
 the discipline and other of the schoolboy's natural 
 grievances, it would seem as if Lamb's school-years 
 had a genial influence on his mind and spirit. 
 
 As to the education, in the common acceptation of 
 the word, which he gained during those seven years 
 at Christ's Hospital, we may form a very just notion. 
 When he left the school, in his fifteenth year, in 
 November 1789, he was (according to his own state- 
 ment made in more than one passage of his writings) 
 deputy Grecian. Leigh Hunt, who entered the 
 school two years after Lamb quitted it, and knew him 
 intimately in later life, says the same thing. Tal- 
 fourd seems to have applied to the school authorities 
 for precise information, and gives a somewhat different 
 account. He says that "in the language of the 
 school" he was "in Greek form, but not deputy 
 Grecian." No such distinction is understood by 
 "Blues" of a later date, but it may possibly mean 
 that Lamb was doing deputy Grecians' work, though 
 he was in some way technically disqualified from taking 
 rank with them. " He had read," Talfourd goes on 
 to tell us, "Virgil, Sallust, Terence, Lucian, and 
 Xenophon, and had evinced considerable skill in the 
 niceties of Latin composition." Latin, not Greek, was 
 certainly his strong point, and with Terence especially 
 he shows a familiar acquaintance. He wrote collo- 
 quial Latin with great readiness, and in turning 
 nursery rhymes into that language, as well as in one
 
 12 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 or two more serious attempts, there are proofs of an 
 ease of expression very creditable to the scholarship 
 of a boy of fourteen. And if (as appears certain) 
 Lamb, though not in the highest form at Christ's 
 Hospital, had the benefit of the teaching of the head- 
 master, the Rev. James Boyer, we have good reason 
 for knowing that, pedant and tyrant though Boyer 
 may have been, he was no bad trainer for such endow- 
 ments as Coleridge's and Lamb's. 
 
 Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, has drawn a 
 companion picture of the better side of Christ's 
 Hospital discipline, which may judiciously be compared 
 with Lamb's. "At school I enjoyed the inestimable 
 advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, 
 a very severe master. He early moulded my taste to 
 the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer 
 and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. 
 He habituated me to compare Lucretius (in such 
 extracts as I -then read), Terence, and above all, the 
 chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman 
 poets of the so-called silver and brazen ages, but with 
 even those of the Augustan era ; and on grounds of 
 plain sense and universal logic, to see and assert the 
 superiority of the former, in the truth and nativeness 
 both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time 
 that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he 
 made us read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons ; and 
 they were the lessons, too, which required most time 
 and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I 
 learnt from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest,
 
 I THE TEMPLE AND CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 13 
 
 and seemingly that of the wildest odes, had a logic of 
 its own as severe as that of science, and more difficult, 
 because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on 
 more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great 
 poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not 
 only for every word, but for the position of every 
 word ; and I well remember that, availing himself of 
 the synonyms to the Homer of Didymus, he made 
 us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would 
 not have answered the same purpose, and wherein 
 consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the 
 original text." Such a teacher, according to Coleridge, 
 was the guiding spirit of Christ's Hospital ; and even 
 allowing for Coleridge having in later life looked back 
 with magnifying eyes upon those early lessons, and 
 read into Boyer's teaching something that belonged 
 rather to the learner than the teacher, we need not 
 doubt how great were the young student's obligations 
 to his master. Lamb, who was three years younger, 
 and never reached the same position in the school, 
 may not have benefited directly by this method of 
 Boyer's, but he was the intimate companion of the 
 elder schoolboy, and whatever Boyer taught we may 
 be sure was handed on in some form or other to 
 Lamb, tinged though it may have been by the wond- 
 rous individuality of his friend. 
 
 For the influence of Coleridge over Lamb, during 
 these schooldays and afterwards, is one of the most 
 important elements a biographer of Lamb has to take 
 account of. The boy, Samuel Taylor, had entered the
 
 14 CHAELES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 school, as we have seen, in the same year. He was a 
 lonely, dreamy lad, not living wholly apart from the 
 pastimes of his companions, wandering with them into 
 the country, and bathing in the New Eiver, on the 
 holidays of summer, but taking his pleasure on the 
 whole sadly, loving above all things knowledge, and 
 greedily devouring whatever of that kind came in his 
 way. Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, at 
 the time a Grecian in the school, found him one day 
 reading Virgil in his play-hour, for his own amuse- 
 ment, and reported the circumstance to Boyer, who 
 acted upon it by fostering henceforth in every way 
 his pupil's talent. A stranger who met the boy one 
 day in the London streets, lost in some day-dream, 
 and moving his arms as one who " spreadeth forth his 
 hands to swim," extracted from him the confession 
 that he was only thinking of Leander and the Helles- 
 pont. The stranger, impressed with the boy's love of 
 books, subscribed for him to a library in the neigh- 
 bourhood of the school, and young Coleridge proceeded, 
 as he has told us, to read " through the catalogue, 
 folios and all, whether I understood them or did not 
 understand them, running all risks in skulking out to 
 get the two volumes which I was entitled to have 
 daily." With a full consciousness, as is apparent, of 
 his power, he seems at this age to have had no desire 
 for distinction, but only for enlarged experience. At 
 one time he wanted to be apprenticed to a shoemaker, 
 whose wife had shown him some kindness. At a later 
 time, encouraged by the example of his elder brother,
 
 I THE TEMPLE AND CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 15 
 
 who had come up to walk the London Hospital, he 
 conceived a passion for the medical profession and 
 read every book on doctoring he could lay his hands 
 on. He Avent through a phase of atheism again, 
 probably, out of sheer curiosity until he was judi- 
 ciously (so he said) flogged out of it by Boyer. And 
 meantime he was reading metaphysics, and writing 
 verses, in the true spirit of the future Coleridge. The 
 lines he composed in his sixteenth year, suggested by 
 his habit of living in the future till time present and 
 future became in thought inextricably intermingled, 
 surely entitle him to the name of the "marvellous 
 boy," as truly as anything Chatterton had written at 
 the same age : 
 
 On the wide level of a mountain's head 
 (I knew not where, but 'twas some fairy place) 
 Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread, 
 Two lovely children run an endless race, 
 
 A sister and a brother ! 
 
 That far outstripp'd the other ; 
 Yet ever runs she with reverted face, 
 And looks and listens for the boy behind ; 
 
 For he, alas ! is blind ! 
 
 O'er rough and smooth with even step he pass'd, 
 And knows not whether he be first or last. 
 
 A striking feature of these lines is not so much 
 that they are not the echo of any one school of poetry, 
 but that in the special metaphysic of the thought, and 
 the peculiar witchery of the verse, Coleridge here
 
 16 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 anticipated his maturest powers. It is on first 
 thoughts strange that the boy who had read through 
 whole libraries, "folios and all," and who could write 
 verses such as these, should have been so deeply 
 stirred as we know him to have been at the age of 
 seventeen, when the small volume of fourteen sonnets 
 of William Lisle Bowles fell into his hands. What 
 was there, it might well be asked, in the poetry of 
 Bowles, pathetic and graceful as it was, so to quicken 
 the poetic impulse of Coleridge, that years afterwards 
 he wrote of it to a friend as having " done his heart 
 more good than all the other books he ever read, 
 excepting his Bible." It is the fashion in the present 
 day to speak slightingly of Bowles, but his sonnets 
 have unquestionable merit. Their language is me- 
 lodious to a degree which perhaps only Collins in that 
 century had surpassed, and it expressed a tender 
 melancholy, which may have been inspired also by the 
 study of the same poet. But Coleridge, the omnivor- 
 ous reader, can hardly have been unacquainted with 
 Gray and Collins, and the writer of such lines as 
 
 On the wide level of a mountain's head 
 
 (I knew not where, but 'twas some fairy place), 
 
 could have had little to learn, as to the subtler music 
 of versification, even from the greatest models. But 
 it is significant that Coleridge couples these sonnets 
 with the Bible, and he could hardly have done so 
 without meaning it to be understood that Bowles's 
 sonnets marked some change not purely artistic in his
 
 I THE TEMPLE AND CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 17 
 
 mind's growth. For the melancholy of Gray was 
 constitutional, but the sadness of Bowles had its root 
 in a close habit of introspection, and dwelling upon 
 the moral side of things. The pensive beauty of such 
 a sonnet as the well-known one on the Influence of 
 Time on Grief wakes chords not often reached by the 
 sentiment of the elder poets. There can be little 
 doubt that at a critical point of Coleridge's life his 
 moral nature was touched in ways for which he was 
 profoundly grateful by these few poems of Bowles. 
 He admits the obligation, indeed, in the first version 
 of his sonnet to Bowles, when he confesses that 
 "those soft strains" waked in him "love and sym- 
 pathy " as well as fancy, and made him henceforth 
 "not callous to a brother's pains." And we are 
 justified in believing that his young companion, 
 Charles Lamb, was passing with him along the same 
 path of deepening thoughtfulness. He, too, had felt 
 the charm of Bowles's tenderness. In his earliest 
 letters to Coleridge no other name is mentioned oftener 
 and with more admiration ; and writing to his friend 
 a few years later, from the " drudgery of the desk's 
 dead wood" at the India House, Lamb complains 
 sorrowfully, " Not a soul loves Bowles here : scarce 
 one has heard of Burns : few but laugh at me for 
 reading my Testament." 
 
 It was in the year 1789, the year of the publication 
 of Bowles's earliest sonnets, that Charles Lamb was 
 removed from Christ's Hospital, and the companion- 
 ship of the two friends was for a while interrupted. 

 
 18 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 Lamb had found other congenial associates among the 
 Blue Coats, and has embalmed their names in various 
 ways in his essays ; the two Le Grices from Cornwall, 
 and James White, whose passion was for Shakspeare, 
 and who afterwards compiled a collection of letters, 
 as between Falstaff and his friends, in which he 
 displayed some fancy, but chiefly a certain skill in 
 taking to pieces the phraseology of the humorous 
 characters in the historical plays and re-setting it in 
 divers combinations. It was by these and other like 
 accidents that the tastes and powers of the young 
 Charles Lamb were being drawn forth in those seven 
 years of school-life. The Latin and Greek of the 
 Rev. Matthew Field, the under grammar-master, even 
 the more advanced instruction under James Boyer, 
 had a less important bearing on the future Elia than 
 the picturesque surroundings of the Temple, alternat- 
 ing with those of the foundation of Edward VI, and 
 above all, the daily companionship of Samuel Taylor 
 Coleridge. 
 
 Leigh Hunt, in his autobiography, has described 
 Avith great humour and spirit the Christ's Hospital of 
 his day, only two or three years later. Hunt left 
 school at the age of fifteen, when he had attained the 
 same rank as Lamb deputy Grecian and, as he tells 
 us, for the same reason. He, too, had an impediment 
 in his speech. " I did not stammer half so badly as I 
 used, but it was understood that a Grecian was bound 
 to deliver a public speech before he left school, and to 
 go into the Church afterwards; and as I could do
 
 I THE TEMPLE AND CHKIST'S HOSPITAL 19 
 
 neither of these things, a Grecian I could not be." 
 During his seven years in the school Hunt often saw 
 Charles Lamb, when he came to visit his old school- 
 fellows, and recalled in after-life the " pensive, brown, 
 handsome, and kindly face," and " the gait advancing 
 with a motion from side to side, between involuntary 
 unconsciousness and attempted ease." He dressed 
 even then, Leigh Hunt adds, with that " Quaker-like 
 plainness " that distinguished him all through life. 
 
 To leave school must have been to Charles Lamb a 
 bitter sorrow. His aptitude for the special studies of 
 the school was undeniable, and to part from Coleridge 
 must have been a still heavier blow. His biographers 
 have followed Leigh Hunt in pointing out that the 
 school exhibitions to the universities were given on 
 the implied condition of the winners of them proceed- 
 ing to holy orders, and that in Lamb's case his 
 infirmity of speech made that impossible. But there 
 were probably other reasons, not less cogent. It 
 must have been of importance to his family that 
 Charles should, with as little delay as possible, begin 
 to earn his bread. There was poverty in his home, 
 and the prospect of means becoming yet more strait- 
 ened. There were deepening anxieties of still graver 
 cast, as we shall see hereafter. The youngest child of 
 the family returned to share this poverty and these 
 anxieties, and to learn thus early the meaning of that 
 law of sacrifice to which he so cheerfully submitted 
 for the remainder of his life.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 FAMILY STRUGGLES AND SORROWS 
 
 (17891797) 
 
 IN two of Lamb's Essays of Elia, My Relations, and 
 Mackery End in Hertfordshire, he has described various 
 members of his own family, and among them his 
 brother John and his sister Mary. These should be 
 carefully read, in conjunction with the less studied 
 utterances on the same theme in his letters, by those 
 who would understand the conditions of that home of 
 which he now became an inmate. Of the family of 
 seven children born in the Temple to John and Eliza- 
 beth Lamb, only three survived, the two just men- 
 tioned and Charles. The elder brother, John, at the 
 time of his brother's leaving school a young man of 
 twenty-six, held a clerkship in the South Sea House. 
 Samuel Salt was a Deputy-Governor of the South Sea 
 House, and it was no doubt to his introduction that 
 John Lamb owed the appointment, and it is evident 
 that at the time he first comes under our notice, his 
 position in the office was fairly lucrative, and that the
 
 CHAP. II FAMILY STRUGGLES AND SORROWS 21 
 
 young man, unmarried, and of pleasant artistic tastes, 
 was living by himself, enjoying life, and not troubling 
 himself too much about his poor relations in the 
 Temple. The genial selfishness of his character is 
 described with curious frankness by Charles, who yet 
 seemed to entertain a kind of admiration for the well- 
 dressed dilettante who cast in this way a kind of 
 reflected light of respectability upon his humble 
 relatives. He even addresses a sonnet to his brother, 
 and applauds him for keeping " the elder brother up 
 in state." There is a touch of sarcasm here, perhaps ; 
 and there is a sadder vein of irony in the description 
 in My Relations : 
 
 It does me good as I walk towards the street of my 
 daily avocation on some fine May morning, to meet him 
 marching in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly hand- 
 some presence, and shining sanguine face that indicates 
 some purchase in his eye a Claude or a Hobbima for 
 much of his enviable leisure is consumed at Christie's and 
 Phillips' s, or where not, to pick up pictures and such gauds. 
 On these occasions lie mostly stoppeth me, to read a short 
 lecture on the advantage a person like me possesses above 
 himself, in having his time occupied with business which 
 lie must do ; assureth me that he often feels it hang heavy 
 on his hands ; wishes he had fewer holidays ; and goes off 
 Westward Ho ! chanting a tune to Pall Mall ; perfectly 
 convinced that he has convinced me, while I proceed in 
 my opposite direction tuneless. 
 
 We feel that this picture needs no additional 
 touches. "Marching in a quite opposite direction"
 
 22 CHAELES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 was what John Lamb continued to do, in all respects, 
 as concerned the dutiful and home-keeping members 
 of his family. It was not to him that father and 
 mother, sister or brother, were to look for help in 
 their great need. Wholly different was the other 
 elder child, next to him in age, Mary Lamb, the 
 Bridget Ella of the Essays. Ten years older than 
 Charles, she filled a position to him in these boyish 
 days rather of mother than of sister. It is clear that 
 these two children from the earliest age depended 
 much on one another for sympathy and support. 
 The mother never understood or appreciated the 
 daughter's worth, and the father, who seems to have 
 married late in life, was already failing in health and 
 powers when Charles left school. The brother and 
 sister were therefore thrown upon one another for 
 companionship and intellectual sympathy, when school 
 friendships were for a while suspended. Mary Lamb 
 shared from childhood her brother's taste for reading. 
 " She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into 
 a spacious closet of good old English reading, without 
 much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will 
 upon that fair and wholesome pasturage." The 
 spacious closet was, it would seem, the library of 
 Samuel Salt, to which both she and Charles early had 
 access. It was a blessed resource for them in face of 
 the monotony and other discomforts of their home and 
 against more serious evils. There was, as we have 
 seen, a taint of mania in the family, inherited from 
 the father's side. It appeared in different shapes in
 
 II FAMILY STKUGGLES AND SORROWS 23 
 
 all three children, if we are to trust a casual remark 
 in one of Charles's letters touching his brother John. 
 But in Mary Lamb there is reason to suppose that it 
 had been a cause of anxiety to her parents from an 
 early period of her life. In one of his earliest poems 
 addressed to Charles Lamb, Coleridge speaks of him 
 creeping round a " dear-loved sister's bed, with noise- 
 less step," soothing each pang with fond solicitude. 
 These claims upon his brotherly watchfulness fell to 
 the lot of Charles while still a boy, and they were 
 never relaxed during life. There was a pathetic truth 
 in the prediction of Coleridge which followed : 
 
 Cheerily, dear Charles ! 
 Thou tliy best friend shalt cherish many a year. 
 
 He continued to devote himself to this, his best friend, 
 for more than forty years, and henceforth the lives of 
 the brother and sister are such that the story of the 
 one can hardly be told apart from the other. 
 
 It has been said that Lamb's first years were passed 
 between the Temple and Christ's Hospital between 
 " cloister and cloister " but there were happy holiday 
 seasons when he had glimpses of a very different life. 
 These were spent with his grandmother, Mary Field, 
 at the old mansion of the Plumer family, Blakesware, 1 
 closely adjoining the pleasant village of Widford, 
 in Hertfordshire. The Plumers had two residences 
 
 1 Lamb disguised the name, in his well-known essay, ns 
 " Blakesmoor in Hertfordshire." He admits the identity in a 
 letter to Bernard Barton of 10th August 1827.
 
 24 CHAELES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 in the county, one at Gilston, and the other just 
 mentioned, a few miles distant. The latter was the 
 house where the dowager Mrs. Plumer and younger 
 children of the family resided. Sometimes there 
 would be no members of the family to inhabit it, and 
 at such times old Mrs. Field, who held the post of 
 housekeeper for the last fifty or sixty years of her 
 life, reigned supreme over the old place. Her three 
 grandchildren were then often with her, and the old- 
 fashioned mansion, with its decaying tapestries and 
 carved chimneys, together with the tranquil, rural 
 beauty of the gardens and the surrounding country, 
 made an impression on the childish imagination of 
 Lamb, which is not to be overlooked in considering 
 the influences which moulded his thought and style. 
 There were many ties of family affection binding him 
 to Hertfordshire. His grandmother was a native of 
 the county, and in the beautiful essay called Mackery 
 End he has described a visit paid in later life to other 
 relations, in the neighbourhood of Wheathampstead. 
 It is noticeable how Lamb, the " scorner of the fields," 
 as Wordsworth termed him, yet showed the true 
 poet's appreciation of English rural scenery, whenever 
 at least his heart was touched by any association of it 
 with human joy or sorrow. 
 
 In 1792 Mrs. Field died at a good old age, and 
 lies buried in the quiet churchyard of Widford. 
 Lamb has preserved her memory in the tender tribute 
 to her virtues, The Grandame, which appeared among 
 his earliest published verses
 
 II FAMILY STRUGGLES AND SORROWS 25 
 
 On the green hill top 
 
 Hard by the house of prayer, a modest roof 
 And not distinguished from its neighbour-barn 
 Save by a slender tapering length of spire, 
 The Grandame sleeps. A plain stone barely tells 
 The name and date to the chance passenger. 
 
 Time and weather have effaced even name and date, 
 but the stone is still pointed out in Widford church- 
 yard. The old lady had suffered long from an in- 
 curable disease, and the young Charles Lamb had 
 clearly found some of his earliest religious impressions 
 deepened by watching her courage and resignation : 
 
 For she had studied patience in the school 
 
 Of Christ ; much comfort she had thence derived 
 
 And was a follower of the Nazarene. 
 
 With her death the tie with Blakesware was not 
 broken. The family of the Lambs had pleasant 
 relations with other of the Widford people. Their 
 constant friend, Mr. Randal Norris, the Sub-treasurer 
 of the Inner Temple, had connections with the place, 
 and long after the death of Mrs. Field we find Lamb 
 and his sister spending occasional holidays in the 
 neighbourhood. 
 
 At some date, unfixed, in the two years following 
 his removal from Christ's Hospital, Charles obtained 
 a post of some kind in the South Sea House, where 
 his brother John already held an appointment. No 
 account of this period of his life remains to us, except 
 such as can be drawn from the essay on the South Sea
 
 26 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 Home, written thirty years later in the London 
 Magazine as the first of the papers signed Elia. The 
 essay contains little or nothing about himself, and we 
 are ignorant as to the duties and emoluments of his 
 situation. It was not long, however, before he got pro- 
 motion, in the form of a clerkship, in the accountant's 
 office of the East India Company, obtained for him 
 through the influence of Samuel Salt. His salary 
 began at the rate of 70 a year, rising by gradual 
 steps, and in the service of the East India Company 
 Charles Lamb continued for the rest of his working 
 life. 
 
 The clerkship in the India House must have been 
 one of the last kind services of Samuel Salt to the 
 family of his faithful clerk, for the old Bencher died 
 in the same year, 1792. On his death, the two sets 
 of chambers occupied by him passed into other hands, 
 and the Lamb family had to quit the old home in 
 Crown Office Row. For five -and -forty years John 
 Lamb had served his master with true devotion, and 
 Samuel Salt showed that he was not insensible of the 
 obligation. By his will, dated 1786, he bequeaths 
 " To my servant, John Lamb, who has lived with me 
 near forty years," 500 South Sea stock ; and " to 
 Mrs. Lamb 100 in money, well deserved for her 
 care and attention during my illness." By a codicil, 
 dated 20th December 1787, his executors are directed 
 to employ John Lamb to receive the testator's 
 "exchequer annuities of 210 and 14, during their 
 term, and to pay him 10 a year for his trouble so
 
 ii FAMILY STRUGGLES AND SORROWS 27 
 
 long as he shall receive them." By a later codicil, he 
 gives another 100 to Mrs. Lamb. With this small 
 capital, and the pension of .10, and the small salary 
 of Charles as one of the youngest clerks in the India 
 Office, the Lamb family were now left to begin the 
 real battle of life. Whether they removed at once to 
 Little Queen Street, Holborn, where we find them 
 living four years later, does not appear. No light is 
 thrown on the matter by any reference in the writings 
 of Charles Lamb. No letter, or other fragment of 
 writing by him, of earlier date than 1795, has been 
 preserved. His work as a junior clerk absorbed the 
 greater part of his day and of his year. In his first 
 years of service his annual holiday was a single week, 
 and this scanty breathing-space he generally spent in 
 his favourite Hertfordshire. Then there were the 
 occasional visits to the theatre, and it was the theatre 
 which all through life shared with books the keenest 
 love of Lamb and his sister. He has left us an 
 account, in the essay, My First Play, of his earliest 
 experiences of this kind, beginning with Artaxerxes, 
 and proceeding to The Lady of the Manor and The 
 ff^ay of the World, all seen by him when he was 
 between six and seven years old. Seven years elapsed 
 before he saw another play (for play-going was not 
 permitted to Christ's Hospital boys), and he admits 
 that when after that interval he visited the theatre 
 again, much of its former charm had vanished. The 
 old classical tragedy and the old-world sentimental 
 comedy alike failed to satisfy him, and it was not till
 
 28 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 he first saw Mrs. Siddons that the acted drama re- 
 asserted its power. "The theatre became to him 
 once more," he tells us, "the most delightful of re- 
 creations." One of the earliest of his sonnets records 
 the impression made upon him by this great actress. 
 And as soon as we are admitted through his corre- 
 spondence with Coleridge and others to know his tastes 
 and habits, we find how important a part the drama 
 and all its associations were playing in the direction 
 of his genius. 
 
 Nor was the gloom of his home life unrelieved by 
 occasional renewals of the intellectual companionship 
 he had enjoyed at school. Coleridge had gone up to 
 Jesus College, Cambridge, early in 1791, and except 
 during the six months of his soldier's life in the Light 
 Dragoons, remained there for the next four years. 
 During this time he made occasional visits to London, 
 when it was the great pleasure of the two school- 
 fellows to meet at a tavern near Smithfield, the 
 " Salutation and Cat " (probably a well-known rallying 
 point in the old Christ's days), and there to spend 
 long evenings in discussion on literature and the other 
 topics dear to both. Coleridge was now writing 
 poems, and finding a temporary home for them in the 
 columns of the Morning Chronicle. Among them 
 appeared the sonnet on Mrs. Siddons, which was thus 
 probably Lamb's first appearance in print. Both the 
 young men were clearly dreaming of authorship, and 
 Lamb's first avowed appearance as author was in the 
 first volume of poems by Coleridge, published by
 
 ii FAMILY STRUGGLES AND SORROWS 29 
 
 Cottle, of Bristol, in the spring of the year 1796. 
 "The effusions signed C. L.," says Coleridge in the 
 preface to this volume, "were written by Mr. Charles 
 Lamb of the India House. Independently of the 
 signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently 
 distinguished them." The effusions consisted of four 
 sonnets, the one already noticed on Mrs. Siddons, one 
 " written at midnight by the seaside after a voyage," 
 and two, in every way the most noteworthy, dealing 
 with the one love-romance of Charles Lamb's life. 
 The sonnets have no special literary value, but the 
 first of these has importance enough in its bearing on 
 Lamb's character to justify quotation : 
 
 Was it some sweet device of Faery 
 
 That mocked rny steps with many a lonely glade, 
 
 And fancied wanderings with a fair-haired maid ? 
 
 Have these things been 1 Or what rare witchery, 
 
 Impregning with delights the charmed air, 
 
 Enlightened up the semblance of a smile 
 
 In those fine eyes ? methought they spake the while 
 
 Soft soothing things, which might enforce despair 
 
 To drop the murdering knife, and let go by 
 
 His foul resolve. And does the lonely glade 
 
 Still court the footsteps of the fair-haired maid ? 
 
 Still in her locks the gales of summer sigh ? 
 
 While I forlorn do wander, reckless where, 
 
 And 'mid my wanderings meet no Anna there. 
 
 If the allusions in this and the following sonnet 
 stood alone, we might well be asking, as in the case 
 of Shakspeare's sonnets-, whether the situation was
 
 30 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 not dramatic rather than autobiographical; but we 
 have good reasons for inferring that the Anna, " the 
 fair-haired maid " of these poems, had a real existence. 
 His first love is referred to constantly in later letters 
 
 and essays as Alice W n, and it is easy to perceive 
 
 that the Anna of the sonnets and this Alice W n 
 
 were the same person. In both cases the fair hair 
 and the mild, pale blue eyes are the salient features. 
 But the sonnets that tell of these, tell also of the 
 " winding wood- walks green," and 
 
 the little cottage which she loved, 
 The cottage which did once my all contain. 
 
 From these alone we might infer that Lamb had 
 first met the subject of them, not in London, but 
 during his frequent visits to Blakesware. Lamb him- 
 self, often so curiously out-spoken on the subject of 
 his personal history, has nowhere directly told us 
 where he met his Alice, but he cannot seriously have 
 meant to keep the secret. In the essay, JBlakesmoor in 
 
 H shire, he recalls the picture-gallery with the old 
 
 family portraits, and among them " that beauty with 
 the cool, blue, pastoral drapery, and a lamb, that hung 
 next the great bay window, with the bright yellow 
 Hertfordshire hair, so like my Alice!" His "fair- 
 haired maid " was clearly from Hertfordshire. It 
 will be seen hereafter what light is further thrown on 
 the matter by Lamb himself. All that we know as 
 certain, is that Lamb, while yet a boy, lost his heart, 
 and that whether the course of true love ran smooth
 
 ii FAMILY STRUGGLES AND SOKROWS 31 
 
 or not, he willingly submitted to forego the hoped-for 
 tie, when a claim upon his devotion appeared in the 
 closer circle of his home. 
 
 Unless, indeed, a more personal and even more 
 terrible occasion of this sacrifice had arisen at an 
 earlier date. We know, on his own admission, that 
 in the winter of 1795-96, Charles Lamb himself suc- 
 cumbed to the family malady, and passed some weeks 
 in confinement. In the earliest of his letters that has 
 been preserved, belonging to the early part of 1796, 
 he tells his friend Coleridge the sad truth : 
 
 My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six 
 weeks that finished last year and began this, your very 
 humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at 
 Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite 
 any one. But mad I was ! . . . Coleridge, it may con- 
 vince you of my regard for you when I tell you my head 
 ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another 
 person, who I am inclined to think was the more immedi- 
 ate cause of my temporary frenzy. 
 
 The "other person" can have been no other 
 than the fair-haired Alice, and if disappointed love 
 was the immediate cause of his derangement, the 
 discovery in him of this tendency may have served 
 to break off all relations between the lovers still 
 more effectually. Wonderfully touching are the lines 
 which, as he tells Coleridge in the same letter, were 
 written by him in his prison-house in one of his lucid 
 intervals :
 
 32 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 TO MY SISTER 
 
 If from my lips some angry accents fell, 
 Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind, 
 'Twas but the error of a sickly mind 
 And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well, 
 And waters clear, of Reason : and for me 
 Let this my verse the poor atonement be 
 My verse, which thou to praise wert e'er inclined 
 Too highly, and with a partial eye to see 
 No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show 
 Kindest affection ; and would'st oft-times lend 
 An ear to the despairing, love-sick lay, 
 Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay 
 But ill the mighty debt of love I owe, 
 Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend. 
 
 The history of many past weeks or months seems 
 written in these lines ; the history of a hopeless 
 attachment, a reason yielding to long distress of mind, 
 and a sister's love already repaying by anticipation 
 the "mighty debt" which in after days it was itself 
 to owe. 
 
 This year, 1795-96, was indeed a memorable one in 
 the annals of the brother and sister. The fortunes of 
 the Lamb family were at low ebb. They were in 
 lodgings in Little Queen Street, Holborn, the mother 
 a confirmed invalid, and the father sinking gradually 
 into second childhood. Charles had been temporarily 
 under restraint, and Mary Lamb, in addition to the 
 increasing labour of ministering to her parents, was 
 working for their common maintenance by taking in
 
 ii FAMILY STRUGGLES AND SORROWS 33 
 
 needlework. It is not strange that under this pres- 
 sure her own reason, so often threatened, at last gave 
 way. It was in September of 1796 that the awful 
 calamity of her life befell. A young apprentice girl, 
 who was at work in the common sitting-room while 
 dinner was preparing, appears to have excited the 
 latent mania. Mary Lamb snatched a knife from the 
 table, pursued the girl round the room, and finally 
 stabbed to the heart her mother, who had interfered 
 in the girl's behalf. It was Charles Lamb himself 
 who seized the unhappy sister, and wrested the knife 
 from her hand, but not before she had hurled in her 
 rage other knives about the room, and wounded, 
 though not fatally, the now almost imbecile father. 
 The Times of a few days later relates that an inquest 
 was held on the following day, and a verdict of 
 insanity returned in the case of the unhappy daughter. 
 Lamb's account of the event is given in a letter to 
 Coleridge, of 27th September. 
 
 MY DEAREST FRIEND White, or some of my friends, 
 or the public papers by this time may have informed you 
 of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. 
 I will only give you the outlines : My poor dear, dearest 
 sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own 
 mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the 
 knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, 
 from whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital, 
 God lias preserved to me my senses I eat, and drink, and 
 sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound. My 
 poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take 
 D
 
 34 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 care of Mm and my aunt. Mr. Norris, of the Bluecoat 
 School, has been very kind to us, and we have no other 
 friend ; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, 
 and able to do the best that remains to do. Write as 
 religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is 
 gone and done with. With me the " former things are 
 passed away," and I have something more to do than to 
 feel. 
 
 God Almighty have us well in His keeping. 
 
 C. LAMB. 
 
 Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every 
 vestige of past vanities of that kind. Do as you please ; 
 but if you publish, publish mine (I give free leave) with- 
 out name or initial, and never send me a book, I charge 
 you. 
 
 A second letter followed in less than a week, in a 
 tone somewhat less forlorn. 
 
 Your letter was an inestimable treasure to me. It will 
 be a comfort to you, I know, to know that our prospects 
 are somewhat brighter. My poor dear, dearest sister, the 
 unhappy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty's 
 judgments on our house, is restored to her senses ; to a 
 dreadful sense and recollection of what has past, awful to 
 her mind and impressive (as it must be to the end of life), 
 but tempered with religious resignation and the reasonings 
 of a sound judgment, which, in this early stage, knows how 
 to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit 
 of frenzy, and the terrible guilt of a mother's murder. I 
 have seen her. I found her, this morning, calm and 
 serene ; far, very far, from an indecent, forgetful serenity ;
 
 II FAMILY STRUGGLES AND SORROWS 35 
 
 she has a most affectionate and tender concern for what 
 has happened. Indeed, from the beginning, frightful and 
 hopeless as her disorder seemed, I had confidence enough 
 in her strength of mind and religious principle, to look 
 forward to a time when even she might recover tranquillity. 
 God be praised, Coleridge, wonderful as it is to tell, I 
 have never once been otherwise than collected and calm ; 
 even on the dreadful day, and in the midst of the terrible 
 scene, I preserved a tranquillity which bystanders may 
 have construed into indifference a tranquillity not of 
 despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say that it was a 
 religious principle that most supported me ? I allow much 
 to other favourable circumstances. I felt that I had 
 something else to do than to regret. On that first even- 
 ing, my aunt was lying insensible, to all appearance like 
 one dying, my father, with his poor forehead plastered 
 over, from a wound he had received from a daughter dearly 
 loved by him, who loved him no less dearly, my mother 
 a dead and murdered corpse in the next room, yet was I 
 wonderfully supported. I closed not my eyes in sleep 
 that night, but lay without terrors and without despair. 
 I have lost no sleep since. I had been long used not to 
 rest in things of sense ; had endeavoured after a compre- 
 hension of mind, unsatisfied with the " ignorant present 
 time," and this kept me up. I had the whole weight of 
 the family thrown on me ; for my brother, little disposed 
 (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to 
 take care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad 
 leg, an exemption from such duties, and I was now left 
 alone. . . . 
 
 Our friends here have been very good. Sam Le Grice, 
 who was then in town, was with me the three or four first
 
 36 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 days, and was as a brother to me ; gave up every hour of 
 his time, to the very hurting of his health and spirits, in 
 constant attendance and humouring my poor father ; 
 talked with him, read to him, played at cribbage with 
 him (for so short is the old man's recollection that he was 
 playing at cards, as though nothing had happened, while 
 the coroner's inquest was sitting over the way). Samuel 
 wept tenderly when he went away, for his mother wrote 
 him a very severe letter on his loitering so long in town, 
 and he was forced to go. Mr. Norris, of Christ's Hospital, 1 
 has been as a father to me ; Mrs. Norris as a mother, 
 though we had few claims on them. A gentleman, 
 brother to my godmother, from whom we never had 
 right or reason to expect any such assistance, sent my 
 father <20; and to crown all these God's blessings to 
 our family at such a time, an old lady> a cousin of my 
 father's and aunt's, a gentlewoman of fortune, is to take 
 my aunt and make her comfortable for the short remainder 
 of her days. My aunt is recovered, and as well as ever, 
 and highly pleased at thoughts of going ; and has gener- 
 ously given up the interest of her little money (which 
 was formerly paid my father for her board) wholly and 
 solely to my sister's use. Reckoning this, we have, Daddy 
 and I, for our two selves and an old maid-servant to look 
 after him when I am out, which will be necessary, .170, 
 
 1 The earliest mention of Mr. Randal Norris, Sub-treasurer 
 of the Inner Temple, for many years the faithful friend of the 
 Lamb family. Mr. Norris was twice married. It was through 
 his second wife (not the Mrs. Norris mentioned above) that 
 he was connected with Widford in Hertfordshire. Mrs. Arthur 
 Tween, Mr. Norris's daughter by the second marriage, tells us 
 that she does not know in what way her father was ever con- 
 nected with Christ's Hospital.
 
 ii FAMILY STRUGGLES AND SORROWS 37 
 
 or ,180 rather, a year, out of which we can spare 50 or 
 60 at least for Mary while she stays at Islington, where 
 she must and shall stay during her father's life, for his 
 and her comfort. I know John will make speeches about 
 it, but she shall not go into an hospital The good lady 
 of the madhouse, and her daughter an elegant, sweet- 
 behaved young lady love her and are taken with her 
 amazingly ; and I know from her own mouth she loves 
 them, and longs to be with them as much. Poor thing ! 
 they say she was but the other morning saying she knew 
 she must go to Bethlehem for life ; that one of her brothers 
 would have it so, but the other would wish it not, but 
 be obliged to go with the stream ; that she had often as she 
 passed Bethlehem thought it likely, " here it may be my 
 fate to end my days," conscious of a certain flightiness in 
 her poor head oftentimes, and mindful of more than one 
 severe illness of that nature before. A legacy of 100, 
 which my father will have at Christmas, and this 20 I 
 mentioned before, with what is in the house, will much 
 more than set us clear. If my father, an old servant- 
 maid, and I, can't live, and live comfortably, on 130 or 
 120 a year, we ought to burn by slow fires; and I 
 almost would, that Mary might not go into an hospital. 
 Let me not leave one unfavourable impression on your 
 mind respecting my brother. Since this has happened 
 he has been very kind and brotherly, but I fear for his 
 mind. He has taken his ease in the world, and is not 
 fit himself to struggle with difficulties, nor has much 
 accustomed himself to throw himself into their way ; and 
 I know his language is already, " Charles, you must take 
 care of yourself, you must not abridge yourself of a single 
 pleasure you have been used to," etc. etc., and in that
 
 38 CHARLES LAMB CHAP, 
 
 style of talking. But you, a Necessarian, can respect a 
 difference of mind, and love what is amiable in a character 
 not perfect. He has been very good, but I fear for his 
 mind. Thank God, I can unconnect myself with him, 
 and shall manage all my father's monies in future myself 
 if I take charge of Daddy, which poor John has not even 
 hinted a wish, at any future time even, to share with me. 
 The lady at this madhouse assures me that I may dismiss 
 immediately both doctor and apothecary, retaining occa- 
 sionally a composing draught or so for a while ; and there 
 is a less expensive establishment in her house, where she 
 will not only have a room and nurse to herself for 50 or 
 guineas a year the outside would be 60 you know by 
 economy how much more even I shall be able to spare for 
 her comforts. She will, I fancy, if she stays make one of 
 the family, rather than of the patients ; the old and young 
 ladies I like exceedingly, and she loves dearly; and they, 
 as the saying is, take to her extraordinarily, if it is extra- 
 ordinary that people who see my sister should love her. 
 Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister 
 was most and thoroughly devoid of the quality of selfish- 
 ness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, dearest soul, in a 
 future letter for my own comfort, for I understand her 
 thoroughly ; and if I mistake not, in the most trying 
 situation that a human being can be found in, she will be 
 found (I speak not with sufficient humility, I fear, but 
 humanly and foolishly speaking) she will be found, I trust, 
 uniformly great and amiable. God keep her in her 
 present mind, to whom be thanks and praise for all His 
 dispensations to mankind. 
 
