an irascible old lady who owned the next garden. He sat under his own
vine and contemplated the growth of vegetable nature. He explored his
new neighbourhood, hunted up ancient hostelries, and made comparisons of
their sundry and divers taps. He prowled about Bartholomew Fair,
drinking in delight of its penny puppet-shows, and its other “celebrated
follies,” as they had been contumeliously called by sedate John Evelyn,
a visitor there nearly two centuries earlier. He took long walks into
the country, with Tom Hood’s erratic dog, Dash, who imposed outrageously
on Lamb’s good-nature; and went on excursions with Mary, farther
afield--notably to Enfield, where they made short stays with a Mrs.
Leishman, into whose house they finally removed in 1827.
“I am settled for life, I hope, at Enfield. I have taken the prettiest
compacted house I ever saw,” he wrote. _No_ health in Islington, was his
complaint to Tom Hood; and yet, “‘twas with some pains that we were
evulsed from Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh sticking to the
door-posts. To change habitations is to die to them, and in my time I
have died seven deaths.” He hoped for benefit to Mary from the quiet,
and to himself from the change, and yet he looked forward to casual
trips to town, mainly “to breathe the _fresher_ air of the metropolis.”
In those days they went to Enfield by coach twice a week or so, from one
or another of the old inns, left standing to-day in Aldgate or
Bishopsgate. No coaches run now, but it is a pleasant walk, up through
the long northern suburb, still showing, spite of its being so citified,
traces of its old-time gentility in the square, stately, stolid brick
mansions, the rural homes of rich city merchants a century since. We
pass the High Cross at Tottenham, and beside it the _Swan Inn_,
descendant of that _Swan_ in front of which, within sight of their
beloved Lea, Anceps and Piscator rested “in a sweet, shady arbour which
nature herself has woven with her own fine fingers:” but the stream is
polluted now, and the arbour has gone, and Izaak Walton would not care
for the new _Swan_. So we pass by Bruce Castle, thus named because it
was owned by Robert Bruce, father of the Scotch king--now a boys’
school--and come into that bit of road famous for John Gilpin’s ride,
and so on into Edmonton. Here we turn from the highway--by which the
stage-coaches kept on northward to Ware and Hatfield--and going three
miles farther, along the cross road, we reach Enfield.
By rail it is ten miles from Liverpool Street Station, and we whisk
there in forty minutes by many trains each day; underground, behind
houses, over their roofs; along by Bethnal Green and Hackney Downs and
London Fields--where now can be seen no green nor downs nor any
fields--past Silver Street and Seven Sisters and White Hart Lane, and
many such prettily named places; and last of all through a stretch of
real country into the dapper little station of Enfield.
“Enfield Chase” was a favourite hunting-ground of royalty until it was
divided into parcels and sold after the execution of Charles I. Some of
the old hunting-lodges still stand in gardens, one of them once tenanted
by William Pitt. I have talked with aged men in the village who have
seen, when they were boys, the “King’s red deer” come into “The Chase”
to drink from the New River: which winds through the land here, its
waters drawn from the springs of Amwell and Chadwell, and from slopes
with sunshine on them, and led later underground through pipes to supply
London town. This _new_ river was cut and engineered by Mr. Hugh
Myddelton, citizen and goldsmith, who, “with his choice men of art and
painful labourers set roundly to this business,” in the year of grace
1609, and was knighted by the first James for his enterprise and success
in his stupendous work. Tom Hood got out “Walton Redivivus, a New River
Eclogue,” and Lamb wrote a preface for it, in which he referred to his
new home having the same neighbour as his cottage at Colebrook.
Doubtless he recalled, too, his out-of-town bathing-excursions with the
other boys at Christ’s, and how they would wanton like young dace in
this same stream. “My old New River has presented no extraordinary
novelties lately. But there Hope sits, day after day, speculating on
traditionary gudgeons. I think she hath taken the fisheries. I now know
the reason why our forefathers were denominated the East and West
Angles.”
