*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 56140 ***

                         IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF
                             CHARLES LAMB

                     [Illustration: CHARLES LAMB.]




                         IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF
                             CHARLES LAMB

                                  BY
                         BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN
                     AUTHOR OF “OLD CHELSEA,” ETC.

                    ILLUSTRATED BY HERBERT RAILTON
                          AND JOHN FULLEYLOVE

                  WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY BY E. D. NORTH

                               NEW YORK
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                                 1890


                          COPYRIGHT, 1890, BY
                       CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.

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


                                  TO
                               L. H. F.

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

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

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

_B. E. M._

_NEW YORK, October, 1890._




List of Illustrations.


CHARLES LAMB,                                               FRONTISPIECE

                                                                    PAGE

_The Temple Gardens, from Crown Office Row_,                          14
          _By John Fulleylove._

_A Corner in the Blue-Coat School_,                                   18
          _By Herbert Railton._

_The East India House_,                                               26
          _By Herbert Railton._

_No. 7 Little Queen Street_,                                          32

_The House in Pentonville_,                                           39

_The Feathers Tavern_,                                                48
          _By Herbert Railton._

_No. 20 Russell Street, Covent Garden_,                               78
          _By Herbert Railton._

_The Cottage in Colebrook Row_,                                       96
          _By Herbert Railton._

_Lamb’s two Houses at Enfield_,                                      102
          _By John Fulleylove._

_No. 34 Southampton Buildings_,                                      122
          _By Herbert Railton._

_Charles Lamb--the Maclise Portrait_,                                126

_Fac-simile of a Receipt for a Legacy_,                              128
          _Signed by Charles Lamb as Guardian for
            his Sister Mary._

_The Walden House at Edmonton_,                                      130
          _By John Fulleylove._

_Edmonton Church, from Lamb’s Grave_,                                136
          _By John Fulleylove._

_The Grave of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb at
  Edmonton_,                                                         140
          _By John Fulleylove._




                            [Illustration:

                       _In the_ Footprints _of_
                            Charles Lamb.]

    “The sun set; but set not his hope:
     Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:
     Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
     Deeper and older seemed his eye;
     And matched his sufferance sublime
     The taciturnity of time.
     He spoke, and words more soft than rain
     Brought the Age of Gold again:
     His action won such reverence sweet,
     As hid all measure of the feat.”
               --EMERSON.


    “Far from me, and from my friends, be such
    frigid philosophy as may conduct us, indifferent
    and unmoved, over any ground, which has been
    dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue.”
                 --SAMUEL JOHNSON.




I.


[Illustration: “Old Bricks for Sale.”]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “A merry cheerful man. A merrier man,
     A man more apt to frame matter for mirth,
     Mad jokes and antics for a Christmas-eve,
     Making life social, and the laggard time
     To move on nimbly, never yet did cheer
     The little circle of domestic friends.”

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: THE TEMPLE GARDENS, FROM CROWN OFFICE ROW.]

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

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

    “---- half linger,
     Half run before,”

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

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

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

As he walks down the Old Bailey, or through Fleet Market--then in the
full foul odour of

[Illustration: A CORNER IN THE BLUE-COAT SCHOOL.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




II.


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

[Illustration: THE EAST INDIA HOUSE.

[From an old print in the British Museum.]]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: NO. 7 LITTLE QUEEN STREET.]

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

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

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

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

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

“It seems that the young lady had been once before deranged. The jury,
of course, brought in their verdict--_Lunacy_.”

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: THE HOUSE IN PENTONVILLE.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: THE FEATHERS TAVERN.]

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

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

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

    “When maidens such as Hester die.”

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




III.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




IV.


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

[Illustration: NO. 20 RUSSELL STREET, COVENT GARDEN.]

Pepys, Johnson, revisiting their once favourite foregathering place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: THE COTTAGE IN COLEBROOK ROW.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




V.


