CHARLES LAMB
At one of those free-and-easy sociable gatherings in Lamb's rooms, in the
Temple, which Hazlitt has so happily immortalised, Lamb provoked some
discussion by asking which of all the English literary men of the past one
would most wish to have seen and known. Ayrton, who was of the company,
said he would choose the two greatest names in English literature--Sir
Isaac Newton and John Locke. "Every one burst out laughing," writes
Hazlitt, "at the expression of Lamb's face, in which impatience was
restrained by courtesy. 'Yes, the greatest names,' he stammered out
hastily, 'but they were not persons--not persons.... There is nothing
personally interesting in the men.'" It is Lamb's glory that he is both a
great name and a great and interesting personality; and if his question
were put again to-day in any company of book-lovers I should not be alone
in saying at once that the writer of the past I would soonest have seen
and known is Charles Lamb.
It is difficult to write of him without letting your enthusiasm run away
with you. Except for a few reviewers of his own day (and the reviewers of
one's own day count for little or nothing the day after), nobody who knew
Lamb in his life or has come to know him through his books and the books
that tell of him has been able to write of him except with warmest
admiration and affection. Even so testy and difficult a man as Landor, who
only saw Lamb once, could not touch on his memory without profound
emotion, and says in some memorial verses:--
"Of all that ever wore man's form, 'tis thee
I first would spring to at the gates of heaven."
And you remember Wordsworth's--
"O, he was good, if e'er a good man lived!"
There is, too, that well-known anecdote of how Thackeray lifted a volume
of _Elia_ and held it against his forehead and murmured "St. Charles!" All
which, and many other utterances of love and reverence for his personal
character, particularly Wordsworth's reference to him as "Lamb, the frolic
and the gentle," would have exasperated Lamb himself and moved him to
angry protest. "I have had the _Anthology_," he wrote to Coleridge in
1800, "and like only one thing in it, 'Lewti'; but of that the last stanza
is detestable, the rest most exquisite: the epithet 'enviable' would dash
the finest poem. For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me
ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in
better verses. It did well enough five years ago when I came to see you,
and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines to feed upon
such epithets; but besides that the meaning of 'gentle' is equivocal at
best, and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of
gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment has long
since vanished. I hope my virtues have done sucking. I can scarce think
but you meant it in joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to
believe that you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be
a cordial to some green-sick sonneteer." The epithet so rankled in his
recollection that a week later he returned to the topic. "In the next
edition of the _Anthology_ (which Phoebus avert, and those nine other
wandering maids also!) please to blot out 'gentle-hearted,' and substitute
'drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering,' or any
other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in
question. And for Charles read Tom, or Bob, or Richard for mere delicacy."
Gentle Lamb certainly was, but the word is not large enough or robustly
human enough to cover all his character. He wins your regard by his faults
as well as by his virtues. If he drank a little too much at times, and
sometimes talked and wrote foolishly and too flippantly to please the
serious-minded, he far more often talked and wrote wisely, wittily,
exquisitely, and for thirty-eight years of his life he readily sacrificed
himself to his sister's well-being, giving up all thought of marriage that
he might be her constant guardian and attendant, watching dreadfully for
signs of her recurring fits of insanity, and when they were coming upon
her going with her to the melancholy gate of the asylum, and directly her
mind was cleared, returning eagerly to fetch her home again.
He was never in the habit of laying himself out to create a good
impression on strangers; if they were unsympathetic, or he did not take to
them, in his freakish fashion he would deliberately say and do things to
shock and antagonise them, and so it came about that those who did not
know him or could not appreciate him frequently set him down as "something
between an imbecile, a brute, and a buffoon." Carlyle formed that sort of
impression of him; and one can believe there was scarcely any point of
contact between Carlyle's sombre, deadly earnest, man-with-a-message
outlook and the tricksy, elvish, quaintly humorous spirit of Lamb, who
wrote with a delicate fancy and tenderness that are more lasting than
Carlyle's solid preachings are likely to prove, and who "stuttered his
quaintness in snatches," says Haydon, "like the fool in _Lear_, and with
equal beauty."