We pass the town’s old inns, with steep-sloping roofs, and many a
stately mansion set in great gardens; among them the ancient
manor-house, renovated by Edward VI. for the residence of his sister,
the Princess Elizabeth. From here she wrote letters which you may see in
the British Museum; and in the Bodleian at Oxford is the MS.
translation, in her own hand, of an Italian sermon preached here by
Occhini. This building--now The Palace School--contains one of her
rooms, oak-panelled and richly ceilinged; and in the grounds is a noble
cedar of Lebanon, planted in 1670. We look up at the swinging signs of
the _Rising Sun_ and the _Crown and Horseshoes_, past all of which Lamb
often went, and, doubtless, too often did _not_ get past without going
in. It tickled him to urge truly proper people to tipple with him in
these two taverns; and even lady-like Miss Kelly--the actress with the
“divine, plain face”--and the austere Wordsworth were enticed to enter,
and persuaded to have “a pull at the pewter!”
And so, through a leafy lane bordered by stately elms, with cosey
cottages on either hand, across a cheerful green, alongside the rippling
stream, we reach the “Manse,” as Lamb’s home was called for many
years--a name it has only lately lost, when it was newly stuccoed and
painted. It has been re-christened “The Poplars,” from the four tall
trees of that species which rear themselves in its front garden. In the
garden behind, the old yew and the bent apple-trees, and beyond the
pleasant fields stretching away, are all as they were when he looked
through and over them to the Epping Hills. The house has been enlarged
and changes have been made inside, and all is hideously and shamelessly
“smart.”
Nothing in this interior speaks to us of its old tenants. They were
seen, on their coming to take the house, by a schoolboy next door, who
has given this pleasing description of them: “Leaning idly out of a
window, I saw a group of three issuing from the ‘gambogy-looking
cottage’ close at hand--a slim, middle-aged man in quaint,
uncontemporary habiliments, a rather shapeless bundle of an old lady, in
a bonnet like a mob-cap, and a young girl; while before them bounded a
riotous dog [Hood’s immortal ‘Dash’], holding a board, with ‘This House
To Let’ on it, in his jaws. Lamb was on his way back to the
house-agent’s, and that was his fashion of announcing that he had taken
the premises.”
In the summer of 1829, the family of three left this home, the care of
which was wearing too heavily on Mary. “We have taken a farewell of the
pompous, troublesome trifle called housekeeping, and are settled down
into poor boarders and lodgers, at next door, with an old couple, the
Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield.... Our providers are an honest pair,
Dame Westwood and her husband; he, when the light of prosperity shined
on them, a moderately thriving haberdasher within Bow Bells, retired
since with something under a competence ... and has _one anecdote_, upon
which, and about £40 a year, he seems to have retired in green old age.”
It was “forty-two inches nearer town,” Lamb wrote, and it still is
there, next door to their first Enfield home, as you see it in our cut:
a comfortable cottage set back from the road, vines clambering over its
small entrance-porch and hiding all the walls. In its little back
sitting-room were written the “Last Essays of Elia.” In this house he
remained for almost four years, and in 1833 he made his last
remove--except the final one we all must make--to Edmonton.
VI.
These years at Enfield were not happy years. They were both getting old;
Mary’s malady was growing on her, taking her more frequently _from
home_; and even the visits of their child, Emma Isola--she was now a
governess--mitigated his loneliness but slightly. His removal to the
country had left his friends a long way behind, and, for all his urging,
they could not come often so far afield for informal calls. “We see
scarce anybody,” he laments. Hazlitt and Hood and Hunt came
occasionally; faithful Martin Burney fetched forth his newest whim for
their amusement; and loyal Crabb Robinson often walked out to take tea
or to play whist, or for a stroll in the fields with Charles. Once, as
he has recorded in his “Diary,” he brought the mighty Walter Savage
Landor for a call: “We had scarcely an hour to chat with them, but it
was enough to make both Landor and Worsley express themselves delighted
with the person of Mary Lamb, and pleased with the conversation of
Charles Lamb; though I thought him by no means at his ease, and Miss
Lamb was quite silent. Nothing in the conversation recollectable. Lamb
gave Landor White’s ‘Falstaff’s Letters.’ Emma Isola just showed
herself. Landor was pleased with her, and has since written verses on
her.” Only this once did Lamb and Landor come face to face.
Lamb had always hated the country. “Let not the lying poets be believed,
who entice men from the cheerful streets,” he querulously complains; and
he asks, “What have I gained by health? Intolerable dulness. What by
early hours and moderate meals? A total blank.... Let no native Londoner
imagine that health and rest, innocent occupation, interchange of
converse sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything
better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden was the primitive
prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned
himself out of it.”