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

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

[Illustration: LAMB’S TWO HOUSES AT ENFIELD.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “That best portion of a good man’s life,
     His little, nameless, unremembered acts
     Of kindness and of love.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: EDMONTON CHURCH, FROM LAMB’S GRAVE.]

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

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

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

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

    “‘At the centre of his being lodged
     A soul by resignation sanctified:
     Oh, he was good, if e’er a good man lived.’”

[Illustration: THE GRAVE OF CHARLES AND MARY ANNE LAMB AT EDMONTON.]




INDEX.


“A Farewell to Tobacco,” 89.

Addison, Joseph, 78.

Ainger, Canon, 25.

“Album Verses,” 128.

Aldgate, 113.

“All’s Well That Ends Well,” 95.

Amiens, 99, 100.

Amwell river, 97, 115.

Anceps, 114.

Aram, Eugene, 61.

Aristotle, 4.

Ashe river, 23.

_Athenæum, The_, 128.

Aunt Hetty, 15, 40.

Austen, Lady, 135.


Bacon, Francis, 125.

Balzac, Honoré de, 57.

Bank of England, 139.

Bartholomew Fair, 112.

Bartlett’s Passage, 11.

Barton, Bernard, 61, 76, 102.

Bay Cottage, 137, 140.

Bedford, Duke of, 78.

Bentham, Jeremy, 4.

Bethnal Green, 114.

Bird, William, 12.

Bishopsgate, 29, 113.

Blakesware, 22, 25, 49, 97.

Blue-Coat School, The, 17, 20, 46, 47, 139.

Bodleian Library, 116.

Boswell, James, 5.

Boulogne, 68.

Bow Bells, 119.

Bow Street, 78, 79, 80.

Boythorn, 96.

Braham, J., 5.

Brick Court, 13.

Brighton, 98.

_British Ladies’ Magazine_, 28.

British Museum, 116, 123, 124.

Brompton Crescent, 34.

Browne, Sir Thomas, 44, 132.

Bruce Castle, 114.

Bruce, Robert, 114.

“Brutus,” 100.

Buildings, Bartlett’s, 11.

Buildings, Featherstone, 48.

Buildings, Mitre Court, 53, 54, 102.

Buildings, New, 7.

Buildings, Ram Alley, 8.

Buildings, Southampton, 41, 52, 54, 122.

Bulwer, Lytton, 62.

Buonaparte, General, 34.

Burney, Captain, 61, 131.

Burney, Fanny, 61.

Burney, Martin, 61, 68, 85, 120.

Burns, Robert, 133.

Byron, Lord, 3, 126.


Cambridge, 98, 107.

Carlyle, Thomas, 47, 72, 124.

Cary, Rev’d H. F., 124, 139.

Cary, F. S., 124.

Castlereagh, Lord, 70.

Cervantes, 75.

Chadwell river, 115.

Chancery Lane, 54, 123.

Chapel Street, 38, 52.

Charing Cross, 6, 19.

Charles I., 115.

Chatham, Earl of, 34.

Chelsea China, 111.

Christ’s Hospital, 16, 29, 41, 42, 69, 116, 140.

Church Street, 136.

Cibber, Colley, 78.

City, The, 6, 26, 47.

City Road, 103.

Clare, Allan, 49.

Clarke, Mrs. Cowden, 132.

Clifford’s Inn, 70.

Clive, Robert, 27.

Colburn, H., 126.

Colebrook Cottage, 110, 113, 116.

Colebrook Row, 102, 103.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 17, 19, 20, 33, 38,
    40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 54, 59, 60,
    63, 64, 65, 66, 77, 85, 96, 97, 98, 132, 134.

“Coleridge, Early Recollections of,” 126.

Colman, George, Jr., 5.

Congreve, William, 5.

Cornwall, Barry (See Procter).

Cornwallis, Lord, 27.

Cook, Captain, 61.

Coote, Sir Eyre, 27.

Cottle, Joseph, 126.

Covent Garden, 78, 80, 81, 102.

Cowper, William, 5, 135, 140.

Cranmer, Archbishop, 17.