That is a fine and wonderful glimpse of one side of Lamb given by Leigh
Hunt when he says he could have imagined him "cracking a joke in the teeth
of a ghost, and then melting into thin air himself out of sympathy with
the awful." In describing him, most of his friends emphasise "the bland,
sweet smile, with a touch of sadness in it." "A light frame, so fragile
that it seemed as if a breath would overthrow it," is Talfourd's picture
of him, "clad in clerk-like black, and surmounted by a head of form and
expression the most noble and sweet. His black hair curled crisply about
an expanded 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.'" Add to this the sketch that
Patmore has left of him: "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 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 could
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."
It was a look--this look of patient endurance, of smiling resignation, of
painful cheerfulness--that you could not understand unless you were aware
of the appalling tragedy that lay in the background of his life, and of
the haunting dread, the anxious, daily anticipation of disaster, and the
need of concealing this anxiety from her, that were involved in the
matter-of-course self-sacrifice with which he devoted himself to the care
and guardianship of his sister, Mary.
It was in 1796, when Lamb was living with his father and mother and sister
in lodgings in Little Queen Street, that the tragedy happened which was to
overshadow all his after years. The father was drifting into second
childhood, the mother an invalid. Mary Lamb had to attend upon them both,
with the help of a small servant and, in addition, took in plain sewing;
Charles was a junior clerk at the India House. Only a little while before
Lamb had himself suffered a mental breakdown and had been placed under
temporary restraint ("the six weeks that finished last year," he writes to
Coleridge, in May 1796, "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"); then, in September 1796, his sister suddenly went
out of her mind, stabbed her mother to the heart, and in her frenzy threw
knives at others in the room, and wounded her father before Lamb could
seize her and get her under control. There are no letters more terrible or
more pathetic than those he wrote to Coleridge, when the horror and
heartbreak of this event was fresh upon him.
"My dearest Friend," he writes on the 27th September 1796, "White, or
some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time 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
has 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 care of him 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 all 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) without name or initial, and never send me a
book, I charge you.
"Your own judgment will convince you not to take any notice of this
yet to your dear wife. You look after your family; I have my reason
and strength left to take care of mine. I charge you, don't think of
coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God Almighty
love you and all of us!
"C. LAMB."
The book he mentions is one that he and Coleridge and Lloyd were arranging
to publish together. In October there is another letter, replying to one
from Coleridge, and saying his sister is restored to her senses--a long
letter from which I shall quote only one or two memorable passages: "God
be praised, Coleridge! wonderful as it is to tell, I have never once been
otherwise than collected and calm; even on that 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 evening my aunt
was lying insensible--to all appearance like one dying; my father, with
his poor forehead plaistered over from a wound he had received from a
daughter, dearly loved by him, and 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.... One little
incident may serve to make you understand my way of managing my mind.
Within a day or two after the fatal one, we dressed for dinner a tongue,
which we had had salted for some weeks in the house. As I sat down, a
feeling like remorse struck me: this tongue poor Mary got for me; and can
I partake of it now, when she is far away? A thought occurred and relieved
me: if I give in to this way of feeling, there is not a chair, a room, an
object in our rooms, that will not awaken the keenest griefs. I must rise
above such weaknesses. I hope this was not want of true feeling. I did not
let this carry me, though, too far. On the very second day (I date from
the day of horrors), as is usual in such cases, there were a matter of
twenty people, I do think, supping in our room: they prevailed on me to
eat _with them_ (for to eat I never refused). They were all making merry
in the room! Some had come from friendship, some from busy curiosity, and
some from interest. I was going to partake with them, when my recollection
came that my poor dead mother was lying in the next room--the very next
room--a mother who, through life, wished nothing but her children's
welfare. Indignation, the rage of grief, something like remorse, rushed
upon my mind. In an agony of emotion I found my way mechanically to the
adjoining room, and fell on my knees by the side of her coffin, asking
forgiveness of Heaven, and sometimes of her, for forgetting her so soon.
Tranquillity returned, and it was the only violent emotion that mastered
me. I think it did me good."
Through all his subsequent letters from time to time there are touching
little references to his sister's illnesses: she is away, again and again,
in the asylum, or in charge of nurses, and he is alone and miserable, but
looking forward to her recovering presently and returning home. Once when
they are away from London on a visit, she is suddenly taken with one of
these frenzies, and on the way back to town he has to borrow a waistcoat
to restrain her violence in the coach. But his love and loyalty were proof
against it all; nothing would induce him to separate from her or let her
go out of his charge, except during those intervals when she was so
deranged as to be a danger to others and to herself.