He was unable to read or write to any extent in hot weather; “what I
can do, and do over-do, is to walk; but deadly long are the days, these
summer all-day days, with but a half-hour’s candle-light, and no
firelight.” Sometimes, of a “genial hot day,” he would do his twenty
miles and over. Once he took charge of a little school during the
master’s short absence; and his first exercise of authority was to give
the boys a holiday! But nothing abated his boredom, and even in his bed
he repined: “In dreams I am in Fleet Street, but I wake and cry to sleep
again.” And when he went to town, and sought in Fleet Street fresh
sights and fresher air, he found no content: “The streets, the shops,
are left, but all old friends are gone.... Home have I none, and not a
sympathizing house to turn to in the great city.”
He took lodgings for a while at No. 24 Southampton Buildings, within
sight of his former quarters at No. 34 of the same street--a house in
which Hazlitt frequently had put up, not far from the house famed for
his “ancillary affection!” The numbers remain unchanged; and you may
look at the queer old
[Illustration: NO. 34 SOUTHAMPTON BUILDINGS.]
stuccoed front on any day you choose to turn out from Chancery Lane. The
house has a strange, sloping roof of tiles, and altogether it is quite
unlike any of its neighbours.
But this impermanent residence in town brought no real relief, for he
found that the bodies he cared for were in graves or dispersed. He
sought solace in work, and made extracts for Hone’s _Table Book_ from
among the two thousand old plays left by Garrick to the British Museum.
Hone had been grateful to Lamb for having contributed already to his
_Every Day Book_; and had dedicated the issue for 1826 to him and to
Mary. In doing so, he published his gratitude, most distastefully to
them, saying in his preface that he could not forget “your and Miss
Lamb’s sympathy and kindness when glooms outmastered me; and that your
pen spontaneously sparkled in the book when my mind was in clouds and
darkness. These ‘trifles,’ as each of you would call them, are benefits
scored upon my heart.”
Forgiving this fulsome gush, Lamb set his pen to sparkling again in the
following year, and found relief in it. “It is a sort of office-work to
me--hours ten to four, the same. It does me good.” The reading-room
wherein he worked is now the print-room, a venerable and musty chamber,
famous in those days for its fine specimens of the Pulex literarius, or
Museum flea; and doubtless infested, too--for Lamb’s irritation, as for
Carlyle’s, since the latter has left it on record--by that reader, still
startling us there to-day, who blows his nose “like a Chaldean trumpet
in the new moon;” and by that other, who slumbers peacefully with his
head in a ponderous tome, and wakes suddenly, snorting.
The assistant-librarian of the Museum at that time was the Reverend Mr.
Cary--“the Dante man”--a friend of the Lambs of recent years; and
Charles found congenial companionship at his table, where he was
frequently invited to dine. Near the Museum, in Hart Street, F. S. Cary,
the son of the librarian, had his studio; and there Charles would
wander, on Thursdays, during the summer of 1834, and sit for his
portrait, with Mary. He is portrayed seated in a chair, and Mary stands
behind him; the figures full length and half-life size. This painting
was never completed, and from it the artist made a copy of Charles
alone, after death. Of this, Crabb Robinson said, a few years later: “In
no one respect a likeness; thoroughly bad; complexion, figure,
expression unlike. But for ‘Elia’ on a paper, I should not have thought
it possible that it could have been meant for Charles Lamb.”
Another portrait of him had been painted in 1805 by William Hazlitt; his
last work with the brush, we are told by his grandson. This figure, in
the costume of a Venetian senator, is well known in its engravings, and
is considered an interesting presentation of the man. But, beyond the
fine and forcible poise of the head--the noble head which resembled that
of Bacon, said Leigh Hunt, except that it had less worldly vigour and
more sensibility--this is to me an unpleasing picture. It robs Lamb of
just that sensibility, and transforms him into a burly, truculent,
ill-conditioned creature! He was thirty years old at the time this was
painted. When he was twenty-three, an admirable drawing in chalk had
been made by Hancock; a profile likeness, in which the superb sweep of
the cranial arch and the subtle sweet lines about the mouth are most
noticeable. This, the first portrait known of him, was engraved on steel
for Cottle’s “Early Recollections of Coleridge.”