Crown Office Row, 7, 8, 13, 14.

Cunningham, Allan, 61.


Dalston, 103.

Dante, 124.

D’Arblay, Madame, 61.

Da Vinci, 111.

De Quincey, Thomas, 62, 70, 93, 108.

“Deserted Village, The,” 13.

Dickens, Charles, 6, 62.

Drury Lane Theatre, 72, 81.

Dryden, John, 3, 78.

Dyer, George, 42, 68, 69, 70, 104, 105.


Eagle House, 139.

East India Company, 110, 135.

East India House, 5, 26, 30, 44, 82, 83, 126.

Edward VI., 17, 116.

Edmonton, 15, 114, 119, 129, 134, 135, 139, 140.

“Elia,” 9, 58, 71, 75, 76, 82, 94, 103, 125, 140.

“Elia, Bridget,” 21, 94.

“Elia, Last Essays of,” 119, 128.

Elizabeth, Princess, 116.

Elliston, R. W., 72.

Embankment, The, 14.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 64.

Enfield, 43, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 135.

Enfield Chase, 115.

“English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” 126.

_Englishman’s Magazine, The_, 127, 128.

Epping Hills, 117.

Essays of Charles Lamb:
  Blakesmoor in H----shire, 24.
  Child Angel, The, 16.
  Confessions of a Drunkard, 74, 90.
  Mackery End, 94.
  My First Play, 42.
  New Year’s Eve, 51.
  Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, 9.
  Old Margate Hoy, The, 98.
  Peter’s Net, 127.
  Popular Fallacies, 127.
  South Sea House, The, 29.
  Superannuated Man, The, 111.
  Two Races of Men, The, 31.

Evans, William, 126.

Evelyn, John, 5, 112.

_Every Day Book, The_, 12, 123.

“Excursion, The,” 86.

Exeter Exchange, 6.


Falstaff, 105.

“Falstaff’s Letters,” 121.

Fetter Lane, 3, 11.

Field, Mrs., 22, 25.

Fielding, Henry, 5, 43.

Finden, W., 126.

Fleet Market, The, 18.

Fleet Street, 19, 122.

Forster, John, 5.

Franklin, Benjamin, 3.

_Fraser’s Magazine_, 127.

Fulleylove, John, 14.


Gardens, The Temple, 14.

Garrick, David, 9, 123.

Gate Street, 33.

Gay, John, 78.

Gilchrist, Mrs. Annie, 91.

Gilpin, John, 114, 135, 136.

Gladmans, The, 21.

Godwin, William, 60, 94.

Goethe, 57.

Goldsmith, Oliver, 5, 13.

“Good-Natur’d Man, The,” 13.

Göttingen, 66.

Gracechurch Street, 26.

Gray, Thomas, 107.

Great Fire, The, 26.

Great Turnstile, The, 48.

Gutch, John Mathew, 41, 53.


Hackney, 40.

Hackney Downs, 114.

“Hamlet,” 67.

Hancock, ----, 125.

Hand Court, 48.

Hare Court, 54.

Hart Street, 124.

Hastings, 98.

Hastings, Warren, 27.

Hatfield, 114.

Haydon, Benjamin R., 61, 70, 71, 77.

Hazlitt, William, 4, 41, 60, 65, 66, 73, 74, 77,
    85, 91, 98, 99, 120, 122, 125, 132.

Hazlitt, Mrs., 69, 98.

Hazlitt, W. Carew, 38.

Helena, 95.

Heliogabalus, 87.

Helvellyn, 6.

Hermia, 95.

Hertfordshire, 21, 22.

“Hester,” 51.

Hogarth, William, 23, 58, 111.

Holborn, 11, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 48.

Holland House, 56.

Hollis Street, 3.

Holy Trinity Church, 32.

Hone, William, 12, 123.

Hood, Thomas, 4, 61, 112, 113, 115, 118, 120.

Hook, Theodore, 107.

Hoole, John, 27.

House of Commons, The, 86.