 It is necessary for the full understanding of what
 
 ii FAMILY STRUGGLES AND SORROWS 39 
 
 Charles Lamb was, and of the life that lay before 
 him, that this deeply interesting account should be 
 given in his own words. Anything that a biographer 
 might add would only weaken the picture of courage, 
 dutifulness, and affection here presented. The only 
 fitting sequel to it is the history of the remaining 
 five-and-thirty years, in which he fulfilled so nobly and 
 consistently his self-imposed task. 
 
 Poor Mrs. Lamb was laid to rest in the churchyard 
 of St. Andrew's, Holborn, on the 26th of this month, 
 and it then became absolutely necessary for the family 
 to make another change of residence. Charles, with 
 his father, now between severity and eighty years of 
 age and shattered in body and mind, removed to 
 Pentonville. The old aunt, Sarah Lamb ("Aunt 
 Hetty "), did not long find shelter with the capricious 
 relative who had undertaken the charge of her, and 
 returned to share the new home at Pentonville, until 
 her death in the following February. Mary Lamb 
 remained for some weeks in the asylum at Hoxton, 
 until, on certain conditions arranged between Charles 
 and the proper authorities, her release from confine- 
 ment was brought about, and the brother's guardian- 
 ship accepted as sufficient for the future. The mania 
 which had once attacked Charles never returned. 
 Either the shock of calamity, or the controlling power 
 of the vow he had laid on himself, overmastered the 
 inherited tendency. But in the case of Mary Lamb 
 it returned at frequent intervals through life,' never 
 again happily with any disastrous result. The attacks
 
 40 CHARLES LAMB CHAP, il 
 
 seem to have been generally attended with forewarn- 
 ings, which enabled the brother and sister to take the 
 necessary measures, and a friend of the Lambs has 
 related how on one occasion he met the brother and 
 sister, at such a season, walking hand in hand across 
 the fields to the old asylum, both bathed in tears.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE 
 (17971800) 
 
 THE opening of the year 1797 found Charles Lamb 
 with his helpless father, and his old aunt "Hetty" 
 (her actual name was Sarah Lamb), in rooms in Chapel 
 Street, Pentonville. Mary Lamb, who had remained 
 in the asylum at Islington for many weeks after her 
 mother's death, was still exiled from her home. 
 Charles had wisely resolved that she must not rejoin 
 her family during the father's lifetime ; and later on 
 we find her established in a lodging at Hackney, where 
 her brother spent with her his Sundays and holidays, 
 and what other time he could spare from his invalid 
 father. Aunt Hetty had returned, only to die. Lamb 
 writes to Coleridge in January, " My poor old aunt 
 whom you have seen, the kindest, goodest creature to 
 me when I was at school ; who used to toddle there 
 to bring me good things, when I, school-boy like, only 
 despised her for it, and used to be ashamed to see her 
 come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps
 
 42 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 as we went into the old grammar-school, and open 
 her apron, and bring out her basin, with some nice 
 thing she had caused to be saved for me ; the good old 
 creature is now on her death-bed. . . . She says, poor 
 thing, she is glad she is come home to die with me." 
 The end came within a few days, and on 13th Febru- 
 ary Charles again writes, " This afternoon I attend the 
 funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on Thursday." l 
 
 Charles was now left, the solitary companion of 
 his aged father, who was to survive yet two years 
 longer. Of the domestic history of the pair during 
 this time we know almost nothing. Lamb's corre- 
 spondence with Coleridge was intermitted for eighteen 
 months, during Coleridge's absence from England, and 
 there was no other correspondent to whom he cared 
 to confide his family troubles. But happily for his 
 sanity of mind, he was beginning to find friends and 
 interests in new directions. 
 
 What books had been to him all his life, and what 
 education he had been finding in them, is evident from 
 his earliest extant letters. His published correspond- 
 ence begins in the spring of 1796, with a letter to 
 Coleridge, then at Bristol, and from this and other 
 letters of the same year we see the first signs of that 
 variety of literary taste so noteworthy in a young man 
 of twenty-one. The letters of this year are mainly on 
 critical subjects. He encloses his own sonnets, and 
 
 1 In the Burial Register of St. Andrew's, Holborn, an entry 
 appears of the funeral on this day of "Sarah Lamb, from St. 
 James's, Clerkenwell. "
 
 in FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE 43 
 
 points out the passages in elder writers, Parnell or 
 Cowley, to which he has been indebted. Or he 
 acknowledges poems of Coleridge, sent for his criticism, 
 and proceeds to express his opinion on them with 
 frankness. He had been introduced to Southey, by 
 Coleridge, some time in 1795, and he writes to the 
 latter, " With Joan of Arc I have been delighted, 
 amazed ; I had not presumed to expect anything of 
 such excellence from Southey. Why, the poem is 
 alone sufficient to redeem the character of the age we 
 live in from the imputation of degenerating in poetry, 
 were there no such beings extant as Burns, Bowles, 
 
 and Cowper, and ; fill up the blank how you 
 
 please." It is noticeable also how prompt the young 
 man was to discover the real significance of the poetic 
 revival of the latter years of the eighteenth century. 
 Burns he elsewhere mentions at this time to Coleridge 
 in stronger terms of enthusiasm as having been the 
 " God of my idolatry, as Bowles was of yours," nor 
 was he less capable of appreciating the "divine chit- 
 chat " of Cowper. The real greatness of Wordsworth 
 he was one of the earliest to discover and to proclaim. 
 And at the same time his imagination was being 
 stirred by the romantic impulse that was coming from 
 Germany. "Have you read," he asks Coleridge, 
 " the ballad called ' Leonora ' in the second number of 
 the Monthly Magazine ? If you have ! ! ! There is 
 another fine song, from the same author (Burger), in 
 the third number, of scarce inferior merit." But still 
 more remarkable in the intellectual history of so
 
 44 CHAELES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 young a man is the acquaintance he shows with the 
 earlier English authors, at a time when the revival of 
 Shakspearian study was comparatively recent, and 
 Avhen the other Elizabethan dramatists were all but 
 unknown save to the archaeologist. We must suppose 
 that the library of Samuel Salt was more than usually 
 rich in old folios, for certainly Lamb had not only 
 " browsed " (to use his own expression), but had read 
 and criticised deeply, as well as discursively. In a 
 letter to Coleridge of this same year, 1796, he quotes 
 with enthusiasm the rather artificial lines of Massinger 
 in A Very Woman, pointing out the " fine effect of the 
 double endings." 
 
 Not far from where my father lives, a lady, 
 
 A neighbour by, blest with as great a beauty 
 
 As nature durst bestow without undoing, 
 
 Dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then, 
 
 And blest the house a thousand times she dwelt in. 
 
 This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, 
 
 When my first fire knew no adulterate incense, 
 
 Nor I no way to flatter but my fondness, 
 
 In all the bravery my friends could show me, 
 
 In all the faith my innocence could give me, 
 
 In the best language my true tongue could tell me, 
 
 And all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me, 
 
 I sued and served ; long did I serve this lady, 
 
 Long was my travail, long my trade to win her ; 
 
 With all the duty of my soul I served her. 1 
 
 1 These lines are interesting as having been chosen by Lamb 
 for a " motto " to his first published poems. As so used, they 
 clearly bore reference to his own patient wooing at that time.
 
 in FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE 45 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher he quotes with no less 
 delight, "in which authors I can't help thinking 
 there is a greater richness of poetical fancy than in 
 any one, Shakspeare excepted." Again, he asks the 
 same inseparable friend, "Among all your quaint 
 readings did you ever light upon Walton's Complete 
 Angler? I asked you the question once before; it 
 breathes the very spirit of innocence, purity, and 
 simplicity of heart ; there are many choice old verses 
 interspersed in it : it would sweeten a man's temper 
 at any time to read it : it would Christianise every 
 discordant angry passion." And while thus discursive 
 in his older reading, he was hardly less so in the 
 literature of his own century. He had been fascinated 
 by the Confessions of Rousseau, and was for a time at 
 least under the influence of the sentimental school of 
 novelists, the followers of Eichardson and Sterne in 
 England. So varied was the field of authors and 
 subjects on which his style was being formed and his 
 fancy nourished. 
 
 Long afterwards, in his essay on Books and Head- 
 ing, he boasted that he could read anything which he 
 called a book. " I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury 
 is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too 
 low." But this versatility of sympathy, which was 
 at the root of so large a part of both matter and 
 manner when he at length discovered where his real 
 strength lay, had the effect of delaying that discovery 
 for some time. His first essays in literature were 
 mainly imitative, and though there is not one of them
 
 46 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 that is without his peculiar charm, or that a lover 
 of Charles Lamb would willingly let die, they are 
 more interesting from the fact of their authorship, and 
 from the light they throw on the growth of Lamb's 
 mind, than for their intrinsic value. 
 
 Meantime, his lonely life in Chapel Street, Penton- 
 ville, was cheered by the acquisition of some new 
 friends, chiefly introduced by Coleridge. He had 
 known Southey since 1795, and some time in the 
 following year, or early in 1797, he had formed a 
 closer bond of sympathy with Charles Lloyd, son of 
 a banker of Birmingham, a young man of poetic taste 
 and melancholy temperament, who had taken up his 
 abode, for the sake of intellectual companionship, 
 with Coleridge at Bristol One of the first results of 
 this companionship was a second literary venture in 
 which the new friend took a share. A second edition 
 of Poems by S. T. Coleridge, to which are now added 
 Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd, appeared at 
 Bristol, in the summer of 1797, published by Cole- 
 ridge's devoted admirer, Joseph Cottle. 
 
 " There were inserted in my former edition," writes 
 Coleridge in the preface, " a few sonnets of my friend 
 and old school-fellow, Charles Lamb. He has now 
 communicated to me a complete collection of all his 
 poems ; quse qui non prorsus amet, ilium omnes et 
 virtutes et veneres odere." The phrase is a trifle 
 grandiloquent to describe the short list some fifteen 
 in all of sonnets and occasional verses here printed. 
 Nor is there anything in their style to indicate the in-
 
 Ill FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE 47 
 
 fluence of new models. A tender grace of the type of 
 his old favourite, Bowles, is still their chief merit, and 
 they are interesting as showing how deeply the events 
 of the past few years had stirred the religious side of 
 Charles Lamb's nature. A review of the day charac- 
 terised the manner of Lamb and Lloyd as " plaintive," 
 and the epithet is not ill -chosen. Lamb was still 
 living chiefly in the past, and the thought of his 
 sister, and recollection of the pious "Grandame" in 
 Hertfordshire, with kindred memories of his own 
 childhood and disappointed affections, make the 
 subject-matter of almost all the verse. A little 
 allegorical poem, with the title of " A Vision of Re- 
 pentance," relegated to an appendix in this same 
 volume, marks the most sacred confidence that Lamb 
 ever gave to the world as to his meditations on the 
 mystery of evil. 
 
 It is unlikely that this little venture brought any 
 profit to its authors, or that a subsequent volume of 
 blank verse by Lamb and Lloyd in the following year 
 was more remunerative. To Lloyd the question was 
 doubtless of less importance ; but Lamb was anxious 
 for his sister's sake to add to his scanty income, and 
 with this view he resolved to make an experiment in 
 prose fiction. In the year 1798 he composed his little 
 story, bearing the title, as originally issued, of A 
 Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret. 
 
 This " miniature romance," as Talfourd calls it, is 
 perhaps better known, after the essays of Elia, than 
 any of Lamb's writings, and the secret of its charm,
 
 48 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 in the face of improbabilities and unrealities of many 
 kinds, is one of the curiosities of literature. The 
 story itself is built up of the most heterogeneous 
 materials. The idea of the story, the ruin of a village 
 maiden, Rosamund Gray, by a melodramatic villain 
 with the "uncommon" name of Matravis, was sug- 
 gested to Lamb, as he admits in a letter to Southey, 
 by a " foolish " (and it must be added, a very scur- 
 rilous) old ballad about "an old woman clothed in 
 gray." The name of his heroine he borrowed from 
 some verses of his friend Lloyd's (not included in 
 their joint volume), and that of the villain from one 
 of the ruffians employed to murder the king in Mar- 
 lowe's Edward the Second, that death-scene which 
 he afterwards told the world " moved pity and terror 
 beyond any scene ancient or modern " with which he 
 was acquainted. The conduct of the little story bears 
 strong traces of the influence of Richardson and Mac- 
 kenzie, and a rather forced reference to the latter's 
 Julia de Roubignd seems to show where he had lately 
 been reading. A portion of the narrative is conducted 
 by correspondence between the two well-bred young 
 ladies of the story, and when one of them begins a 
 letter to her cousin, " Health, innocence, and beauty 
 shall be thy bridesmaids, my sweet cousin," we are 
 at once aware in what school of polite letter-writing 
 the author had studied. After the heroine, the two 
 principal characters are a brother and sister, Allan 
 and Elinor Clare, the relation between whom (the 
 sister is represented as just ten years older than her
 
 in FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE 49 
 
 brother) is borrowed almost without disguise from 
 that of Lamb and his sister Mary. "Elinor Clare 
 was the best good creature, the least selfish human 
 being I ever knew, always at work for other people's 
 good, planning other people's happiness, continually 
 "forgetful to consult for her own personal gratifica- 
 tions, except indirectly in the welfare of another; 
 while her parents lived, the most attentive of 
 daughters ; since they died, the kindest of sisters. 
 I never knew but one like her." There is besides a 
 school-fellow of Allan's, who precedes him to college, 
 evidently a recollection of the school friendship with 
 Coleridge. But still more significant, as showing the 
 personal element in the little romance, is the circum- 
 stance that Lamb lays the scene of it in that Hert- 
 fordshire village of Widford where so many of his 
 own happiest hours had been spent, and that the 
 heroine, Rosamund Gray, is drawn with those features 
 on which he was never weary of dwelling in the 
 object of his own boyish passioa Eosamund, with 
 the pale blue eyes and the "yellow Hertfordshire 
 hair " is but a fresh copy of his Anna and his Alice. 
 That Rosamund Gray had an actual counterpart in 
 real life seems certain, and the little group of cottages, 
 in one of which she dwelt with her old grandmother, 
 is still shown near the village of Widford, about half 
 a mile from the site of the old mansion of Blakeswarc. 
 And it is the tradition of the village, and believed by 
 those who have the best means of judging, that 
 " Rosamund Gray " (her real name was equally remote 
 E
 
 50 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 from this, and from Alice W n) was Charles 
 
 Lamb's first and only love. Her fair hair and eyes, 
 her goodness, and (we may assume) her poverty, 
 were drawn from life. The rest of the story in which 
 she hears a part is of course pure fiction. The Anna 
 of the sonnets made a prosperous marriage, and lived 
 to a good old age. 1 
 
 As if Lamb were resolved to give his little tale 
 the character of personal "confessions," he has con- 
 trived to introduce into it, by quotation or allusion, 
 all his favourite writers, from Walton and Wither to 
 Mackenzie and Burns. But of more interest from 
 this point of view than any resemblances of detail is 
 the shadow, as of recent calamity, that rests upon 
 the story, and the strain of religious emotion that 
 pervades it. It is this that gives the romance, con- 
 ventional as it is for the most part in its treatment 
 of life and manners, its real attractiveness. It is 
 redolent of Lamb's native sweetness of heart, delicacy 
 of feeling, and undefinable charm of style. And 
 these qualities did not altogether fail to attract atten- 
 tion. The little venture was a moderate success, and 
 
 1 Her actual name was, I am well assured, Ann Simmons. 
 My authority is Mrs. Arthur Tween, daughter of Lamb's old 
 friend, Randal Norris, and herself familiar from childhood with 
 the people and traditions of Widford. Ann Simmons married 
 Mr. Bartram, a silversmith and pawnbroker of Princes Street, 
 Leicester Square ; and one of their daughters became the wife 
 of the late Mr. William Coulson, the eminent surgeon. There 
 is probably no one now living to throw any further light upon 
 the course of this, Charles Lamb's earliest love.
 
 Ill FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE 51 
 
 brought its author some " few guineas." One tribute 
 to its merits was paid many years later, which, we 
 may hope, did not fail to reach the author. Shelley, 
 writing to Leigh Hunt from Leghorn, in 1819, and 
 acknowledging the receipt of a parcel of books, adds, 
 " With it came, too, Lamb's works. What a lovely 
 thing is his Rosamund Gray ! How much knowledge 
 of the sweetest and deepest part of our nature in it ! 
 When I think of such a mind as Lamb's, when I see 
 how unnoticed remain things of such exquisite and 
 complete perfection, what should I hope for myself, 
 if I had not higher objects in view than fame?" 
 
 There is scanty material for the biographer of 
 Lamb during these first four years of struggling 
 poverty. The few events that varied his monotonous 
 life are to be gathered from the letters to Coleridge 
 and Southey, written during this period. The former 
 was married, and living at Nether Stowey, near 
 the Quantock Hills, where Charles and Mary Lamb 
 paid him apparently their first visit, during one of 
 Charles's short holidays in the summer of 1797. This 
 visit was made memorable by a slight accident that 
 befell Coleridge on the day of their arrival, and forced 
 him to remain at home while his visitors explored the 
 surrounding country. Left alone in his garden, he 
 composed the curiously Wordsworthian lines, bearing 
 for title (he was perhaps thinking of Ferdinand in 
 the Tempest), "This lime-tree bower my prison," in 
 which he apostrophises Lamb as the " gentle-hearted 
 Charles," and addresses him as one who had
 
 52 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 Hungered after nature, many a year 
 In the great city pent, winning thy way 
 With sad and patient zeal, through evil and ]>.iin 
 And strange calamity. 
 
 Charles did not quite relish the epithet "gentle- 
 hearted," and showed that he winced under a title 
 that savoured a little of pity or condescension. 
 Indeed, it is evident, in spite of the real affection that 
 Lamb never ceased to feel for Coleridge, that the 
 relations between the friends were often strained 
 during these earlier days. This year, 1797, was that 
 of the joint volume, and the mutual criticism indulged 
 so freely by both was leaving a little soreness behind. 
 Then there was the question of precedence between 
 Lamb and Lloyd in this same volume, which was 
 settled in Lloyd's favour, not without a few pangs, 
 confessed by Lamb himself. And when, in the 
 following year, Coleridge was on the eve of his visit 
 to Germany with the Wordsworths, a foolish message 
 of his, "If Lamb requires any knowledge, let him 
 apply to me," had been repeated to Lamb by some 
 injudicious friend, and did not tend to improve 
 matters. Lamb retaliated by sending Coleridge a 
 grimly humorous list of "Theses quaedam Theologicae," 
 to be by him "defended or oppugned (or both) at 
 Leipsic or Gottingen." Numbers five and six in tin's 
 list may be given as a sample. " Whether the higher 
 order of Seraphim illuminati ever sneer ? " " Whether 
 pure intelligences can love, or whether they can love 
 anything besides pure intellect)" The rest are in
 
 in FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE 53 
 
 the same vein, and if they have any point at all, 
 it must lie in a certain assumption of intellectual 
 superiority in which Coleridge had indulged to the 
 annoyance of his friend. There was a temporary 
 soreness in the heart of Charles on parting with his 
 old companion. There had been a grievance of the 
 same kind before. It had been bitterly repented of, 
 even in a flood of tears. To the beginning of this 
 year, 1798, belong the touching verses composed in 
 the same spirit of self-confession that has marked so 
 much of his writing up to this period, about the " old 
 familiar faces." In their earliest shape they are more 
 directly autobiographical. Lamb afterwards omitted 
 the first stanza, and gave the lines a less personal 
 character. 
 
 Where are they gone, the old familiar faces ? 
 I had a mother, but she died, and left me 
 Died prematurely in a day of horrors 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have had playmates, I have had companions 
 
 In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days, 
 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have been laughing, I have been carousing, 
 Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies- 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I loved a love once, fairest among women. 
 Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
 
 54 CHARLES LAM It CHAP. 
 
 I had a friend, a kinder friend has no man. 
 Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly ! 
 Left him to muse on the old familiar faces. 
 
 Ghostlike I paced round the haunts of my childhood. 
 Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse, 
 Seeking to find the old familiar faces. 
 
 Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother ; 
 Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling, 
 So might we talk of the old familiar faces. 
 
 For some they have died, and some they have left me, 
 And some are taken from me, all are departed ; 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 The "friend of my bosom" was undoubtedly 
 Coleridge, whose coldness and waywardness at this 
 juncture had not long availed to cancel the memory 
 of old and sacred ties. The friend whom Lamb had 
 " left abruptly " would seem to have been the new 
 associate, Charles Lloyd. In a letter to Coleridge of 
 this very month (28th January) Lamb mentions a 
 momentary breach with his friend. " I hud well nigh 
 quarrelled," he writes, "with Charles Lloyd." If 
 Lamb was at this difficult crisis moody and sensitive, 
 so also was Lloyd even then a prey to the melancholy 
 which clung to him through life, ami it was well for 
 Lamb that on Coleridge leaving England he had some 
 more genial companionship to take refuge in. Three 
 years before, he had made the acquaintance of 
 Southey. In the summer of 1797 he and Lloyd had 
 passed a fortnight under his roof in Hampshire.
 
 Ill FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE 55 
 
 And now that Coleridge was far away, it was Southey 
 who naturally took his place as literary adviser and 
 confidant. 
 
 We gather from Lamb's letters to Southey, in 1798- 
 99, that this change of association for the time was 
 good for him. Coleridge and Lloyd were of temper- 
 aments too nearly akin to Lamb's to be wholly 
 serviceable in these days, when the calamities in his 
 family still overshadowed him. The friendship of 
 Southey, the healthy-natured, the industrious, and 
 the methodical, was a wholesome change of atmo- 
 sphere. Southey was now living at Westbury, near 
 Bristol. Though only a few months Lamb's senior, 
 he had been three years a married man, and was 
 valiantly working to support his young wife by that 
 craft of literature which he followed so patiently to 
 his life's end. In this year, 1798, he was in his 
 sweetest and most humorous ballad vein. It was the 
 year of the Well of St. Keyne and the Battle of Blenheim,, 
 and other of those shorter pieces by which Southey 
 will always be most widely known. He had not 
 failed to discover Lamb's value as a critic, and each 
 eclogue or ballad, as it is written, is submitted to his 
 judgment. The result of this change of interest is 
 shown in a marked difference of tone and style in 
 Lamb's letters. He is less sad and meditative, and 
 begins to exhibit that peculiar playfulness which we 
 associate with the future Elia. One day he writes : 
 " My tailor has brought me home a new coat, lapelled, 
 with a velvet collar. He assures me everybody wears
 
 56 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 velvet collars now. Some are born fashionable, some 
 achieve fashion, and others, like your humble servant, 
 have fashion thrust upon them." And his remarks 
 on Southey's ode To a Spider (in which he justly notes 
 the metre as its chief merit> and wonders that "Burns 
 had not hit upon it") are followed by a discursive 
 pleasantry having the true Elia ring, " I love this sort 
 of poems that open a new intercourse with the most 
 despised of the animal and insect race. I think this 
 vein may be further opened. Peter Pindar hath very 
 prettily apostrophised a fly; Burns hath his mouse 
 and his louse ; Coleridge, less successfully, hath made 
 overtures of intimacy to a jackass, therein only 
 following, at unresembling distance, Sterne and 
 greater Cervantes. Besides these, I know of no other 
 examples of breaking down the partition between us 
 and our 'poor earth-born companions."' And the 
 suggestion that follows, that Southey should under- 
 take a series of poems, with the object of awakening 
 sympathy for animals too generally ill-treated or held 
 in disgust, is most characteristic, both in matter and 
 manner. Indeed it is in these earlier letters to 
 Southey, rather than in his poetry or in Rosamund Gray, 
 that Charles Lamb was feeling the way to his true 
 place in literature. Already we observe a vein of 
 reflectiveness and a curious felicity of style which owe 
 nothing to any predecessor. And if his humour, even 
 in his lightest moods, has a tinge of sadness, it is not 
 to be accounted for only by the suffering he had 
 paned through. It belonged in fact to the profound
 
 in FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE 57 
 
 humanity of its author, to the circumstance that with 
 him, as with all true humorists, humour was but one 
 side of an acute and almost painful sympathy. 
 
 At the close of the year 1799 Coleridge returned 
 from Germany, and the intercourse between the two 
 friends was at once resumed, never again to be inter- 
 rupted. Mary Lamb was once more under her 
 brother's care at Pentonville, for the death of the old 
 father in the spring of this year had made the long- 
 desired reunion possible. But the change proved to 
 be the beginning of fresh troubles. It appears from 
 a letter of Charles to Coleridge, in the spring of 1800, 
 that there was no alleviation of his burden of constant 
 anxiety. The faithful old servant of many years had 
 died, after a few days' illness, and Lamb writes : 
 "Mary, in consequence of fatigue and anxiety, is 
 fallen ill again, and I was obliged to remove her yes- 
 terday. 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 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. 
 Excuse my troubling you, but I have nobody by me 
 to speak to me. I slept out last night, not being able 
 to endure the change and the stillness ; but I did not
 
 58 CHARLES LAMB . n\p. 
 
 sleep well, and I must come back to my own bed. I 
 am going to try and get a friend to come and be with 
 me to-morrow. I am completely shipwrecked. My 
 head is quite bad. I almost wish that Mary were 
 dead. God bless you. Love to Sarah and little 
 Hartley." 
 
 It is the solitary instance in which he allows us to 
 see his patience and hopefulness for a moment failing 
 him. That terrible sentence "we are in a manner 
 marked " has not perhaps received its due weight, in 
 the estimate of what the brother and sister were called 
 upon to bear. It seems certain that if they were not 
 actually driven from lodging to lodging, because the 
 dreadful rumour of madness could not bo shaken off, 
 they were at least shunned and kept at a distance 
 wherever they went The rooms in Pentonville they 
 soon received notice to quit, and it might have been 
 difficult for them at this juncture to decide which way 
 to turn for shelter, but for the good-nature of an old 
 friend and school -fellow of Lamb's, John Matthew 
 Gutch, then living in Southampton Buildings, Holborn. 
 Gutch, who was in business there as a law-stationer, 
 offered the Lambs three rooms in his house, together 
 with a share in the services of an old housekeeper. 
 "I am in much better spirits," Charles writes to 
 Manning in May, or June, 1800. " I have had a very 
 eligible offer to lodge with a friend in town. He will 
 have rooms to let at Midsummer ; by which time I 
 hope my sister will be well enough to join mo. It is 
 a great object to me to live in town, where we shall
 
 in FIRST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE 59 
 
 be much more private, and to quit a house and neigh- 
 bourhood where poor Mary's disorder, so frequently 
 recurring, has made us a sort of marked people. We 
 can be nowhere private except in the midst of London. 
 We shall be in a family where we visit very frequently ; 
 only my landlord and I have not yet come to a con- 
 clusion. He has a partner to consult. I am still on 
 the tremble, for I do not know where we could go into 
 lodgings that would not be, in many respects, highly 
 exceptionable. Only God send Mary well again, and 
 I hope all will be well ! " To the rooms in South- 
 ampton Buildings they removed at Midsummer, and 
 there they remained until Lady Day of the following 
 year. Whether the " partner " proved intractable, or 
 whether Gutch himself repented of his offer, we cannot 
 say; but early in 1801 we learn from a letter of Charles 
 to Manning that the brother and sister were once more 
 to be cast upon the wide world of London to make a 
 home. And then it was that Charles Lamb turned, 
 perhaps because they were more retired and secure 
 from vulgar overlooking, to the old familiar and 
 dearly-loved surroundings of his childhood. "I am 
 going to change my lodgings," he writes, in a tone of 
 cheerful looking-forward simply marvellous, consider- 
 ingthe terrible cause of thisfresh removal "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 tip-toe) over the Thames and 
 Surrey Hills, at the upper end of King's Bench Walks
 
 60 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 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 my immortal mind for my present 
 lodgings resemble a minister's Iev6e, I have so in- 
 creased my acquaintance (as they call 'em) since I 
 have resided in town. Like the country mouse that 
 had tasted a little of urbane manners, I long to be 
 nibbling my own cheese by my dear self, without 
 mouse-traps and time-traps. By my new plan I shall 
 be as airy, up four pair of stairs, as in the country, 
 and in a garden in the midst of enchanting (more 
 than Mahomedan paradise) London, whose dirtiest 
 drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing trades- 
 man, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn, 
 James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. ! 
 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, Char- 
 ing Cross, with the man upon a black horse ! These 
 are thy gods, London ! Ain't you mightily moped 
 on the banks of the Cam 1 Had you not better come 
 and set up here ? You can't think what a difference. 
 All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I warrant 
 you. At least, I know an alchemy that turns her 
 mud into that metal a mind that loves to be at home 
 in crowds." 
 
 In a letter to Wordsworth, of somewhat later date, 
 replying to an invitation to visit the Lakes, he dwells 
 on the same passionate love for the great city, the
 
 in FIKST EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE 61 
 
 " place of his kindly engendure " not alone for its 
 sights and sounds, its print-shops, and its bookstalls, 
 but for the human faces, without which the finest 
 scenery failed to satisfy his sense of beauty. " The 
 wonder of these sights," he says, "impels me into 
 night walks about her crowded streets, and I often 
 shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at 
 so much life. All these emotions must be strange to 
 you ; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider 
 what must I have been doing all my life not to have 
 lent great portions of my heart with usury to such 
 scenes ?" 
 
 "What must I have been doing all my life?" 
 This might well be the language of tender retrospect 
 indulged by some man of sixty. It is that of a young 
 man of six-and-twenty. It serves to show us how 
 much of life had been crowded into those few years.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND DRAMATIC CRITICISM 
 
 (18001809) 
 
 LAMB was now established in his beloved Temple. 
 For nearly nine years he and his sister resided in 
 Mitre Court Buildings, and for about the same period 
 afterwards within the same sacred precincts, in Inner 
 Temple Lane. Of adventure, domestic or other, his 
 biographer has henceforth little to relate. The track 
 is marked on the one hand by his changes of resi- 
 dence and occasional brief excursions into the country, 
 on the other by the books he wrote and the friend- 
 ships he formed. 
 
 He had written to his friend Manning, as we have 
 seen, how his acquaintance had increased of late. Of 
 such acquaintances Manning himself is the most in- 
 teresting to us, as having drawn from Lamb a series 
 of letters by far the most important of those be- 
 longing to the period before us. Manning was a 
 remarkable person, whose acquaintance Lamb had 
 made on one of his visits to Cambridge during the
 
 CHAP, iv DKAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CRITICISM 63 
 
 residence at that University of his friend Lloyd. He 
 was mathematical tutor at Caius, and, in addition to 
 his scientific turn, was possessed by an enthusiasm 
 which in later years he was able to turn to very 
 practical purpose, for exploring the remoter parts of 
 China and Thibet. Lamb had formed a strong 
 admiration for Manning's genius. He told Crabb 
 Eobinson in after years that he was the most " won- 
 derful man " he had ever met. Perhaps the circum- 
 stance of Manning's two chief interests in life being 
 so remote from his own, drew Lamb to him by a 
 kind of "sympathy of difference." Certainly he 
 made very happy use of the opportunity for friendly 
 banter thus afforded, and the very absence of a 
 responsive humour in his correspondent seems to 
 have imparted an additional richness to his own. 
 Meantime, to add a few guineas to his scanty income, 
 he was turning this gift of humour to what end he 
 could. For at least three years (from 1800 to 1803) 
 he was an occasional contributor of facetious para- 
 graphs, epigrams, and other trifles to the newspapers 
 of the day. " In those days," as he afterwards told 
 the world in one of the Elia essays (Newspapers Thirty- 
 Jive Years Ago), " every morning paper, as an essential 
 retainer to its establishment, kept an author, who was 
 bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty para- 
 graphs. Sixpence a joke, and it was thought pretty 
 high too, was Dan Stuart's settled remuneration in 
 these cases. The chat of the day, scandal, but above 
 all, dress, furnished the material. The length of no
 
 64 ClIAKLKS I.AMI1 CHAP. 
 
 paragraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they 
 might be, but they must be poignant." Dan Stuart 
 was editor of the Morning Post, and Lamb contributed 
 to this paper, and also to the Chronicle and the 
 Albion. Six jokes a day was the amount he tells us 
 he had to provide during his engagement on the Post, 
 and in the essay just cited he dwells with much 
 humour on the misery of rising two hours before 
 breakfast (his days being otherwise fully employed 
 at the India House) to elaborate his jests. "No 
 Egyptian task-master ever devised a slavery like to 
 that, our slavery. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating 
 Sundays too), why, it seems nothing ; we make twice 
 the number every day in our lives as a matter of 
 course, and claim no sabbatical exemptions. But 
 then they come into our head. But when the head 
 has to go out to them, when the mountain must go 
 to Mahomet!" A few samples of Lamb's work in 
 this line have been preserved. One political squib 
 has survived, chiefly perhaps as having served to 
 give the coup de grace to a moribund journal, called 
 the Albion, which had been only a few weeks before 
 purchased (" on tick doubtless," Lamb says) by that 
 light-hearted spendthrift, John Fenwick, immortalised 
 in another of Lamb's essays (Tlie Two Races of M- /< ) 
 as the typical man who borrows. The journal had 
 been in daily expectation of being prosecuted, when 
 a (not very scathing) epigram of Lamb's on the apo- 
 stasy of Sir James Mackintosh, alienated the last of 
 Fenwick's patrons, Lord Stanhope, and the "murky
 
 IV DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CRITICISM 65 
 
 closet," "late Kackstraw's museum " in Fleet Street, 
 knew the editor and his contributors no more. Lamb 
 was not called upon to air his Jacobin principles, 
 survivals from his old association with Coleridge and 
 Southey, any further in the newspaper world. " The 
 Albion is dead," he writes to Manning, " dead as nail 
 in door my revenues have died with it ; but I am 
 not as a man without hope." He had got a new 
 introduction, through his old friend George Dyer, to 
 the Morning Chronicle, under the editorship of Perry. 
 In 1802 we find him again working for the Post, but 
 in a different line. Coleridge was contributing to 
 that paper, and was doing his best to obtain for 
 Lamb employment on it of a more dignified char- 
 acter than providing the daily quantum of jokes. 
 He had proposed to furnish Lamb with prose versions 
 of German poems for the latter to turn into metre. 
 Lamb had at first demurred, on the reasonable 
 ground that Coleridge, whose gift of verse was cer- 
 tainly equal to his own, might as easily do the whole 
 process himself. But the pressure of pecuniary 
 difficulty was great, and a fortnight later he is telling 
 Coleridge that the experiment shall at least be tried. 
 " As to the translations, let me do two or three 
 hundred lines, and then do you try the nostrums 
 upon Stuart in any way you please. If they go 
 down, I will try more. In fact, if I got, or could but 
 get, fifty pounds a year only, in addition to what I 
 have, I should live in affluence." By dint of hard 
 work, much against the grain, he contrived during 
 F
 
 66 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 the year that followed to make double the hoped-for 
 sum ; but humour and fancy produced to order could 
 not but fail sooner or later. It came to an end some 
 time in 1803. "The best and the worst to me," he 
 writes to Manning in this year (Laml> ruivly dates a 
 letter), " is that I have given up two guineas a week 
 at the Post, and regained my health and spirits, which 
 were upon the wane. I grew sick, and Stuart unsitis- 
 fied. Ludisti satis, tempus abire est. I must cut closer, 
 that's all." 
 