About the end of 1799 Lamb moved into the Temple and, first at Mitre Court
Buildings, then in Middle Temple Lane, he resided there, near the house of
his birth, for some seventeen years in all. In these two places he and his
sister kept open house every Wednesday evening, and Hazlitt and Talfourd,
Barry Cornwall, Holcroft, Godwin, and, when they were in town, Wordsworth
and Coleridge were among their guests. Hazlitt and Talfourd and others
have told us something of those joyous evenings in the small, dingy rooms,
comfortable with books and old prints, where cold beef and porter stood
ready on the sideboard for the visitors to help themselves, and whilst
whoever chose sat and played at whist the rest fleeted the golden hours in
jest and conversation.
[Illustration: WILL'S COFFEE HOUSE. RUSSELL STREET.]
Towards the end of 1817 the Lambs took lodgings at 20 Russell Street,
Covent Garden, a house which was formerly part of Will's famous Coffee
House, which Dryden used to frequent, having his summer seat by the
fireside and his winter seat in the balcony, as chief of the wits and men
of letters who made it their place of resort. In a letter to Dorothy
Wordsworth, Mary Lamb reports their change of address: "We have left the
Temple. I think you will be sorry to hear this. I know I have never been
so well satisfied with thinking of you at Rydal Mount as when I could
connect the idea of you with your own Grasmere Cottage. Our rooms were
dirty and out of repair, and the inconvenience of living in chambers
became every year more irksome, and so, at last, we mustered up resolution
enough to leave the good old place that so long had sheltered us, and here
we are living at a brazier's shop, No. 20 Russell Street, Covent Garden, a
place all alive with noise and bustle; Drury Lane Theatre in sight from
our front, and Covent Garden from our back windows. The hubbub of the
carriages returning from the play does not annoy me in the least; strange
that it does not, for it is quite tremendous. I quite enjoy looking out of
the window, and listening to the calling up of the carriages, and the
squabbles of the coachmen and linkboys. It is the oddest scene to look
down upon; I am sure you would be amused with it. It is well I am in a
cheerful place, or I should have many misgivings about leaving the
Temple." And on the 21st November 1817, Lamb also writes to Dorothy
Wordsworth: "Here we are, transplanted from our native soil. I thought we
never could be torn up from the Temple. Indeed it was an ugly wrench, but
like a tooth, now 'tis out, and I am easy. We 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 mandrakes 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
the earliest peas and 'sparagus. Bow Street, where the thieves are
examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty
hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and casually
throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way,
with a constable to conduct the solemnity. These little incidents
agreeably diversify a female life."
During his residence in Russell Street, from 1817 till 1823, Lamb
published in two volumes a collection of his miscellaneous writings, and
contributed the _Essays of Elia_ to the _London Magazine_, which makes
this Russell Street house, in a sense, the most notable of his various
London homes. Here he continued his social gatherings, but had no regular
evening for them, sending forth announcements periodically, such as that
he sent to Ayrton in 1823: "Cards and cold mutton in Russell Street on
Friday at 8 & 9. Gin and jokes from 1/2 past that time to 12. Pass this on
to Mr. Payne, and apprize Martin thereof"--Martin being Martin Burney.
[Illustration: LAMB. COLEBROOKE ROW.]
By the autumn of this year he has flitted from Covent Garden, and on the
2nd September writes to Bernard Barton: "When you come London-ward you
will find me no longer in Covent Garden. I have a cottage in Colebrooke
Row, Islington. A cottage, for it is detached; a white house, with six
good rooms, the New River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if a
moderate walking pace can be so termed) close to the foot of the house;
and behind is a spacious garden, with vines (I assure you), pears,
strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight the heart of
old Alcinous. 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"; and writing at the end of that
week to invite Allsop to dinner on Sunday he supplies him with these
directions: "Colebrook Cottage, left hand side, end of Colebrook Row, on
the western brink of the New River, a detached whitish house." To Barton,
when he has been nearly three weeks at Islington, he says, "I continue to
estimate my own roof-comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a
lodger! My garden thrives (I am told), though I have yet reaped nothing
but some tiny salad and withered carrots. But a garden's a garden
anywhere, and twice a garden in London."