Hoxton, 34, 37, 40, 49.

Hunt, Leigh, 4, 17, 20, 45, 61, 76, 111, 120, 125, 126, 131.


Inner Temple Lane, 8, 9, 54, 59, 79.

Irving, Edward, 61.

Irving, Washington, 3.

Islington, 50, 52, 102, 104, 113, 128.

Isola, Emma, 107, 120, 121, 129.

Italy, 34, 131.


James I., 115.

Johnson, Samuel, 5, 6, 79.

Joseph, G. F., 126.

“Juvenile Poems,” 136.


Keats, John, 71, 136.

Kelly, Miss, 117.

King’s Bench Walk, 52.

Knowles, Mr., 34.


Lakes, The, 98.

Lamb, Charles (mentioned), 5, 7, 9, 11, 12,
    13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 28, 29, 31,
    33, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46,
    47, 48, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62,
    63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73,
    74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 85, 86, 90, 93,
    94, 97, 100, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109,
    112, 115, 117, 118,
    119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127,
    128, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140.

Lamb, John (the father), 9, 10, 28.

Lamb, John (the son), 14, 28, 29, 37, 38, 109.

Lamb, Mary (mentioned), 5, 11, 13, 14, 15, 21,
    28, 38, 40, 41, 53, 55, 58, 69, 73, 74, 80, 81,
    82, 89, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100,
    103, 105, 107, 109, 112, 113, 118, 120, 121,
    123, 124, 128, 130, 132, 138, 140.

Landor, Walter Savage, 96, 120, 121.

Lea river, 97, 114.

Leadenhall Street, 26, 32, 82, 110.

“Lear, King,” 77.

Leighton, Archbishop, 133.

Leipsic, 66.

Leishman, Mrs., 113.

Lime Street, 26.

Lincoln, Abraham. 75.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 32, 33, 48.

Lion House, 137.

Little Britain, 3.

Little Queen Street, 32, 42, 48.

Liverpool Road, 38.

Liverpool Street, 114.

Lloyd, Charles, 45, 61.

London, 3, 6, 7, 26, 74, 81, 97, 100, 115, 130.

London Fields, 114.

_London Magazine, The_, 62, 76, 82, 128.

London Road, 136.

“Lord Byron and His Contemporaries,” 126.

Louvre, The, 100.

“Lovel,” 9.

Lucan, 64.

“Lyrical Ballads,” 67.


“Macbeth,” 94.

Mackarel End, 21.

Mackery End, 21, 97.

Maclise, Daniel, 127.

Macready, W. C., 72.

Manning, Thomas, 30, 52, 53, 55, 61, 67, 72.

Manse, The, 117.

Margate, 98.

Metal Exchange, The, 26.

Meyer, Henry, 126.

Middleton, Bishop, 20.

“Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 95.

Mill, John Stuart, 27.

Milton, John, 3, 4, 67, 71, 130.

Molière, 75.

Montagu, Basil, 61.

Montaigne, 108.

Moore, Thomas, 71.

_Morning Chronicle, The_, 44.

Moxon, Edward, 127, 128, 129, 130, 134.

Moxon, Mrs., 130, 134, 135.

“Mr. H----, a Farce,” 72.

“Mrs. Leicester’s School,” 96, 134.

Mulready, William, 96.

Myddleton, Hugh, 115.


Napoleon, 60.

Nether Stowey, 64, 97.

_New Monthly Magazine, The_, 127, 128.

New River, 97, 102, 103, 104, 115, 116.

Newgate Street, 17, 46.

Newton, Isaac, 71.

Noggs, Newman, 38.


Occhini, 116.

Old Bailey, The, 18.

“On Needle-work,” 96.

Oriental Bank, The, 29.

Otaheite, 131.

“Othello,” 94.

Ovid, 23.

Oxford, 98, 99, 116.


Palace School, The, 116.

Paris, 68, 99, 100, 101.

Patmore, Coventry, 68.

Payne, John Howard, 99, 100.

“Pencillings by the Way,” 74.