 \Yhile writing for the newspapers, he had not 
 allowed worthier ambitions to cool. He was still 
 thinking of success in very different fields. As curly 
 as the year 1799 he had submitted to Coleridge and 
 Southey a five-act drama in blank verse, with the 
 title of Pride's Cure, afterwards changed to John 
 jroodvU. His two friends had urgently dissuaded 
 him from publishing, and though he followed this 
 advice, ho had not abandoned the hope of seeing it 
 one day upon the stage, and at Christmas of that year 
 had sent it to John Kemble, then manager of I>mi y 
 Lane. Nearly a year later, having heard nothing in 
 the meantime from the theatre on the subject, he 
 applied to Kemble to know his fate. The answer 
 was returned that the manuscript was lost, and Lamb 
 had to furnish a second copy. Later, Kemble went 
 so far as to grant the author a personal interview, 
 but the final result was that the play was declined as 
 unsuitable. 
 
 That Lamb should ever have dreamed of any other
 
 iv DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CRITICISM 67 
 
 result may well surprise even those who have some 
 experience of the attitude of a young author to his 
 first drama. John Woodml has no quality that could 
 have made its success on the stage possible. It shows 
 no trace of constructive skill, and the character- 
 drawing is of the crudest. By a strange perverseness 
 of choice, Lamb laid the scene of his drama, written 
 in a language for the most part closely imitated from 
 certain Elizabethan models, in the period of the 
 Kestoration, and with a strange carelessness introduced 
 side by side with the imagery and rhythm of Fletcher 
 and Massinger a diction often ludicrously incongruous. 
 Perhaps the most striking feature of the play, regarded 
 as a serious effort, is the entire want of keeping in the 
 dialogue. Certain passages have been often quoted, 
 such as that on which Lamb evidently prided himself 
 most, describing the amusements of the exiled baronet 
 and his son in the forest of Sherwood 
 
 To see the sun to bed, and to arise 
 Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes, 
 Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him 
 With all his fires and travelling glories round him. 
 
 To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air, 
 Go eddying round, and small birds, how they fare, 
 When mother autumn fills their beaks with corn 
 Filched from the careless Amalthea's horn. 
 
 They serve to show how closely Lamb's fancy and 
 his ear were attuned to the music of Shakspeare and
 
 68 CHARLES LAMP. CHAP. 
 
 Shukspeare's contemporaries; but the allusion is 
 suddenly broken by scraps of dialogue sounding the 
 depths of bathos 
 
 Servant, Gentlemen, the fireworks are iva-ly. 
 Pint Gent. What be they ? 
 
 Lovell. The work of London artiste, which our host has 
 provided in honour of this day. 
 
 Or by such an image as that with which the play 
 concludes, of the penitent John Woodvil, kneeling on 
 the "hassock" in the "family-pew" of St Mary 
 Ottery, in the " sweet shire of Devon." 
 
 Lamb was not deterred by his failure with the 
 managers from publishing his drama. It appeared 
 in a small duodecimo in 1802; and when, sixteen 
 years later, he included it in the first collected edition 
 of his writings, dedicated to Coleridge, he was still 
 able to look with a parent's tenderness upon this child 
 of his early fancy. "When I wrote John /FiWci/,'' 
 he says, "Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, 
 were then a first Inv, and from what I was so freshly 
 conversant in, what wonder if my language imper- 
 ceptibly took a tinge?" This expresses in fact the 
 real significance of the achievement Though it is 
 impossible seriously to weigh the merits of John 
 fPoodvil as a drama, it is yet of interest as the result 
 of the studies of a young man of fine taste and inde- 
 pendent judgment in a field of English literature 
 which had lain long unexplored. Within a few years 
 Charles Lamb was to contribute, by more etl
 
 IV DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CRITICISM 69 
 
 methods, to the revived study of the Elizabethan 
 drama, but in the meantime he was doing something, 
 even in John Woodvtt, to overthrow the despotic 
 conventionalities of eighteenth -century "poetic dic- 
 tion," and to reaccustom the ear to the very different 
 harmonies of an older time. 
 
 John Woodvil was noticed in the Edinburgh Review 
 for April 1803. Lamb might have been at that early 
 date too insignificant, personally, to be worth the 
 powder and shot of Jeffrey and his friends, but he 
 was already known as the associate of Coleridge and 
 Sou they, and it was this circumstance as the con- 
 cluding words of the review rather unguardedly admit 
 that marked his little volume for the slaughter. 
 He had been already held up to ridicule in the pages 
 of the Anti- Jacobin, as sharing the revolutionary 
 sympathies of Coleridge and Southey. It is certainly 
 curious that Lamb, who never "meddled with politics," 
 home or foreign, any more than the Anti-Jacobin's 
 knife-grinder himself, should have his name embalmed 
 in that periodical as a leading champion of French 
 Socialism : 
 
 Coleridge and Southey, Lloyd and Lamb and Co., 
 Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepeaux. 
 
 There was abundant opportunity in Lamb's play 
 for the use of that scourge which the Edinburgh 
 Review may be said to have first invented as a critical 
 instrument. Plot and characters, and large portions 
 of the dialogue, lent themselves excellently to the
 
 70 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 purposes of critical banter, and it was easy to show 
 that Lamb had few qualifications for the task he had 
 undertaken. As he himself observed in his essay on 
 Hogarth : " It is a secret well known to the professors 
 of the art and mystery of criticism, to insist ujxm 
 what they do not find in a man's works, and to pass 
 over in silence what they do." It was open to the 
 reviewer to note, as even Lamb's friend Southey 
 noted, the "exquisite silliness of the story," but it 
 did not enter into his plan to detect, as Southey had 
 done, the " exquisite beauty " of much of the jxx;try. 
 The reason why it is worth while to dwell for a 
 moment on this forgotten review (not, by the way, 
 by Jeffrey, although Lamb's friends seem generally 
 to have attributed it to the editor's own hand) is that 
 it shows how much Lamb was in advance of his 
 reviewer in familiarity with our older literature. 
 The review is a piece of pleasantry, of which it would 
 be absurd to complain, but it is the pleasantry of an 
 ignorant man. The writer affects to regard the play 
 as a specimen of the primeval drama. "We have 
 still among us," he says, " men of the age of Thespis," 
 and declares that "the ti;i_<<lv of Mr. Lamb may 
 indeed be fairly considered as supplying the first of 
 those lost links which connect the improvements of 
 J Plains with the commencement of the art.'' 
 Talfourd expresses wonder that a young critic sin mid 
 "seize on a little eighteenjMjnny book, simply 
 printed, without any pivf.in- : maki- dalwrate 
 mrrrimcnt of its outline, and, ^ivin^ no hint of it:;
 
 iv DRAMATIC AUTHOKSHIP AND CRITICISM 71 
 
 containing one profound thought or happy expression, 
 leave the reader of the review at a loss to suggest a 
 motive for noticing such vapid absurdities." But 
 there is really little cause for such wonder. The one 
 feature of importance in the little drama is that it 
 here and there imitates with much skill the imagery 
 and the rhythm of a family of dramatists whom 
 the world had been content entirely to forget for 
 nearly two centuries. There is no reason to suppose 
 that Lamb's reviewer had any acquaintance with these 
 dramatists. The interest of the review consists in the 
 evidence it affords of a general ignorance, even among 
 educated men, which Lamb was to do more than any 
 man of his time to dispel. The passage about the 
 sports in the Forest, which set William Godwin (who 
 met with it somewhere as an extract) searching through 
 Beaumont and Fletcher to find, probably conveyed no 
 idea whatever to the Edinburgh Eeviewer, save that 
 which he honestly confessed, that here was a specimen 
 of versification which had been long ago improved 
 from off the face of the earth. 
 
 In the summer of 1802 Charles and his sister spent 
 their holiday, three weeks, with Coleridge at Keswick. 
 The letters to Coleridge and Manning referring to 
 this visit show pleasantly that there was something 
 of affectation in the disparaging tone with which 
 Charles was wont to speak of the charms of scenery. 
 Though on occasion he would make his friends smile 
 by telling that when he ascended Skiddaw he was 
 obliged, in self-defence, to revert in memory to the
 
 72 i 1IA1ILKS J.AMB . IIAI-. 
 
 shop in St. Martin's Lane, it is evident 
 fn>m his enthusiastic words to Manning tliat the Lake 
 scenery had moved and delighted him. " Coleridge 
 dwells," he writes to Manning, "upon a small hill by 
 the side of Keswick, in a comfortable house, quite 
 enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains : great 
 floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all 
 couchant and asleep. We got in in the evening, 
 travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst 
 of a gorgeous sunset which transmuted all the moun- 
 tains into colours, purple, etc. etc. We thought \ve 
 had got into Fairyland. But that went off (as it 
 never came again ; while we stayed we had no more 
 fine sunsets) ; and we entered Coleridge's comfortable 
 study just in the dusk, when the mountains were all 
 dark with clouds upon their heads. Such an impres 
 sion I never received from objects of sight before, nor 
 do I suppose that I can ever again. Gloriou> 
 tures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, etc., I never shall 
 forget ye, how ye lay about that night, like an en 
 trenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed for the night, 
 but promising that ye were to be seen in the iimni 
 ing." And later, " We have elaml>ered up to the top 
 of Skiddaw, and I have waded up the bed of L"d-.iv. 
 In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a 
 tiling as that which tourists call rtiuntl<; which I 
 very much suspected before." And again, of Skid 
 daw, "Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop 
 of it, with a prospect of mountains all about and 
 about, making you giddy : and then Scotland afar off,
 
 IV DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CRITICISM 73 
 
 and the border countries so famous in song and ballad ! 
 It was a day that will stand out like a mountain, I 
 am sure, in my life." 
 
 It is pleasant to read of these intervals of bracing 
 air, both to body and mind, in the story of the brother 
 and sister, for the picture of the home life in the 
 Temple lodging at this time, drawn by the same frank 
 hand, is anything but cheerful. This very letter to 
 Manning (who was apparently spending his holiday 
 in Switzerland) goes on to hint of grave anxieties and 
 responsibilities belonging to the life in London. " My 
 habits are changing, I think, i.e. from drunk to sober. 
 Whether I shall be happier or not remains to be 
 proved. I shall certainly be more happy in a morn- 
 ing ; but whether I shall not sacrifice the fat, and the 
 marrow, and the kidneys i.e. the night, glorious 
 care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours 
 wine into our mortifications, changes the scene from 
 indifferent and flat to bright and brilliant 1 Man- 
 ning, if I should have formed a diabolical resolution 
 by the time you come to England, of not admitting 
 any spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my 
 guest on such shameworthy terms? Is life, with 
 such limitations, worth trying 1 The truth is that 
 my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about my 
 house, who consume me. This is a pitiful tale to be 
 read at St. Gothard, but it is just now nearest my 
 heart." 
 
 The tale is indeed a sad one, and we have no 
 reason to suppose it less true than pitiful. There is
 
 74 < IIAKI.I-S I. \.MIJ CHAI-. 
 
 no concealment on the part of Laml> himself, or his 
 sister, or of those who knew him most intimately, 
 of the fact that from an early ago Charles fiin<l in 
 wine, or its equivalent-, ;i stimulus that relieved him 
 under the pressure of shyness, anxiety, and low 
 spirits, and that the habit remained with him till tin- 
 end of his life. It is not easy to deal with this 
 "fr.iilty" (to borrow Talfourd's expression) in Laml>, 
 without falling into an apologetic tone, suggestive 
 of the much-abused proverb connecting excuse with 
 accusation. But it is the biographer's task to account 
 for these things, if not to excuse them, and at this 
 period there is not wanting evidence of haul trials 
 attending the life of the brother and sister which may 
 well prompt a treatment of the subject the reverse 
 of harsh. There is a correspondence extant of Mary 
 I, ;imlt with Miss Stoddart, afterwards the wife of 
 William Hazlitt, which throws much sad light on tin- 
 history of the joint home during these years. The 
 pressure of poverty was being keenly felt. " I hoj>e, 
 when I write next," she says, early in l>ul, "I shall 
 be able to tell you ( 'harles has begun something 
 which will produce a little money : for it is not well 
 to be very poor, which we certainly are at this present 
 \\iiting." Charles's engagement as contributor of 
 squibs and occasional paragraphs to the Mmi. 
 had come to an end, just before this letter of Mary's : 
 but poverty was not the worst of the home tn>u)>lt -. 
 It is too clear that both hnithcr and sister sufVen-il 
 from constant and harassing depression, an>l that
 
 IV DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CKITICISM 75 
 
 their heroic determination to live entirely for each 
 other only made matters worse. "It has been sad 
 and heavy times with us lately," Mary writes in the 
 year following (1805). "When I am pretty well, his 
 low spirits throw me back again ; and when he begins 
 to get a little cheerful, then I do the same kind office 
 for him;" and again, "Do not say anything when 
 you write of our low spirits it will vex Charles. 
 You would laugh, or you would cry, perhaps both, 
 to see us sit together, looking at each other with long 
 and rueful faces, and saying ' How do you do ?' and 
 'How do you do?' and then we fall a crying, and 
 say we will be better on the morrow. He says we 
 are like toothache and his friend gum-boil, which 
 though a kind of ease, is but an uneasy kind of ease, 
 a comfort of rather an uncomfortable sort." In the 
 following year we gather that Charles, still bent on 
 success in the drama as the most likely means of adding 
 to his income, had begun to write a farce, and finding 
 the gloom here described intolerable, in such an 
 association, had taken a cheap lodging hard by to 
 which he might retire, and pursue his work without 
 distraction. But the more utter solitude proved as 
 intolerable as the depressing influences of home. 
 " The lodging," writes Mary Lamb, " is given up, and 
 here he is again Charles, I mean as unsettled and as 
 undetermined as ever. When he went to the poor 
 lodging, after the holidays I told you he had taken, 
 he could not endure the solitariness of them, and I 
 had no rest for the sole of my foot till I promised to
 
 76 riiAKI.Ks I. AMI: .HAP 
 
 believe his solemn protestations that he could and 
 would write as well at homo as there." 
 
 There is a remark in this same letter, hardly more 
 touching than it is indicative of the clear-sighted 
 wisdom of this true-hearted woman. "Our love for 
 each other," she writes, " has been the torment of our 
 lives hitherto. I am most seriously intending to bend 
 the whole force of my mind to counteract this, and I 
 think I see some prospect of success." It doubtless 
 was this strong affection, working by ill-considered 
 means, that made much of the unhappiness of Charles 
 Lamb's life. His sense of what he owed to his sister, 
 who had been mother and sister in one, his admira- 
 tion for her character, and his profound pity for her 
 affliction, made him resolve that no other tie, no other 
 taste or pleasure, should interfere with the prime 
 duty of cleaving to her as long as life should last. 
 But this exclusive devotion was not a good thing for 
 either. They wanted some strong human interests 
 from outside to assist them to bear those of home. 
 They were both fond of society. In their later more 
 prosperous days they saw much society of a brilliant 
 and notable sort, but already Charles had made the 
 discovery that "open house" involved temptation of 
 a kind he had not learnt to resist The little suppers, 
 at home and with friends elsewhere, meant too much 
 punch and too much tobacco, and the inevitable sequel 
 of depression and moroseness on the morrow. u \\< 
 came home v TV *moky and drinky last night," is the 
 frequent burden of Miss Lamb's letters. And so it
 
 IV DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CRITICISM 77 
 
 came to pass that his social life was spent too much 
 between these two extremes the companionship of 
 that one sister, anxiet}^ for whose health was always 
 pressing, and whose inherited instincts were too like 
 his own, and the convivialities which banished melan- 
 choly for a while and set his fancy and his speech at 
 liberty, but too often did not bear the morning's reflec- 
 tion. He needed at this time fewer companions, 
 but more friends. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, 
 Manning, were all out of London, and only in his 
 scanty holidays, or on occasion of their rare visits to 
 town, could he take counsel with them. 
 
 One pleasant gleam of sunshine among the driving 
 clouds of those years of anxiety is afforded in the 
 lines on Hester Savory. During the three years that 
 Lamb lived at Pentonville (1797-1800), he had fallen 
 in love (for the second and last time) with a young 
 Quakeress. 1 In sending the verses to Manning (in 
 Paris) in 1803, Lamb recalls the old attachment as 
 one his friend would remember having heard him 
 mention. However ardent it may have been, it was 
 presumably without hope of requital, for Lamb 
 admits that he had never spoken to the lady in his 
 life. He may have met her daily in his walks to and 
 
 1 In a note to my Letters of Charles Lamb I have printed 
 some information about this lady, with which Miss Emma 
 Savory, of Blackheath, a niece of Hester, kindly supplied me. 
 "She (Hester) was the eldest sister of my father, A. B. Savory, 
 and lived with him and his sisters, Anna and Martha, at Penton- 
 ville. She married Charles Stoke Dudley, and died, eight months 
 after her marriage, of fever."
 
 78 ril.VIM.ES I..VMB CHAP. 
 
 from the office, or have watched her week by 
 on her way to that Quaker's meeting he has so 
 lovingly described elsewhere. And now, only a 
 month before, she had died, and Lamb's true vein. 
 unspoiled by squibs and jxiragraphs written to order 
 for party journals, flows once more in its native 
 purity and sweetness : 
 
 When maidens such as Hester die, 
 Their place ye may not well supply, 
 Though ye among a thousand try 
 
 With vain endeavour. 
 A month or more hath she been dead, 
 Yet cannot I by force be led 
 To think upon flie wormy bed 
 
 And her together. 
 
 A springy motion in her gait, 
 
 A rising step, did indicate 
 
 Of pride and joy no common rate 
 
 That flushed her spirit 
 I know not by what name beside 
 I shall it call ; if 'twas not pride, 
 It was a joy to that allied 
 
 She did inherit. 
 
 Her parents held the Quaker rule 
 Wliirli <loth the human feeling cool: 
 But she was trained in Nature's school ; 
 
 Nature ha<l Me-t her. 
 A waking eye, a prying mind, 
 A heart tli.it .-tirs, is hard to 1-iml :
 
 iv DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CRITICISM 79 
 
 A hawk's keen sight ye cannot blind, 
 Ye could not Hester. 
 
 My sprightly neighbour ! gone before 
 To that unknown and silent shore, 
 Shall we not meet ? as heretofore, 
 
 Some summer morning, 
 When from thy cheerful eyes a ray 
 Hath struck a bliss upon the day, 
 A bliss that would not go away ; 
 
 A sweet forewarning I 1 
 
 These charming verses are themselves a "sweet 
 forewarning " of happier times to come. New friends 
 were at hand and new interests in literature were 
 soon to bring a little cheerful relief to the monotony 
 of the Temple lodging. We have already heard 
 something of a play in preparation. The first 
 intimation of Lamb's resolve to tempt dramatic for- 
 tune once again is in a letter to Wordsworth, in Sep- 
 tember 1805. "I have done nothing," he writes, 
 " since the beginning of last year, when I lost my 
 newspaper job, and having had a long idleness, I 
 must do something, or we shall get very poor. 
 Sometimes I think of a farce, but hitherto all. schemes 
 have gone off; an idle brag or two of an evening, 
 vapouring out of a pipe, and going off in the morning ; 
 
 1 The copy of this poem, sent to Manning in Lamb's most 
 careful and clerkly writing, is in my possession. I have care- 
 fully reproduced Lamb's own punctuation. That of the last 
 stanza is specially worth attention, as making the sense clearer 
 than in the lines as usually printed.
 
 80 < HVU.K^ IAMB 
 
 but now I have bid farewell to my ' sweet enemy ' 
 tobacco, as you will sec in the next page, I shall 
 perhaps set nobly to work. Hang work !" He did 
 set to work, in good heart, during the six months 
 that followed. Mary Lamb's letters contain frequent 
 references to the farce in progress, and before Mid- 
 summer 1806 it was completed, and accepted by the 
 proprietors of Drury Lane. The farce was the cele- 
 brated Mr. H. 
 
 No episode of Lamb's history is better known than 
 the production, and the summary failure of this jeu 
 d 'esprit. That it failed is no matter for surprise, and 
 most certainly none for regret. Though it had the 
 advantage, in its leading character, of the talent of 
 Elliston, the best light-comedian of his day, the 
 slightness of the interest (dealing with the inconveni- 
 ences befalling a gentleman who is ashamed to confess 
 that his name is Hogsflesh) was too patent for the 
 best acting to contend against. Crabb Robinson, one 
 of Lamb's more recent friends, accompanied the 
 brother and sister to the first and only i>erformance, 
 and received the impression that the audience resented 
 tin- vulgarity of the name, when it was at last revealed, 
 rather than the flini-im-ss of the plot. But the latter 
 is quite sufficient to account for what happened. The 
 curtain fell amid a storm of hisses, in which Lamb is 
 said to have taken a conspicuous share. In d coil, his 
 genuine critical faculty must have come to hi-; deliver 
 ance when he thus viewed his own work from the 
 position of an outsider. He expresses no surprise at
 
 iv DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CRITICISM 81 
 
 the result, after the first few utterances of natural 
 disappointment. The mortification must have been 
 considerable. The brother and sister had looked 
 forward to a success. They sorely needed the money 
 it might have brought them, and Charles's deep-seated 
 love of all things dramatic made success in that field 
 a much cherished hope. But he bore his failure, as 
 he bore all his disappointments in life, with a cheerful 
 sweetness. Rewrites to Hazlitt: "Mary is a little 
 cut at the ill-success of Mr. H., which came out last 
 night and failed. 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 AVC must 
 thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces." It 
 must be admitted that Mr. H. is not much better in 
 reading than it was found in the acting. Its humour, 
 consisting largely of puns and other verbal pleasantries, 
 exhibits little or nothing of Lamb's native vein, and 
 the dialogue is too often laboriously imitated from 
 the conventional comedy-dialogue then in vogue. But 
 even had this been different, the lack of constructive 
 ability already shown in John Woodvil must have made 
 success as a writer for the stage quite beyond his 
 reach. 
 
 He was on safer ground, though not perhaps 
 working so thoroughly con amore, in another literary 
 enterprise of this time. In 1805 he had made the 
 acquaintance of William Hazlitt, and Hazlitt had 
 introduced him to William Godwin. Godwin had 
 started, as his latest venture, a series of books for 
 G
 
 82 CHAItLES I-AMD rim-. 
 
 children, to which he himself contributed under tin- 
 name of Edward Baldwin. Lamb, writing to his 
 friend Manning, in May 1806, thus describes a joint 
 task in which he and his sister were engaged in 
 connection with this scheme : " She is doing for 
 Godwin's bookseller twenty of Shakspeare's plays. 
 to be made into children's tales. Six are already 
 done by her, to wit, The Tem).<t, Jf'infer's Tale, Mid- 
 summer Night, Much Ado, Two Gentlemen of Verona, 
 and Cymbeline; and the Merchant of Venice is in 
 forwardness. I have done Othello and Macbeth, and 
 mean to do all the tragedies. I think it will be 
 popular among the little people, besides money. It's 
 to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done thum 
 capitally, I think you'd think." Mary herself 
 supplements this account in a way that makes 
 curiously vivid to us the homely realities of their 
 joint life. She writes about the same time : " Charles 
 has written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and has begun 
 Hamlet. You would like to see us, as we often sit 
 writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), 
 like Hernia and Helena, in the Midsummer JViV//</'.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" Writing these Tabs from 
 Shakspeare was no doubt task-work to the brother and 
 sister, but it was task-work on a congenial theme, and 
 one for which they had special qualifications. They
 
 iv DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CRITICISM 83 
 
 had, to start with, a profound and intimate acquaint- 
 ance with their original, which set them at an infinite 
 distance from the usual compilers of such books for 
 children. They had, moreover, command of a style, 
 Wordsworthian in its simplicity and purity, that 
 enabled them to write down to the level of a child's 
 understanding, without any appearance of condescen- 
 sion. The very homeliness of the style may easily 
 divert attention from the rare critical faculty, the 
 fine analysis of character, that marks the writers' 
 treatment of the several plays. It is no wonder that 
 the publisher in announcing a subsequent edition was 
 able to boast that a book designed for young children 
 had been found suitable for those of more advanced 
 age. There is, indeed, no better introduction to the 
 study of Shakspeare than these Tales no better 
 initiation into the mind of Shakspeare, and into the 
 subtleties of his language and rhythm. For the ear 
 of both Charles and Mary Lamb had been trained on 
 the cadences of Elizabethan English, and they were 
 able throughout to weave the very words of Shak- 
 speare into their narrative without producing any 
 effect of discrepancy between the old and the new. 
 
 The Tales were published in January 1807, and 
 were a success, a second edition appearing in the 
 following year. One result of this success was a 
 commission from Godwin to make another version of 
 a great classic for the benefit of children, the story of 
 the Odyssey. Lamb was no Greek scholar, but he had 
 been, like Keats, stirred by the rough vigour of
 
 84 CIIAl;l.KS LAMP. CHAT. 
 
 ( 'hapman's translation. "Chapman is divine," he 
 said afterwards to Bernard Barton, " and my abridge- 
 ment has not quite emptied him of his divinity." 
 And the few words of preface with which he modestly 
 introduced his little book as a supplement to that 
 well-known school classic the Adventures of Teleniachtts, 
 shows that the moral value of this record of human 
 vicissitude had moved him not less than the variety 
 of the adventure. " The picture which he exhibits," 
 he writes, " is that of a brave man struggling with 
 adversity; by a wise use of events, and with an 
 inimitable presence of mind under difficulties, forcing 
 out a way for himself through the severest trials to 
 which human life can be exposed; with enemies 
 natural and supernatural surrounding him on all 
 sides. The agents in this tale, besides men and 
 women, are giants, enchanters, sirens; things whirh 
 denote external force or internal temptations, the 
 twofold danger which a wise fortitude must expect 
 to encounter in its course through this world." We 
 cannot be wrong in judging that Charles Lamb had 
 seen in this "wisdom of the ancients" an image of 
 sirens and enchanters, of trials and disciplines, that 
 beset the lonely dweller at home not less surely than 
 the wanderer from city to city, and had found therein 
 something of a cordial and a tonic for himself. No 
 one felt more repugnance than did Lamb to the 
 appending of a formal moral to a work of art, to use 
 his own comparison, like the "God send the good 
 ship safe into harbour" at the end of a bill of lading.
 
 iv DKAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CEITICISM 85 
 
 But it was to be his special note as a critic that he 
 could not keep his human compassion from blending 
 with his judgment of every work of human imagina- 
 tion. If his strength as a critic was and remains for 
 us as the " strength of ten," it was because his heart 
 was pure. 
 
 To what masterly purpose he had been long train- 
 ing this faculty of criticism he was now about to show. 
 The letter to Manning, which tells of his Adventures 
 of Ulysses, announces a more important undertaking 
 apparently a commission from the firm of Longman 
 Specimens of English Dramatic Poets contemporary 
 with ShaJcspeare. " Specimens," he writes, " are be- 
 coming fashionable. We have Specimens of Ancient 
 English Poets, Specimens of Modern English Poets, 
 Specimens of Ancient English Prose Writers, without 
 end. They used to be called 'Beauties.' You have 
 seen Beauties of ShaJcspeare ? so have many people that 
 never saw any beauties in Shakspeare." But Lamb's 
 method was to have little in common with that of the 
 unfortunate Dr. Dodd. " It is to have notes," is the 
 brief mention of that feature of the collection which 
 was at once to place their author in the first rank of 
 critics. The commentary, often extending to no more 
 than a dozen or twenty lines appended to each scene, 
 or each author chosen for illustration, was of a kind 
 new to a generation accustomed to the Variorum 
 school of annotator. It contains no philology, no 
 antiquarianism, no discussion of difficult or corrupt 
 passages. It takes its character from the principle set
 
 86 CHARLES LA Mi: CIIAP. 
 
 forth in the Preface on which the selection of scenes 
 is made : 
 
 The kind of extracts which I have sought after have 
 been, not so much passages of wit and humour though 
 the old plays are rich in such as scenes of passion, some- 
 times of the deepest quality, interesting situations, serious 
 descriptions, that which is more nearly allied to poetry 
 than to wit, and to tragic rather than comic poetry. The 
 plays which I have made choice of have been with few 
 exceptions those which treat of human life and manners, 
 rather than masques and Arcadian Pastorals, with their 
 train of abstractions, unimpassioned deities, passionate 
 mortals, Claius, and Medorus, and Ainintas, and Amaryllis. 
 My leading design has been to illustrate what may be 
 called the moral sense of our ancestors. To show in what 
 manner they felt when they placed themselves by tin- 
 li\vtT of imagination in trying situations, in the conflicts 
 of duty and passion, or the strife of contending duties ; 
 what Fort of loves and enmities theirs were ; how their 
 griefs were tempered, and their full-swoln joys abated ; how 
 much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contem- 
 poraries, and how far in his divine mind and manners he 
 surpassed them and all mankind. 
 
 The very idea of the collection was a bold one. 
 When we cast our eye over the list of now familiar 
 names, Marlowe and Peclo, Marston, Chapman, Ford, 
 and Webster, from whom Lamb chose his scenes, we 
 must not forget that he was ploa-lin^ their merits 
 before a public which knew them only as names, if it 
 knew them at all. With the one exception of Shak-
 
 IV DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CRITICISM 87 
 
 speare, the dramatists of the period, between "the 
 middle of Elizabeth's reign and the close of the reign 
 of Charles I.," were unknown to the general reader of 
 the year 1808. Shakspeare, indeed, had a permanent 
 stage-existence that best of commentaries which fine 
 acting supplies, to which Lamb himself had been from 
 childhood so largely indebted. But for those who 
 studied him in the closet there was no aid to his in- 
 terpretation save such as was supplied by the very 
 unilluminating notes of Johnson or Malone. And 
 this circumstance must be taken into account if we 
 would rightly estimate the genius of Lamb. As a 
 critic he had no master it might almost be said, no 
 predecessor. He was the inventor of his own art. 
 As the friend of Coleridge, he might have heard 
 something of that school of dramatic criticism of 
 which Lessing was the founder, but there is little 
 trace of any such influence in Lamb's own critical 
 method. And though, three years later, Coleridge 
 was to make another contribution of value to the same 
 cause, in the Lectures on Shakspeare delivered at the 
 London Philosophical Society, it is likely that his 
 obligations were at least as great to Lamb, as those of 
 Lamb had ever been, in the same field, to Coleridge. 
 
 The suggestion in the Preface, already cited, of 
 Shakspeare as the representative dramatist, the stand- 
 ard by which his contemporaries must be content to be 
 judged, is amply followed up in the notes, and gives 
 a unity of its own to a collection so miscellaneous. I 
 may refer, as examples, to the masterly distinction
 
 88 CHARLES LAM R .HAP. 
 
 drawn between the use made of the supernatural by 
 Middleton in the Witch, and by Shakspeare in Ufacbeih, 
 and again to the contrast indicated between the Dirge 
 in Webster's White Devil and the "Ditty which re- 
 minds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the Tempest" 
 " as that is of the water, watery ; so is this of the 
 earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of foi-lin^ 
 which seems to resolve itself into the elements which 
 it contemplates," a criticism which could only have 
 been conceived by one who was himself a poet How 
 admirably again does he draw attention (in a note on 
 the Merry Devil of Ediivmtnn) to that feature of Shak- 
 speare's genius which perhaps more than any other is 
 forced upon the reader's mind as he turns from passage 
 to passage in this collection : " This scene has much 
 of Shakspeare's manner in the sweetness and good- 
 naturedness of it It seems written to make the 
 reader happy. Few of our dramatists or novelists 
 have attended enough to this. They torture and 
 wound us abundantly. They are economists only in 
 delight" Nothing, again, can be more profound th;m 
 his remark on the elaborate and ostentatious saint li- 
 ness of Ordella (in Fletcher's Thierry and Theodoret). 
 " Shaksj>eare had nothing of this contortion in his 
 mind, none of that craving after romantic incidents, 
 and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which 
 I think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility.'' 
 And yet though Lamb's fine judgment approved the 
 fidelity to nature, and the artistic self-control which 
 he here emphasises in his great model, it is clear that
 
 iv DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND CRITICISM 89 
 
 the audacious conceptions, both of character and 
 situation, in which writers such as Ford and Tourneur 
 indulged, had no small fascination for him. As he 
 recalled the dreary types of virtue, the " insipid level- 
 ling morality to which the modern stage is tied down," 
 he turned with joy as from a heated saloon into the 
 fresh air to the "vigorous passions" the "virtues 
 clad in flesh and blood," with which the old dramatists 
 presented him. And this joy in the presentment of 
 the naked human soul is felt throughout all his criti- 
 cisms on the more terrible scenes of Shakspeare's 
 successors. His " ears tingle," or his eyes fill, or his 
 heart leaps within him, as Calantha dies of her Broken 
 Heart, or Webster's Duchess yields slowly to the 
 torture. Hence it is that Lamb's criticism as often 
 takes the form of a study of human life, as of the 
 dramatist's art. And hence also the effect he often 
 leaves of having indulged in praise too great for the 
 occasion. There is, moreover, another reason for this 
 last-named result, which was inseparable from Lamb's 
 method. No two dramatists can be measured by 
 comparing passage with passage, scene with scene. 
 Shakspeare and Marlowe cannot be compared or con- 
 trasted by setting the death of Edward II side by 
 side with that of Richard II. Drama must be put 
 side by side with drama. Lamb does not indeed 
 suggest, by anything that he says, that the rank of a 
 dramatist can be decided by passages or extracts. 
 Only it did not enter into his scheme to dwell upon 
 that supreme art of construction, and that highest
 
 90 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. IV 
 
 gift of characterisation, which are needed to make 
 the perfect dramatist In "profoundness of single 
 thoughts," in "richness of imagery," in "abundance 
 of illustration," he could produce passage after passage 
 from Shakspeare's contemporaries that evinced genius 
 nearly allied to Shakspeare's ; but of that " fundamen- 
 tal excellence " which " distinguishes the artist from 
 the mere amateur, that power of execution which 
 creates, forms, and constitutes," it was not possible 
 for him to supply example. And this reservation 
 the student must be prepared to make who would 
 approach the study of the Elizabethan Drama by the 
 aid of Charles Lamb's specimens. 
 
 But, whatever qualification must be interposed, it 
 is certain that the publication of these extracts, and 
 the accompanying commentary, has a well-defined 
 place in the poetical renascence that marked the early 
 years of this century. The revived study of the old 
 English dramatists other than Shakspeare dates 
 from this publication. Coleridge had not yet begun 
 to lecture, nor Hazlitt to write, and it was not till 
 some twenty years later that Mr. Dyce began his 
 different, but not less important, labours in the same 
 field. To Lamb must be allowed the credit of having 
 first recalled attention to a range of poetical excellence, 
 in forgetfulness of which English poetry had too long 
 pined and starved. It was to these mountain-heights 
 of inspiration not to the cultivated lowlands of the 
 eighteenth century that poetry was to turn her eyes 
 for help.
 
 CHAPTEE V 
 
 INNER TEMPLE LANE PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 
 (18091817) 
 
 TALFOURD made the acquaintance of Charles Lamb 
 early in the year 1815, and has recorded the impression 
 left by his appearance and manner at that time in 
 words which at this stage of our memoir it may be 
 convenient to quote. Lamb has been fortunate in his 
 verbal portrayers, if not in the attempts of the 
 painter's art to convey a true idea of his outward 
 man. Leigh Hunt has declared that "there never 
 was a true portrait of Lamb " and those who take 
 the trouble to examine in succession the half-dozen 
 likenesses that are in existence are obliged to admit 
 that it is difficult to derive from them any consistent 
 idea of his features and expression. But it so happens 
 that we have full-length portraits of him drawn by 
 other hands, which more than compensate for this 
 want. Poets, critics, and humorists, of kindred 
 genius, have left on record how Charles Lamb 
 appeared to them ; and though the various accounts
 
 92 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 bear, as might be expected, the strong impress of 
 their writers' individuality, and though each naturally 
 gives most prominence to the traits that struck him 
 most, the final impression left is one of agreement, in 
 remarkable degree. We have descriptions of Lamb, 
 all possessing points of great interest, by Talfourd, 
 Procter, Hood, Patmore, and others, and from these 
 it is possible to learn how their subject looked and 
 spoke and bore himself, with a precision and vividness 
 that we are seldom in such cases allowed to enjoy. I 
 have the advantage of being able to confirm their 
 accounts by the testimony of a living witness. 1 Mr. 
 James Crossley, of Manchester, has related to me his 
 recollections of more than one interview which he 
 had with Lamb, nearly sixty years ago, and has kindly 
 allowed me to make use of them. 
 