Here, in November of that year, happened the accident to George Dyer that
supplied Lamb with the subject of his whimsical Elian essay, _Amicus
Redivivus_. Dyer was an odd, eccentric, very absent-minded old bookworm
who lived in Clifford's Inn; Lamb delighted in his absurdities, and loved
him, and loved to make merry over his quaint sayings and doings. "You have
seen our house," he writes to Mrs. Hazlitt, in the week after Dyer's
adventure. "What I now tell you is literally true. Yesterday week George
Dyer called upon us at one o'clock (_bright noonday_) on his way to dine
with Mrs. Barbauld at Newington. He sat with Mary about half-an-hour, and
took leave. The maid saw him go out, from her kitchen window, but suddenly
losing sight of him, ran up in a fright to Mary. G. D., instead of keeping
the slip that leads to the gate, had deliberately, staff in hand, in broad
open day, marched into the New River. He had not his spectacles on, and
you know his absence. Who helped him out they can hardly tell, but between
'em they got him out, drenched through and through. A mob collected by
that time, and accompanied him in. 'Send for the Doctor,' they said: and a
one-eyed fellow, dirty and drunk, was fetched from the public-house at the
end, where it seems he lurks for the sake of picking up water practice;
having formerly had a medal from the Humane Society for some rescue. By
his advice the patient was put between blankets; and when I came home at
four to dinner, I found G. D. abed and raving, light-headed with the
brandy and water which the doctor had administered. He sang, laughed,
whimpered, screamed, babbled of guardian angels, would get up and go home;
but we kept him there by force; and by next morning he departed sober, and
seems to have received no injury."
Before he left Islington the India Company bestowed upon Lamb the pension
that at last emancipated him from his "dry drudgery at the desk's dead
wood," and he communicates the great news exultantly to Wordsworth in a
letter dated "Colebrook Cottage," 6th April 1825: "Here I am, then, 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: £441, _i.e._ £450, with a deduction of £9
for a provision secured to my sister, she being survivor, the pension
guaranteed by Act Georgii Tertii, &c. I came home FOR EVER on Tuesday in
last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was
like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three,
_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 the
tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the
gift. Holydays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys; their
conscious fugitiveness; the craving after making the most of them. Now,
when all is holyday, there are no holydays. 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."
He made use of these experiences in one of the best of his essays, that on
_The Superannuated Man_, in which also you find echoes of a letter he
wrote to Bernard Barton just after he had written to Wordsworth:
"I am free, B. B.--free as air.
'The little bird that wings the sky
Knows no such liberty!'
"I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o'clock.
'I came home for ever!'
"I have been describing my feelings as well as I can to Wordsworth in a
long letter and don't care to repeat. Take it briefly that for a few days
I was painfully oppressed by so mighty a change, but it is becoming daily
more natural to me. I went and sat among 'em all at my old thirty-three
years' desk yester morning; and deuce take me if I had not yearnings at
leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry, sociable lads, at leaving
them in the lurch, fag, fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior
felicity gave me anything but pleasure. B. B. I would not serve another
seven years for seven hundred thousand pounds."
From Islington Lamb journeyed over to Highgate every now and then to visit
Coleridge at Mr. Gilman's; and a-visiting him at Colebrooke Cottage came
Coleridge, Southey, William Hone, and among many another, Hood, to whom he
took an especial liking. Coleridge thought he was the author of certain
Odes that were then appearing in the _London Magazine_, but writing in
reply Lamb assured him he was mistaken: "The Odes are four-fifths done by
Hood, a silentish young man you met at Islington one day, an invalid. The
rest are Reynolds's, whose sister H. has recently married."
During the two years or more after his release from the India House, Lamb
and his sister spent two or three short holidays lodging with a Mrs.
Leishman at The Chase, Enfield; in 1827 they rented the house of her, and
Lamb wrote from that address on the 18th September to Hood, who was then
living at 2 Robert Street, Adelphi: "Give our kind loves to all at
Highgate, and tell them we have finally torn ourselves outright away from
Colebrooke, where I had _no_ health, and are about to domicilate for good
at Enfield, where I have experienced good.