Pentonville, 38, 39, 42, 48.

Pepys, Samuel, 79.

Petty France, 3.

Piscator, 114.

Pitt, William, 43, 115.

Plantagenet, 14.

Plumer Family, The, 22.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 71.

“Poems on Various Subjects,” 44.

“Poetry for Children,” 96.

Poplars, The, 117.

Portraits, of Charles Lamb, 124, 125, 126, 127;
  of Mary Lamb, 124.

Primrose Hill, 70.

Prior, Matthew, 9.

Procter, B. W. (Barry Cornwall), 5, 56, 61, 62, 92, 93, 104, 107.

Pulham, Brook, 127.


_Quarterly Review, The_, 75.


Ratcliffe Highway, 70.

Regent’s Canal, The, 103.

“Religio Medici,” 132.

Rickman, John, 86.

Ridley, Bishop Nicholas, 17.

Rippon, Gideon, 139.

Robinson, Crabb, 58, 59, 62, 63, 73, 99, 120, 125, 133.

Rousseau, 108.

Royal Academy, The, 127.

Russell, Lord John, 66.

Russell Street, 78, 79, 81, 82, 90, 102.


Sadler’s Wells, 103.

St. Andrews, 38, 39.

St. John’s Wood, 135.

St. Martin’s Lane, 6.

St. Paul’s, 19, 47.

St. Paul’s Churchyard, 6.

Salisbury, 98.

Salisbury Plain, 56.

Salt, Samuel, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 30, 32.

Seine river, 100.

Seven Sisters, The, 114.

Sévigné, Madame de, 57.

Shaftesbury, Lord, 43.

Shakespeare, 14, 21, 43, 67, 68, 94, 95, 134, 140.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 45.

Shelley, Mrs., 131.

Shenstone, William, 57.

Siddons, Mrs., 44.

Silver Street, 114.

Simmons, Ann, 48, 49.

Skiddaw, 6.

Smith, Sydney, 66.

Smollett, Tobias, 78.

South Sea House, The, 29.

Southey, Robert, 46, 75, 76.

Spenser, Edmund, 5.

Staple Inn, 54.

Starkey, ----, 12.

Steele, Richard, 78.

Sterne, Laurence, 57, 75.

Stoddart, Sarah, 92.

Strand, The, 6, 75, 131.

Surrey Hills, The, 52.

Swift, Jonathan, 9, 43, 78.

Swinburne, Algernon, 5.


_Table Book, The_, 123.

“Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret,” 45, 49.

“Tales from Shakespear,” 96, 134, 140.

Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 45, 56, 62, 126, 133.

Talma, 101.

Tasso, 27.

Taverns:
  _Bell_, 135;
  _Bell and John Gilpin’s Ride_, 136;
  _Crown and Horseshoes_, 117;
  _Feathers_, 48;
  _Golden Fleece_, 136;
  _Horse and Groom_, 136;
  _Rising Sun_, 116;
  _Salutation and Cat_, 46, 47;
  _Swan_, 114.

Temple, The, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11,
    13, 14, 18, 32, 52, 53,
    54, 56, 57, 79, 80, 90, 94, 102, 140.

Thackeray, W. M., 87.

Thames river, 52.

“This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” 64.

Threadneedle Street, 29.

“Three Memorable Murders,” 70.

_Times, The London_, 34.

Titian, 5, 11.

Tottenham, 113.

_True Briton, The_, 36.

Tuileries, The, 100.


Van Diemen’s Land, 62.

Versailles, 100.


Wageman, ----, 126.

Wainewright, Thomas, 62.

Walden, Mr. and Mrs., 129, 130, 134.

Walton, Izaak, 10, 114.

“Walton Redivivus,” 115.

Ware, 25, 97, 114.

Warwick, Earl of, 14.

“Waverley,” 70.

Westminster, 3.

Westwoods, The, 118, 130.

Wheathampstead, 21.

White Hart Lane, 114.

White, James, 121.

Whittington, Richard, 26.