 Talfourd's reminiscence, committed to writing 
 shortly after Lamb's death, if slightly idealised l>y liis 
 own poetic temperament, is not for that reason a less 
 satisfactory basis on which to form a conception of 
 Charles Lamb's appearance. "Methinks I see him 
 before me now, as he apjxjured then, and as he con- 
 tinued with scarcely any perceptible alteration to me, 
 during the twenty years of intimacy which followed, 
 and were closed by his death. A light frame, so 
 fragile that it seemed as if a breath would overthrow 
 it, clad in clerk-like black, was surmounted by a lu-iul 
 of form and expression the most noble and sweet 
 His black hair curled crisply al><ut. an c\]i.milril 
 1 Mr. Crossley clio<l not long nffor those words were writt. n.
 
 V PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 93 
 
 forehead ; his eyes, softly brown, twinkled with 
 varying expression, though the prevalent feeling was 
 sad; and the nose slightly curved, and delicately 
 carved at the nostril, with the lower outline of the 
 face regularly oval, completed a head which was finely 
 placed on the shoulders, and gave importance and 
 even dignity to a diminutive and shadowy stem. 
 Who shall describe his countenance, catch its 
 quivering sweetness, and fix it for ever in words? 
 There are none, alas, to answer the vain desire of 
 friendship. Deep thought, striving with humour; 
 the lines of suffering wreathed into cordial mirth; and 
 a smile of painful sweetness, present an image to the 
 mind it can as little describe as lose. His personal 
 appearance and manner are not unfitly characterised 
 by what he himself says in one of his letters to 
 Manning of Braham, 'a compound of the Jew, the 
 gentleman, and the angel.'" 
 
 From this tender and charming sketch it is instruc- 
 tive to turn to the rude etching on copper made by 
 Mr. Brook Pulham from life, in the year 1825, which, 
 in the opinion of Lamb's biographers (and Mr. Crossley 
 confirmed their judgment), gives a better idea than all 
 other existing portraits of Charles Lamb's outward 
 man. The small stature he was very noticeably 
 below the middle height the head apparently out of 
 proportion to the slender frame, the Jewish cast of 
 nose, the long black hair, the figure dwindling down 
 to " almost immaterial legs," the tight-fitting clerk- 
 like suit of black, terminating in gaiters and straps,
 
 94 ( IIAI;I.KS I.A.MI: tour, 
 
 all these appear in Mr. Pulham's etching in >u<-h bold 
 realism that the portrait might easily pass for a 
 caricature, were it not confirmed in all its details by 
 other authorities. Mr. Crossley recalled with perfect 
 distinctness the aspect of Lamb as he sat at his desk 
 in his room at the India House, looking the more 
 diminutive for being perched upon a very high stool. 
 His hair and complexion were so dark that, when 
 looked at in combination with the complete suit of 
 solemn black, they suggested old Fuller's description 
 of the negro, of which Lamb was so fond an image 
 " cut in ebony." He might have passed, Hood tells 
 us, for a "Quaker in black." "He had a long 
 melancholy face," says Mr. Procter, "with keen 
 penetrating eyes." "There was altogether," Mr. 
 Patmore says, " a Rabbinical look about Lamb's head 
 which was at once striking and impressive." But the 
 feature of his expression that all his friends dwell on 
 with most loving emphasis is " the bland sweet smile, 
 with the touch of sadness in it ;" and Mr. Patmore's 
 description of the general impression produced l>y 
 this countenance well sums up and confirms the 
 testimony of all other friends : " In point of intellectual 
 character and expression, a finer face was never seen, 
 nor one more fully, however vaguely corresponding 
 with the mind whose features it interpreted. There 
 was the gravity usually engendered by a life passed 
 in book learning, without the slightest tinge of that 
 assumption and affectation which almost always attend 
 the gravity so engendered ; the intensity and elevation
 
 V PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 95 
 
 of general expression that mark high genius, without 
 any of its pretension and its oddity ; the sadness 
 waiting on fruitless thoughts and baffled aspirations, 
 but no evidence of that spirit of scorning and contempt 
 which these are apt to engender. Above all, there 
 was a pervading sweetness and gentleness which went 
 straight to the heart of every one who looked on it : 
 and not the less so, perhaps, that it bore about it an 
 air, a something, seeming to tell that it was not put 
 on for nothing would be more unjust than to tax 
 Lamb with assuming anything, even a virtue, which 
 he did not possess but preserved and persevered in, 
 spite of opposing and contradictory feelings within 
 that struggled in vain for mastery. It was a thing 
 to remind you of that painful smile which bodily 
 disease and agony will sometimes put on, to conceal 
 their sufferings from the observation of those they 
 love." 
 
 We know Charles Lamb's history, and have not 
 to ask for any explanation of the appearances thus 
 described. He had always (it must not be forgotten) 
 to contend against sad memories, and anticipation of 
 further sorrow. He was by nature "terribly shy," 
 and his difficulties of speech, and possibly a conscious- 
 ness of oddity of manner and appearance, aggravated 
 this diffidence. It was "terrible" to him as he 
 confessed to Mr. Procter one morning when they were 
 going together to breakfast with Rogers to undergo 
 the scrutiny of servants. Hence only at times, and 
 in certain companies, was he entirely at his ease ; and
 
 96 CHARLES LAM It . HAI-. 
 
 it is evident that when in the society of those in 
 sympathy with him and his tastes, he conveyed an 
 entirely different impression of himself from that left 
 under the opposite circumstances. Before strangers, 
 or uncongenial acquaintance, he was uncomfortable, 
 and if not actually silent, generally indulged in some 
 line of conversation or vein of sentiment foreign to 
 his own real nature. Like most men, Charles Lamb 
 had various oddnesses, contradictions, perversenesses 
 of temper, and unless he was in company of those 
 who loved him (and who he knew loved him), and 
 understood him, he was very prone, in a spirit of 
 what children call " contrariness," to set to work to 
 alienate them still more from any possibility of sym- 
 pathy with him. Something of this must of course 
 be laid to the account of the extra glass of wine or 
 spirits that so often determined his mood for the 
 evening, only that when Procter, or Talfourd, or 
 Coleridge, or Hazlitt were round his hospitable table, 
 this stimulus served but to set free the richer and 
 more generous springs of thought and fancy within 
 him. I have the authority of Mr. Crossley for saying 
 that on one evening when in manner, speech, and 
 walk, Lamb was obviously under the influence of 
 what he had drunk, ho discoursed at length upon 
 Milton, with a fulness of knowledge, an eloquence, 
 ainl a profundity of critical jwwer, which left an 
 impression upon Mr. Crossley never to be effaced. 
 But we know that the wine was not in this case the 
 good, any more than on other occasions it was the
 
 v PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 97 
 
 evil, influence. "It created nothing," says Mr. Pat- 
 more, " but it was the talisman that not only unlocked 
 the poor casket in which the rich thoughts of Charles 
 Lamb were shut up, but set in motion that machinery 
 in the absence of which they would have lain like 
 gems in the mountain or gold in the mine." But 
 where the society was unsympathetic, the wine often 
 set free less lovable springs of fancy in Charles Lamb. 
 He would take up a perverse attitude of contradiction, 
 with too slight regard for the courtesies of human 
 intercourse, or else give play to a mere spirit of reck- 
 less and not very edifying mockery. The same enthu- 
 siastic friend and admirer just quoted is obliged to 
 admit that "to those who did not know him, or 
 knowing, did not and could not appreciate him, Lamb 
 often passed for something between an imbecile, a 
 brute, and a buffoon; and the first impression he 
 made on ordinary people was always unfavourable, 
 sometimes to a violent and repulsive degree." Many 
 persons have of late been startled by the discovery 
 that Lamb sometimes left the same impression upon 
 people the reverse of ordinary. Nothing perhaps in 
 the Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle has provoked 
 so much surprise, and hurt so many feelings, as his 
 passing criticism upon Lamb. And yet it is entirely 
 supported and explained by Mr. Patmore's observa- 
 tion. No two persons could have been more anti- 
 pathetic than Lamb and Carlyle, and nothing there- 
 fore is less surprising than that to the author of the 
 Latter-Day Pamphlets Charles and his sister should 
 
 H
 
 98 CHARLES LAMB THAI'. 
 
 have appeared two very "sorry phenomena," or that 
 the scraps of Lamb's talk which he overheard during 
 a passing call should often have seemed " contemptibly 
 small," "ghastly make-believe of wit," and the rest 
 There is no need to question the substantial justice 
 of this report. It is only too probable that the 
 presence of the austere and dyspeptic Scotchman (one 
 of that nation Lamb had all his days been trying in 
 vain to like) made him more than usually disposed 
 to produce his entire stock of frivolity. He had 
 always taken a perverse delight in shocking uncon- 
 genial society. Another noticeable person very dif- 
 ferent in all respects from Carlyle has left a record, 
 significant by its very brevity, of an evening in 
 Lamb's company. Macready tells in his diary how 
 he was asked to meet him at Talfourd's, and this is 
 what he records of the interview : " I noted one odd 
 saying of Lamb's, that ' the last breath he drew in he 
 wished might be through a pipe, and exhaled in a 
 pun.'" Lamb may have discovered at a glance that 
 he and the great tragedian were not likely to take 
 the same views of men and things. Perhaps his love 
 both for joking and smoking had struck Ma< -ready 
 the reverse of favourably, and if so, it was quite in 
 Lamb's way to clench once for all the unfavourable 
 impression by such an "odd saying" as that just 
 quoted. 
 
 Charles Lamb has drawn for us a character of him- 
 self, but, so fond was he of hoaxes and mystifications 
 of this kind, that we might have hesitated to accept
 
 v PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 99 
 
 it as faithful, were it not in such precise accord with 
 the testimony of others already cited. The second 
 series of the Essays of Elia was introduced by a 
 Preface, purporting to be written " by a friend of the 
 late Elia," but of course from Charles's own hand. 
 In this preface he assumes Elia to have actually died, 
 and after some preliminary remarks on his writings 
 thus proceeds to describe his character and manners : 
 
 My late friend was in many respects a singular charac- 
 ter. Those who did not like him, hated him ; and some, 
 who once liked him, afterwards became his bitterest haters. 
 The truth is, he gave himself too little concern what he 
 uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither 
 time nor place, and would e'en out with what came upper- 
 most With the severe religionist he would pass for a 
 free-thinker ; while the other faction set him down for a 
 bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his senti- 
 ments. Few understood him, and I am not certain that 
 at all times he quite understood himself. He too much 
 affected that dangerous figure irony. He sowed doubt- 
 ful speeches, and reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. He 
 would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light 
 jest; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that 
 could understand it. Your long and much talkers hated 
 him. The informal habit of his mind, joined to an in- 
 veterate impediment of speech, forbade him to be an 
 orator ; and he seemed determined that no one else should 
 play that part when he was present He was petit and 
 ordinary in bis person and appearance. I have seen him 
 sometimes in what is called good company, but where he 
 has been a stranger, sit silent and be suspected for an odd
 
 100 CHARLES LAM I! < HAP. 
 
 fellow ; till some unlucky occasi"ii i>i"Y"kin^ it, lie would 
 stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether senseless, 
 perhaps, if rightly. taken) which has stamped his character 
 for the evening. It was hit or miss with him ; but nine- 
 times out of ten he contrived by this device to send away 
 a whole company his enemies. His conceptions rose 
 kindlier than his utterance, and his happiest impromptus 
 had the appearance of effort. He has been accused of 
 trying to be witty, when in truth he was but struggling 
 to give his poor thoughts articulation. He chose his 
 companions for some individuality of character which 
 they manifested. Hence not many persons of science, 
 and few professed literati, were of his councils. They 
 were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain fortune ; 
 and as to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious 
 than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) income, he 
 passed with most of them for a great miser. To my 
 knowledge this was a mistake. His intimadot, to confess 
 a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged regiment. He 
 found them floating on the surface of society ; an<l tin- 
 colour, or something else, in the weed pleased him. The 
 burrs stuck to him ; but they were good and loving burrs 
 for all that. He never greatly cared for the society of 
 what are called good people. If any of these were scan- 
 dalised (and offences were sure to arise) he could not help 
 it When he has been remonstrated with for not making 
 more concessions to the feelings of good people, he would 
 retort by asking what one point did these good people 
 ever concede to him ? He was temperate in his iu< .<!- 
 .ni'l diversions, but always kept a little on this side of 
 abstemiousness. Only in the use of the Indian weed he 
 might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he wmld
 
 v PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 101 
 
 say, as a solvent of speech. Marry as the friendly 
 vapour ascended, how his prattle would curl up sometimes 
 with it ! the ligaments which tongue-tied him were 
 loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist ! 
 
 When a man's account of himself his foibles and 
 eccentricities is confirmed in minutest detail by 
 those who knew and loved him best, it is reasonable 
 to conclude that we are not far wrong in accepting it, 
 and this self-portraiture of Lamb's gives an unexpected 
 plausibility to the judgments, which otherwise have a 
 harsh sound, of Mr. Patmore and Carlyle. The pecu- 
 liarities which Lamb here enumerates are just those 
 which are little likely qver to receive gentle considera- 
 tion from the world. 
 
 Lamb's mention of the "senseless pun" which 
 often "stamped his character for the evening," sug- 
 gests opportunely the subject of his reputation as a 
 humorist and wit. This habit of playing upon words 
 was a part of him through life, and as in the case of 
 most who indulge in it, became an outlet for whatever 
 mood was for the moment dominant in Charles Lamb's 
 mind. When he was ill at ease, and in an attitude 
 (as he often was) of antagonism to his company, it 
 would take the shape of a wanton interruption of the 
 argument under discussion. To use a simile of Mr. 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, it was the halfpenny laid 
 upon the line by a mischievous boy to upset a whole 
 train of cars. When he was annoyed, he made 
 annoying puns, when he was frivolous, he made 
 frivolous puns, but when he was in the cue, and his
 
 102 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 surroundings were such as to call forth his better 
 powers, he put into this form of wit, humour and 
 imagination of a high order. Samples of all these 
 kinds have been preserved, and are not without use 
 as showing the various moods of his in any - side* 1 
 nature, but it is pitiable to read long strings of them, 
 set down without any discrimination, and to be asked 
 to accept them as specimens of Lamb's "wit and 
 humour." Many of his jests thus handed down are 
 little more than amusing evidence of a restless levity, 
 and almost petulant impatience of the restraints of 
 serious discourse. Much of his conversational humour 
 took the form of retort courteous, or the reverse. 
 Sometimes these embodied a criticism so luminous or 
 acute that they have survived, not only for their 
 drollery, or even their severity. "Charles, did you 
 ever hear me preach 1 " asked Coleridge, referring to 
 the days of his Unitarian ministry. " I never heard 
 you do anything else," was the reply. When Words- 
 worth was discussing with him the degree of origin- 
 ality to be allowed to Shakspeare, as borrowing his 
 plots from sources ready to his hand, and was even 
 hinting that other poets, with the History of Hamblet 
 before them, might have been equally successful in 
 adapting it to the stage, Charles cried out, " Oh ! 
 here's Wordsworth says he could have written Hamlet, 
 if he'd had the mind." In both these cases the retort 
 embodies a felicitous judgment A foible if in 
 cither case it is to be called a foible in the character 
 of the two poets, respectively, flashes out into sudden
 
 v PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 103 
 
 light. The pun is more than a pun ; the wit is more 
 than wit ; it is a sudden glory of truth kindled by the 
 imagination. Lamb's wide reading and memory give 
 a peculiar flavour to much of his wit. He had a way 
 of applying quotations which is all his own. "When 
 Crabb Eobinson, then a new-fledged barrister, told 
 him of his sensations on getting his first brief in the 
 King's Bench, "I suppose," said Charles, "you said to 
 it, 'Thou great First Cause, least understood.'" 
 Somebody remarking on Shakspeare's anachronisms 
 clocks and watches in Julius Ccesar, oracles of Delphi 
 in the Winter's Tale he said he supposed that was 
 what Dr. Johnson meant when he wrote of him that 
 "panting Time toiled after him in vain." Hood 
 records a visit paid by him to the Lambs when they 
 were living at Islington, with a wasp's nest near their 
 front door. " He was one day bantering my wife on 
 her dread of wasps, when all at once he uttered a 
 terrible shout a wounded specimen of the species 
 had slily crawled up the leg of the table, and stung 
 him in the thumb. I told him it was a refutation 
 well put in, like Smollett's timely snowball. ' Yes,' 
 said he, ' and a stinging commentary on Macbeth 
 
 By the pricking of my thumbs, 
 Something wicked this way comes.'" 
 
 Readers of the Essays of Elia will recall many happy 
 effects produced by this novel use of familiar quota- 
 tions. Not that he ever condescended to degrade a 
 really fine passage by any vulgar associations. No
 
 104 CHARLES LAMB < HAP. 
 
 great harm was done (in the " Essay on Roast Pig ") 
 by calling in his friend's " Epitaph on an Infant " to 
 justify the sacrifice of the innocent suckling, before it 
 should " grow up to the grossness and indocility which 
 too often accompany maturer swinehood 
 
 Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade 
 Death came with timely care." 
 
 And, now and then, with the true instinct of a poet, 
 he throws a new and lasting halo over a homely 
 object by associating it with one more poetic and 
 dignified, as when in the "Praise of Chimney-sweepers" 
 he notes the brilliant white of the little climbing-boys' 
 teeth peering from between their sooty lips " It is," 
 he adds 
 
 " as when a gable cloud 
 Turns forth her silver lining on the night," 
 
 an application of Milton which is only not witty (to 
 borrow Sydney Smith's skilful distinction), because the 
 enjoyment of its wit is overpowered by our admiration 
 of its beauty. 
 
 li Specimens of wit and humour" afford, under the 
 happiest conditions, but melancholy reading, and none 
 can less well afford to be separated from their context 
 than those of Lamb. And in his case the context 
 is not merely that of the written or spoken matter, 
 but that of the man himself his look, manner, and 
 habits. To understand how his drollery affected 
 those who were present, and made them anxious to 
 preserve some record of it, it is necessary to ke -\> in
 
 v PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 105 
 
 mind how he looked and spoke, his odd face, his 
 stammer, and his wilfulness in the presence of uncon- 
 genial natures. There is a diverting scene recorded 
 in the diary of Haydon, the painter, which, however 
 amplified by Haydon's facile pen, seems to bring 
 before us "an evening with Charles Lamb" with 
 more reality than the general recollections of Talfourd 
 and Procter. Something of the "diluted insanity" 
 that so shocked Mr. Carlyle is here shadowed forth. 
 Haydon had got up a little dinner, on occasion of 
 Wordsworth being in town (December 1817), and 
 Lamb and Keats were of the party. The account 
 must be given in his own words : 
 
 On 28th December the immortal dinner came off in 
 my painting-room, with Jerusalem towering up behind us 
 as a background. Wordsworth was in fine cue, and we 
 had a glorious set-to on Homer, Shakspeare, Milton, and 
 Virgil. Lamb got exceedingly merry, and exquisitely witty ; 
 and his fun, in the midst of Wordsworth's solemn intona- 
 tions of oratory, was like the sarcasm and wit of the fool 
 in the intervals of Lear's passion. He made a speech and 
 voted me absent, and made them drink my health. " Now," 
 said Lamb, "you old lake poet, you rascally poet, why do 
 you call Voltaire dull ?" We all defended Wordsworth, 
 and affirmed there was a state of mind when Voltaire 
 would be dull. " Well," said Lamb, " here's Voltaire 
 the Messiah of the French nation and a very proper one 
 too." 
 
 He then in a strain of humour beyond description 
 abused me for . putting Newton's bead into my picture 
 " a fellow," said be, " who believed nothing unless it was
 
 106 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 as clear as the three sides of a triangle." And then he 
 ;nnl Keats agreed that he had destroyed all the poetry of 
 the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours. It 
 was impossible to resist him, and we all drank " Newton's 
 health, and confusion to mathematics." It was delightful 
 to see the good humour of Wordsworth in giving in to all 
 our frolics without affectation, and laughing as heartily as 
 the best of us. 
 
 By this time other friends joined, amongst them poor 
 Ritchie, who was going to penetrate by Fezzan to 
 Timbuctoo. I introduced him to all as "a gentlrnuin 
 going to Africa." Lamb seemed to take no notice ; but 
 all of a sudden he roared out, " Which is the gentleman 
 we are going to lose ?" We then drank the victim's 
 health, in which Ritchie joined. 
 
 In the morning of this delightful day, a gentleman, a 
 perfect stranger, had called on me. He said he knew un- 
 friends, had an enthusiasm for Wordsworth, and begged I 
 would procure him the happiness of an introduction. Id- 
 told me he was a Comptroller of Stamps, and often hul 
 correspondence with the poet. I thought it a liberty ; but 
 still, as he seemed a gentleman, I told him he might come. 
 
 When we retired to tea we found the Comptroller. 
 In introducing him to Wordsworth I forgot to say who 
 he was. After a little time the Comptroller looked down, 
 looked up, and said to Wordsworth, "Don't you think, 
 sir, Milton was a great genius ?" Keats looked at me, 
 Wordsworth looked at the Comptroller. Lamb, who was 
 dosing by the fire, turned round and said, M Pray, sir, did 
 you say Milton waa a great genius ?" " No, sir ; I asked 
 Mr. Wordsworth if he were not" "Oh," said Lamb, 
 "then you are a silly fellow." "Charles! my dear
 
 v PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 107 
 
 Charles !" said Wordsworth ; but Lamb, perfectly innocent 
 of the confusion he had created, was off again by the fire. 
 After an awful pause the Comptroller said, " Don't 
 you think Newton a great genius ?" I could not stand 
 it any longer. Keats put his head into my books. Ritchie 
 squeezed in a laugh. Wordsworth seemed asking himself, 
 "Who is this 1" Lamb got up and, taking' a candle, said, 
 " Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological 
 development 1" He then turned his back on the poor 
 man, and at every question of the Comptroller he 
 chanted 
 
 " Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John 
 Went to bed with his breeches on." 
 
 The man in office finding Wordsworth did not know who 
 he was, said in a spasmodic and half-chuckling anticipa- 
 tion of assured victory, " I have had the honour of some 
 correspondence with you, Mr. Wordsworth." "With me, 
 sir?" said Wordsworth, "not that I remember." "Don't 
 you, sir ? I am a Comptroller of Stamps." There was a 
 dead silence ; the Comptroller evidently thinking that 
 was enough. While we were waiting for Wordsworth's 
 reply, Lamb sung out 
 
 " Hey diddle diddle, 
 The cat and the fiddle. " 
 
 ' My dear Charles !" said Wordsworth. 
 
 "Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John," 
 
 chanted Lamb ; and then rising, exclaimed, " Do let me 
 have another look at that gentleman's organs." Keats 
 and I hurried Lamb into the painting -room, shut the 
 door, and gave way to inextinguishable laughter. Monk- 
 house followed, and tried to get Lamb away. We went
 
 108 CHARLES LAMB .HAP. 
 
 back, but the Comptroller was irreconcilable. We soothed 
 and smiled, and asked him to supper. He stayed, though 
 his dignity was sorely affected. However, being a good- 
 natured man, we parted all in good humour, and no ill 
 effects followed. 
 
 All the while, until Monkhouse succeeded, we could 
 hear Lamb struggling in the painting-room and calling at 
 intervals, " Who is that fellow ? Allow me to see his 
 organs once more." 
 
 It is not difficult to guess how Carlyle or Macready 
 would have commented on this scene, had they been 
 present. 
 
 But the Wednesday evenings when Charles and 
 Mary Lamb kept open house if the term could be 
 applied to the slender resources of the garret in Inner 
 Temple Lane produced something better in the way 
 of intellectual result than the above. Talfourd and 
 Procter have told us the names and qualities of the 
 guests who gathered about the Lambs on these occa- 
 sions, and the homely fare and the cordial greeting 
 that awaited them the low, dingy rooms, with books 
 :uxl prints for their chief furniture, the two tables set 
 out for whist, and the cold beef and can of porter on 
 the sideboard, to which each guest helped himself as 
 he chose. On these occasions would be found Words- 
 worth and Coleridge when in town, and then the 
 company resolved themselves willingly into a band of 
 contented listeners ; but at other times no difference 
 of rank would be recognised, and poets and critics 
 painters, journalists, barristers, men in public offices,
 
 v PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 109 
 
 dramatists, and actors met on terms of unchallenged 
 equality. Hazlitt has made an attempt, in a well- 
 known essay, to reproduce an actual conversation at 
 which he was present on one of these Wednesdays. 
 He admits that, writing twenty years after the event, 
 memory was ill able to recall the actual words of the 
 speakers. But even when allowance is made for the 
 lapse of time, it is hard to believe that Hazlitt had 
 much of the Boswellian faculty. The subject that 
 had been discussed was " Persons one would wish to 
 have seen." Isaac Newton and Locke, Shakspeare 
 and Milton, and many others were suggested, and all 
 dismissed for one reason or another by Lamb. Sir 
 Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville were two he 
 substituted for these. But it is impossible to accept 
 the following sentence as a sample of Lamb's conver- 
 sational manner. " When I look at that obscure but 
 gorgeous prose composition, the Urn Burial, I seem 
 to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom of 
 which are hid pearls and rich treasure ; or, it is like 
 a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, 
 and I would invoke the spirit of the author to lead 
 me through it." This style is equally unlike that 
 of essay and letter, and nothing so pointless and so 
 grandiose, we are sure, ever proceeded from his lips. 
 It was not so that Lamb, as Haydon expressed it, 
 "stuttered out his quaintness in snatches, like the 
 Fool in Lear" But we can distinguish that stammer- 
 ing tongue, if we listen, above the din of the supper 
 party and the whist -table (not rigorous as Mrs.
 
 110 CHARLES LAMB . u u 
 
 Battle's) ranging from the maddest drollery to the 
 subtlest criticism, calling out to Martin Burney, 
 "Martin, if dirt were trumps, what a hand you'd 
 have," or declaring that he had once known a young 
 man who "wanted to be a tailor, but hadn't the 
 spirit," or pronouncing, a propos of the water-cure, 
 that it was neither new nor wonderful, for that it was 
 at least as old as the Flood, when, " in his opinion," 
 it killed more than it cured. We can hear him draw- 
 ing some sound distinction, as between the ingrained 
 jealousy of Leontes and the mere credulity of Othello, 
 or contrasting the noble simplicity of the Nut-Brown 
 Maid with Prior's vapid paraphrase, in Henry and 
 Emma. We can listen to him as he fearlessly decried 
 all his friends' idols of the hour, Byron or Shelley or 
 Goethe, and raved with something of a perverse 
 enthusiasm over some forgotten worthy of the six- 
 teenth century. We can hear him pleading for the 
 "divine compliments" of Pope, and repeating with 
 a faltering voice the tender lines 
 
 Happy my studies, when by these approval ! 
 Happier their author, when by these beloved ! 
 From these the world will judge of men and books, 
 Not from the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cookes. 
 
 It was this range of sympathy, yet coupled with such 
 strange limitations this alternation of tenderness and 
 frolic of scholarly fulness and luminous insight, that 
 drew the poet and the critic, as well as the boon com- 
 panion, to Lamb's Wednesday nights.
 
 v PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 111 
 
 Lamb's letters at this time afford excellent speci- 
 mens of his drollery and high animal spirits. The 
 following was addressed to Manning early in 1810. 
 Manning was then in China. 
 
 DEAR MANNINCI When I last wrote you I was in 
 lodgings. I am now in chambers, No. 4 Inner Temple 
 Lane, where I should be happy to see you any evening. 
 Bring any of your friends, the mandarins, with you. I 
 have two sitting-rooms ; I call them so par excellence, for 
 you may stand, or loll, or lean, or try any posture in 
 them, but they are best for sitting ; not squatting down 
 Japanese fashion, but the more decorous mode which 
 European usage has consecrated. I have two of these 
 rooms on the third floor, and five sleeping, cooking, etc., 
 rooms on the fourth floor. In my best room is a choice 
 collection of the works of Hogarth, an English painter of 
 some humour. In my next best are shelves, containing a 
 small but well-chosen library. My best room commands 
 a court in which there are trees and a pump, 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 sent you a parcel of books by' my 
 last, to give you some idea of the state of European litera- 
 ture. There comes with this two volumes, done up as 
 letters, of minor poetry, a sequel to Mrs. Leicester ; the 
 best you may suppose mine ; the next best are my coad- 
 jutor's ; you may amuse yourself in guessing them out ; 
 but I must tell you mine are but one-third in quantity of 
 the whole. So much for a very delicate subject. It is
 
 112 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 hard to speak of one's own self, etc. Holcroft had finished 
 his life when I wrote to you, and Hazlitt has since finished 
 his life : I do not mean his own life, but he has finished a 
 life of Holcroft, which is going to press. Tuthill is Dr. 
 Tuthill ; I continue Mr. Lamb. I have published a little 
 book for children on titles of honour ; and to give them 
 some idea of the difference of rank and gradual rising I 
 have made a little scale, supposing myself to receive the 
 following various accessions of dignity from the king, who 
 is the fountain of honour. As at first, 1, Mr. C. Lamb ; 
 2, C. Lamb, Esq. ; 3, Sir C. Lamb, Bart ; 4, Baron Lamb 
 of Stamford ; l 5, Viscount Lamb ; 6, Earl Lamb ; 7, 
 Marquis Lamb ; 8, Duke Lamb. It would look like 
 quibbling to carry it on further, and especially as it is not 
 necessary for children to go beyond the ordinary titles of 
 sub-regal dignity in our own country ; otherwise, I have 
 sometimes in my dreams imagined myself still advancing 
 as 9th, King Lamb; 10th, Emperor Lamb; llth, 
 Pope Innocent, higher than which is nothing. Puns I 
 have not made many (nor punch much) since the date of 
 my last ; one I cannot help relating. A constable in 
 Salisbury Cathedral was telling me that eight people dinl 
 at the top of the spire of the cathedral, upon which I 
 remarked that they must be very sharp set. But in 
 general, I cultivate the reasoning part of my mind more 
 than the imaginative. I am stuffed out so with eating 
 turkey for dinner and another turkey for supper yester- 
 day (Turkey in Europe and Turkey in Asia), that I can't 
 jog on. It is New Year here. That is, it was New Year 
 half a year back when I was writing this. Nothing 
 
 1 Where my family came from. I have chosen that, if ever 
 I should have ray choice.
 
 v PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 113 
 
 puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing 
 puzzles me less, for I never think about them. The 
 Persian ambassador is the principal thing talked of now. 
 I sent some people to see him worship the sun on Prim- 
 rose Hill, at half-past six in the morning, 28th November ; 
 but he did not come, which makes me think the old fire- 
 worshippers are a sect almost extinct in Persia. The 
 Persian ambassador's name is Shaw Ali Mirza. The com- 
 mon people call him Shaw nonsense. While I think of 
 it, I have put three letters besides my own three into the 
 India post for you, from your brother, sister, and some 
 gentleman whose name I forget. Will they, have they, 
 did they come safe ? The distance you are at cuts up 
 tenses by the root. I think you said you did not know 
 Kate *********. I express her by nine stars, though 
 she is but one. You must have seen her at her father's. 
 Try and remember her. Coleridge is bringing out a paper 
 in weekly numbers, called the Friend, which I would send 
 if I could ; but the difficulty I had in getting the packets 
 of books out to you before deters me ; and you'll want 
 something new to read when you come home. Except 
 Kate, I have had no vision of excellence this year, and 
 she passed by like the queen on her coronation day ; you 
 don't know whether you saw her or not. Kate is fifteen ; 
 I go about moping, and sing the old pathetic ballad I used 
 to like in my youth 
 
 She's sweet fifteen, 
 
 I'm one year more. 
 
 Mrs. Bland sang it in boy's clothes the first time I heard 
 it. I sometimes think the lower notes in my voice are 
 like Mrs. Eland's. That glorious singer, Braham, one of 
 my lights, is fled. He was for a season. He was a rare 
 I -
 
 114 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel ; 
 yet all these elements mixed up so kindly in him that 
 you could not tell which preponderated ; but he is gone, 
 and one Phillips is engaged instead. Kate is vanished, but 
 Miss B is always to be met with ! 
 
 Queens drop away, while blue-legged Maukin thrives, 
 And courtly Mildred dies while country Madge survives. 
 
 That is not my poetry, but Quarles's ; but haven't you 
 observed that the rarest things are the least obvious ? 
 Don't show anybody the names in this letter. I write 
 confidentially, and wish this letter to be considered as 
 private. Hazlitt has written a grammar for Godwin ; 
 Godwin sells it bound up with a treatise of his own on 
 language, but the grey mare is the better horse. I don't 
 
 allude to Mrs. , but to the word grammar, which 
 
 comes near to grey mare, if you observe, in sound. That 
 figure is called paronomasia in Greek. I am sometimes 
 happy in it An old woman begged of me for charity. 
 " Ah ! sir," said she, " I have seen better days." " So 
 have I, good woman," I replied ; but I meant literally, 
 days not so rainy and overcast as that on which she 
 begged ; she meant more prosperous days. Mr. Dawe is 
 made Associate of the Royal Academy. By what law of 
 association I can't guess. 
 
 The humour of this letter and there are many as 
 good is not the humour of the Essays of Elui. It is 
 not charged with thought like them, nor does it reach 
 the same depths of feeling. But it is the humour of 
 a man of genius. The inventiveness of it all ; tin; 
 simplicity with which the most daring flights of fancy
 
 v PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 115 
 
 are hazarded; the amazing improbability of the 
 assertion that it was the "common people" who 
 called the ambassador " Shaw nonsense ;" the gravity 
 with which it is set down that it is not necessary 
 in England to teach children the degrees of rank 
 beyond royalty, all this is delightful in the extreme, 
 and the power to enjoy it may be taken as a test of 
 the reader's capacity for understanding Lamb's place 
 as a humorist. 
 
 The eight years spent in Inner Temple Lane were, 
 in Talfourd's judgment, the happiest of Lamb's life. 
 His income was steadily rising, and he no longer had 
 to bear the pressure of inconvenient poverty. Friends 
 of a higher order than the " friendly harpies " he has 
 told us of, who came about him for his suppers, and 
 the brandy -and -water afterwards, were gradually 
 gathering round him. Hazlitt, and Crabb Robinson, 
 and Procter, and Talfourd were men of tastes and 
 capacities akin to his own. The period was not a 
 fertile one in literary production. The little collec- 
 tion of stories for children, called Mrs. Leicester's 
 School, written jointly with his sister, and the volume 
 of Poetry for Children, also a joint production, con- 
 stitute with one notable exception the whole of 
 Lamb's literary labours during this time. The excep- 
 tion named is the contribution to Leigh Hunt's 
 periodical, the Reflector, of two or three masterly 
 pieces of criticism, which may be more conveniently 
 noticed later in this memoir. 
 
 Meantime the cloud of domestic anxiety was still
 
 116 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 unlifted. Mary Lamb's illnesses were frequent and 
 embarrassing. An extract from a letter to Miss 
 Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth's sister (October 1815), 
 tells once more the of ten -told tale, and shows the 
 unaltered patience and seriousness of her brother's 
 faithful guardianship. The passage has a further 
 interest in the picture it incidentally draws of the 
 happier days of the brother and sister: "I am 
 forced to be the replier to your letter, for Mary has 
 been ill, and gone from home these five weeks yester- 
 day. She has left me very lonely and very miserable. 
 I stroll about, but there is no rest but at one's own 
 fireside, and there is no rest for me there now. I look 
 forward to the worse half being past, and keep up as 
 well as I can. She has begun to show some favour- 
 able symptoms. The return of her disorder has been 
 frightfully soon this time, with scarce a six months' 
 interval. I am almost afraid my worry of spirits 
 about the East India House was partly the cause of 
 her illness, but one always imputes it to the cause 
 next at hand; more probably it comes from some 
 cause we have no control over or conjecture of. It 
 cuts great slices out of the time, the little time, we 
 shall have to live together. I don't know but the 
 recurrence of these illnesses might help me to sustain 
 her death better than if we had no partial separa- 
 tions. But I won't talk of death. I will imagine us 
 immortal, or forget that we are otherwise. By God's 
 blessing, in a few weeks wo may be making our meal 
 together, or sitting in the front row of the Pit at
 
 v PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 117 
 
 Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past the 
 theatres, to look at the outside of them, at least, if 
 not to be tempted in. Then we forget that we are 
 assailable ; we are strong for the time as rocks ; ' the 
 wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs.' "
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 RUSSELL STREET, COM. NT CARDEN TIIK I'SSAYS OF 
 ELIA 
 
 (18171823) 
 
 IN tho autumn of 1817, Lamb and his sister left the 
 Temple, their home for seventeen years, for lodgings 
 in Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, the corner 
 of Bow Street, and the site where Will's Coffee- 
 House once stood. " Here we are," Lamb writes to 
 Miss Wordsworth in November of this year, " trans- 
 planted from our native soil. I thought we never 
 could have been torn up from the Temple. Indeed 
 it was an ugly wrench, but like a tooth, now 'tis 
 out, and I am easy. \\ ' never can strike root so 
 deep in any other ground. This, where we are, is a 
 light bit of gardener's mould, and if they take us up 
 from it, it will cost no blood and groans, like man- 
 drakes pulled up. 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
 
 CHAP, vi EUSSELL STEEET, COVENT GAEDEN 119 
 
 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 con- 
 course of people coming this way, with a constable 
 to conduct the solemnity. These little incidents 
 agreeably diversify a female life." 
 
