Lamb's time, after his manumission from India-House, seems to have hung
rather heavily upon his hands. Though the "birds of the air" were not so
free as he was then, I fear they were a great deal happier and vastly
more contented than our liberated and idle old clerk. Though in the
first flush and excitement of his freedom from his six-and-thirty years'
confinement in a counting-house,--(he entered the office a dark-haired,
bright-eyed, light-hearted boy; he left it a decrepit, silver-haired,
rather melancholy, somewhat disappointed man, whose spirits, as he
himself confesseth, had grown gray before his hair,)--though, when in
the dizzy and happy early hours of his freedom, Elia exultingly wrote
(and felt) that "a man can never have too much time to himself," the
honeymoon (if I may so express it) of his emancipation from the
"Dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood"
was not fairly over before he felt that man's true element is
labor,--that occupation, which in his younger days he had called a
"fiend," was in very truth an angel,--the angel of contentment and joy.
Doctor Johnson stoutly maintained by both tongue and pen, that, in
general, no one could be virtuous or happy who was not completely
employed. Not only the bread we eat, but the true pleasures and real
enjoyments of life, must be earned by the sweat of the brow. The poor
old mill-horse, turned loose in the pasture on Sundays, seems sadly to
miss his accustomed daily round of weary labor; the retired
tallow-chandler, whose story has pointed so many morals and adorned so
many tales, would have died of inertia and ennui in less than six months
after his retirement from business, had not his successor kindly allowed
him to help on melting-days; and methinks the very ghosts of certain
busy and energetic men must fret and fume at the idle and inactive state
of their shadowy and incorporal selves; nor, unless--as some hope and
believe--we are to have our familiar and customary tasks and duties to
perform in heaven, could their souls be happy and contented in Paradise.
But--after this rather foolish and wholly unnecessary digression--to
return to Lamb. Elia, who had while a toil-worn clerk so carefully and
frugally husbanded every odd moment and spare hour of time,--who, after
his day's labor at India-House was over, had read so many massive old
folios, and written so many pleasant pages for the pleasure and
solacement of himself, and a choice and select number of men and
women,--now that he had the whole long day to himself, read but little,
and wrote but seldom.
And as for those long walks in the country, which he talked of so fondly
in some of his letters to his friends,--those walks to Hoddesdon, to
Amwell, to Windsor, and other towns and villages in the near vicinity of
London, which he had enjoyed in anticipation a few years before he had
the leisure actually to take them,--those long walks on "fine
Isaac-Walton mornings," were found to be, it must be confessed, rather
tiresome and unsatisfactory. They were most melancholy failures, when
compared--as Elia could not help comparing them--with the pleasant walks
he and Mary had taken years before to Enfield, and Potter's-Bar, and
Waltham. Nay, even the "saunterings in Bond Street," the "digressions
into Soho," to explore book-stalls, the visits to print-shops and
picture-galleries, soon ceased to afford Lamb much real pleasure or
enjoyment. Yea, London itself, with all its wonders and marvels, with
all its (to him) memories and associations, he found to be, to one who
had nothing to do but wander idly and purposeless through her thronged
and busy streets and thoroughfares,--a mere looker-on in Vienna,--a
somewhat dreary and melancholy place. Indeed, the London of 1825-30 was
a far different place to Elia from the London of twenty years before,
when he resided at No. 4, Inner-Temple Lane, (near the place of his
"kindly engendure,") and gave his famous Wednesday-evening parties,
("Oh!" exclaims Hazlitt, "for the pen of John Buncle to consecrate a
_petit souvenir_ to their memory!") and when Jem White, and Ned P----,
and Holcroft, and Captain Burney, and other of his old friends and
jovial companions were alive and merry.
And now, in these later years and altered times, when even the old
memories and the old associations seemed to have lost their power over
him, and gone were most of "the old familiar faces," and when he felt as
if the game of life were scarcely worth the candle, our melancholy and
forlorn old humorist thus sadly and pathetically writes to the Quaker
poet:--"But town, 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 passed 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 chums, that
lived so long and flourished so steadily, are crumbled away. When I took
leave of our adopted young friend at Charing Cross, 'twas a heavy
unfeeling rain, and I had nowhere to go. Home have I none, and not a
sympathizing house to turn to in the great city. Never did the waters of
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 old 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 it was better to get home to my hole at
Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my corner." And at Enfield Elia was
far from being happy or contented. Winter, however,--"confining,
room-keeping winter," with its short days and long evenings, and cozy,
comfortable fireside and cheerful candle-light,--he succeeded in passing
tolerably pleasantly there; but the "deadly long days" of
summer--"all-day days," he called them, "with but a half-hour's
candle-light, and no fire-light"--were fearfully dull, wearisome, and
unprofitable to him, "a scorner of the fields," an exile from London.
And he thought, as he strolled through the green lanes and along the
pleasant country-roads in the vicinity of Enfield, of the days when he
was
"A clerk in London gay,"
and sighed for the drudgery and confinement of the counting-house, and
longed to take his seat again at his old desk at India-House. In brief,
Lamb felt that he should be happier and better, if he had something to
do. And partly to amuse himself, and partly to assist a friend, he
employed himself for a few months in a pleasant and congenial task. "I
am going through a course of reading at the Museum," he writes to
Bernard Barton,--"the Garrick plays, out of part of which I formed my
Specimens. I have two thousand to go through; and in a few weeks have
despatched the tithe of 'em. It is a sort of office-work to me; hours,
ten to four, the same. It does me good. Men must have regular occupation
that have been used to it." And in another (later) letter to Barton he
says, "I am giving the fruit of my old play-reading to Hone, who sets
forth a portion weekly in the 'Table-Book.'" And he not only furnished
the "Table-Book" with specimens of the Garrick plays, but he wrote for
that work, and the "Every-Day Book," a number of pleasant,
characteristic little sketches and essays. We herewith present the
reader with one of the best and most remarkable of these articles. Of
course all will observe, and admire, the humorous, yet very gentle,
loving, almost pathetic manner in which Elia describes the person and
character of Mary's old usher,--