Widford, 25, 49.

Wild, Jonathan, 43.

Willis, N. P., 74.

Will’s Coffee House, 78.

Wilson, Walter, 88.

Wiltshire, 98.

Winterslow, 98.

Winterton, Alice, 48, 51.

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 80, 81, 97.

Wordsworth, William, 6, 31, 60,
    63, 65, 67, 70, 73, 83, 87,
    90, 97, 107, 109, 110,
    117, 135, 140.

Worsley, P., 120.

Wren, Sir Christopher, 47.

                  *       *       *       *       *

                             BIBLIOGRAPHY,

                                  BY

                           ERNEST D. NORTH.


                                     PAGE

I. LEADING EVENTS IN LAMB’S LIFE                                     149

II. FIRST EDITIONS                                                   150

III. THE “ELIA” ESSAYS                                               165

IV. REVIEWS, POEMS, ESSAYS, ETC.                                     168

V. COLLECTED WORKS                                                   170

VI. SINGLE WORKS                                                     172

VII. LETTERS                                                         181

VIII. POETICAL WORKS                                                 182

IX. LAMBIANA:

   BIOGRAPHY, CRITICISMS, ETC.                                       182

   MAGAZINE ARTICLES                                                 189

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

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

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




I. LEADING EVENTS IN LAMB’S LIFE.


     1775. Born February 10, Crown Office Row, Temple.

     1782 (aged 7). Enters Christ’s Hospital School.

     1789 (aged 14). Leaves school and enters service of South Sea
     House.

     1792 (aged 17). Enters service East India Company.

     1795 (aged 20). Resides at No. 7 Little Queen St., Holborn.

     1796 (aged 21). Publishes four Sonnets in volume of “Poems by S. T.
     Coleridge.”

     1797 (aged 22). Removes to No. 45 Chapel St.,
     Pentonville.--Contributes to “Poems by S. T. Coleridge, Charles
     Lamb, and Charles Lloyd.”

     1800 (aged 25). Writes Epilogue to Godwin’s “Antonio.”

     1801 (aged 26). Removes to No. 16 Mitre-Court Buildings, Temple.

     1802 (aged 27). Publishes “John Woodvil.”

     1806 (aged 31). Produces “Mr. H.”--a Farce, at Drury Lane.

     1807 (aged 32). Publishes “Tales from Shakespear”--“Mrs.
     Leicester’s School.”--Writes Prologue for “Faulkener,” by Godwin.

     1808 (aged 33). Publishes “Specimens of Dramatic Poets”--“The
     Adventures of Ulysses.”

     1809 (aged 34). Publishes “Poetry for Children.”--Removes to No. 4
     Inner Temple Lane.--Lives at No. 34 Southampton Buildings.

     1811 (aged 36). Publishes “Prince Dorus.”

     1813 (aged 38). Writes Prologue for Coleridge’s “Remorse.”

     1817 (aged 42). Removes to No. 20 Russell St., Covent Garden.

     1818 (aged 43). Publishes “Collected Works.” 2 vols.

     1820 (aged 45). Contributes to the _London Magazine_.

     1823 (aged 48). Removes to Colebrooke (Colnbrooke) Row,
     Islington.--Publishes “Essays of Elia,” First Series.

     1825 (aged 50). Retires from East India House.--Contributes
     numerous articles to Hone’s _Every Day Book_.

     1826 (aged 51). Removes to Enfield.

     1827 (aged 52). Contributes Introduction to “The Garrick Plays,” in
     Hone’s _Table Book_.

     1829 (aged 53). Lodges in Enfield.

     1830 (aged 55). Publishes “Album Verses.”--Contributes “De Foe’s
     Works of Genius” to Wilson’s “Memoirs of Daniel De Foe.”

     1831 (aged 56). Publishes “Satan in Search of a Wife.”

     1832 (aged 57). Removes to Bay Cottage, Edmonton.

     1833 (aged 58). Publishes “Last Essays of Elia.”--Contributes
     Epilogue to “The Wife,” by J. Sheridan Knowles.