 During the seventeen years in the Temple, Lamb's 
 worldly fortunes had improved. His salary from the 
 India House was increasing every year, and he was 
 beginning to add to his income by authorship. He 
 was already known as critic and essayist to an ap- 
 preciative few. Friends were gathering round him, 
 and acquaintances who enjoyed his conversation and 
 his weekly suppers (Wednesday evening was open 
 house in the Temple days) were increasing in rather 
 an embarrassing degree. Ever since he had had a 
 house of his own, he had suffered from the intrusion 
 of such troublesome visitors. A too easy good-nature 
 on his part may have been to blame for this. He 
 took often, as he confesses, a perverse pleasure in 
 noticing and befriending those whom others, with 
 good reason, looked shyly on, and as time went on 
 he began to find very little of his leisure time that 
 he could call his own. It may have been with some 
 hope of beginning a freer life on new soil that he 
 resolved to tear himself from his beloved Temple. 
 If so, he was not successful. A remarkable letter 
 to Mrs. Wordsworth, a few months only after his
 
 120 CHARLES LAMB rim-. 
 
 removal to Russell Street, tells the same old story 
 of well-meaning intruders. "The reason why I 
 cannot write letters at home is that I am never alone." 
 "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 ; 
 and five evenings in a week would be as much as I 
 should covet to be in company, but I assure you that 
 it is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one 
 to myself. 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." "All I mean is that I am 
 a little over-companied, but not that I have any 
 animosity against the good creatures that are so 
 anxious to drive away the harpy solitude from me. 
 I like 'em, and cards, and a cheerful glass; but I 
 mean merely to give you an idea between office con- 
 finement and after-office society, how little time I can 
 call my own." It is not difficult to form an i<U-;i 
 from this frank disclosure of the hindrances and tin- 
 snares that beset Lamb's comfort and acted harmfully 
 on his temper and habits. It was fortunate for him 
 that at this juncture he should have been lcl t<> 
 discover where his powers as a writer indisputably
 
 vi RUSSELL STREET, CO VENT GARDEN 121 
 
 lay, and to find the exact opportunity for their 
 exercise. 
 
 In this same year, 1818, a young bookseller, Charles 
 Oilier, whose acquaintance he had recently made, 
 proposed to him to bring out a complete collection of 
 his scattered writings. Some of these, John Woodvil 
 and Rosamond Gray, had been published separately in 
 former years, and were now out of print. Others 
 were interred among extinct magazines and journals, 
 and these were by far the most worthy of preservation. 
 The edition appeared in the year 1818, in two hand- 
 some volumes. It contained, besides John Woodvil 
 and Rosamond Gray, and a fair quantity of verse 
 (including the Farewell to Tobacco], the Recollections of 
 Christ's Hospital, the essay on The Tragedies of Shak- 
 speare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage 
 representation, and that on The Genius and CJiaracter of 
 Hogarth, these two last having originally appeared in 
 Leigh Hunt's magazine, the Reflectoi: The edition 
 was prefaced by a dedicatory letter to Coleridge. 
 "You will smile," wrote Lamb, "to see the slender 
 labours of your friend designated by the title of 
 Works ; but such was the wish of the gentlemen who 
 have kindly undertaken the trouble of collecting 
 them, and from their judgment there could be no 
 appeal." He goes on pleasantly to recall to his old 
 schoolfellow how, in company with their friend Lloyd, 
 they had so many years before tried their poetical 
 fortune. "You will find your old associate," he 
 adds, " in his second volume, dwindled into prose
 
 122 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 and criticism." Lamb must have felt, as he wrote the 
 word, that " dwindled " was hardly the fitting term. 
 He had written nothing as yet so noble in matter and 
 in style, nothing so worthy to live, as the analysis of 
 the characters of Hamlet and Lear in the essay on 
 Sliakspeare's Tragedies. Lamb's high rank, as essayist 
 and critic, must have been put beyond dispute by the 
 publication under his own name of his collected 
 IPorks. He was already well known and appreciated 
 by some of the finest minds of his day. He now 
 addressed a wider public, and the edition of 1818 
 gave him a status he had not before enjoyed. And 
 yet at this date, various as were the contents of the 
 two volumes, he had not found the opportunity that 
 was to call forth his special faculty. 
 
 The opportunity was, however, at hand. In Janu- 
 ary 1820, Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, the publishers, 
 brought out the first number of a new monthly 
 journal, reviving in it the name of an earlier and 
 extinct periodical, the London Magazine. The editor 
 they chose was John Scott, a competent critic and 
 journalist who had formerly edited the Champion 
 newspaper. The aim of this new venture, as set forth 
 in the opening prospectus, was to be of a higher and 
 more intellectual class than its many popular contem- 
 poraries. It was to be a journal of criticism and the 
 Belles Letires, including original poetry, and yet to 
 contain in a monthly appendix such statistics of trade 
 and general home and foreign intelligence as would 
 make it useful to those of a less literary turn. The
 
 vi RUSSELL STREET, COVENT GARDEN 123 
 
 magazine had an existence of five years, undergoing 
 many changes of fortune, and passing in that time 
 through many hands. Its first editor, Mr. Scott, was 
 killed in a duel in the summer of 1821, and its first 
 publishers parted with it to Taylor and Hessey. At 
 no period of its career does it seem to have been a 
 marked commercial success. Either capital was 
 wanted, or management was unsatisfactory, for the 
 list of contributors during these five years was 
 remarkable. Mr. Procter and Thomas Hood have 
 discoursed pleasantly on their various fellow -contri- 
 butors to the magazine, and the social gatherings held 
 once a month by Taylor and Hessey (who employed 
 no editor) at the office in Waterloo Place. Hazlitt, 
 Allan Cunningham, Gary (the translator of Dante), 
 John Hamilton Eeynolds, George Darley, Keats, 
 James Montgomery, Sir John Bowring, Hartley 
 Coleridge, were regular or occasional contributors. 
 Carlyle published his Life and Writings of Schiller in 
 the later volumes, and De Quincey (besides other 
 papers) his Opium Eater. 
 
 Talfourd thinks that Lamb owed to his intimacy 
 with Hazlitt his introduction to the managers of the 
 London. He was not on the staff from the beginning. 
 The first number was issued in January 1820, and 
 Lamb's first contribution was in the August following. 
 In the number for that month appeared an article, 
 with the not very attractive title, Recollections of the 
 South-Sea House. As to its authorship there was no 
 indication except the signature at the end "Elia."
 
 124 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 Lamb has himself told us the origin of this immortal 
 nom de plume. When he had written his first essay, 
 wishing to remain anonymous, and yet wanting a 
 convenient mark for identification in articles to come, 
 he bethought him of an Italian of the name of Elia, 
 who had been fellow -clerk with him thirty years 
 before, during the few months that he had been 
 employed as a boy in the South-Sea House. As a 
 practical joke (Lamb confesses) he borrowed his old 
 friend's name, hoping to make his excuses when they 
 should next meet " I went the other day," writes 
 Lamb to his publisher, Mr. Taylor, in July 1821, 
 " (not having seen him for a year) to laugh over with 
 him at my usurpation of his name, and found him, 
 alas ! no more than a name, for he died of consump- 
 tion eleven months ago, and I knew not of it So the 
 name has fairly devolved to me, I think, and 'tis all 
 he has left me." Lamb continued to use it for his 
 contributions to the London and other periodicals for 
 many years. It is doubtful if the name has ever been 
 generally pronounced as Lamb intended. "Call him 
 Ellia," he went on to say, but the world has taken 
 more kindly to the broad c and the single I. 1 
 
 1 See letter to J. Taylor (Ldten of Charles Lamb, ii. 35). In 
 this letter Lamb further mentions that his old fellow -clerk, 
 lik<- himself, "add-d th<- function of an author to that of a 
 scrivener." I do not know that he has ever been identified on 
 the literary side. There was a certain Felix Ellia who, in th<- 
 year 1799, published a melodramatic romance, of the then 
 |K)|iular type, called " Norman Banditti, or the Fortress of 
 Constance." The book is noticed rather contemptuously in the
 
 vi THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 125 
 
 When the first series of the Essays of Elia appeared 
 in a collected form in 1823, it consisted of some five- 
 and-twenty essays, contributed at the rate of one a 
 month (occasionally two) with scarcely an intermis- 
 sion between August 1820 and December 1822. It 
 would seem as if no conditions had been imposed upon 
 Lamb by the editor as to the subject-matter of his 
 essays. He was allowed to roam at his own free will 
 over the experiences of his life, and to reproduce them 
 in any form, and with any discursiveness into which 
 he might be allured on the way. The matter of the 
 essays proved to be largely personal, or at least to 
 savour of the autobiographical. The first essay 
 already referred to professed to be a recollection of 
 the South-Sea House as it existed thirty years before, 
 with sketches of several of the clerks who had been 
 Lamb's contemporaries. As, however, he was a boy 
 of fifteen at the time he entered, and moreover was 
 at most two years in the office, it is probable that he 
 owed much of the knowledge exhibited in the paper 
 to his elder brother John, who remained in the office 
 long after Charles had left it. Lamb was in the habit 
 of spending his short summer holiday in one or other 
 of the two great University towns, and his second 
 essay was an account of Oxford in the Vacation. The 
 third in order of appearance was an account of Christ's 
 
 Critical Review for December of the same year. Can this have 
 been Lamb's friend ? It would be quite in accordance with 
 Lamb's habits, if, while recalling the pronunciation of the 
 name, he had forgotten the spelling.
 
 126 CHARLES LAMR 
 
 Hospital, on that side of it which had not been 
 touched in his earlier paper on the same subject 
 The fourth was a discursive meditation on the Two 
 Races of Men, by which Lamb meant those who borrow 
 and those who lend, which he illustrated by the 
 example of one Ralph Bigod (whom he had known in 
 his journalist days on the Albion), and Coleridge, who 
 so freely borrowed from Lamb's library, and so 
 bountifully returned the loan with interest in the 
 shape of marginal annotations. In the essay, Mrs. 
 Battle's Opinions on JHiist, he describes an old lady, a 
 relative of the Plumer family, whom he had known in 
 person, or by repute, at the old mansion in Hertford- 
 shire. In the chapter On Ears, his own want of 
 musical ear, and the kind of impressions from musi- 
 cal sounds to which he was susceptible, is the subject 
 of his confidences. In My Relations and Mockery End 
 in Hertfordshire he draws portraits, under the disguise 
 of two cousins, James and Bridget Klia, of his brother 
 John and his sister Mary. The Old Benchers of the 
 Inner Temple comprises all that he remembered of his 
 boyhood spent in the Temple, with particulars of the 
 more notable Masters of the Bench of that day, 
 obtained no doubt from his father, the Lovel of the 
 essay, and his father's old and loyal friend Randal 
 Norris, the sub-treasurer of the Inner Templa Other 
 essays, such as that On Chimney Sweepers, and The 
 Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis, contain the results 
 of that observing eye with which he had daily sur- 
 veyed the streets of his beloved city for so many
 
 vi THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 127 
 
 years, " looking no one in the face for more than a 
 moment," as Mr. Procter has told us, yet "contriving 
 to see everything as he went on." 
 
 The opening essay on the South-Sea House shows 
 that there was no need to feel his way, either in 
 matter or style. He began in the fulness of his 
 observation, and with a style already formed, and 
 adapting itself to all changes of thought and feeling. 
 His description of John Tipp, the accountant, was 
 enough to show that not only a keen observer, but 
 a master of English was at work : 
 
 At the desk, Tipp was quite another sort of creature. 
 Thence all ideas that were purely ornamental were ban- 
 ished. You could not speak of anything romantic with- 
 out rebuke. Politics were excluded. A newspaper was 
 thought too refined and abstracted. The whole duty of 
 man consisted in writing off dividend warrants. The 
 striking of the annual balance in the company's books 
 (which perhaps differed from the balance of last year in 
 the sum of 25 : 1 : 6) occupied bis days and nigbts for a 
 month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the dead- 
 ness of things (as they call them in tbe city) in bis beloved 
 house, or did not sigh for a return of the old stirring days 
 wben South Sea hopes were young (lie was indeed equal 
 to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the 
 most nourishing company in tbese or those days) : but to a 
 genuine accountant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. 
 The fractional fartbing is as dear to his heart as tbe thou- 
 sands which stand before it. He is tbe true actor who, 
 whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it 
 witb like intensity. Witb Tipp, form was everything.
 
 128 CHARLES LAMB I-IIAI-. 
 
 His life was formal. His actions seemed ruled with a 
 ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart. Id- 
 made the best executor in the world ; he was plagued 
 with incessant executorships accordingly, which excited 
 his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. 1I< 
 would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose 
 rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of 
 the dying hand that commended their interests to his 
 protection. With all this there was about him a sort of 
 timidity his few enemies used to give it a worse name a 
 something which, in reverence to the dead, we will place, 
 if you please, a little on this side of the heroic. Nat un- 
 certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a 
 sufficient measure of the principle of self-preservation. 
 There is a cowardice which we do not despise, because it 
 has nothing base or treacherous in its elements ; it betrays 
 itself, not you ; it is mere temperament ; the absence of 
 the romantic and the enterprising ; it sees a lion in the 
 way, and will not, with Fortinbras, " greatly find quarrel 
 in a straw," when some supposed honour is at stake. Tipp 
 never mounted the box of a stage coach in his life, or 
 leaned against the rails of a balcony, or walked upon the 
 ridge of a parapet, or looked down a precipice, or let off a 
 gun, or went upon a water-party, or would willingly let 
 you go if he could have helped it ; neither was it recorded 
 of him that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook 
 friend or principle. 
 
 Two of the essays have attained a celebrity, cer- 
 tainly not out of projwrtion to their merits, but 
 serving to make quotation from them almost an 
 impertinence. These are the Dissertation on Roast Pig,
 
 VI THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 129 
 
 Lamb's version of a story told him by his friend 
 Manning (though not probably to be found in any 
 Chinese manuscript), and the essay, finally called 
 Imperfect Sympathies, but originally bearing the cum- 
 brous title of Jews, Quakers, Scotchmen, and other 
 Imperfect Sympathies. It is here that occurs the famous 
 analysis of the Scotch character, perhaps the cleverest 
 passage, in its union of fine observation and felicity of 
 phrase, in the whole of Lamb's writings. The anec- 
 dote of Lamb's favourite picture, his " beauty, "- 
 the Leonardo da Vinci, and that of the party where 
 the son of Burns was expected, together with the 
 complaint that follows of the hopelessness of satisfying 
 a Scotchman in the matter of the appreciation of that 
 poet, have become as much commonplaces of quotation 
 as Sydney Smith's famous reference to the surgical 
 operation. The brilliancy of the whole passage has 
 rather thrown into the shade the disquisition on 
 Quaker manners that follows, and the story he had 
 heard from Carlisle, the surgeon, of the three Quakers 
 who " stopped to bait " at Andover. But the whole 
 paper is excellent. 
 
 Hardly less familiar is the account of old Mrs. 
 Battle, and her opinions upon the game of whist. 
 " ' A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the 
 game.' This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah 
 Battle (now with God), who next to her devotions 
 loved a good game at whist. She was none of your 
 lukewarm gamesters, your half and half players, who 
 have no objection to take a hand if you want one to 
 K
 
 130 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 make up a rubber ; who affirm that they have no 
 pleasure in winning, that they like to win one game 
 mid lose another, that they can while away an hour 
 very agreeably at a card -table, but are indifferent 
 whether they play or no, and will desire an adversary 
 who has slipped a wrong card to take it up and play 
 another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of 
 a table ; one of these flies will spoil a whole pot Of 
 such it may be said that they do not play at cards, 
 but only play at playing with them." 
 
 The portrait must have been drawn in the main 
 from life. 1 One of the most singular suggestions ever 
 offered by Lamb's editors is that this " gentlewoman 
 born," with her " fine last-century countenance," the 
 niece of "old Walter Plumer," was drawn from 
 Lamb's old grandmother, Mrs. Field. As a test of the 
 likelihood of this theory it will be found instructive 
 to read, after this essay, the touching lines aln-u.ly 
 cited called The Gramlnnif. 
 
 The marked peculiarities of Lamb's style give so 
 unique a colouring t<> nil these essays that one is apt 
 to overlook to what a variety of themes it is found 
 suitable. There is no mood, from that of almost 
 reckless merriment to that of pathetic sweetness or 
 
 1 Since this passage was first written, I have been toM l.y 
 a near relative of Lamb's fii.nl, John Rirkmnn, ami an inti- 
 mate friend in JUT yuth of tin- I'.niiiry family, that tl 
 features of Sarah liattlc's personality were certainly drawn from 
 Sarah Burner, tho wife of the captain. The whole Biirnry 
 family, as is wi-11 known, were devoted to whist. The 
 published a little treatise on the game.
 
 VI THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 131 
 
 religious awe, to which the style is not able to modu- 
 late with no felt sense of incongruity. A feature of 
 Lamb's method, as we have seen, is his use of quota- 
 tions. Not only are they brought in so as really to 
 illustrate, but the passages cited themselves receive 
 illustration from the use made of. them, and gain a 
 permanent and heightened value from it. Whether 
 it be a garden-scene from Marvell, a solemn paradox 
 from Sir Thomas Browne, or a stanza from some then 
 recent poem of Wordsworth, the quotation fulfils a 
 double purpose, and has sent many a reader to explore 
 for himself in the author whose words strike him with 
 such luminous effect in their new setting. Take, for 
 example, the Miltonic digression in the essay on Grace 
 before Meat. Lamb is never more happy than in 
 quoting from or discoursing on Milton : 
 
 The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the 
 banquet which Satan, in the Paradise Regained, provides 
 for a temptation in the wilderness : 
 
 A table richly spread in regal modes 
 With dishes piled and meats of noblest sort 
 And savour ; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, 
 In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled 
 Gris-amber-steamed ; all fish from sea or shore, 
 Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained 
 Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. 
 
 The tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would go 
 down without the recommendatory preface of a benedic- 
 tion. They are like to be short graces where the devil 
 plays the host. I am afraid the poet wants his usual
 
 132 CHARLES LAMR CHAP. 
 
 decorum in this place. Was he thinking of the old 
 Homan luxury, or of a gaudy day at Cambridge ? This 
 was a temptation fitter for a Heliogabalus. The win 'It- 
 banquet is too civic and culinary ; and the accompani- 
 ments altogether a profanation of that deep, abstracted, 
 holy scene. The mighty artillery of sauces which tin- 
 cook-fiend conjures up, is out of proportion to the simple 
 wants and plain hunger of the gue.sk He that disturbed 
 him in his dreams, from his dreams might have been 
 taught better. To the temperate fantasies of the fami-ln-'l 
 Son of Qod what sort of feasts presented themselves ? He 
 dreamed indeed 
 
 As appetite is wont to dream 
 Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment sweet. 
 
 But what meats ? 
 
 Him thought, he by the brook of Clicrith stood, 
 
 And saw the ravens with their horny beaks 
 
 Food to Elijah bringing even and morn : 
 
 Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought. 
 
 He saw the prophet also how he !ll 
 
 Into the desert, and how there he slept 
 
 Under a junior : then how awaked 
 
 He found his supper on the coals prepared, 
 
 And by the angel was bid rise and eat, 
 
 And ate the second time after repose, 
 
 The strength whereof sufficed him forty days : 
 
 Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook 
 
 Or as a guest with Daniel at his puke. 
 
 Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate 
 dreams of the divine H lingerer. To which of these two 
 visionary banquets, think you, would the introduction <>f 
 what is called the grace have been most fitting and per- 
 tinc-nt 7
 
 vi THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 133 
 
 "I am no Quaker at my food." So Lamb 
 characteristically proceeds, after one short paragraph 
 interposed "I confess I am not indifferent to the 
 kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's flesh 
 were not made to be received with dispassionate 
 services. 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. There is a 
 physiognomical character in the tastes for food. 
 
 C holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who 
 
 refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is 
 right." 
 
 And so he rambles on in almost endless digression 
 and absolute fearlessness as to egotism of such a kind 
 ever palling or annoying. This egotism it is almost 
 superfluous to mark is a dominant characteristic of 
 Lamb's manner. The prominence of the personal 
 element had indeed been a feature of the essay proper 
 ever since Montaigne, its first inventor. But Lamb's 
 use of the " I " has little resemblance to the gossiping 
 confessions of the Gascon gentleman. These grave 
 avowals as to the minced veal and the dumplings are 
 not of the same order as Montaigne's confidences as 
 to his preference of white wine to red. The "I" 
 of Lamb in such a case is no concession to an idle 
 curiosity, nor is it in fact biographical at all. Nor 
 is it the egotism of Steele and Addison, though, when 
 occasion arises, Lamb shows signs of the influence 
 upon him of these earlier masters in his own special
 
 134 CHARLES LAMB . IIAI-. 
 
 school. Ho thus begins, for instance, his paj><T called 
 The Wedding: "I do not know when I have been 
 better pleased than at being invited last week to be 
 present at the wedding of a friend's daughter. I like 
 to make one at these ceremonies, which to us old 
 people give back our youth in a manner, and restore 
 our gayest season, in the remembrance of our own 
 success, or the regrets scarcely less tender, of our own 
 youthful disappointments, in this point of a settle- 
 ment. On these occasions I am sure to bo in good- 
 humour for a week or two after, and enjoy a reflected 
 honeymoon." In matter, language, and cadence, this 
 might have been taken bodily from the Sj 
 Yet this was no freak of imitation on Lamb's part. 
 It merely arose from the subject and the train of 
 thought engendered by it being of that domestic 
 kind which Richard Steele loved so well to discourse 
 on. Lamb's mind and memory were so stored with 
 English reading of an older date, that the occurn -IK v 
 of a particular theme sends him back, quite naturally, 
 to those early masters who had socially made that 
 theme their own. For all his strongly-marked indi- 
 viduality of manner, there are perhaps f.\\- Knglish 
 writers who have written so differently upon different 
 themes. When he chose to be fanciful, he could l>o 
 as euphuistic as Donne or Burton, when he was led 
 to be grave and didactic, he could write with tin- 
 sententiousness of Bacon, when his imagination and 
 frrliug together lifted him above thoughts of style, 
 his English cleared and soared into regions not far
 
 vi THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 135 
 
 below the noblest flights of Milton and Jeremy 
 Taylor. When on the other hand he was at home, 
 on homely themes, he wrote "like a man of this 
 world," and of his own century and year. 
 
 Still it must be said that his style is in the main 
 an eclectic English. It is needless to add that this 
 implies no affectation. No man ever wrote to such 
 purpose in a style deliberately assumed. Hazlitt 
 remarks of him, that "he is so thoroughly imbued 
 with the spirit of his authors, that the idea of imita- 
 tion is almost done away. There is an inward 
 unction, a marrowy vein both in the thought and 
 feeling, an intuition, deep and lively, of his subject 
 that carries off any quaintness or awkwardness aris- 
 ing from an antiquated style and dress." This is 
 quite true, and Hazlitt might have added that in 
 the rare instances when Lamb used this old-fashioned 
 manner, without the deeper thought or finer observa- 
 tion to elevate it, the manner alone, whimsical and 
 ingenious as it is, becomes a trifle wearisome. The 
 euphuistic ingenuity of All Fools' Day is not a pleas- 
 ing sample of Lamb's faculty. 
 
 His friend Bernard Barton wrote of him in a sonnet, 
 
 From the olden time 
 
 Of authorship, thy patent should be dated, 
 And thou with Marvell, Browne, and Burton, mated. 
 
 This trio of authors is well chosen. There is no poet 
 he loves better to quote than Marvell, and none with 
 whose poetic vein his own is more in sympathy.
 
 136 CHARLES LAMIJ < IIAI-. 
 
 Limit received his impressions from nature (unless it 
 was in Hertfordshire) largely through the medium of 
 books, and he makes it clear that old- fashioned 
 garden-scenes come to him first with their peculiar 
 charm when he meets with them in Milton or Marvell. 
 But the second name cited by Barton is the most 
 important of all among the influences on Lamb's 
 style and the cast of his thought. Of all old writers, 
 the author of the Urn Burial and the //'//'<' Medici 
 appears oftenest, in quotation or allusion, in the Essays 
 of Elia. Lamb somewhere boasts that he first 
 " among the moderns " discovered and proclaimed his 
 excellences. And though Lamb never (so far as I 
 can discover) caught the special rhythm of Browne's 
 sentences, it is from him that he adopted the constant 
 habit just referred to, of asserting his opinions, feel- 
 ings, and speculations in the first person. Different 
 as are the two men in other regards, Lamb's egotism 
 is largely the egotism of Sir Thomas Browne. From 
 Browne too he probably caught a certain habit of 
 gloomy paradox, in dwelling on the mysteries of the 
 supernatural world. His sombre musings upon death 
 in the essay called New Year's Ere bear the strong 
 impress of Browne, notwithstanding that they are 
 antagonistic (perhaps consciously) to a remarkable 
 passage in the Rdi<jio Medici. And even in his lighter 
 vein of speculation, Lamb's persistent use of the first 
 |>erson often reads as if he were humorously parody- 
 ing the same original. 
 
 A large portion of Lamb's history is related in
 
 vi THE ESSAYS OF ELI A 137 
 
 these essays, and with the addition of a few names 
 and dates, a complete biography might be constructed 
 from them alone. As we have seen, he tells of his 
 childish thoughts and feelings, of his school days, his 
 home in the Temple, the Hertfordshire village where 
 he passed his holidays as a boy, and the University 
 towns where he loved to spend them in manhood. 
 He has drawn detailed portraits of his grandmother, 
 his father, sister, and brother, and would no doubt 
 have added that of his mother, but for the painful 
 memories it would have brought to Mary. Of the 
 incidents in the happier days of his life, when Mary 
 was in good health, and the daily sharer in all in- 
 terests and pleasures, he has written with a special 
 charm. There is a passage in the essay called Old 
 China without which any picture of their united life 
 would be incomplete. The essay had begun by de- 
 claring Lamb's partiality for old china, from which 
 after a few paragraphs he diverges, by a modulation 
 common with him, to the recollection of his past 
 struggles. He had been taking tea, he says, with his 
 cousin (under this relationship his sister Mary is 
 always indicated), using a new set of china, and 
 remarking to her on their better fortunes which 
 enabled them to indulge now and again in the luxury 
 of such a purchase, "when a passing sentiment 
 seemed to overshade the brows of my companion. 
 I am quick at detecting these summer clouds in 
 Bridget. 
 
 " ' I wish the good old times would come again/
 
 138 CHARLES LAMB .MAC. 
 
 she said, ' when we were not quite so rich I do not 
 mean that I want to be poor, but there was a mil Ik- 
 state,' so she was pleased to ramble on, ' in which I 
 am sure we were a great deal happier. A purchase 
 is but a purchase, now that you have money enough 
 and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. 
 When we coveted a cheap luxury (and ! how much 
 ado I had to get you to consent in those days !) wo 
 were used to have a debate two or three days before, 
 and to weigh the for and against, and think what we 
 might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit 
 upon, that should be an equivalent. A thing was 
 worth buying then, when we felt the money that we 
 paid for it. 
 
 '"Do you remember the brown suit which you 
 made to hang upon you, till all your friends mod 
 shame upon you, it grew so threadbare, and all 
 because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which 
 you dragged home late at night from Barker's in 
 Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it 
 for weeks before we could make up our minds to the 
 purchase, and had not come to a determinuti'm till 
 it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when 
 you set off from Islington fearing you should be too 
 late and when the old bookseller, with some grum- 
 bling, opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for 
 ho was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from 
 his dusty treasures, and when you lugged it home, 
 wishing it were twice as cumbersome, and when you 
 presented it to me, and when we were exploring the
 
 VI THE ESSAYS OF ELI A 139 
 
 perfectness of it (collating, you called it), and while I 
 was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, 
 which your impatience would not suffer to be left 
 till daybreak was there no pleasure in being a poor 
 man 1 or can those neat black clothes which you 
 wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since 
 we have become rich and finical, give you half the 
 honest vanity with which you flaunted it about in 
 that over-worn suit your old corbeau for four or 
 five weeks longer than you should have done, to 
 pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen 
 or sixteen shillings, was it 1 a great affair we thought 
 it then which you had lavished on the old folio 1 
 Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, 
 but I do not see that you ever bring me home any 
 nice old purchases now.' " 
 
 The essay Blakesmoor in H shire has been 
 
 more than once referred to in connection with Lamb's 
 old grandmother, Mrs. Field. The essay acquires a 
 new interest when it is known how much of fact is 
 contained in it. William Plumer, who represented 
 his county in parliament for so many years, and was 
 at the time of his death in 1822 member for Higham 
 Ferrers, left his estates at Gilston and Blakesware to 
 his widow, apparently with the understanding that 
 the old Blakesware mansion should be pulled down. 
 Accordingly not long before the date of Lamb's essay 
 (September 1824) it had been levelled to the ground ; 
 and some of the more valuable of its contents, includ- 
 ing the busts of the Twelve Csesars, so often dwelt
 
 140 CHARLES LAMB CIIAI- 
 
 on by Lamb in letter or essay, removed to the other 
 house at Gilston. Under its roof, and among its 
 gardens and terraces, Lamb's happiest days as a child 
 had been spent, and he had just been to look once 
 more on the few vestiges still remaining : 
 
 I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range 
 at will over the deserted apartments of some fine old 
 family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit 
 of a better passion than envy ; and contemplations on the 
 great and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been 
 its inhabitants, weave for us illusions incompatible with 
 the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish 
 present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I 
 think, attends us between entering an empty and a 
 crowded church. In the latter it is chance but some 
 present human frailty an act of inattention on the part 
 of some of the auditory, or a trait of affectation, or worse, 
 vain K'lory. on that of the preacher puts us by our best 
 thoughts, disharmonising the place and the occasion. But 
 would'st thou know the beauty of holiness ? Go alone on 
 some weekday, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, 
 traverse the cool aisles of some country church ; think of 
 the piety that has kneeled there the congregations, old 
 and younir, that have found consolation there the meek 
 pastor, the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emo- 
 tions, no cross, conflicting comparisons, drink in th 
 tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed 
 and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep 
 around thee. 
 
 Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going 
 some few miles out of my road to look upon the remains
 
 vi THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 141 
 
 of an old great house with which I had been impressed 
 in this way in infancy. I was apprised that the owner 
 of it had lately pulled it down ; still I had a vague notion 
 that it could not all have perished, that so much solidity 
 with magnificence could not have been crushed all at once 
 into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it. 
 
 The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand 
 indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it 
 to an antiquity. 
 
 I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. 
 Where had stood the great gates ? What bounded the 
 courtyard ? Whereabout did the outhouses commence ? 
 A few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was 
 so stately and so spacious. 
 
 Death does not shrink up his human victim at this 
 rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their pro- 
 portion. 
 
 Had I seen these brick and mortar knaves at their 
 process of destruction, at the plucking of every panel I 
 should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have 
 cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of the 
 cheerful store-room, in whose hot window-seat I used to 
 sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plot before, and the 
 hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever 
 haunted it about me it is in mine ears now, as oft as 
 summer returns ; or a panel of the yellow room. 
 
 Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had 
 magic in it. The tapestried bedrooms tapestry so much 
 better than painting not adorning merely but peopling 
 the wainscots at which childhood ever and anon would 
 steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to 
 exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter
 
 Ill* CHARLES LAMB .MAP. 
 
 \viili those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally all 
 Ovid on tin- walls in colours vivider than his descrip- 
 tions. AcUcon in mid sjirout, with the unappeasable 
 prudery of Diana ; and the still more provoking and 
 almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, de- 
 liberately divesting of Marsyas. 
 
 Then that haunted room in which old Mrs. Battle 
 died whereinto I have crept, l>ut always in the daytime, 
 with a passion of fear ; and a sneaking curiosity, terror- 
 tainted, to hold communication with the past. How shall 
 they IniUd it up again ? 
 
 It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted 
 but that traces of the splendour of past inmates were 
 everywhere apparent. Its furniture was still standbi;.:, 
 even to the tarnished gilt-leather battledores and crumbling 
 feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that 
 children had once played there. But I was a lonely 
 child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew 
 every nook and corner, wondered and worshipped every- 
 where. The solitude of childhood is not so much the 
 mother of thought, as it i< the feeder of love, and silenee, 
 and admiration. So strange a passion for the place pos- 
 sessed 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 
 >]!! \shii h bound me to the house, and such my careful- 
 ness not to pass its strict and proper j.n -in< -is. 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 
 Lacut Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, exten- 
 sive prospects and those at no great distance from the
 
 VI THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 143 
 
 house I was told of such what were they to me, being 
 out of the boundaries of my Eden ? So far from a wish 
 to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the 
 fences of my chosen prison ; and have been hemmed in 
 by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. 
 I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet 
 
 Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines ; 
 
 Curl me about, ye gadding vines : 
 
 And oh so close your circles lace, 
 
 That I may never leave this place : 
 
 But lest your fetters prove too weak, 
 
 Ere I your silken bondage break, 
 
 Do you, brambles, chain me too, 
 
 And, courteous briars, nail me through. 1 
 
 t 
 
 I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides, the low- 
 built roof, parlours ten feet by ten, frugal boards, and all 
 the homeliness of home these were the condition of my 
 birth the wholesome soil which I was planted in. 
 
 Yet without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I 
 am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond ; 
 and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the con- 
 trasting accidents of a great fortune. 
 
 In this essay, save for the change of Blakesware to 
 Blakesmoor, the experience is related without disguise. 
 But it is not always easy to disengage fact from 
 fiction in these more personal confessions. Lamb had 
 a love of mystifying and putting his readers on a 
 false scent. And the difficulty of getting at the truth 
 is the greater because he is often most outspoken 
 when we should expect him to be reticent, and on the 
 1 Marvell on Appleton House, to the Lord Fairfax.
 
 144 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 other hand alters names and places when there would 
 seem to be little reason for it A curious instance of 
 this habit is supplied by the touching reverie called 
 Dream Children. This essay appeared in the London 
 for January 1822. Lamb's elder brother John was 
 then lately dead. A letter to Wordsworth, of March 
 in this year, mentions his death as recent, and speaks 
 of a certain "deadness to everything," which the 
 writer dated from that event The " broad, burly, 
 jovial " John Lamb (so Talfourd describes him) had 
 lived his own, easy, prosperous life up to this time, 
 not altogether avoiding social relations with his 
 brother and sister, but evidently absorbed to the last 
 in his own interests and pleasures. The death of this 
 brother, wholly unsympathetic as he was with Charles, 
 served to bring home to him his loneliness. He was 
 left in the world with but one near relation, and that 
 one too often removed from him for months at a time 
 by the saddest of afflictions. No wonder if he became 
 keenly aware of his solitude. No wonder if his 
 thoughts turned to what might have been, and he 
 looked back to those boyish days when he wandered in 
 the glades of Blakesware with Alice by his side. Ho 
 imagines himself with his little ones, who have crept 
 round him to hear stories about their "great-grand- 
 mother Field." For no reason that is apparent, while 
 he retains his grandmother's real name, he places the 
 house in Norfolk, but all the details that follow are 
 drawn from Blakesware. "Then I went on to say 
 how religious and how good their great-grandmother
 
 vi THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 145 
 
 Field was, how beloved and respected by everybody, 
 though she was not indeed the mistress of this great 
 house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in some 
 respects she might be said to be the mistress of it too) 
 committed to her by its owner, who preferred living 
 in a newer and more fashionable mansion which he 
 had purchased somewhere in an adjoining county; 1 
 but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had been 
 her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house 
 in a sort while she lived, which afterwards came to 
 decay, and was nearly pulled down, and all its old 
 ornaments stripped and carried away to the owner's 
 other house, where they were set up, and looked as 
 awkward as if some one were to carry away the old 
 tombs they had seen lately at the abbey and stick 
 them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. 
 Here John smiled, as much as to say, ' That would be 
 foolish indeed.' " 
 
 Inexpressibly touching, when we have once learned 
 to penetrate the thin disguise in which he clothes 
 them, are the hoarded memories, the tender regrets, 
 which Lamb, writing by his "lonely hearth," thus 
 ventured to commit to the uncertain sympathies of 
 the great public. More touching still is the almost 
 superhuman sweetness with which he deals with the 
 character of his lately lost brother. He had named 
 his little ones after this brother, and after their 
 "pretty dead mother" John and Alice. And there 
 
 1 This is, of course, Gilston, the other seat of the Plumer 
 family. 
 
 L
 
 146 CHARLES LAMB . MM-. 
 
 is something of the raagic of genius, unless, inlf-<l, 
 it was a burst of uncontrollable anguish, in the revela- 
 tion with which his dream ends. He kept still, as 
 always, the secret of his beloved's name. But he tells 
 us who it was that won the prize from him, and it is no 
 secret that in this case the real name is given. 
 