'Lord, what good hours do we keep!
How quietly we sleep!'...
We have got our books into our new house. I am a dray-horse if I was not
ashamed of the undigested dirty lumber, as I toppled 'em out of the cart,
and blest Becky that came with 'em for her having an unstuffed brain with
such rubbish.... 'Twas with some pain we were evulsed from Colebrook. You
may find some of our flesh sticking to the doorposts. To change
habitations is to die to them; and in my time I have died seven deaths.
But I don't know whether every 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. My house-deaths have generally been periodical,
recurring after seven years; but this last is premature by half that time.
Cut off in the flower of Colebrook!" He mentions that the rent is 10s.
less than he paid at Islington; that he pays, in fact, £35 a year,
exclusive of moderate taxes, and thinks himself lucky.
But the worry of moving brought on one of Mary Lamb's "sad, long
illnesses"; and whilst she was absent, Lamb fled from the loneliness of
his country home to spend ten days in town. "But Town," he writes to
Barton, "with all my native hankering after it, is not what it was. The
streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. And in London I
was frightfully convinced of this as I past houses and places--empty
caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about anybody. The bodies I
cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old Clubs, that lived so long and
flourished so steadily, are crumbled away. 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 the heaven pour down on
a forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend's house, but it
was large and straggling--one of the individuals of my long knot of
friends, card-players, pleasant companions--that have tumbled to pieces
into dust and other things--and I got home on Thursday convinced that I
was better to get home to my hole at Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in
my corner. Less than a month, I hope, will bring home Mary. She is at
Fulham, looking better in her health than ever, but sadly rambling, and
scarce showing any pleasure in seeing me, or curiosity when I should come
again. But the old feelings will come back again, and we shall drown old
sorrows over a game of Picquet again. But 'tis a tedious cut out of a life
of sixty-four, to lose twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two."
[Illustration: CHARLES LAMB]
The cares of housekeeping, however, sat too heavily on them, and in
October 1829 they abandoned those responsibilities, gave up their cottage
on Chase Side, and went to lodge and board with their next-door
neighbours, an old Mr. and Mrs. Westwood, and in this easier way of living
their spirits and their health revived. Nevertheless, by January 1830 Lamb
had lost all his contentment with rural life, and was yearning desperately
for the remembered joys of London. "And is it a year since we parted from
you at the steps of Edmonton stage?" he writes to Wordsworth. "There are
not now the years that there used to be." He frets, he says, like a lion
in a net, and then goes on to utter that yearning to be back in London
that I have quoted already in my opening chapter. "Back-looking
ambition," he continues, "tells me I might still be a Londoner! Well, if
we ever do move, we have incumbrances the less to impede us; all our
furniture has faded under the auctioneer's hammer, going for nothing, like
the tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon or two
left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must go out
of it. I would live in London shirtless, bookless." And to Bernard Barton
he says, "With fire and candle-light I can dream myself in Holborn....
Give me old London at Fire and Plague times, rather than these tepid
gales, healthy country air, and purposeless exercise."
Early in 1833 he removed from Enfield, and his reasons for doing so he
explains in a letter to Mrs. Hazlitt, on the 31st May of that year: "I am
driven from house to house by Mary's illness. I took a sudden resolution
to take my sister to Edmonton, where she was under medical treatment last
time, and have arranged to board and lodge with the people. Thank God I
have repudiated Enfield. I have got out of hell, despair of heaven, and
must sit down contented in a half-way purgatory. Thus ends this strange
eventful history. But I am nearer to town, and will get up to you somehow
before long." About the same date he wrote to Wordsworth: "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 she is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious with fears and
lookings forward to the next shock. 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. They have had the care of her before. I see little of her: alas! I
too often hear her. _Sunt lachrymæ rerum!_ and you and I must bear it....
I am about to lose my old and only walk-companion, whose mirthful spirits
were the 'youth of our house,' Emma Isola. I have her here now for a
little while, but she is too nervous properly to be under such a roof, so
she will make short visits--be no more an inmate. With my perfect approval
and more than concurrence she is to be wedded to Moxon at the end of
August--so 'perish the roses and the flowers'--how is it? Now to the
brighter side. I am emancipated from the Westwoods, and I am with
attentive people and younger. I am 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; one or two though, most beloved.