A striking piece of portraiture of his mature manhood has been found
within a few years. It is a water-colour sketch by Mr. Joseph, A. R. A.,
and had been inserted, along with many other portraits, in a copy of
Byron’s “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.” This volume had been thus
enlarged, in 1819, by Mr. William Evans, Lamb’s desk-companion in the
East India House, and he had doubtless induced Lamb to sit for this
portrait with this intent. Another admirable likeness was painted in
oil, in 1827, by Henry Meyer, and this was engraved for the quarto
edition of Leigh Hunt’s “Lord Byron and his Contemporaries,” published
by Colburn, in 1828.
The frontispiece of our volume is a reproduction of the portrait first
engraved for Talfourd’s “Letters,” published in 1837. It is known as the
Wageman portrait, engraved by Finden, and is perhaps the most noted and
[Illustration: THE MACLISE PORTRAIT.]
the most attractive of any likeness we have. Our Maclise portrait is
made from an etching done by Daniel Maclise, R. A., for _Fraser’s
Magazine_; in which pages it appeared, as one of “A Gallery of
Illustrious Literary Characters,” published from the year 1830 to 1838.
Of all the portraits of Lamb, however, it was always held by those who
had seen him that Brook Pulham’s etching on copper was the most
life-like in every way ever done. We are fortunate in having so many
portraits, some of them so good; for Lamb never liked to sit, regarding
the desire to pose for a picture as an avowal of personal vanity.
Of serious literary work, during this period, Lamb did but little; his
main pen product being his letters to his many absent friends, which
give us such valuable and characteristic glimpses into the man’s lovable
nature. He wrote a series of short essays, with the title “Popular
Fallacies,” for the _New Monthly Magazine_ in 1828; and a little prose
miscellany--chat and souvenirs of the Royal Academy--called “Peter’s
Net,” for the _Englishman’s Magazine_ in 1831. The year before, Moxon
had published a small volume of small poems by Lamb--“Album
Verses”--concerning which a curious secret has only lately come to
light. The critics found little to praise in these verses--and with good
reason--and a review was sent to the _Englishman’s Magazine_, with a
line to Moxon from Lamb: “I have ingeniously contrived to review myself.
Tell me if this will do.” He did not praise or puff his own work, let me
hasten to say; but his paper is rather a protest against the errors and
carelessness of those same “indolent reviewers.” Still, it is a clear
case of surreptitious self-reviewing, and of it we may say, in the words
of the coy Quakeress--not Lamb’s Islington Quakeress--when she
reluctantly consented to let her ardent wooer enforce his threat to kiss
her--“it must not be made a practice of.”
In 1833 appeared the “Last Essays of Elia,” collected in one volume,
from the _London_, the _Englishman’s_, and the _New Monthly Magazines_,
and the _Athenæum_. This work closed his literary life, not long before
the closing of his bodily life.
For the scene darkens swiftly now. “Mary
[Illustration: FAC-SIMILE OF A RECEIPT FOR A LEGACY, SIGNED BY CHARLES
LAMB AS GUARDIAN FOR HIS SISTER MARY.
[By permission of Charles B. Foote, Esq., the owner of the original.]]
is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months,
followed by two of depression most dreadful. I look back upon her
earlier attacks with longing. Nice little durations of six weeks or so,
followed by complete restoration, shocking as they were to me, then. In
short, half her life is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious
with fears and lookings-forward to the next shock.” This was in May,
1833, when he decided to remove to Edmonton: “With such prospects it
seemed to me necessary that she should no longer live with me, and be
fluttered with continual removals; so I am come to live with her at a
Mr. Walden’s and his wife, who take in patients, and have arranged to
lodge and board us only.”
To lay a little more load on him, he lost Emma Isola, one month later,
in July, 1833, by her marriage with Edward Moxon: their betrothal having
been entered into “with my perfect approval and more than concurrence,”
he writes. In the same letter he says, as unselfishly as always: “I am
about to lose my only walk companion, whose mirthful spirits were the
youth of our house.” He gave her, for a marriage gift, his most
cherished possession, a portrait of John Milton. Mary’s reason was too
clouded, at the time, to take interest in this affair, or even to
understand it; but on the day of the wedding, being at table with them
all, Mrs. Walden proposed the health of Mr. and Mrs. Moxon. The
utterance of the unwonted name restored Mary to her composedness of
mind, as if by an electrical stroke; she wrote afterward to the young
couple: “I never felt so calm and quiet after a similar illness as I do
now. I feel as if all tears were wiped from my eyes, and all care from
my heart.”