 Then in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, 
 though their great-grandmother Field loved all her grand- 
 children, yet in an especial manner she might be said to 
 
 love their uncle, John L , because he was so handsome 
 
 and spirited a youth, and a king to the rest of us ; and 
 instead of moping about in solitary corners, like some of 
 us, he would mount the most mettlesome horse he could 
 get, when but an imp no bigger than themselves, and 
 make it carry him half over the county in a morning, and 
 join the hunters when there were any out ; and yet he 
 loved the old house and gardens too, but had too much 
 spirit to be always pent up within their Umndaries ; and 
 how their uncle grew up to man's estate as brave as he 
 was hand.-oine, to the admiration of everybody, but of 
 their great-grandmother Field most especially ; and how 
 he used to carry me upon his back when I was a lame- 
 footed boy for he was a good bit older than me many 
 a mile when I could not walk for pain ; and how in after- 
 life he became lame-footed too, and I did not alv 
 fear) make allowance enough for him when he wa* impa- 
 tient and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate 
 he had been to me when I was lame-footed ; and how 
 when he died, though he had not l>een dead an hour, it 
 1 aw if he Inul died a ^reat while ago, such a distance 
 [fl betwixt life and death ; and how I bore his death
 
 vi THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 147 
 
 as I thought pretty well at first, but afterwards it haunted 
 and haunted me ; and though I did not cry or take it to 
 heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I 
 had died, yet I missed him all day long and knew not till 
 then how much I had loved him. I missed his kindness 
 and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be alive 
 again to be quarrelling with him (for we quarrelled some- 
 times), rather than not have him again, and was as uneasy 
 without him as he their poor uncle must have been when 
 the doctor took off his limb. Here the children fell a- 
 crying, and asked if their little mourning which they had 
 on was not for Uncle John, and they looked up and prayed 
 me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them some 
 stories about their pretty dead mother. Then I told how 
 for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in 
 despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice 
 
 W n ; and as much as children could understand, I 
 
 explained to them what coyness and difficulty and denial 
 meant in maidens when suddenly, turning to Alice, the 
 soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a 
 reality of representment, that I became in doubt which of 
 them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair 
 was ; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually 
 grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding till 
 nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the 
 uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely im- 
 pressed upon me the effects of speech : " We are not of 
 Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children 
 of Alice call Bartram father. We are nothing ; less than 
 nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, 
 and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of 
 ages before we have existence and a name " and immedi-
 
 148 CHARLES I. A Mi: 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 ately awaking I found myself ijuirtly sv.itol in my bachelor 
 arm-chair, where I h;il fallen a>lcc]>, with the faithful 
 Bridget unchanged by my side ; but John L. (or James 
 Elia) was gone for ever. 
 
 The space available for quotation is exhausted, and 
 many sides of Lamb's peculiar faculty are still unre- 
 presented. Those who have yet to make his ac- 
 quaintance may be advised to read, in addition to 
 those already named, the essay On Some of the Old 
 Actors, containing the analysis of the character of 
 Malvolio, a noble example of the uses which Shak- 
 spearian criticism may be made to serve the extract 
 from a letter to his friend Barron Field, a judge in 
 New South Wales, entitled Distant Correspondents, and 
 that called The Praise of Chimney Sweepers. Belonging 
 to the personal group, which includes Blakesmoor and 
 Dream Children, is the paper Mockery End in Hertford- 
 shire, scarcely less delightful. The two critical essays 
 on Sidney and Wither (the latter, however, does not 
 belong to the Elia series) contain some of Lamb's 
 most subtle criticism and most eloquent writing. 
 Barbara S. is an anecdote of Fanny Kelly's early lid- ; 
 and Captain Jackson is a character-sketch, which, 
 despite the vast difference between the two writers, 
 curiously suggests the fine hand of Miss Austen. 
 Lastly, the paper with the startling title, Confessions 
 of a Dntiihinl, is not to be overlooked. A strange 
 interest attaches to this paper. It had been originally 
 written by Lamb, at the request of his friend, Basil 
 Montagu, as a contribution to a volume of selections
 
 vi THE ESSAYS OF ELTA 149 
 
 in prose and verse on the temperance question. 1 In 
 this capacity it had been quoted in an article in the 
 Quarterly, for April 1822, as "a fearful picture of the 
 consequences of intemperance," which the reviewer 
 went on to say "we have reason to know is a true 
 tale." In order to give the author the opportunity of 
 contradicting this statement, the tract was reprinted 
 in the London in the following August, under the 
 signature of Elia. To it were appended a few words 
 of remonstrance with the Quarterly reviewer for 
 assuming the literal truthfulness of these confessions, 
 but accompanied with certain significant admissions 
 that showed Lamb had no right to be seriously indig- 
 nant. "It is indeed," he writes, "a compound 
 extracted out of his long observations of the effects of 
 drinking upon all the world about him; and this 
 accumulated mass of misery he hath centred (as the 
 custom is with judicious essayists) in a single figure. 
 We deny not that a portion of his own experiences 
 may have passed into the picture (as who, that is not 
 a washy fellow, but must at some time have felt the 
 after-operation of a too generous cup ?) ; but then how 
 heightened ! how exaggerated ! how little within the 
 sense of the Eeview, where a part, in their slanderous 
 usage, must be understood to stand for the whole." 
 The truth is that Lamb in writing his paper had been 
 playing with edge-tools, and could hardly have com- 
 plained if they turned against himself. It would be 
 
 1 Some Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented Liquors. By 
 a Water-Drinker. 1814.
 
 150 CHARLES LAMB rii.vi-. 
 
 those who knew Lamb, or at least the circumstances 
 of his life, best, who would be most likely to accept 
 these confessions as true. For in the course of them 
 he gives with curious fidelity the outline of an experi- 
 ence that was certainly not imaginary. The " friendly 
 harpies " who came about him for his gin-and-water, 
 and made its consumption more and more a habit ; 
 the exchange of these in due course for companions of 
 a better type, " of intrinsic and felt worth ; " the sub- 
 stitution for a while, under the influence of two of 
 these, of the " sweet enemy " tobacco, and the new 
 slavery to this counter-attraction ; the increasing need 
 of stimulant to set his wits to work, and the buffoonery 
 indulged under its effects, all this is told in a way 
 that no friend of Lamb could affect to mistake. No 
 doubt the exaggeration which Lamb pleads is there 
 also, and the drunkard's utter collapse and misery arc 
 described in a style which, as applied to himself, was 
 absurd. But to call the insinuation that the tract had 
 in it biographic truth, " malignant," as some of Lamb's 
 apologists have done, is not less absurd. The essay 
 has enough reality in it to live as a very powerful 
 plea for the virtue of self-restraint, and it may 
 continue to do good service in the cause. 
 
 Do Quincey has observed that one chief pleasure 
 we derive from Lamb's writing is due to a secret 
 satisfaction in feeling that his admirers must always 
 of necessity be a select few. There is an unpleasantly 
 cynical flavour about the remark, but at the same time 
 one understands to what it points. Thoroughly to
 
 vi THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 151 
 
 understand and enjoy Charles Lamb, one must have 
 come to entertain a feeling towards him almost like 
 personal affection, and such a circle of intimates will 
 always be small. It is necessary to come to the study 
 of his writings in entire trustfulness, and having first 
 cast away all prejudice. The reader must be content 
 to enjoy what is set before him, and not to grumble 
 because any chance incident on the road tempts the 
 writer away from the path on which he set out. If 
 an essay is headed Oxford in the Vacation, he must not 
 complain that only half the paper touches on Oxford, 
 and that the rest is divided between the writer Elia 
 and a certain absent-minded old scholar, George Dyer, 
 on whose peculiarities Lamb was never weary of 
 dwelling. What, then, is the compensating charm? 
 What is there in these rambling and multifarious 
 meditations that proves so stimulating and suggestive ? 
 There is an epithet commonly applied to Lamb so 
 hackneyed that one shrinks from using it once more 
 the epithet "delightful." No other word certainly 
 seems more appropriate, and it is perhaps because (in 
 defiance of etymology) the sound of it suggests that 
 double virtue of illuminating, and making happy. It is 
 in vain to attempt to convey an idea of the impression 
 left by Lamb's style. It evades analysis. One might 
 as well seek to account for the perfume of lavender, 
 or the flavour of quince. It is in truth an essence, 
 prepared from flowers and herbs gathered in fields 
 where the ordinary reader does not often range. And 
 the nature of the writer the alembic in which these
 
 152 CHARLES LAMB t-n \i-.vi 
 
 various simples were distilled was as rare for sweet- 
 ness and purity as the best of those enshrined in the 
 old folios his "midnight darlings." If he had by 
 nature the delicate grace of Marvell, and the quaint 
 fancy of Quarles, he also shared the chivalry of 
 Sidney, and could lay on himself "the lowliest 
 duties," in the spirit of his best-beloved of all, John 
 Milton. It is the man, Charles Lamb, that constitutes 
 the enduring charm of his written words. He is, as 
 I have said, an egotist but an egotist without a touch 
 of vanity or self-assertion an egotist without a grain 
 of envy or ill-nature. When asked one day whether 
 he did not hate some person under discussion, he 
 retorted, "How could I hate him? Don't I know 
 him 1 I never could hate any one I knew." It is this 
 humanity that gives to his intellect its flexibility and 
 its deep vision, that is the feeder at once of his pathos 
 :tinl his humour.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 COLEBROOK ROW, ISLINGTON THE CONTROVERSY 
 
 WITH SOUTHEY, AND RETIREMENT FROM THE 
 
 INDIA HOUSE 
 
 (18231826) 
 
 THE last six years of Lamb's life, though the most 
 remarkable in his literary annals, had not been fruit- 
 ful in incident. The death of his elder brother, 
 already mentioned, was the one event that nearly 
 touched his heart and spirits. Its effect had been, 
 with the loss of some other friends about the same 
 time, to produce, he said, "a certain deadness to 
 everything." It had brought home to him his lone- 
 liness, and moreover served to increase a long -felt 
 weariness of the monotony of office life. Already, in 
 the beginning of 1822, he was telling 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
 
 154 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 hours of the day between ten and four, without ease 
 or interposition. Tcedet me harum quotidianarum for- 
 marum, these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's 
 dish. ... I dare not whisper to myself a pension on 
 this side of absolute incapacitation and infirmity, till 
 years have sucked me dry otium cum indigniiate. I 
 had thought in a green old age (0 green thought !) 
 to have retired to Ponder's End, emblematic name, 
 how beautiful ! in the Ware Road, there to have 
 made up my accounts with heaven and the Company, 
 toddling about it between it and Cheshunt, anon 
 stretching, on some fine Isaac Walton morning, to 
 Hoddesden or Amwell, careless as a beggar; but 
 walking, walking ever, till I fairly walked myself off 
 my legs, dying walking ! The hope is gone. I ait 
 like Philomel all day (but not singing) with my heart 
 against this thorn of a desk." Very touching, by the 
 side of the delightful suggestion of Ponder's End, is 
 the dream of retirement to the Ware Road the road, 
 that is to say, that led to Widford and Blakesware. 
 If these were not to him exactly what Auburn was 
 to Goldsmith, he still at times had hopes 
 
 His long vexation past, 
 There to return, and die at home at last. 
 
 Three years were, however, to elapse before he was 
 at liberty to choose his own place of residence. It is 
 significant that though he could never bring himself 
 to live quite beyond reach of town, and the " sweet 
 security of streets," it was in the Hertfordshire
 
 vii COLEBROOK KOW, ISLINGTON 155 
 
 direction that he turned in his last days, and died 
 as it were half-way between London and that quiet 
 Hertfordshire village, the two places he loved best 
 on earth. 
 
 There was one incident in those Eussell Street 
 days that would have been an event indeed in the 
 life of most home-keeping men who had reached 
 middle life without having once left English shores. 
 In the summer holiday of 1822 Charles and his 
 sister made a trip to Paris. James Kenney, the 
 dramatist, who had married a French lady, was 
 living with his family at Versailles, and had invited 
 the Lambs to be his guests. They left England in the 
 middle of June, and two months later we find Mary 
 Lamb still in Paris, and seeing the sights under the 
 direction of their friend, Crabb Eobinson. Charles, 
 who had returned earlier to England, had left a 
 characteristic note of instructions for his sister's guid- 
 ance, advising her to walk along the " Borough side 
 of the Seine," where she would find a mile and a half 
 of print-shops and bookstalls. " Then," he adds, not 
 unfairly describing a first impression of Pere-la-Chaise, 
 " there is a place where the Paris people put all their 
 dead people, and bring them flowers and dolls and 
 gingerbread-nuts and sonnets and such trifles ; and 
 that is all, I think, worth seeing as sights, except 
 that the streets and shops of Paris are themselves 
 the best sight." In a note to Barron Field on his 
 return he adds a few more of his experiences, how 
 he had eaten frogs, fricasseed, " the nicest little deli-
 
 156 CHARLES LAM I! CHAP. 
 
 cate things," and how the Seine was " exactly the 
 size to run through a magnificent street." 
 
 He finds time, however, to add to his hasty note 
 the pleasant intelligence that he had met Talma, 
 doubtless through Kenney's introduction. Talma 
 had lately given a thousand francs for what he was 
 assured was an authentic portrait of Shakspeare, and 
 he invited Kenney to bring Lamb to see it. 1 " It is 
 painted," Lamb writes, "on the one half of a pair of 
 bellows, a lovely picture, corresponding with the folio 
 head." It is hard to believe that Lamb had any 
 doubts about the spuriousness of this relic, though 
 his language on the point is dubious. He quotes the 
 rhymes " in old carved wooden letters " that sur- 
 rounded the portrait, and adds the significant remark 
 that Ireland was not found out by his parchments, 
 but by his poetry. And perhaps he did not wish to 
 hurt Talma's feelings. It was arranged that the 
 party should see the tragedian in Regulus the same 
 evening, and that he should sup with them after theper- 
 formance. Lamb, we are told, " could not at all enter 
 into the spirit of French acting, ami in his general 
 distaste made no exception in favour of his intended 
 guest. This, however, did not prevent their mutual 
 and high relish of each other's character and conver- 
 sation, nor was any allusion made to the performance, 
 till, on rising to go, Talma inquired how he liked it 
 
 1 The Shakspeare Portrait imposture is exposed in an article 
 in Chambers a Journal of 27th September 1 856, " The Apocryphal 
 iu Portraiture."
 
 vii COLEBROOK ROW, ISLINGTON 157 
 
 Lamb shook his head and smiled. ' Ah ! ' said Talma. 
 ' I was not very happy to-night : you must see me in 
 Sylla.' 'Incidit in Scyllam,' said Lamb,' qui vult 
 vitare Charybdim.' 'Ah ! you are a rogue ; you are 
 a great rogue,' said Talma, shaking him cordially by 
 the hand, as they parted." 
 
 There is a sad story, only too likely to be true, 
 that Mary Lamb was seized with one of her old 
 attacks on the journey, and had to be left at Amiens 
 in charge of her attendant. If so, it may account for 
 her brother avoiding the subject in later essays and 
 letters. An Elia essay embodying even the surface 
 impressions of a month's stay in Paris would have 
 been a welcome addition to the number. Lamb was 
 usually prompt to seize on the latest incident in his 
 life and turn it to this purpose. When short-sighted 
 George Dyer, leaving the cottage at Islington, walked 
 straight into the New Eiver in broad daylight, the 
 adventure appears the very next month in the London 
 Magazine, under the heading of Amicus Redivivus. 
 But France and the French do not seem to have 
 opened any new vein of humour or observation. In 
 truth, Lamb was unused to let his sympathies go 
 forth save in certain customary directions. Any 
 persons, and any book that he had come to know 
 well any one of the " old familiar faces " served 
 to draw out those sympathies. But novelties he 
 almost always passed by unmoved. 
 
 The first series of Lamb's essays, under the title of 
 Elia Essays that have appeared under that signature
 
 158 CHARLES LAMB ni.\i-. 
 
 tn the London Magazine was published in a single 
 volume by Taylor and Hessey at the opening of the 
 year 1823. It contained the contributions of some- 
 thing less than two years. As yet there was assuredly 
 no sign of failing power in the brain and heart that 
 produced them. Nor did Lamb cease to contribute to 
 the magazine and elsewhere after the appearance of 
 the first volume. The second series, published ten 
 years later, is an exception to the rule that sequels 
 must necessarily be failures. Old China and Poor 
 Relations, the Old Margate Hoy, Blakesmoor, Barbara S., 
 and the Superannuated Man, which are found in the 
 second series, exhibit all Lamb's qualities at their 
 highest It was perhaps only a passing mood of 
 melancholy that made him write to Bernard Barton, 
 in March 1823, when the book had already begun to 
 make its mark "They have dragged me again into 
 the magazine, but I feel the spirit of the thing in my 
 own mind quite gone. ' Some brains ' (I think Ben 
 Jonson says it) ' will endure but one skimming.' " But 
 another cause for this depression may have been at 
 work. There was a painful incident connected with 
 the Elia volume from the first, for which even the 
 quick appreciation of the public could not compensate. 
 There had been one exception to the welcome with 
 which the book had been greeted. A word of grave 
 disapprobation, or what had seemed such to Lamb, 
 had been heard amid the chorus of approval, and this 
 word had been spoken by a dear and valued friend. 
 In the Quarterly fteview of January 1823 appeared
 
 vii COLEBROOK ROW, ISLINGTON 159 
 
 an article, known to be by Southey, professing to be 
 a review of a work by Gregoire, ex-Bishop of Blois, 
 on the rise and progress of Deism in France. After 
 the fashion of reviewers, Southey had made the book 
 an occasion for a general survey of the spread of free 
 thought in England as well as abroad, and the 
 article was issued with the alarming title, Progress of 
 Infidelity. Towards its close Southey is led charac- 
 teristically into many general reflections on the 
 reasonableness of belief, and the unreasonableness of 
 scepticism, and while engaged on this line of thought, 
 it seems to have occurred to him that he might at 
 once " point a moral" and call attention to a friend's 
 book, by a quotation from the then newly published 
 volume of Lamb. And this is how he set about it : 
 "Unbelievers have not always been honest enough 
 thus to express their real feelings ; but this we know 
 concerning them, that when they have renounced 
 their birthright of hope, they have not been able 
 to divest themselves of fear. From the nature of the 
 human mind this might be presumed, and in fact it is 
 so. They may deaden the heart and stupefy the 
 conscience, but they cannot destroy the imaginative 
 faculty. There is a remarkable proof of this in Elids 
 Essays, a book which wants only a sounder religious 
 feeling to be as delightful as it is original. In that 
 upon Witches and other Night Fears, he says ' It is not 
 book or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, 
 which create these terrors in children. They can at 
 most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H.,
 
 160 CHARLES LAMB OUT. 
 
 who of all children has been brought up with the most 
 scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition, who 
 was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or 
 scarcely to be told of bad men, or to hear or read of 
 any distressing story, finds all this world of fear, from 
 which he has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in his 
 own "thick-coming fancies;" and from his little mid- 
 night pillow this nurse-child of optimism will start at 
 shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which 
 the reveries of the cell -damned murderer are tran- 
 quillity.' " 
 
 I have had occasion to refer to this essay before, in 
 speaking of Lamb's childhood. For, as usual, it 
 originated in his own experience. He was led to relate 
 how from the age of four to seven his nightly sleep 
 had been disturbed by childish terrors, in which the 
 grim picture of Saul and the Witch, in Stackhouse's 
 History of the Bible, had borne so prominent a part. 
 And then, in order to strengthen his argument that 
 these terrors are nervous, and not to be traced to any 
 gloomy or improper religious training, he cites the 
 parallel case, within his own knowledge, of "dear 
 little T. H." All Lamb's friends and associates knew 
 that this was little Thornton Hunt, Leigh Hunt's 
 eldest son. The use of initials was really no disguise 
 at all. Lamb admitted in his subsequent remonstrance 
 with Southey that to call him T. H. was "as good as 
 naming him." If the sanctity of private life had been 
 violated, it was certainly Lamb who had set the 
 example. But, as certainly, he had said nothing to
 
 vii THE CONTROVEKSY WITH SOUTHEY 161 
 
 the discredit of the poor child or his parents. Ac- 
 cording to the ethics of journalism current sixty years 
 ago there was nothing uncommon in this way of 
 indicating living people. Lamb was specially fond of 
 bringing in his friends and acquaintances by their 
 initials. His own family, Coleridge, Norris, Barron 
 Field, and many others, occur repeatedly in his writ- 
 ings in this guise. He was intimate with Leigh Hunt 
 and his young family, and sincerely attached to them. 
 Nothing had been further from his thoughts than to 
 cast any kind of slight upon the little boy, " Thornton 
 Hunt, my favourite child," or his educators. It must 
 therefore have been with something more than disgust 
 that he found the Quarterly Reviewer proceeding, 
 after the passage just cited, to point out with unmis- 
 takable animus that such nervous terrors were easily 
 to be accounted for in the case of one who had been 
 brought up in ignorance of all the facts and consola- 
 tions of the Christian religion. 
 
 It is possible that this gratuitous attack upon a 
 political opponent, through his own child, was not 
 added to the article until after it had left Southey's 
 hands. All that we know from Southey himself is 
 that his sole object in mentioning Lamb's volume had 
 been to call attention to its general merits that he 
 had in the first instance written " a saner religious feel- 
 ing," which was the word that exactly expressed his 
 meaning ; that happily remembering in time the 
 previous history of the Lamb family, he had hastily 
 changed the word to "sounder," meaning to re-cast 
 M
 
 162 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 OHA*. 
 
 the sentence when the article returned to him in 
 proof, and that the opportunity never came. Wo 
 may be sure that this explanation represents the 
 whole truth. Southey had written to his friend 
 Wynn, in the very month in which the article ap- 
 peared : " Read Elin t if the book has not fallen in 
 your way. It is by my old friend, Charles Lamb. 
 There are some things in it which will offend, and 
 some which will pain you, as they do me ; but you 
 will find in it a rich vein of pure gold." And the 
 things which pained him were certainly of a kind 
 about which the word sane might be more properly 
 used than the word sound. Lamb was probably mis- 
 taken in thinking that Southey referred to certain 
 familiarities, if not flippancies, of expression on serious 
 subjects that he may at times have indulged in. On 
 this score he had a fair retort ready in the various 
 ballads of diablerie that Southey had not disdained to 
 write, and to publish. Nor was Southey, we may be 
 sure, offended by so genuinely earnest a plea for 
 temperance and rational gratitude as is contained in 
 the essay Grace before Meat. Rather (as Lamb evi- 
 dently suspected) was it such a vein of speculation as 
 that followed out in New Year's Etv, which would 
 cause a strange chill to the simple faith and steadfast 
 hopefulness of his friend. As I have said, Lamb 
 seems in this essay to have written with the express 
 purpose of presenting the reverse side of a passage in 
 his favourite Religio Media. Sir Thomas Browne had 
 there written : " I thank God I have not those strait
 
 VII THE CONTROVERSY WITH SOUTHEY 163 
 
 ligaments, or narrow obligations to the world, as to 
 dote on life, or be convulsed and tremble at the name 
 of death." " When I take a full view and circle of 
 myself without this reasonable moderator, and equal 
 piece of justice, death, I do conceive myself the 
 miserablest person extant." Lamb may have argued 
 (in the very words applied to this treatise in the essay 
 on Imperfect Sympathies) that it was all very well for 
 the author of the Religio Medici, " mounted upon the 
 airy stilts of abstraction," to "overlook the imper- 
 tinent individualities of such poor concretions as 
 mankind," but that to him, Elia, death meant some- 
 thing by no means to be defined as a "reasonable 
 moderator," and "equal piece of justice." He clung 
 to the things he saw and loved the friends, the 
 books, the streets and crowds around him, and he was 
 not ashamed to confess that death meant for him the 
 absence of all these, and that he could not look it 
 steadfastly in the face. 
 
 It is worth noticing that the profound melancholy 
 of this essay had already attracted attention, and 
 formed the subject of a copy of verses, in the form of 
 a Poetical Epistle to Elia, signed " Olen," in the London 
 Magazine for August 1821. l Elia had been there 
 taken to task, in lines of much eloquence and feeling, 
 
 1 The lines were by the late Sir Charles Elton, of Clevedon 
 Court, Somersetshire, a frequent contributor at the time to the 
 London Magazine. They were afterwards included by him in 
 a volume Boyhood, and other Poems, published in 1835. (See 
 Letters of Charles Lamb, ii. pp. 35 and 313.)
 
 164 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 for his negative views on the subject of a future life. 
 And indeed, for all the dallying with paradox, and 
 the free blending of fact with fiction, in this singular 
 paper, the fragments of personal confession are very 
 remarkable. There are few things in literature more 
 pathetic than the contrast drawn between the two 
 stages of his own life, as if he would have given the 
 lie sadly to his friend's adage about the child being 
 father of the man : 
 
 If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is 
 introspective and mine is painfully so can have a less 
 respect for his present identity, than I have for the man 
 Elia, I know him to be light, and vain, and humor- 
 some ; a notorious . . . ; addicted to . . . ; averse from 
 counsel, neither taking it nor offering it ; ... besides ; a 
 stammering buffoon ; what you will ; lay it on, and spare 
 not ; I subscribe to it all, and much more than thou canst 
 be willing to lay at his door but for the child Elia 
 that " other me " there in the background I must take 
 leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master, 
 witb as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling 
 of five-and-forty as if it had been a child of some other 
 house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient 
 small-pox at five, and rougher medicaments. I can lay 
 its poor fevered bead upon tbe sick pillow at Christ's, 
 and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of 
 maternal tenderness hanging over it, tbat unknown bad 
 watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the 
 least colour of falsehood. Qod belp tbee, Elia, bow art 
 thou changed ! Thou art sophisticated. I know how 
 honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was ; how
 
 VII THE CONTROVERSY WITH SOUTHEY 165 
 
 religious, how imaginative, how hopeful ! From what 
 have I not fallen if the child I remember was indeed 
 myself, and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a 
 false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, 
 and regulate the tone of my moral being. 
 
 Although the gloom is relieved by no ray of hope 
 or consolation, the reality of the self-reproach might 
 well have saved the writer from criticism, even as to 
 the " sanity " of his religious feeling. 
 
 Lamb was annoyed, rather than deeply hurt, by 
 the attack upon himself. He had old grievances 
 against the Quarterly Review. Eight or nine years 
 before, he had written for it a review of Wordsworth's 
 Excursion, which Gifford inserted after alterations that 
 Lamb compared to pulling out the eyes and leaving 
 only the bleeding sockets. "I cannot give you an 
 idea of what he (Gifford) has done to it," he wrote to 
 Wordsworth. " The language he has altered through- 
 out. Whatever inadequateness it had to its subject, 
 it was, in point of composition, the prettiest piece of 
 prose I ever writ." And it is clear from the article 
 itself, as it appears in the number for October 1814, 
 that this language is not exaggerated. The sweetness 
 and delicate perception of the author are there, but 
 the diction bears little of his peculiar mark. Then 
 had come the unfortunate reference to the Confessions 
 of a Drunkard, already mentioned. In general the 
 Quarterly set were in implacable opposition to the Lamb 
 set, and now, not for the first time, he had to hear 
 hard things said, not only of himself, but of those who
 
 166 CHARLES LAMB UIAIV 
 
 were bound to him by ties of strong affection. He 
 seems not to have been informed of the attack till 
 some months after its appearance. It is not till the 
 July following, at least, that any mention of it occurs 
 in his letters. In that month he writes to Bernard 
 Barton : " Southey has attacked Elia on the score of 
 infidelity, in the Quarterly article, Progress of Infidelity. 
 He might have spared an old friend such a construc- 
 tion of a few careless flights, that meant no harm to 
 religion. If all his unguarded expressions on the 
 subject were to be collected but I love and respect 
 Southey, and will not retort. I hate his review and 
 his being a reviewer. The hint he has dropped \\ ill 
 knock the sale of the book on the head, which was 
 almost at a stop before." This last apprehension was 
 evidently groundless. There is no reason to suppose 
 that the book made its way more slowly for the para- 
 graph in the review. For whatever here and there 
 is morbid in them, the Essays themselves contain the 
 best antidote. 
 
 Lamb could not resist the opportunity it afforded 
 him for a fresh essay of Elia, and in the London for 
 October 1823 appeared the Letter of Elia to Robert 
 Southey, Esq. As a whole, it is not one of Lamb's 
 happiest efforts. His more valid grounds of complaint 
 against the review are set forth with sufficient dignity 
 and force. He urges quite fairly that to say a book 
 " wants a sounder religious feeling," is to say either 
 too much or too little. And the indecency of attack- 
 ing Leigh Hunt through his own child, a boy of
 
 vii THE CONTROVERSY WITH SOUTHEY . 167 
 
 twelve, is properly rebuked. But when Lamb carries 
 the war into the enemy's territory, he is less success- 
 ful. As two blacks do not make a white, it was beside 
 the mark to make laborious fun over Southey's 
 youthful ballads; and the grievance as to the fees 
 extorted from visitors to Westminster Abbey comes 
 in rather flatly as a peroration. The concluding 
 paragraphs of the letter are the only portions that 
 Lamb afterwards thought well to reprint. They 
 appeared, ten years later, in the Second Series of Mia 
 under the title of Tombs of the Abbey. The letter, as 
 a whole, is given in Mrs. Leicester's School, etc. 
 
 Lamb was not so deeply moved by Southey's criti- 
 cism but that he could make some sport over his 
 annoyance. What actually galled him was the attack, 
 through himself, upon a friend. In previous articles 
 in the same Review he had found himself compli- 
 mented at the expense of another friend, William 
 Hazlitt. And now he took the opportunity to vindi- 
 cate his friendship for both Hunt and Hazlitt in a 
 passage that forms the most interesting and valuable 
 portion of the letter. There had been a coolness, 
 he tells us, between himself and Hazlitt, and it is 
 pleasant to know that Lamb's generosity of tone at 
 this time helped to make the relations between them 
 once more cordial. "Protesting," he says, "against 
 much that he has written, and some things which he 
 chooses to do ; judging him by his conversation which 
 I enjoyed so long, and relished so deeply ; or by his 
 books, in those places where no clouding passion
 
 168 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 < H. \r. 
 
 intervenes, I should belie my own conscience if 1 
 said less than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural 
 and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits 
 breathing. So far from being ashamed of that in- 
 timacy which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I 
 was able for so many years to have preserved it 
 entire ; and I think I shall go to my grave without 
 finding or expecting to find such another companion." 
 Not less manly and noble is the justification of his 
 steady friendship for Leigh Hunt, at that time liv- 
 ing abroad, and with a reputation in England of ill 
 savour with those to whom the pages of the Quarterly 
 were addressed. "L. H. is now in Italy; on his 
 departure to which land, with much regret, I took 
 my leave of him and of his little family, seven of 
 them, sir, with their mother, and as kind a set of 
 little people (T. H. and all), as affectionate children 
 as ever blessed a parent. Had you seen them, sir, I 
 think you could not have looked upon them as so 
 many little Jonases, but rather as pledges of the 
 vessel's safety, that was to bear such a freight of love. 
 I wish you would read Mr. H.'s lines to that same 
 I. H., 'six years old, during a sickness' 
 
 Sleep breathes at last from out thee, 
 My little patient boy 
 
 (they are to be found on the 47th page of Foliage) 
 and ask yourself how far they are out of the spirit of 
 Christianity. 
 
 As he wrote these words, Lamb may have recall--!
 
 VII THE CONTROVERSY WITH SOUTHEY 169 
 
 how his own unfailing sympathy had been a comfort 
 to this friend in those darker days when Leigh Hunt 
 was undergoing his two years' imprisonment in the 
 Surrey jail for his newspaper attack on the Prince 
 Eegent. Lamb and his sister were among the Hunts' 
 most regular visitors at that time. "My eldest little 
 boy," writes Hunt in his Autobiography, " was my con- 
 stant companion, and we used to play all sorts of 
 juvenile games together." And it was on watching 
 the child at play among the uncongenial surroundings 
 of prison life that Lamb had written his own lines to 
 "T. L. H. a child," comforting child and father 
 with the thought that the time of deliverance was at 
 hand, when the boy would be once more in his native 
 element, breathing the healthful air and plucking the 
 wild flowers on Hampstead Heath. Lamb was 
 always tender over children, and these lines have a 
 simplicity, over and above their studied quaintness, 
 that savours pleasantly of Blake : 
 
 Guileless traitor, rebel mild, 
 
 Convict unconscious, culprit-child ! 
 
 Gates that close with iron roar 
 
 Have been to thee thy nursery door: 
 
 Chains that chink in cheerless cells 
 
 Have been thy rattles and thy bells : 
 
 Walls contrived for giant sin 
 
 Have hemmed thy faultless weakness in : 
 
 Near thy sinless bed black guilt 
 
 Her discordant house hath built, 
 
 And filled it with her monstrous brood
 
 170 i 1IARLES LAMB OHAK, 
 
 Sights by thee not understood 
 
 Sights of fear, and of distress, 
 
 That pass a harmless infant's guess ! 
 
 But the clouds that overcast 
 
 Thy young morning, may not last 
 
 Soon shall arrive the rescuing hour 
 
 That yields thee up to Nature's power. 
 
 Nature that so late doth greet thee 
 
 Shall in o'erflowing measure meet tin <. 
 
 She shall recompense with cost 
 
 For every lesson thou hast lost. 
 
 Then wandering up thy sire's loved hill 
 
 Thou shalt take thy airy fill 
 
 Of health and pastime. Birds shall sing 
 
 For thy delight each May morniny. 
 
 'Mid new-yeaned lambkins thou shall play, 
 
 Hardly less a lamb than they. 
 
 Then thy prison's lengthened bound 
 
 Shall be the horizon skirting round. 
 
 And, while thou fill'st thy lap with ll"W. is 
 
 To make amends for wintry hours, 
 
 The breeze, the Bunslrinc, and the place, 
 
 Shall from thy tender brow efface 
 
 Each vestige of untimely care 
 
 That sour restraint had graven there ; 
 
 And on thy every look impress 
 
 A more excelling childishness. 
 
 So shall be thy days beguil 
 
 Thornton Hunt, my favourite child. 
 
 Southey first learned from the pages of the London 
 Magazine the effect of the language used by him in
 
 vii THE CONTROVEESY WITH SOUTHEY 171 
 
 the Quarterly Review. " On my part," he wrote to his 
 publisher, after reading Lamb's epistle, "there was 
 not even a momentary feeling of anger. I was very 
 much surprised and grieved, because I knew how 
 much he would condemn himself, and yet no resent- 
 ful letter was ever written less offensively ; his gentle 
 nature may be seen in it throughout." Southey was 
 in London in the month after the publication of 
 Lamb's remonstrance, and wrote him a letter in lan- 
 guage full of affection and sorrow. The soreness at 
 once passed away. " Dear Southey," he replied, " the 
 kindness of your note has melted away the mist which 
 was upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow. 
 That accursed Q. R. had vexed me by a gratuitous 
 speaking, of its own knowledge, that the Confessions 
 
 of a D d was a genuine description of the state of 
 
 the writer. Little things that are not ill meant may 
 produce much ill. That might have injured me alive 
 and dead : I am in a public office, and my life is 
 insured. I was prepared for anger, and I thought I 
 saw in a few obnoxious words a hard case of repeti- 
 tion directed against me. I wish both Magazine and 
 Eeview at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed 
 to see you, and my sister (though innocent) still more 
 so ; for the folly was done without her knowledge, and 
 has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel 
 was absent at that time. I will muster up courage 
 to see you, however, any day next week. We shall 
 hope that you will bring Edith with you. That will 
 be a second mortification. She will hate to see us ;
 
 171 CHARLES LAM I! . IIAI-. 
 
 but come, and heap embera We deserve it I for 
 what I've done, and she for being my sister." The 
 visit was paid, and the old intimacy renewed, never 
 again to be weakened by unkindly word. 
 