But London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though not one known
of the latter were remaining."
Emma Isola is "the adopted young friend" referred to by Lamb in a letter
quoted a few pages back. She was the granddaughter of an Italian refugee;
her mother was dead; her father was an "Esquire Bedell" of Cambridge, and
the Lambs met her at the house of a friend when they were visiting that
town in 1823. She was a charming, brown-faced little girl, and they were
so taken with her that she was invited to visit them in London during her
holidays, and they ended by adopting her and calling her their niece. She
brought a great deal of happiness into their lives; Lamb gives whimsical
accounts in some of his letters of how he is teaching her Latin, and his
sister is prompting her in her French lessons. When she was old enough she
became governess in the family of a Mr. and Mrs. Williams at Bury; fell
ill and was kindly nursed there; and Lamb tells in one of his most
delightful letters how he went to fetch her home to Enfield, when she was
convalescent, and it is good to glimpse how sympathetically amused he is
at Emma's covert admonitions and anxiety lest he should drink too much, at
dinner with the Williamses, and so bring disgrace upon himself and her.
His beautiful affection for their young ward shines through all the
drollery of his several notes to Edward Moxon (the publisher) in which he
speaks of their engagement; and it has always seemed to me it is this same
underlying affection for her and wistfulness to see her happy that help to
make the following letter, written just after the wedding, one of the
finest and most pathetic things in literature:--
"_August 1833._
"DEAR MR. AND MRS. MOXON,--Time very short. I wrote to Miss Fryer, and
had the sweetest letter about you, Emma, that ever friendship
dictated. 'I am full of good wishes, I am crying with good wishes,'
she says; but you shall see it.
"Dear Moxon, I take your writing most kindly, and shall most kindly
your writing from Paris. I want to crowd another letter to Miss Fryer
into the little time after dinner, before post time. So with twenty
thousand congratulations,--Yours,
C. L.
"I am calm, sober, happy. Turn over for the reason. I got home from
Dover Street, by Evans, _half as sober as a judge_. I am turning over
a new leaf, as I hope you will now."
[Illustration: LAMB'S COTTAGE. EDMONTON.]
[_The turn of the leaf presents the following_:--]
"MY DEAR EMMA AND EDWARD MOXON,--Accept my sincere congratulations,
and imagine more good wishes than my weak nerves will let me put into
good set words. The dreary blank of _unanswered questions_ which I
ventured to ask in vain was cleared up on the wedding day by Mrs. W.
taking a glass of wine and, with a total change of countenance,
begging leave to drink Mr. and Mrs. Moxon's health. It restored me
from that moment, 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.
MARY LAMB."
"_Wednesday._
"DEARS AGAIN,--Your letter interrupted a seventh game at picquet which
_we_ were having, after walking to Wright's and purchasing shoes. We
pass our time in cards, walks, and reading. We attack Tasso soon.
"C. L.
"Never was such a calm, or such a recovery. 'Tis her own words
undictated."
And it was in this plain, commonplace little cottage in Church Street,
Edmonton, that Mary Lamb was thus suddenly awakened out of her
derangement; that Charles Lamb and she wrote, by turns, that letter to the
Moxons; that the Lambs sat contentedly playing picquet when the letter of
the bride and bridegroom came to them from Paris. These are the very rooms
in which these things happened; the stage remains, but the actors are
departed. Within a stone's throw of the house, in Edmonton Churchyard,
Lamb and his sister lie buried. His death was the result of an accident.
He had gone on his accustomed walk along the London Road, one day in
December, when he stumbled and fell over a stone, slightly injuring his
face. So trivial did the wound seem that writing to George Dyer's wife on
the 22nd December 1834, about a book he had lost when he was in
London--"it was the book I went to fetch from Miss Buffham's while the
tripe was frying"--he says nothing of anything being the matter with him.
But erysipelas supervened, and he grew rapidly worse, and died on the
27th. His sister, who had lapsed into one of her illnesses and was
unconscious, at the time, of her loss, outlived him by nearly thirteen
years, and reached the great age of eighty-two.