Amid all these added adversities, he tried, with his cheerful and
cheering courage, to make the best of it all. He found compensation in
that they were “emancipated from the Westwoods,” and were settled “three
or four miles nearer the great city, coaches half-price less, and going
always, of which I will avail myself. I have few friends left there, but
one or two most beloved. But London streets and faces cheer me
inexpressibly, though not one known of the latter were remaining.” And
yet he struggled to town still more
[Illustration: THE WALDEN HOUSE AT EDMONTON.]
infrequently, and then only to find that, “with all my native hankering
after it, it is not what it was.... The streets and shops entertaining
as ever, else I feel as in a desert, and get me home to my care.” It is
a touching sight, as we may picture it, that of the lonely man, with
worn face and wistful eyes, wandering forlornly up and down his once
familiar streets, seeing so seldom any of the once familiar faces. One
day he met Mrs. Shelley in the Strand, and was--she wrote to Leigh
Hunt--very entertaining and amiable, though a little deaf. He asked her
if they made puns in Italy, and told her that Captain Burney once made a
pun in Otaheite, the first that was ever made in that country. The
natives could not make out what he meant; but all at once they
discovered the pun, and danced round him in transports of joy!
During these lamentable days he saw his sister but seldom: “Alas! I too
often hear her!... Her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and
sanity of this world.” That is to me the most tender and touching
utterance in all the letters since letters were invented.
At times, when her mind was not too turbid, she played piquet with him,
and they talked of death; which they did not fear, nor yet wish for.
Neither had been ever quite able to say with Sir Thomas Browne, in
Lamb’s favourite “Religio Medici”: “I thank God I have not those strait
ligaments, or narrow obligations to the world, as to dote on life, or be
convulsed and tremble at the name of death.” Both wished that Mary
should go first. Mrs. Cowden Clarke has told us how he said abruptly,
one day--his blunt words covering his intense tenderness--“You must die
first, Mary.” And she replied, with her little quiet nod and kindly
smile: “Yes, I must die first, Charles!”
Death was much in their thoughts during these days. Hazlitt had died in
1830, Lamb being with him at the last; and in July, 1834, Coleridge
ended, after long suffering, a life of “blighted utility,” as he himself
truly put it. The passing away of this dearest of the old familiar faces
profoundly affected Lamb. “His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot
think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an
ineffectual turning and reference to him.” Nor did he linger long
alone. One day, in the winter of that year, taking his customary walk,
he stumbled, fell, and bruised his face. The wound did not seem serious,
until erysipelas suddenly set in, and rapidly drained him of his
insufficient vitality. So, on the 27th of December, 1834, the Festival
of St. John and the Eve of the Innocents, sank to sleep forever, in the
fine words of Archbishop Leighton, “this sweet diffusive bountiful soul,
desiring only to do good.” He was happy in not living, as he had said
long before, “after all the strength and beauty of existence is gone,
when all the ‘life of life is fled,’ as poor Burns expresses it.”
It was a peaceful and painless ending, yet infinitely pitiful in its
loneliness for one so essentially social in his life; his sister’s mind
being too clouded to comprehend what was passing, and his only two
friends who happened to be within reach--Talfourd and Crabb
Robinson--arriving too late for his recognition. They heard him
murmuring, with his faint voice, the names of his dear old companions.
Only a few days before he had shown to a friend the mourning-ring left
him by Coleridge, crying out, as he was wont to do, “Coleridge is dead.”
And it had been but two weeks since, when, during a walk, he had pointed
out to his sister the spot in the churchyard where he would like to lie.
They laid him there, and she loved to walk to the grave of an evening,
so long as she stayed in Edmonton. Indeed, she was with difficulty
induced to go away for short visits to the Moxons and other friends. She
was still at the Waldens in July, 1836, for an indenture has been shown
to me lately, of that date and of that place, by which she disposes of
the copyright of the “Tales from Shakespear” and of “Mrs. Leicester’s
School.” This document was witnessed by Edward Moxon and Frederick
Walden. Her signature to it is in distinct and unshaken characters, and
her middle name is written without the final _e_, thus, curiously
enough, spelling it Ann; for it was always elsewhere and by every one
spelled Anne.