 In this note to Southey, Lamb has to tell of a 
 change of address. In August of this year (1823) he 
 and his sister had finally moved from Russell Street, 
 and for the first time in their united lives became 
 householders. The rooms over the brazier's had from 
 the first had many drawbacks, and for some years 
 the brother and sister had occasionally retired to a 
 rural lodging at Dalston, partly to enjoy a short re- 
 spite from the din of the theatres and the market, 
 but chiefly that Charles might be able to write with- 
 out interruption from the increasing band of intruders 
 on his scanty leisure. There is a pretty glimpse of 
 one such period of retreat in a note to Miss Hutchin- 
 son of April in this year " Meanwhile of afternoons 
 we pick up primroses at Dalston, and Mary corrects 
 me when I call 'em cowslips." And now they re- 
 solved to fix their tent permanently within reach of 
 primroses and cowslips, and Charles must tell the 
 story in his own words. He writes to Bernard 
 Barton : " When you come London ward, you will 
 find me no longer in Covcnt Garden. I have a 
 cottage in Colebrook Row, Islington ; a cottage, for 
 it is detached ; a white house with six good rooms ; 
 w K'ivcr (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
 
 VII THE REMOVAL TO ISLINGTON 173 
 
 garden with vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, 
 parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight the heart 
 of old Alcinous. You enter without passage into a 
 cheerful dining-room, all studded over and rough 
 with old books ; and above is a lightsome drawing- 
 room, three windows, full of choice prints. I feel 
 like a great lord, never having had a house before." 
 The sequel must be given, so amusingly illustrative 
 of the snares and pitfalls that are inseparable even 
 from rural felicity : "I am so taken up with pruning 
 and gardening, quite a new sort of occupation to me. 
 I have gathered my Jargonels, but my Windsor pears 
 are backward. The former were of exquisite raciness. 
 I do now sit under my own vine and contemplate the 
 growth of vegetable nature. I can now understand 
 in what sense they speak of father Adam. I re- 
 cognise the paternity while I watch my tulips. I 
 almost fell with him, for the first day I turned a 
 drunken gardener (as he let in the serpent) into my 
 Eden, and he laid about him, lopping off some choice 
 boughs, etc., which hung over from a neighbour's 
 garden, and in his blind zeal laid waste a shade which 
 had sheltered their window from the gaze of passers- 
 by. The old gentlewoman (fury made her not hand- 
 some) could scarcely be reconciled by all my fine 
 words. There was no buttering her parsnips. She 
 talked of the law. What a lapse to commit on the 
 first day of my happy ' garden state ' ! " 
 
 The same letter tells of the failing fortunes of the 
 London Magazine. Lamb was still contributing to its
 
 174 CHARLES LAMP. CHAP. 
 
 pages, though not so regularly as of old. He speaks 
 of himself as lingering among its creaking rafters, like 
 the last rat, and of many ominous 'secessions from 
 the ranks of its old supporters. Hazlitt and Procter 
 had forsaken it, and with them one who might well 
 have been spared before, the wretched Wainwright, 
 who had contributed to its pages various flimsy and 
 conceited rhapsodies on art and letters. It is char- 
 acteristic of Lamb that he always finds some good- 
 natured word to say of this man, such as " kind " or 
 "light-hearted," principally, no doubt, because the 
 others of his set looked on him with some sus- 
 picion. It was his way to seek for the redeeming 
 qualities in those the world looked coldly on. He 
 did not live to know the worst of this now notorious 
 hypocrite and scoundrel. 
 
 In their autumn holiday of 1823, Charles and Mary 
 Lamb made an acquaintance destined for the next 
 ten years to add a new and most happy interest to 
 their lonely lives. They were still faithful to the 
 University towns in vacation time, and at the house 
 of a friend 1 in Cambridge, where Charles liked to 
 play his evening game at whist, they found a little 
 girl, the orphan daughter of Charles Isola, one of the 
 Esquire Bedells of the University ; her grandfather, 
 an Italian refugee, having settled in Cambridge as 
 teacher of his own language. The child, who was at 
 
 1 Mrs. Paris, mother of the eminent physician of that name, 
 and sister of Lamb's frieml William Ayrt<>n, tin- musical critic 
 and operatic manager.
 
 vii KETIREMENT FROM THE INDIA HOUSE 175 
 
 other times at school, spent her holidays with an 
 aunt in Cambridge. The Lambs took a strong fancy 
 to her, invited her to stay with them during her next 
 holidays, and finally adopted her. She called them 
 uncle and aunt, and their house was generally her 
 home, until her marriage with Mr. Moxon, the pub- 
 lisher, in 1833. The education of this young girl 
 became the constant care of the brother and sister. 
 They wished to give her the means of becoming her- 
 self a teacher, in the event of her not marrying, and 
 while Charles taught her Latin, Mary Lamb worked 
 hard at French that she might assist her young pupil. 
 Many are the allusions in the letters of the last years 
 to "our Emma;" and as Mary Lamb's periods of 
 mental derangement became more and more frequent 
 and protracted, this new relationship became ever a 
 greater comfort to them both. 
 
 In the meantime Charles was fretting under the 
 unbroken confinement of office life. "I have been 
 insuperably dull and lethargic for many weeks," he 
 writes to Bernard Barton early in 1824, "and cannot 
 rise to the vigour of a letter, much less an essay. 
 The London must do without me for a time, for I 
 have lost all interest about it." A subsequent letter, 
 in August, tells the same tale of increasing weariness. 
 "The same indisposition to write has stopped my 
 'Elias,' but you will see a futile effort in the next 
 number, ' wrung from me with slow pain.' The fact 
 is, my head is seldom cool enough. I am dreadfully 
 indolent." The " futile effort " in the next number
 
 176 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 was no other than the beautiful essay on Jilakesmoar, 
 fresh proof (if any were needed) that " difficult writ- 
 ing " need not make itself felt as such by the reader. 
 Nothing more unforced in style ever came from 
 Charles Lamb's hand no sentences more perfect in 
 feeling and expression than those with which it 
 ends : 
 
 Mine, too whose else ? the 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, bespoke their pristine 
 state to have been gilt and glittering ; the verdant 
 quarters, backwarder still ; and, stretching still beyond, 
 in old formality, the firry wilderness, the haunt of the 
 squirrel and the day-long-murmuring wood-pigeon, 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 
 grove*, than I to that fragtuental mystery. 
 
 Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too 
 fervently in your idol worship, walks and windings of 
 Blakesmoor ! for this, or what sin of mine, has the plough 
 passed over your pleasant places ? I sometimes think 
 that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their 
 extinguished habitations there may be a hope a germ to 
 be revivified. 
 
 The "firry wilderness" still remains, and in the 
 grassy meadow where house and garden once stood 
 may faintly be traced the undulations of the ground
 
 YII RETIREMENT FROM THE INDIA HOUSE 177 
 
 where the triple terraces rose backwards; but this 
 is all of the actual Blakesmoor that survives. Yet in 
 this very essay Lamb has fulfilled his own happy 
 vision, and revivified for all time that " extinguished 
 habitation." 
 
 In spite of indolence and low spirits, the hand of 
 Lamb had not lost its cunning, as the pretty Album 
 verses written for Bernard Barton's daughter, Lucy, 
 sufficiently testify. They were sent to Barton at the 
 end of this month, September. "I am ill at these 
 numbers," he pleaded, " but if the above be not too 
 mean to have a place in thy daughter's sanctum, take 
 them with pleasure." The lines are interesting, as 
 giving another proof of Lamb's native sympathy with 
 the Quaker simplicity. His Elia essay on the Quakers' 
 Meeting has shown it. He had impressed Leigh Hunt, 
 when a boy, by his Quaker-like demeanour. He had 
 conveyed to Hood, we remember, on their first meet- 
 ing, the idea of a "Quaker in black." He had told 
 Barton in an earlier letter, " In feelings, and matters 
 not dogmatical, I hope I am half a Quaker." And 
 here, taking the word Album as text, "little book, 
 surnamed of White" he descants on the themes alone 
 fitted to find shelter in such a home : 
 
 Whitest thoughts, in whitest dress, 
 Candid meanings, best express 
 Mind of quiet Quakeress. 
 
 In February and March of the following year his 
 letters to Barton the correspondent who now drew
 
 178 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 C1IAI'. 
 
 forth his best and most varied powers show that the 
 desire for rest was becoming irritably strong. " Your 
 gentleman brother sets my mouth watering after 
 liberty. 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 ! " Later in March we learn that he had con- 
 veyed to the Directors of the East India Company 
 his willingness to resign. "I am sick of hope de- 
 ferred," he writes. " The grand wheel is in agitation 
 that is to turn up my fortune ; but round it rolls, and 
 will turn up nothing. I have a glimpse of freedom, 
 of becoming a gentleman at large, but I am put off 
 from day to day. I have offered my resignation, and 
 it is neither accepted nor rejected. Eight weeks am 
 I kept in this fearful suspense. Guess what an ab- 
 sorbing state I feel it. I am not conscious of the 
 existence of friends, present or absent. The East 
 India Directors alone can be that thing to me, or not. 
 I have just learned that nothing will be decided this 
 week. Why the next ? why any week ? " 
 
 When he wrote these words, the gratification of 
 his hopes was nearer than he thought. He can 
 scarcely have had any serious anxiety as to the result 
 of his application. Some weeks before he had received 
 some kind of intimation that the matter might be 
 arranged to his satisfaction, and his medical friends 
 had certified that failing health and spirits mal' th"
 
 VII RETIREMENT FROM THE INDIA HOUSE 179 
 
 step at least desirable. But he had served only 
 thirty-three years, and it was not unusual for clerks to 
 complete a term of forty or fifty years' service, so that 
 he may have had some uneasy doubts as to the 
 amount of pension. But all doubts were happily dis- 
 pelled on the last Tuesday in March 1825, when the 
 Directors sent for him and acquainted him with the 
 resolution they had passed. 
 
 Lamb has described this interview in several 
 letters, but nowhere so fully as in the Elia essay, the 
 Superannuated Man, which, after his custom, he at 
 once prepared for the next month's London Magazine. 
 With the one exception that he transforms the 
 Directors of the India House into a private firm of 
 merchants, and with one or two other slight changes 
 of detail, the account seems to be a faithful version of 
 what actually happened. 
 
 A week passed in this manner, the most anxious one, I 
 verily believe, in my life, when on the evening of the 12th 
 of April, just as I was about quitting my desk to go home 
 (it might be about eight o'clock) I received an awful sum- 
 mons to attend the presence of the whole assembled firm 
 in the formidable back parlour. I thought, Now my time 
 has surely come ; I have done for myself. I am going to 
 
 be told that they have no longer occasion for me. L , 
 
 I could see, smiled at the terror I was in, which was a 
 little relief to me ; when to my utter astonishment, 
 
 B , the eldest partner, began a formal harangue to 
 
 me on the length of my services, my very meritorious 
 conduct during the whole of the time (the deuce, thought
 
 1*0 CHARLES LAMP. rim-. 
 
 I, how <li<l ho linl diit that? I protest I nevi-r h;i<l t he- 
 confidence to think as much). He went on to descant on 
 the expediency of retiring at a certain time of life (how 
 my heart panted ! ), and asking me a few questions as to 
 the amount of my own property, of which I have a little, 
 ended with a proposal, to which his three partners nodded 
 a grave assent, that I should accept from the house which 
 I hail 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 tlu-ir 
 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 for ever. 
 
 The munificence thus recorded was happily no 
 fiction. Lamb's full salary at the time was little short 
 of seven hundred a year, and the offer made to him 
 was a pension of four hundred and fifty, with a de- 
 duction of nine pounds a year to secure a fitting 
 provision for his sister, in the event of her surviving 
 him. " Here am I," ho writes to Wordsworth, " after 
 thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in my own room at 
 eleven o'clock, this finest of all April mornings, a freed 
 man, with 441 a year for the remainder of my life, 
 live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity, 
 and starved at ninety." 
 
 The East India Directors seem to have been gener- 
 ous and considerate in a marked degree. If they 
 wished to pay some compliment to literature in the 
 person of their distinguished clerk, it was not less to
 
 vn EETIREMENT FEOM THE INDIA HOUSE 181 
 
 their credit. But in spite of Lamb's modest language 
 as to his official claims upon their kindness, it would 
 seem that he served them steadily and faithfully 
 during those thirty-three years. Save for his brief 
 annual holiday, he stuck to his post. He wrote his 
 letters from the desk in Leadenhall Street, and received 
 some of his callers there, but there is nothing to show 
 that he neglected his daily work. He had sometimes 
 to tell of headache and indisposition, as when he had 
 been dining with the poets the night before, where 
 they had not "quaffed Hippocrene, but Hippocrass 
 rather." And there is a tradition not to be too 
 curiously questioned that on occasion of being re- 
 proved for coming to the office late in the mornings, 
 he pleaded that he made up for it by going away very 
 early. But these peccadilloes are as nothing set 
 against the long extent of actual service, and the 
 hearty and spontaneous action of his employers at its 
 close. 
 
 Though Lamb had always fretted against what he 
 called his slavery to the "desk's dead wood," the 
 discipline of regular, and even of mechanical work 
 was of infinite service to him. With his special tem- 
 perament, bodily and mental, he needed, of all men, 
 the compulsion of duty. The " unchartered freedom" 
 and the " weight of chance desires," which his friend 
 Wordsworth has so feelingly lamented, would have 
 been shipwreck to him. When deliverance from the 
 necessity of toil came, he could not altogether resist 
 their baneful effects. And we may be sure that we
 
 182 CHARLES LAMB CHAP, vn 
 
 should not have had more, but fewer Essays of Elm, if 
 the daily routine of different labour had been less 
 severe or regular. He was well paid for the best of 
 his literary work, but there was no pressure upon him 
 to write for bread. " Thank God," he writes to Ber- 
 nard Barton, " you and I are something besides being 
 writers ! There is corn in Egypt, while there is cash 
 at Leadenhall ! "
 
 CHAPTEE VIII 
 
 ENFIELD AND EDMONTON 
 
 (18261834) 
 
 " I CAME home FOR EVER on Tuesday in last week," 
 Lamb writes to Wordsworth, on the 6th of April 
 1825. "The incomprehensibleness of my condition 
 overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into 
 eternity. Every year to be as long as three, i.e. to 
 have three times as much real time time that is my 
 own in it ! I wandered about thinking I was happy, 
 but feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is 
 passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of 
 the gift. Holidays, even the annual month, were 
 always uneasy joys : their conscious fugitiveness ; the 
 craving after making the most of them. Now, when 
 all is holiday, there are no holidays. I can sit at 
 home, in rain or shine, without a restless impulse 
 for walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall soon 
 find it as natural to me to be my own master, as it 
 has been irksome to have had a master. Mary wakes 
 every morning with an obscure feeling that some good 
 has happened to us."
 
 184 CHARLES LAMB < H.M. 
 
 Certain misgivings as to the consequences of the 
 step he had taken are apparent here, even in his words 
 of congratulation. They appear elsewhere, as in a 
 letter to Barton of the same month, where he tells 
 how the day before he had gone back and sat at his 
 old desk among his old companions, and felt yearnings 
 at having left them in the lurch. Still, he was forcing 
 himself to take the most hopeful view of the change 
 in his life, and the essay on the Superannuated Man, that 
 appeared a month later in the London, elaborates with 
 excellent skill the feelings which he wished to culti- 
 vate and preserve. " A man can never have too much 
 Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little 
 son, I would christen him Nothing-to-do ; he should 
 do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his ele- 
 ment as long as he is operative. I am altogether for 
 the life contemplative." 
 
 One of the earliest uses that he made of his freedom 
 was to pay visits out of London with Mary. In tin 1 
 summer they are at Enfield, having quiet holidays. 
 " Mary walks her twelve miles a day some days," 
 Charles writes to Southey in August, "and I my 
 twenty on others. 'Tis all holiday with me now, you 
 know. The change works admirably." But as time 
 went on, the change was found to be less admirable. 
 The spur and the discipline of regular hours and 
 occupation being taken away, Lamb had to make 
 occupation, or else to find amusement in its stead. 
 
 1 been always fond of walking, and he no^ 
 the experiment of a companion in his walks in the
 
 viri ENFIELD AND EDMONTON 185 
 
 shape of a dog, Dash, that Hood had given him. But 
 the dog proved unmanageable, and was fond of run- 
 ning away down any other streets than those intended 
 by his master, and Lamb had to part with him a year 
 or two later in despair. He passed Dash on to Mr. 
 Patmore, and to this change of ownership we owe the 
 amusing letter in which he writes for information as 
 to the dog's welfare. "Dear P., excuse my anxiety, 
 but how is Dash 1 I should have asked if Mrs. Pat- 
 more kept her rules, and was improving : but Dash 
 came uppermost. The order of our thought should 
 be the order of our writing. Goes he muzzled, or 
 aperto ore ? Are his intellects sound, or does he wan- 
 der a little in his conversation 1 You cannot be too 
 careful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. 
 The first illogical snarl he makes to St. Luke's with 
 him. All the dogs here are going mad, if you can 
 believe the overseers : but I protest, they seem to me 
 very rational and collected. But nothing is so deceit- 
 ful as mad people, to those who are not used to them. 
 Try him with hot water ; if he won't lick it up it is a 
 sign he does not like it. Does his tail wag horizon- 
 tally, or perpendicularly ? That has decided the fate 
 of many dogs in Enfield. Is his general deportment 
 cheerful 1 I mean when he is pleased, for otherwise 
 there is no judging. You can't be too careful. Has 
 he bit any of the children yet 1 If he has, have them 
 shot, and keep him for curiosity, to see if it is the 
 hydrophobia " and so this " excellent fooling " 
 rambles on into still wilder extravagances. " We are
 
 186 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 CHAl'. 
 
 dawdling our time away very idly and pleasantly," the 
 letter concludes, "at a Mrs. Irishman's, Chace, En- 
 field, where if you come a hunting, we can give you cold 
 meat and a tankard." For two years from the time 
 of his leaving the India House, the brother and sister 
 paid occasional visits to Mrs. Leishman's lodgings, 
 until, finally, in 1827, they became sole tenants of the 
 little house, furnished. 
 
 The year 1827 opened sadly for Charles and Mary 
 Lamb. Since the death of their father, thirty years 
 before, they had not had to mourn the loss of many 
 friends connected with their early life. Their brother 
 John had died five years before but he had helped 
 to make their real loneliness felt, rather than to 
 relieve it and they had no other near relations. But 
 there was one dear friend of the family, who had been 
 associated with them in their seasons of heaviest 
 sorrow and hardest struggle. This was Mr. Randal 
 Norris, for many years sub-treasurer and librarian of 
 the Inner Temple, whose name has occurred so often 
 in Lamb's letters and essays. The families of Norris 
 and Lamb were united by more than one bond of 
 friendship. They were neighbours in the Temple for 
 many years, and Mrs. Norris was a native of Widford, 
 and a friend of the old housekeeper at Blakesware. 
 And now Charles writes to Crabb Robinson to tell 
 him that this, his oldest friend, is dying. " In him I 
 
 hav.- a l.i^ the world r;iiHi"t make U|>. He was my 
 friend and my father's friend all the life I can reim-in- 
 bcr. I seem to have made foolish friendships ever
 
 vni ENFIELD AND EDMONTON 187 
 
 since. These are friendships which outlive a second 
 generation. Old as I am waxing, in his eyes I was 
 still the child he first knew me. To the last he called 
 me Charley. I have none to call me Charley now. 
 He was the last link that bound me to the Temple. 
 You are but of yesterday. In him seem to have died 
 the old plainness of manners and singleness of heart." 
 In a few days the lingering illness was over, and the 
 old friend was laid to rest in the Temple Churchyard. 
 During the year that followed, Lamb found a con- 
 genial occupation, and a healthy substitute for his 
 old regular hours, in working daily at the British 
 Museum. He wished to assist Hone, the editor of 
 the Every Day Books, and undertook to make extracts, 
 on the plan of his former volumes of Dramatic Speci- 
 mens, from the collection of plays bequeathed by 
 Garrick to the British Museum, for publication in 
 Hone's Table Book. " It is a sort of office-work to me," 
 he writes to Barton, "hours, ten to four, the same. 
 It does me good. Man must have regular occupation 
 that has been used to it." The extracts thus chosen 
 were confessedly but gleanings after the earlier 
 volumes, and in the scanty comments prefixed to 
 them there is a corresponding falling- off in interest. 
 Some remarks upon the dramas of Thomas Heywood 
 and Henry Porter, in comparison with Shakspeare, 
 show all the old enthusiasm and keen observation. 
 And it is pleasant to hear him repeat once more that 
 the plays of Shakspeare have been the " strongest and 
 sweetest food of his mind from infancy." But the
 
 188 CHARLES LAMB < IIAI-. 
 
 real impetus to the study of the great Elizabethans 
 had been given in the volumes of 1808. 
 
 A series of short essays contributed in this same 
 year to the Neio Monthly Magazine, under the title of 
 Popular Fallacies, are for the most part of slight value. 
 The one of these that was the author's favourite is 
 suggested by the saying that " Home is home, though 
 it is never so homely." The first exception that he 
 propounds to the truth of this maxim is in the case 
 of the " very poor." To places of cheap entertain 
 ment, and the benches of ale-houses, Lamb says, the 
 poor man " resorts for an image of the home which 
 he cannot find at home." Very touching is the 
 picture he goes on to draw of the discrepancy between 
 the " humble meal shared together," as described by 
 the sentimentalist, and the grim irony of the actual 
 facts. " The innocent prattle of his children takes 
 out the sting of a man's poverty. But the children 
 of the very poor do not prattle. It is none of the 
 least frightful features in that condition that there is 
 no childishness in its dwellings. Poor people, said a 
 sensible nurse to us once, do not bring up their child 
 ren, they drag them up." The whole passage is in a 
 strain of more sustained earnestness than is usual 
 with Lamb, and serves to show how widely his sym- 
 pathetic heart had travelled. From this theme he 
 turns to one which touched his own circumstances 
 more nearly. There is yet another home, he says, 
 which gives the lie to the popular saying. It may have 
 all the mat. -rial comforts that are wanting to the poor
 
 vin ENFIELD AND EDMONTON 189 
 
 man, all its fireside conveniences, and yet be no home. 
 "It is the house of the man that is infested with 
 many visitors." And he goes on to draw the distinc- 
 tion between the noble -hearted friends that are 
 always welcome, and the purposeless droppers-in at 
 meal-time, or just at the moment that you have sat 
 down to a book. " They have a peculiarly compas- 
 sionating sneer with which they hope that they do 
 not interrupt your studies." It is Charles Lamb 
 himself who is here publishing to the world the old 
 grievance, which appears so constantly in his letters. 
 He was being driven from Islington by the crowd of 
 callers and droppers-in, from whom he professed his 
 inability to escape in any other way. Hardly is he 
 settled at Enfield, in August 1827, when he has to 
 protest that the swarm of gnats follows him from 
 place to place. " Whither can I take wing," he writes 
 to Barton, "from the oppression of human faces? 
 Would I were in a wilderness of apes, tossing cocoa- 
 nuts about, grinning and grinned at !" 
 
 There is reason to believe, as already observed, 
 that Lamb was in part responsible for these idle 
 trespassers upon his time. He had not had the 
 courage to keep them off when his days were fully 
 occupied, and his evenings were his only time for 
 literature ; and now, when he passed for a man wholly 
 at leisure, it was not likely that the annoyance would 
 diminish. But the truth is, there was an element of 
 irritability in Lamb, due to the family temperament, 
 which the new life, though he could now wander " at
 
 190 CHARLES LAMB OTA*. 
 
 his own sweet will," was little calculated to appease. 
 The rest of which he dreamed, when he retire! in 
 the prime of life from professional work, could only 
 mean, to such a temperament as Lamb's, restless- 
 ness. He looked for relief from many troubles in 
 the mere circumstance of change. It was the caium, 
 non animum disillusion that so many have had to 
 experience. And at the same time he hated having 
 to break with old associations, and to part from any- 
 thing to which he had been long accustomed. When 
 he moved to Enfield, in the autumn of 1827, he 
 wrote to Hood that he had had " no health " at Isling- 
 ton, and having found benefit from previous visits at 
 Enfield, was going to make his abode there altogether. 
 But, he adds, " 'twas with some pain we were evulsed 
 from Colebrook. To change habitations is to die 
 to them ; and in my time I have died seven deaths. 
 But I don't know whether such change does not bring 
 with it a rejuvenescence. 'Tis an enterprise ; and 
 shoves back the sense of death's approximating, which 
 though not terrible to me, is at all times particularly 
 distasteful." The letter ends in a more cheerful \ rin, 
 with news of ten pounds a year less rent than at 
 Islington, and many anticipations of occasional trips 
 to London " to breathe the fresher air of the metro- 
 polis," and of the curds and cream he and Mary 
 would set before Hood and Jordan and other London 
 friends who might visit them in their country home. 
 Some of these joys were to be realised, and there are 
 many signs of the old humour and fancy not having
 
 via ENFIELD AND EDMONTON 191 
 
 been altogether banished by the separation from 
 London interests and friends. Mrs. Shelley meets him 
 in town in August 1828, and writes to Leigh Hunt: 
 " On my return to the Strand I saw Lamb, who was 
 very entertaining and amiable, though a little deaf. 
 One of the first questions he asked me was, whether 
 they made puns in Italy. I said ' Yes, now Hunt is 
 there.' He said that Burney made a pun in Otaheite, 
 the first that ever was made in that country. At 
 first 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." 
 
 Lamb's work in literature was now substantially 
 over, and he did little more than trifle with it, plea- 
 santly and ingeniously, for the last few years. The 
 London Magazine, after a long decay, and many 
 changes of management, came to an end in 1826 ; 
 and though some of Lamb's later contributions to the 
 New Monthly and the Englishman's Magazine were 
 included in the Last Essays of Elia, collected and 
 published in 1833, Elia may be said to have been 
 born, and to have died, with the London Magazine. 
 In 1828 he wrote, at the request of the wife of 
 Thomas Hood, who had lately lost a child, the well- 
 known lines, On an infant dying as soon as born, 
 redolent of the spirit and fancy of Ben Jonson and 
 the later Elizabethans, and though written to order 
 showing no lack of spontaneity. He continued to 
 supply his young lady friends with acrostics and 
 other such contributions to their albums. He suffered,
 
 r.'J - II.VKI.KS LAMB . it M-. 
 
 as he alleged, terrible things from albums at this 
 time. They were another of the taxes he found ruth 
 lessly exacted from " retired leisure." He writes to 
 Procti-r in 1S29: 
 
 We are in the last ages of the world, when St. Paul 
 prophesied that women should be " headstrong, lovers of 
 their own wills, having albums." I fled hither to escape 
 the albumean persecution, and had not been in my new 
 house twenty-four hours when the daughter of the next 
 house came in with a friend's album to beg a contribution, 
 and the following day intimated she had one of her own. 
 Two more have sprung up since. If I take the wings of 
 the morning, and fly unto the uttermost parts of the 
 earth, there will albums be. New Holland has albums. 
 But the age is to be complied with. 
 
 He so far complied with the age as to produce 
 enough, with a few occasional verses of other kinds, 
 to make a little volume for his friend Moxon, then 
 newly starting as a publisher, to issue in appropriate 
 shape in 1830. 
 
 The "new house" spoken of in the letter just 
 quoted was the Enfield house already mentioned ; but 
 in the summer of 1829 Charles and Mary Lamb again 
 changed their home. The sister's illnesses were 
 becoming more frequent and more protracted, and 
 the cares of housekeeping weighed too heavily on her. 
 Their old servant, Becky, had married and left them, 
 ami they were little contented with her successor. 
 There is a gloomy letter of Charles to his constant 
 correspondent Barton, in July of this year, telling
 
 vni ENFIELD AND EDMONTON 193 
 
 how time was not lightening the difficulties of a man 
 with no settled occupation. He had been paying a 
 visit in London, but even London was not what it 
 had been. 
 
 The streets, the shops, are left, but all old friends are 
 gone. . . . When I took leave of our adopted young 
 friend at Charing Cross, 'twas heavy, unfeeling rain, and 
 I had nowhere to go. Home have I none, and not a 
 sympathising house to turn to in the great city. Never 
 did the waters of heaven pour down on a forlorner head. 
 ... I got home on Thursday, convinced that I was better 
 to get home to my home at Enfield, and hide like a sick 
 cat in my corner. And to make me more alone, our ill- 
 tempered maid is gone, who, with all her airs, was yet 
 a home-piece of furniture, a record of better days ; the 
 young thing that has succeeded her is good and attentive, 
 but she is nothing. And I have no one here to talk over 
 old matters with. . . . 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 
 fire-light. ... I pity you for over-work, but I assure you 
 no work is worse. The mind preys on itself the most 
 unwholesome food. I bragged formerly that I could not 
 have too much time. I have a surfeit. With few years 
 to come, the days are wearisome. But weariness is not 
 eternal. Something will shine out to take the load off 
 that flags me, which is at present intolerable. I have 
 killed an hour or two in this poor scrawl. I am a 
 sanguinary murderer of time, and would kill him inch- 
 meal just now. But the snake is vital. Well, I shall 
 write merrier anon. 
 
 O
 
 101 ( 1IAKLES LAMB 
 
 i it \i\ 
 
 A letter of a week or two before h:il given sadder 
 reasons for this depression of spirits. Mary I.amli 
 had again been taken ill, and it had IK-CM necessary 
 to remove her from home. 
 
 I have b'-en very de-'.l.ite indeed. My loneliness is a 
 littli' abated l>y our young friend Emma having just come 
 here for her holidays, and a schoolfellow of hern that was 
 with her. Still the house is not the same, though .-he is 
 the same. 
 
 It was these repeated illne-ses of his sister, and 
 the loss of their old servant, that made tln-m resolve 
 to give up housekeeping, and take lodgings next door 
 ("Forty-two inches nearer town,'' Land) said) with 
 an old couple, a Mr. and Mrs. We -t wood, who under 
 took to board as well as lodge them. "We have 
 both had much illness this year," he wrote to a friend. 
 "and feeling infirmities and fretfulness grow ujx>n 
 us, we have cast oft' the cares of housekeeping, sold 
 off our goods, and commenced boarding and lodging 
 witli a very comfortable old couple next door to 
 where you found us. We use a sort of common table. 
 Nevertheless, we have reserved a private one for an 
 old friend." In less than a week he was able to 
 report the good effect of the change upon M.ny. 
 "She looks two and a half years younger for it. 
 Hut we have had sore trials." 
 
 The next year opens with a letter to Wordsworth 
 describing the new mtnagc, and containing a charming 
 picture of the old couple who now were host and 
 hostess as well as landlords.
 
 vin ENFIELD AND EDMONTON 195 
 
 Our providers are an honest pair, Dame Westwood and 
 her husband ; he, when the light of prosperity sinned on 
 them, a moderately thriving haberdasher within Bow 
 Bells, retired since with something under a competence ; 
 writes himself parcel gentleman ; hath borne parish offices ; 
 sings fine old sea-songs at threescore and ten ; sighs only 
 now and then when he thinks that he has a son on his 
 hands about fifteen, whom he finds a difficulty in getting 
 out into the world ; and then checks a sigh with mut- 
 tering, as I once heard him prettily, not meaning to be 
 heard, " I have married my daughter, however ; " takes 
 the weather as it comes ; outsides it to town in severest 
 season ; and o' winter nights tells old stories not tending 
 to literature (how comfortable to author-rid folks !), and 
 has one anecdote, upon which and about forty pounds a 
 year he seems to have retired in green old age. 
 
 The letter gives encouraging news of his sister's 
 health and spirits, but the loneliness and the want of 
 occupation are pressing heavily, he says, upon him- 
 self. He yearns for London and the cheerful streets. 
 "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 detest- 
 able." Later, in March, his thoughts are diverted 
 from his own condition by the illness of Emma Isola, 
 then living as governess in the family of Mr. 
 Williams, rector of Fornham All Saints', in Suffolk; 
 and a proposal from John Murray to continue the 
 Specimens of the Old Dramatists is declined, because in
 
 196 < HARLES LAMB m.vp. 
 
 his anxiety for their youi I- [ !;e could think 
 
 of nothing else. Miss Isola happily recovered. 
 Lamb fetched her from Fornluun, where the illness 
 had occurred, to Enfield, and it was on the journey 
 home that the famous stage-coach incident occunvl. 
 "We travelled with one of those troublesome fellow- 
 passengers in a stage coach that is called a well- 
 informed man. For twenty miles we discoursed 
 about the properties of steam, probabilities of carriage 
 by ditto, till all my science, and more than all, was 
 exhausted, and I was thinking of escaping my torment 
 by getting up on the outside, when, getting into 
 Bishop Stortford, my gentleman, spying some farming 
 land, put an unlucky question to me : ' What sort of 
 crop of turnips I thought we should have this year t ' 
 Emma's eyes turned to me, to know what in the world 
 I could have to say ; and she burst into a violent fit 
 of laughter, maugre her pale serious cheeks, when 
 with the greatest gravity I replied that ' It depended, 
 I believed, upon boiled legs of mutton. ' 
 
 There is little to record of in< -iiU'iit or change in 
 these last years of the life, now more and more lonely, 
 of brother and sister. A small volume of occasional 
 poetry, Album Pcrses the amusements of the latter 
 years of leisure was produced by Mr. Moxon in 
 1830, but contains little to call for remark; and 
 another venture of Mr. Moxon 'a, The, ./*<//>//////'.. 
 :'>n' t in the following year, dn-w from Lainl. -.in.- 
 prose contributions, undrr the heading of Pttfr's Net. 
 In 1833 the Lambs made their last change of resi-
 
 Vlit ENFIELD AND EDMONTON 197 
 
 dence. Their furniture had been disposed of when 
 they settled at Enfielcl, and they now entered on an 
 arrangement similar to the last, of boarding and 
 lodging with another married pair younger, however, 
 and more active a Mr. and Mrs. Walden, of Bay 
 Cottage, in the neighbouring parish of Edmonton. 
 The reasons for the change are of the old sad kind. 
 A letter to Wordsworth, of May 1833, tells the 
 melancholy story : " Mary 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." Mary Lamb had been on former 
 occasions of illness under the care of the Waldens, and 
 the increasing frequency of her attacks made this 
 change necessary in the interest of both brother and 
 sister. It secured for Mary the constant supervision 
 of an attendant. 
 
 The same letter tells of an additional element of 
 loneliness that was in store for them. Emma Isola 
 was engaged " with my perfect approval and entire 
 concurrence " to Mr. Moxon, the publisher, and the 
 wedding was fixed. Lamb Avrites of it with the old 
 habitual unselfishness, though it was to leave him 
 without his "only walk -companion, whose mirthful 
 spirits were the 'youth of our house.'" He turns,
 
 198 CHARLES LAMB CHAP. 
 
 after his manner, to think of his compensations. He 
 is emancipated from Enfield, Avith attentive people and 
 younger, and what is more, is three or four miles 
 nearer to his beloved town. Miss Isola was married 
 on the 30th of July, and it is pleasant to know that 
 though up to the very day of the wedding Mary Lamb 
 had been unable to interest herself in the event, and 
 was of course unable to be present at the ceremony, 
 she attributes her recovery from this attack to the 
 stimulus of the good news suddenly commun: 
 There is a pathetic note of congratulation from her to 
 the newly-married pair, in which she tells them of this 
 with characteristic simplicity. The Waldens had with 
 happy tact proposed Mr. and Mrs. Moxon's health at 
 their quiet meal. " It restored me from that moment," 
 writes Mary Lamb, "as if by an electrical stroke, to 
 the entire possession of my senses. 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" And Charles is able to add, in 
 a postscript, how they are again happy in their old 
 pursuits cards, walks, and reading : " never was such 
 a calm, or such a recov. 
 
 In this year, 1833, the later essays of Lamb contri- 
 buted to the London Magazine, together with some 
 r pieces from other periodicals, were published 
 by Mr. Moxon under the title of the Last Essays of 
 ind with this event the literary life of Lamb was 
 dr.-tiiu'd to close. Nothing more, beyond an occa- 
 sional copy of verses for a friend, came from his p< n
 
 vili ENFIELD AND EDMONTON 199 
 
 Notwithstanding the increasing illness of his sister, 
 he was able to enjoy some cheerful society, notably 
 with a friend of recent date, Mr. Gary, the translator 
 of Dante, with whom he dined periodically at the 
 British Museum. Mr. John Forster, afterwards to be 
 known widely as the author of the Life of Goldsmith, 
 was another accession to his list of congenial friends. 
 But these could not make compensation for the loss 
 of the old. Lamb was not yet sixty years of age, but 
 he was without those ties and relationships which 
 more than all else we know bring " forward-looking 
 thoughts." His life was lived chiefly in the past, and 
 one by one "the old familiar faces" were passing 
 away. In July 1834 Coleridge died, after many 
 months of suffering. For the last eighteen years of 
 his life he had resided beneath Mr. Gillman's roof at 
 Highgate, and Charles and Mary Lamb were among 
 the most welcome visitors at the house : and now the 
 friendship of fifty years was at an end. All the little 
 asperities of early rivalry ; all the natural regrets at 
 sight of a life so wasted powers so vast ending in 
 performance so inadequate a spirit so willing, and a 
 will so weak were forgotten now. Lamb had never 
 spared the foibles of his old companion ; when Cole- 
 ridge had soared to his highest metaphysical flights 
 he had apologised for him " Yes ! you know Cole- 
 ridge is so full of his fun ; " he had described him as 
 an " archangel, a little damaged " ; but the indescrib- 
 able moral afflatus felt through Coleridge's obscurest 
 rhapsodies had been among the best influences on
 
 200 MIAKI.KS LAM I! 'H\r. 
 
 Charles Lamb's life. A few months later he tri<<! to 
 put his regrets and his obligations into words. 
 " When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it \\ a- 
 without grief. It seemed to me that he had long 
 been on the confines of the next world that he had 
 a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could 
 not grieve ; but since, I feel how great a part he was 
 of me. 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 ;tn<l 
 reference to him. He was the proof and touchstone 
 of all my cogitations." 
 
 The death of his friend was Charles Lamb's death- 
 blow. There had been two persons in the world for 
 whom he would have wished to live Colei iL r r ami 
 his sister Mary. The latter was now for the greater 
 part of each year worse than dead to him. The 
 former was gone, and the blank left him helplessly 
 alone. In conversation with friends he would suddenly 
 exclaim, as if with surprise that a,ught else in the 
 world should interest him, "Coleridge is dead!" 
 And within five weeks of the day when the aflVitinu' 
 tribute just cited was committed to paper, he was 
 called to join his friend. One day in the mid' lie of 
 December, as he was taking his usual walk aloni: tin- 
 London Road, his foot struck against a stone, and ho 
 stumbled and fell, inflicting a slight wound on his 
 face. For some days the injury appeared triflinir. and 
 on the 22d of the month he writes a cheerful note to 
 the wife of his old friend George Dyer, concerning the
 
 vin ENF1ELD AND EDMONTON 201 
 
 safety of a certain book belonging to Mr. Gary, which 
 he had left at her house. Oil the same day, however, 
 symptoms of erysipelas supervened, and it soon became 
 evident that his general health was too feeble to resist 
 the attack. From the first appearance of the disease 
 the failure of life was so rapid that his intimate 
 friends, Talfourd and Crabb Robinson, did not reach 
 his bedside in time for him to recognise them. The 
 few words that escaped his lips while his mind was 
 still unclouded, conveyed to those who watched him 
 that he was undisturbed at the prospect of death. 
 His sister was, happily for herself, in no state to feel or 
 appreciate the blow that was falling. On the 27th of 
 December, murmuring in his last moments the names 
 of his dearest friends, he passed tranquilly out of life. 
 " On the following Saturday his remains were laid in 
 a deep grave in Edmonton churchyard, made in a 
 spot which, about a fortnight before, he had pointed 
 out to his sister on an afternoon wintry walk, as the 
 place where he wished to be buried." 
 
 There is a touching fitness in the circumstance that 
 Charles Lamb could not longer survive his earliest and 
 dearest friend that, trying it for a little while, "he 
 liked it not and died." It was a fitting comment on 
 the circumstance, that that other great poet and 
 thinker who next to Coleridge shared Lamb's deepest 
 pride and affection, as he looked back a year afterwards 
 on the gaps that death had made in the ranks of those 
 he loved, should have once more linked their names 
 in imperishable verse :
 
 202 rilAKU.s i.AMB .MM-. 
 
 Nor baa the rolling iin-;i>un-<l 
 
 From sign t. .-ign its steadfast coi 
 Since every mortal power of Colei 
 Was frozen at its marvellous eou: 
 
 Tlie rapt one of the godlike forehead, 
 The heaven-eyed creature, sleeps in earth : 
 And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, 
 Has vanished from his lonely hearth. 
 
 The friends of Lamb were not slow in giving ex- 
 pression to their sorrow for his loss, and their admira- 
 tion of his character Wordsworth and Landor in 
 Procter, Moxon, Forster, and many others 
 through various channels, in prose. For the most 
 part they had to deal in generalities, for Mary Lamb 
 still lived, and the full extent of her brother's devotion 
 and sacrifice could not yet be told. But abundant 
 testimony was forthcoming that (to borrow Landnr's 
 words) he had left behind him that "worthier thing 
 than tears," 
 
 The love of friend?, without a single foe. 
 
 Wordsworth, in a beautiful tribute to his friend, 
 begun with some view to an inscription for his grave, 
 expressed no more than the verdict of all who knew 
 him well when he wrote 
 
 Oh, he was good, if ever good man wa&. 
 
 And yet there must have been many of his old ac- 
 quaintances who were startled at finding admiration 
 fur him thus expressed. Those who were not aware
 
 vin ENFIELD AND EDMONTON 203 
 
 of the conditions of his life, or knew him only on his 
 ordinary convivial side, regarded him, we are assured, 
 as a flippant talker, reckless indeed in speech, moody, 
 and of uncertain temper. Few could know what 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth and Southey knew so well, 
 that with all his boastful renunciation of orthodoxy 
 in belief, and his freedom of criticism on religious 
 matters, he was one capable of feeling keenly both 
 the sentiment and the principle of religious trust. 
 There is ample evidence of this in those early letters 
 written in the darkest hours of his life. And though 
 the sentiment waned as a different class of associates 
 gathered round him, and there were few at hand with 
 whom to interchange his deeper thoughts, religion in 
 him never died, but became a habit a habit of en- 
 during hardness, and cleaving to the steadfast per- 
 formance of duty in face of the strongest allurements 
 to the pleasanter and easier course. He set himself a 
 task, one of the saddest and hardest that can be 
 undertaken, to act as guardian and companion to one 
 living always on the brink of insanity. For eight- 
 and- thirty years he was faithful to this purpose, 
 giving up everything for it, and never thinking that 
 he had done enough, or could do enough, for his early 
 friend, his "guardian angel." 
 
 It is noteworthy that those surface qualities of 
 Charles Lamb by which so many were content to 
 judge him, were just those which men are slow to 
 connect with sterling goodness such as this. There 
 was a certain Bohemianism in him, it must be allowed
 
 204 CIIAI;I.I:S I.AMI; 
 
 u f "in 1 ness for overmuch tobacco and gin-and-water, 
 and fnr the company of those whom more particular 
 people looked shy upon. He often fretted a^ain-t 
 the loss of time they caused him, Imt he was tolerant 
 fr the moment of what fed his sense of humour or 
 fancy, and always of that which touched the ' virtue of 
 compassion'' in him. He was free of speech, and not 
 in the least afraid of shocking his company. And it 
 seems a natural inference that such traits betoken a 
 hand-to-mouth existence, a certain want of moral back 
 bone, irregularity in money matters, and the absence of 
 any settled purpose. Yet it was for the opposite of all 
 this that Lamb's life is so notable. He wa 
 versed in poverty for some years in marked degree 
 but he seems never to have exceeded his income, or 
 to have been in debt In the days of his most strait- 
 ened means he was never so poor but that he had in 
 e something to help those poorer than himself. 
 His letters show this throughout; and as his own 
 fortunes mended, his generosity in giving becomes 
 truly surpri.-in.L'. "!! ;_.i\e away <//>"////," says his 
 friend Mr. Procter, and goes on to relate how on one 
 occasion when he was in low spirits, and Lamb 
 imagined that it might proceed from pecuniary M 
 lie said suddenly, i- My dear l>oy, I have a quantity of 
 useless things I have now in my desk a a hundred 
 pounds that I don't know what to do with. Take 
 In his more prosperous days he alwa\ 
 'Hers on his bounty. For many years he allowed 
 his old schoolmistress thirty pounds a year. To a
 
 vin EXFIELD AND EDMONTON 205 
 
 friend of Sonthey's who was paralysed, he paid ten 
 pounds yearly ; and when a subscription was raised for 
 Godwin in his gravest difficulties, Lamb's contribution 
 was the munificent one of fifty pounds. His letters, 
 too, prove that he could always make the more diffi- 
 cult sacrifices of time and thought when others were 
 in need. For a young lady establishing a school for 
 a poor fellow seeking an occasional clerkship in the 
 India House for such as these he is continually 
 pleading and taking trouble. And before he knew 
 that the Directors of the India House intended to pro- 
 vide for his sister, in the event of her surviving him, 
 on the footing of a wife, he had managed to put by a 
 sufficient sum to place her beyond the reach of want. 
 At his death he left a sum of two thousand pounds 
 for his sister during her life, with a reversion to the 
 child of their adoption, Emma Isola, then Mrs. Moxon. 
 
 Mary Lamb survived her brother nearly thirteen 
 years, dying at the advanced age of 82, on the 20th 
 of May 1847. After the death of Charles her health 
 rallied sufficiently for her to visit occasionally among 
 their old friends; but as years passed, her attacks 
 became still more frequent, and of longer duration, 
 till her mind became permanently enfeebled. After 
 leaving Edmonton, she lived chiefly in St. John's 
 Wood, under the care of a nurse. Her pension, 
 together with the income from her brother's savings, 
 was amply sufficient for her few needs. 
 
 "She will live for ever in the memory of her 
 friends," writes that true and faithful friend, Crabb
 
 206 IIAIII.F.S LAMB , ii u-. 
 
 llolmison, "as one of the most amiable and admirable 
 of women." From this verdict there is no dissentient 
 voice. With much less from which to form a direct 
 opinion than in her brother's case, we seem to read 
 her character almost equally well. The tributes of 
 her brother scattered through essay and letter, her 
 own few but very significant letters, and her contri- 
 butions to literature, show a strong and healthy 
 common sense, a true womanliness, and a gift of keen 
 and active sympathy. She shared with Charles a 
 love of Quaker-like colour and homeliness in dress. 
 " She wore a neat cap," Mr. Procter tells us, " of the 
 fashion of her youth ; an old-fashioned dress. Il-i 
 face was pale and somewhat square, but very placid, 
 with gray intelligent eyes. She was very mild in 
 her manners to strangers ; and to her brother, gentle 
 and tender, always. She had often an upward look 
 of peculiar meaning when directed towards him, as 
 though to give him assurance that all was thei 
 with her." This unvarying manner, betokening 
 mutual dependence and interest, was the feature that 
 most impressed all who watched them together, In i 
 eyes often fixed on his as on "some adoring disciple." 
 ami ever listening to help his speech in some difficult 
 word, and to anticipate the coming need. 1I< in 
 turn was always on the watch to detect any sL'ii in 
 her face of failing health or spirits, and to divert the 
 conversation, if occasion arose, from any topic that 
 might distress her or set up some dangerous excite- 
 ment Among the strange and motley guests that
 
 VIII ENFIELD AND EDMONTON 207 
 
 their hospitality brought around them, her own 
 opinions and habits remained, with little danger of 
 being shaken. "It has been the lot of my cousin," 
 writes Lamb in the essay Mockery End, " oftener per- 
 haps than I could have wished, to have had for her 
 associates, and mine, free thinkers, leaders and dis- 
 ciples of novel philosophies and systems; but she 
 neither wrangles with nor accepts their opinions. 
 That Avhich was good and venerable to her when she 
 was a child retains its authority over her mind still. 
 She never juggles or plays tricks with her under- 
 standing." It was this element of quietism in Mary 
 Lamb that made her so inestimable a companion for 
 her brother. She was strong where he was weak, 
 and reposeful where he was so often ill at ease. 
 
 She was indeed fitted in all respects to be Charles 
 Lamb's lifelong companion. She shared his worthiest 
 tastes, to the full More catholic in her partialities 
 than he, she devoured modern books as well as 
 ancient with unfailing appetite, and had formed out 
 of her reading a pure and idiomatic English style, 
 with just a touch, as in everything else belonging to 
 her, of an old-world formality. She possessed a 
 distinct gift of humour, as her portion of Mrs. 
 Leicester's School amply shows. The story of the 
 Father's Wedding-day has strokes of humour and obser- 
 vation not unworthy of Goldsmith. Landor used to 
 rave, with characteristic vehemence, about this little 
 sketch, and to declare that the incident of the child 
 wishing, when dressed in her new frock, that her
 
 208 niAIJF.Ks IAMB . n\r. vui 
 
 poor "mamma was alive, to set.- lm\v tin.' she was on 
 papa's wedding day," was a masterpiece. The story 
 culled The Young Mahometan has a special interest as 
 containing yet one more recollection of the old house 
 at Blakesware. The medallions of the Twelve Caesars, 
 the Hogarth prints, and the tapestry hangings, are 
 all there, together with that picturesque incident, 
 which Charles elsewhere has not overlooked, of the 
 broken battledore and shuttlecock telling of happy 
 children's voices that had once echoed through the 
 lonely clumbers. It is certain that Charles and 
 Mary, ardently as they both clung in after years to 
 London sights and sounds, owed much both in genius 
 and character to having breathed the purer, calmer 
 air of rural homesteads. 
 
 A common education, whether that of sweet garden 
 scenes, or the choice fancies and meditations of poet 
 and moralist a sense of mutual need a profound 
 pity for each other's frailties of these was f 
 the bond that held them, and years of suffering and 
 self-denial had made it ever more and more stn.n-. 
 "That we had much to struggle with, as we grew up 
 together, we have reason to be most thankful. It 
 thened and knit our compact closer. We could 
 never have been what we have been to each other, if 
 we had always had the sufficiency which you now 
 complain of." It is with these words of divine pliili. 
 suphy that, when comparative ease had at last been 
 achieved, Chaile- Lamb n.uld look back upon the 
 anxious past
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 LAMB'S PLACE AS A CRITIC 
 
 IT remains to speak of those prose writings of Lamb, 
 many of earlier date than the Essays of Ella, by which 
 his quality as a critic must be determined. As early 
 as 1811 he had published in Leigh Hunt's Reflector 
 his essay on The Genius and Character of Hogarth. 
 This was no subject taken up for the occasion. " His 
 graphic representations," says Lamb, " are indeed 
 books : they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive 
 meaning of words " and no book was more familiar 
 to him. A set of Hogarth's prints, including the 
 Harlot's and Rake's Progresses, had been among the 
 treasures of the old house at Blakesware ; and Lamb 
 as a child had spelled through their grim and ghastly 
 histories again and again, till he came to know every 
 figure and incident in them by heart. And now the 
 cavalier tone in which certain leaders of the classical 
 and historical schools of painting were wont to dis- 
 miss Hogarth as of slight value in point of art, made 
 him keen to vindicate his old favourite. He has
 
 210 ( IIAUI.KS I.AMl: 
 
 scant patience with those who noted defective draw- 
 ing or "knowledge of the figure" in the artist. Ik- 
 is intolerant altogether of technical criticism. The 
 essay is devoted to showing how true a moralist the 
 painter is, and how false the view which would i 
 him chiefly as a humorist He is a great satiric 
 a Juvenal or a Persius. Moreover, he is a combinu- 
 tion of satirist and dramatist. Hogarth had claimr.l 
 for his pictures that they should be judged as suc- 
 cessive scenes in a play, and Lamb takes him at his 
 word. He is carried away by admiration for the 
 tragic power displayed. He is in ecstasies over the 
 print of Gin Latie, certainly one of the poorest of 
 Hogarth's pictures as a composition, losing its due 
 effect by overcrowding of incident, and made grot 
 through sheer exaggeration. Yet what stirs the 
 critic's heart is "the pity of it," and he is in no 
 humour to admit other considerations. He calls it 
 "a sublime print." "Kvery part is full of strange 
 images of death ; it is perfectly amazing and astound- 
 ing to look at;" and so forth. It is noticeaM 
 Lamb does not write with the pictures before him, 
 and trusts to a memory not quite trustworthy. For 
 example, to prove that Hogarth is not merely iv- 
 pulsive, that there is always a sweet humanity in 
 reserve as a foil for the horrors he deals with some- 
 thiiiu' to ''ke.-p the general air from tainting," he says: 
 "Take the mild, supplicating posture of p. 
 poverty, in the poor woman that is persuading the 
 pawnbroker to accept her clothes in pledge in tho
 
 ix LAMB'S PLACE AS A CRITIC 211 
 
 plate of Gin Lane." There is really no such incident 
 in the picture. There is a woman offering in pawn 
 her kettle and fire-irons ; but, taken in combination 
 with all the other incidents of the scene, she is cei-- 
 tainly pledging them to buy gin. Here, as elsewhere, 
 Lamb damages his case by over -statement, partly 
 through love of surprises, partly because he willingly 
 discovered in poem or picture what he wished to find 
 there. He sees more of humanity and sweetness in 
 what affects him than is actually present. He reads 
 something of himself into the composition he is re- 
 viewing. He is on safer ground when he dwells on 
 the genuine power, the pity and the terror, in that 
 last scene but one of The Marriage-a-la-Mode ; and on 
 - the gentleness of the wife's countenance, poetising 
 the whole scene, in the print of TJie Distressed Poet. 
 And he is doing a service to art of larger scope than 
 fixing the respective ranks of Hogarth and Poussin, in 
 these noble concluding lines : 
 
 I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth 
 have necessarily something in them to make us like them ; 
 some are indifferent to us, some in their natures repulsive, 
 and only made interesting by the wonderful skill and 
 truth to nature in the painter ; but I contend that there 
 is in most of them that sprinkling of the better nature 
 which, like holy water, chases away and disperses the 
 contagion of the bad. They have this in them besides, 
 that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human 
 face ; tbey give us skill to detect those gradations of sense 
 and virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious observer)
 
 Jll 1 CHARLES LAMB . n\r. 
 
 in the countenances of the world about us ; and ]nvvi-nt 
 that disgust at common lilV, tli.it /<//('</ //i ijimtiili * 
 /ormarum, which an unrestricted passion for ideal forma 
 and beauties is in danger of producing. 
 
 His judgments of pictures are, as might 1x5 ex- 
 pected, those of a man of letters, not of a painter. 1 1 
 is the story in the picture that impresses him, ami the 
 technical qualities leave him unmoved. A curious 
 instance of this is afforded in his essay on The Barren- 
 ness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of 
 Modern Art. After complaining that, with the 
 exception of Hogarth, no artist within the last fifty 
 years had treated a story imaginatively " upon whom 
 his subject has so acted that it has seemed to direct 
 him> not to he arranged by him " he breaks out into a 
 fine rhapsody on the famous Bacchus and Ariailm' of 
 Titian in the National Gallery. But it is not as a 
 masterpiece of colour and drawing that it excites his 
 al mi ration. The qualities of the poet, not those of 
 the painter, are what he discovers in it. It is the 
 " imaginative faculty " which he detects, as shown in 
 the power of uniting the past and the present. 
 I'm ij.itnus, with his reeling satyr-rout around him, 
 re-peopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste ] 
 dnmk with a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, 
 born of fire, fire-like flings himself at the Cretan:" 
 this is the present. Ariadne, " unconscious of Bacchus, 
 or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcern- 
 ing pageant, her soul undistracted from Theseus "- 
 Ariadne, "pacing the solitary shore in as much heart
 
 ix LAMB'S PLACE AS A CRITIC 213 
 
 silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with 
 which she awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last 
 glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian : " 
 this is the past. But it is in the situation itself, not 
 in Titian's treatment of it, that Lamb has found the 
 antithesis that so delights him. He is in fact the 
 poet, taking the subject out of the painter's hands, 
 and treating it afresh. Lamb obtains an easy victory 
 for the ancients over the moderns by choosing as his 
 foil for Titian and Kaffaelle the treatment of sacred 
 subjects by Martin, the painter of Belshazzar 's Feast 
 and The Plains of Heaven. And it is significant of a 
 certain inability in Lamb to do full justice to his con- 
 temporaries, that in noting the barrenness of the fifty 
 years in question in the matter of art, he has no 
 exception to make but Hogarth. He might have had 
 a word to say for Turner and Wilkie. 
 
 The essay on The Artificial Comedy of the Last 
 Century has received more attention than its import- 
 ance at all warrants, from the circumstance that 
 Macaulay set to work seriously to demolish its 
 reasoning, in reviewing Leigh Hunt's edition of the 
 Restoration Dramatists. Lamb's essay was originally 
 part of a larger essay upon the old actors, in which he 
 was led to speak of the comedies of Congreve and 
 Wycherley, and the reasons why they no longer held 
 the stage. His line of defence is well known. He 
 protests that the world in which their characters move 
 is so wholly artificial a conventional world, quite 
 apart from that of real life that it is beside the mark
 
 211 ( IIAKI.KS I.\MH CHAP. 
 
 to judge them by any moral standard. "They arc a 
 world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land." 
 The apology is really (as Hartley Coleridge acutely 
 points out) for those who, like himself, could enjoy 
 the wit of these writers, without finding their actual 
 judgment of moral questions at all influenced by it. 
 It must be admitted that Lamb does not convince us 
 of the sincerity of his reasoning, and probably he did 
 not convince himself. He loved paradox ; and ho 
 loved, moreover, to find some soul of goodness in 
 things evil. As Hartley Coleridge adds, it was his 
 way always to take hold of things "by the better 
 handle." 
 
 The same love of paradox is manifest in the essay 
 on Shakspeare's Tragedies, "considered with reference 
 to their fitness for stage representation." If there are 
 any positions which we should not expect to find Lamb 
 disputing, they are the acting qualities of Shakspeare's 
 plays, and the intellectual side of the actor's art Yet 
 these are what he devotes this paper to iinpiurnini.'. 
 He had been much disgusted by the fulsome flattery 
 contained in the epitaph on Garrick in Westminster 
 Abbey. In this bombastic effusion, this " farrago of 
 false thoughts and nonsense," as Lamb calls it, Garrick 
 is put on a level with Shakspeare : 
 
 And till Eternity with power sul>li 
 
 Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Tiim-, 
 Sliakspearc and Garrick like twin-stars- shall .-hiin\ 
 Aii'l i-aitli in.i'liat-' with a IKMIII divine. 
 
 Why is it, asks Lamb, that "from the days of the
 
 ix LAMB'S PLACE AS A CRITIC 215 
 
 actor here celebrated to our own, it should have been 
 the fashion to compliment every performer in his 
 turn, that has had the luck to please the town in any 
 of the great characters of Shakspeare, with the 
 notion of possessing a mind congenial uith the poet's : 
 how people should come thus unaccountably to con- 
 found the power of originating poetical images and 
 conceptions with the faculty of being able to read or 
 recite the same when put into words 1" And he goes 
 on, in the same strain of contempt, to speak of the 
 " low tricks upon the eye and ear " which the player 
 can so easily compass, as contrasted with the " ab- 
 solute mastery over the heart and soul of man, whicli 
 a great dramatic poet possesses." No one knew better 
 than Lamb that the resources of the actor's art are 
 not fairly or adequately stated in such language as 
 this. He had himself the keenest relish for good 
 acting, and no one has described and criticised it 
 more finely. Witness his description of his favourite 
 Munden, in the part of the Greenwich Pensioner, Old 
 Dosey, and of Bensley's conception of the character of 
 Malvolio. Or, again, take the exquisite passage in 
 which he recalls Mrs. Jordan's performance of Viola : 
 " There is no giving an account how she delivered the 
 disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was no 
 set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to weave it 
 into a harmonious period, line necessarily following 
 line to make up the music yet I have heard it so 
 spoken, or rather read, not without its grace and 
 beauty ; but when she had declared her sister's
 
 21G CHARLES LAMM am-. 
 
 history to be a 'blank,' and that she 'never told 
 her love,' there was a pause, as if the story had 
 ended and then the image of the 'worm in the bud' 
 came up as a new suggestion and the heightened 
 image of 'Patience' still followed after that, as by 
 some growing (and not mechanical) process, thought 
 springing up after thought, I would almost say, as they 
 were watered by her tears." We are quite sure that 
 the writer of these eloquent words did not seriously 
 ivuMrd the art of acting as a mere succession of tricks 
 "upon the eye and ear." He was for the moment 
 prejudiced against the great actor whom, by tin- 
 way, he had never seen, Garrick having left the stage 
 in 1776 by the injudicious language of his flatterers. 
 But if we make due allowance for his outburst of 
 spleen, we shall find much that is admirably true 
 mixed up with it. Critics have often, for instance, 
 insisted upon what is gained by seeing a drama acted, 
 as distinguished from reading it, and Lamb here 
 devotes himself to showing how far it is from bring 
 all gain. " It is difficult for a frequent playgoer to 
 disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person 
 ami voice of Mr. Kemblc. We speak of Lady 
 Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. 
 Siddons." We get distinctness, says Lamb, from 
 seeing a character thus embodied, but "dearly d<> \\e 
 
 for this sense of distinctness. 
 This lino of criticism leads up to the crowning 
 
 y of this essay, that tin- play* of ShaK 
 "are less calculated for performance on a stage than
 
 ix LAMB'S PLACE AS A CRITIC 217 
 
 those of almost any other dramatist whatever." Here 
 again it may be said that no one knew better than 
 Lamb that in a most important sense these words are 
 the very reverse of truth. There is no quality in 
 which Shakspeare's greatness as a dramatist is more 
 conspicuous than his knowledge of what is effective in 
 stage representation. But Lamb chose to mean some- 
 thing very different from this. He was thinking of 
 certain other qualities in the poet which are incom- 
 municable by the medium of acting, and on these he 
 proceeds to dwell, discussing for that purpose the 
 traditional stage rendering of Hamlet and other 
 characters. He points out how the stage Hamlet 
 almost always overdoes his scorn for Polonius, and 
 his brutality to Ophelia, and asks the reason of this. 
 It does not seem to occur to him that this is simply 
 bad acting, and that it is not at all a necessary incident 
 of the art that Hamlet's feelings should be thus 
 represented. He seems to be confounding the limita- 
 tions of the particular actor with those of his art. 
 Indeed it is clear that many of the positions main- 
 tained in this paper are simply convenient oppor- 
 tunities for enlarging upon some character or con- 
 ception of the great dramatist. 
 
 Lamb had a juster complaint against Garrick than 
 that supplied by the words of a foolish epitaph. He 
 boldly expresses a doubt whether the actor was capable 
 of any real admiration for Shakspeare. Would any 
 true lover of his plays, he asks, have " admitted into 
 his matchless scenes such ribald trash " as Tate and
 
 218 CHARLES LAMB MIVP. 
 
 Gibber and the rest had foisted into the acting versions 
 of the dramas] Much of the scorn and indignation 
 expressed by Lamb in this paper becomes intelligible 
 when we recall in what garbled shapes the dramatist 
 was presented. Garrick himself had taken a pro- 
 minent share in these alterations of the text. It was 
 he who completely changed the last act of Jfamlet, 
 and turned the IFinter's Tale into a piece of Arcadian 
 insipidity. But the greatest outrage of all, in Lamb's 
 view, would be Tate's version of Lear in a modified 
 edition of which Garrick himself had performed. In 
 this version which the editor of Bell's acting edition 
 (1774) calls a "judicious blending" of Shakspeare 
 and Tate the character of the Fool is altogether 
 omitted ; Cordelia survives, and marries Edgar ; and 
 Lear, Kent, and Gloster announce their intention of 
 retiring into private life, to watch the happiness of 
 the young couple, Lear himself bringing down the 
 curtain with these amazing lines : 
 
 Thou, Kent, and I, retired from noise and strife, 
 Will calmly pass our short reserves of time 
 In cool reflections on our fortunes past, 
 Cheered with relation of the prosperous n-i^n 
 Of this celestial pair ; thus our remain-i 
 Shall in an oven course of thoughts be past, 
 Knjoy the present hour, nor fear the last 
 
 This was the stuff which in Lamb's day the actors 
 and their audience were content to accept as the work 
 of the Master-hand. It may well account for a tone
 
 ix LAMB'S PLACE AS A CRITIC 219 
 
 of bitterness, and even of exaggeration, that pervades 
 the essay. It is some compensation that it drew from 
 Lamb his noble vindication of Shakspeare's original. 
 The passage is well known, but I cannot deny myself 
 the pleasure of quoting it once again : 
 
 The Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The con- 
 temptible machinery by which, they mimic the storm 
 which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent 
 the horrors of the real elements than any actor can be to 
 represent Lear ; they might more easily propose to per- 
 sonate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael 
 Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in 
 corporal dimension, but in intellectual ; the explosions of 
 his passion are terrible as a volcano ; they are storms 
 turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, 
 with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. 
 This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be 
 thought on : even as he himself neglects it. On the stage 
 we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the 
 impotence of rage ; while we read it, we see not Lear, but 
 we are Lear, we are in his mind, we are sustained by a 
 grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms ; 
 in the aberrations of his reason we discover a mighty 
 irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the 
 ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the 
 wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions 
 and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do 
 with that sublime identification of his age with that of the 
 heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for 
 conniving at the injustice of his children he reminds them 
 that " they themselves are old " ? What gestures shall we
 
 220 CHAKI.F.s I.AMB 
 
 appropriate to this ? Wh it has the voice or the eye to do 
 with .-iirh things ? But the play is beyond all art, as the 
 tumiR-rings with it show : it is too hard and stony ; it 
 must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not 
 enough that Cordelia is a daughter ; she must shine as a 
 l.ivt-r too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this 
 Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of 
 the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easil 
 happy ending ! as if tin- living martyrdom that Lear had 
 gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, <li<l not 
 make a fair dismissal from the stage of lift- tin- only 
 decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy 
 after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all 
 this pudder and preparation why torment us with all 
 this unnecessary sympathy ? as if the childish pleasure of 
 iMting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him 
 to act over again his misused station as if, at his years, 
 and with his experience, anything was left but to die. 
 
 passage in Lamb's writ lugs is better fitted than 
 this to illustrate his peculiar power as a commentator. 
 It as little suggests Hazlitt or Coleridge as it does 
 Schlegel or Gervinus. It is more remote still it need 
 hardly be added from the fantastic tricks of a later 
 day, which are doing all they can to makf Shak 
 spearian criticism hideous. Lamb's emphatic viiulu -a 
 tion of the course of events in Shak-: agedy 
 
 of course implies a criticism and a commendation of 
 the dramatist But no one feels that ho i- 
 patronising, or ju-lirin^, Shakspcare. He takes 
 as it were, out of tl; ire, ami r-
 
 ix LAMB'S PLACE AS A CRITIC 221 
 
 him as a human being placed in the world where all 
 men have to suffer and be tempted. We forget that 
 he is a character in a play, or even in history. Lamb's 
 criticism is a commentary on life, and no truer homage 
 could be paid to the dramatist than that he should be 
 allowed for the time to pass out of our thoughts. 
 
 Thoroughly characteristic of Lamb is the admir- 
 able paper on The Sanity of True Genius, suggested by 
 Dryden's famous line as to "great wit" being nearly 
 allied to madness. It aims to disprove this, and to 
 show that, on the contrary, the greatest wits " will 
 ever be found to be the sanest writers." He illus- 
 trates this by the use that Shakspeare and others 
 make of the supernatural persons and situations in 
 their writings. " Caliban, the Witches, are as true to 
 the laws of their own nature (ours with a difference) 
 as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the great 
 and the little wits are differenced : that if the latter 
 wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, 
 they lose themselves and their readers." And with a 
 marvellous semblance of paradox, which yet is felt to 
 be profoundly true, he proceeds to declare that in 
 Spenser's Episode of the "Cave of Mammon," where 
 the Money -God, and his daughter Ambition and 
 Pilate washing his hands the most discordant per- 
 sons and situations are introduced, the controlling 
 power of the poet's sanity makes the whole more 
 actually consistent than the characters and situations 
 of everyday life in the latest novel from the Minerva 
 Press. It is a proof, he says, " of that hidden sanity
 
 CHARLES LAM I! urn-. 
 
 which still -uidrs the jn..-t in his wildest seeming 
 al 101 rations." No detached sentences ran. In 
 convey an idea of this splendid argument. Nothing 
 that Lamb has written proves more decisively how 
 large a part the higher imagination plays in true 
 criticism; nothing better illustrates the truth of 
 Butler's claim, that the poet 
 
 must lie tried ly his peers, 
 Aii'l nut 1-y pedants and philosophers. 
 
 That Lamb was a poet is at the root of his great- 
 ness as a critic; and his own judgments of poetry 
 show the same sanity to which he points in his poetical 
 brethren. He is never so impulsive or discursive that 
 he fails to show how unerring is his judgment on 
 all points connected with the poet's art There had 
 been those before Lamb, for example, who ha 1 
 and called attention to the poetry of George Wither ; 
 but no one had thought of noticing that his metre 
 was also that of Ambrose Philips and that Pope and 
 his friends had only proved their own defective ear 
 by seeking to make it ridiculous. " To the measure 
 in which these lines are written, the wits of <,' 
 Anne's days contemptuously gave the name of Namby- 
 pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose Philips, who has used 
 it in some instances, as in the lines on Cuzzoni, to my 
 feeling at least very deliciously ; but Wither, wln<e 
 darling measure it seems to have been, may sho^ 
 in skilful hands it is capable of expressing the subtlest 
 movement of passion. So true it is, what Dray ton
 
 ix LAMB'S PLACE AS A CRITIC 223 
 
 seems to have felt, that it is the poet who modifies 
 the metre, not the metre the poet." 
 
 It was in the margin of a copy of Wither's poems 
 that this exquisite comment was originally made ; 
 and in such a casual way did much of Lamb's finest 
 criticism come into being. All through his life, in 
 letter and essay, he was making remarks of this kind, 
 throwing them out by the way, never thinking that 
 they would be hereafter treasured up as the most 
 luminous and penetrative judgments of the century. 
 And it may well be asked why, with such a range of 
 sympathy, from Marlowe to Ambrose Philips, from 
 Sir T. Browne to Sir William Temple, he was so 
 limited, so one-sided in his estimate of the literature 
 of his own age ? It is true that he was among the 
 first in England to appreciate Burns and Wordsworth. 
 But to Scott, Byron, and Shelley he entertained a 
 feeling almost of aversion. He was glad (as we gather 
 from the essay on The Sanity of True Genius) that " a 
 happier genius " had arisen to expel the " innutritious 
 phantoms " of the Minerva Press ; but the success of 
 the Waverley Novels seems to have caused him amuse- 
 ment rather than any other feeling. About Byron 
 he wrote to Joseph Cottle, " I have a thorough aversion 
 to his character, and a very moderate admiration of 
 his genius : he is great in so little a way. To be a 
 poet is to be the man, not a petty portion of occasional 
 low passion worked up in a permanent form of 
 humanity." Shelley's poetry he told Barton he did 
 not understand, and that it was "thin sown with
 
 --I i IIAKLES LAMB 
 
 fllAT. 
 
 profit or delight" When ho read Goethe's Fn 
 course in an English version), he at once pronounced 
 it inferior to Marlowe's in the chi> >f the plot, 
 
 and was evidently content to let criticism end there. 
 Something of this may be ascribed to a jealousy in 
 Lamb a strange and needless jealousy for his own 
 loved writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
 turies, and a fear lest the new-comers should usurp 
 some of the praise and renown that he claimed for 
 them ; something, also, to a perverseness in him 
 which made him like to be in opposition to the current 
 opinion, whatever it might be. He was often unwill- 
 ing, rather than unable, to discuss the claims of a new 
 candidate for public favour. He lived mainly in 
 communion with an older literature. It was to him 
 inexhaustible in amount and in excellence, ami 1 
 impatient of what sought to divert his attention from 
 it It was literally true of him that " when a new 
 book came out he read an old one." 
 
 But even of the old ones, the classics of our litera- 
 ture, it was not easy to say what his opinion in any 
 case would be. For instance, he was a great a<lmirer 
 of Smollett, and was with great difficulty brought to 
 admit the superiority of Fielding. And in tin- work 
 of agreater humorist than Smollett, in the Pi aic>'|iie 
 school Gil It las he would not acknowledge any merit 
 at all. The truth is that for Lamb to enjoy a 
 of humour, it must embody a strong human interest, 
 or at least have a pulse of humanity throbbing 
 through it Humour, without pity or tenderness,
 
 ix LAMB'S PLACE AS A CRITIC 225 
 
 only repelled him. It was another phase of the same 
 quality in him that as we have seen in his estimate 
 of Byron where he was not drawn to the man, he 
 was almost disabled from admiring, or even under- 
 standing, the man's work. Had he ever come face to 
 face with the author for a single evening, the result 
 might have been quite different. 
 
 There is no difficulty, therefore, in detecting the 
 limitations of Lamb as a critic. In a most remark- 
 able degree he had the defects of his qualities 
 Where his heart was, there his judgment was sound. 
 Where he actively disliked, or was passively indiffer- 
 ent, his critical powers remained dormant. He was 
 too fond of paradox, too much at the mercy of his 
 emotions or the mood of the hour, to be a safe guide 
 always. But where no disturbing forces interfered, 
 he exercised a faculty almost unique in the history of 
 criticism. When Southey heard of his Specimens of 
 the English Dramatic Poets, he wrote to Coleridge : 
 "If co-operative labour were as practicable as it is 
 desirable, what a history of English literature might 
 he and you and I set forth ! " Such an enterprise 
 would be, as Southey saw, all but impossible ; but if 
 the spiritual insight of Coleridge, and the unwearied 
 industry and sober common-sense of Southey, could 
 be combined with the special genius of Charles Lamb, 
 something like the ideal commentary on English 
 literature might be the result: 
 
 As it is, Lamb's contribution to that end is of the 
 rarest value. If it is too much to say that he singly 
 Q
 
 226 CHARLES LAMB . HAI-. ix 
 
 revived the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is 
 because we see clearly that that revival was coming, 
 and would have come even without his help. But he 
 did more than recall attention to certain forgotten 
 writers. He flashed a light from himself upon them, 
 not only heightening every charm and deepening 
 every truth, but making even their eccentricities 
 beautiful and lovable. And in doing this he has 
 linked his name for ever with theirs. When we think 
 of " the sweetest names, and which carry a perfume 
 in the mention, Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond 
 of Hawthornden, and Cowley," then the thought of 
 Charles Lamb will never be far off. His name, too, 
 has a perfume in the mention. "There are some 
 ici tu rations," wrote Southey to Caroline Bowles, 
 "which will not keep, but Lamb's is not of that kind. 
 His memory will retain its fragrance as long as- the 
 best spice that ever was exj>ended upon one of the 
 Pharaohs." 
 
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