     1834 (aged 59 years 10 months). Charles Lamb dies, December 27, at
     Edmonton.

       *       *       *       *       *

II. FIRST EDITIONS.

[_Arranged Chronologically._]


1796.

[1]

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

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

     _Note._ Coleridge says in the Preface, “The Effusions signed C. L.
     were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House--independently
     of the signature their superior merit would have sufficiently
     distinguished them.” There are four, viz.: VII. “To Mrs. Siddons.”
     XI. Beginning “Was it some sweet device of faery land?” XII.
     Beginning “Methinks how dainty sweet it were, reclin’d.” XIII.
     “Written at midnight, by the sea-side, after a voyage.”

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


1797.

[2]

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

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

     _Note._ Lamb’s contribution was eight Sonnets and a Dedication,
     viz.: “Fragments,” (6) “A Vision of Repentance,” in Supplement,
     “Childhood,” “Grandame,” “The Sabbath Bells,” “Fancy,” “The Tomb of
     Douglas.”

     “There were inserted in my former Edition a few Sonnets of my
     Friend and Old Schoolfellow, Charles Lamb. He has now communicated
     to me a complete collection of all his Poems--_quæ qui non prorsus
     amet ilium omnes et virtutes et veneres ordore_.”

     This volume contains two Prefaces, one to the First Edition, signed
     S. T. C., and one to Second Edition, signed “Stowey, May, 1797,” S.
     T. C.

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


1798.

[3]

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

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

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


1798.

[4]

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

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

     _Note._ Another edition was published the same year in Birmingham.
     Printed for Thos. Pearson, pp. 134.

     With the exception of the title-page this edition is identical with
     the London one. Charles Lloyd’s father lived in Birmingham, and it
     is suggested that a few copies had been struck off there.
     [Dedication. “This Tale is inscribed in friendship to Marmaduke
     Thompson, of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge.”]

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


1799.

[5]

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

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

     _Note._ This volume was edited by Robert Southey, and published by
     Joseph Cottle. Among the distinguished contributors were Coleridge,
     Southey, Charles Lloyd, George Dyer, Mrs. Opie, Joseph Cottle,
     etc., etc. Lamb contributed “Living Without God in the World,” pp.
     90-92. A second series was published the next year [See Letter to
     Southey, November 28, 1798], which contained Coleridge’s Poem “This
     Lime-Tree Bower my Prison, A Poem addressed to Charles Lamb of the
     India House,” pp. 140-144.

_Price._ Sotheby’s, 1888 [original boards, uncut], £1. [calf] £1 5_s._


1800.

[6]

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

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

     _Note._ Lamb wrote the Epilogue to this tragedy, which was produced
     on December 13, 1800, at Drury Lane. It was a complete failure.
     [See Letter of Lamb to Manning, December 16, 1800.]

_Price._ $3.50.


1802.

[7]

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

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

     _Note._ Lamb had written this three years earlier than date of
     publication, and had showed it to Southey and Coleridge, who tried
     to dissuade him from publishing it. It was offered to John Kemble
     in 1799, but declined. The original title for the play was “Pride’s
     Cure.”

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


1807.

[8]

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

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

     _Note._ Lamb wrote for this volume “The Witch Aunt,” “First Going
     to Church,” “The Sea Voyage.” The other tales were by Mary. The
     copyright for this and “Tales from Shakespear” was sold to Baldwin
     and Cradock on July 21, 1836, by Mary Ann Lamb, for £15. The
     original holder, according to the Indenture, was William Godwin.

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


1807.

[9]

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

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

     _Note._ The Prologue was by Charles Lamb. The tragedy was produced
     at Drury Lane, December 16, 1807. The subject was taken from an
     incident in De Foe’s “Roxana.”

_Price._ Spencer, 1890 [half morocco], £2 5_s._


1807.

[10]

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

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

     _Note._ The greater number of these Tales are written by Mary,
     viz.: “Tempest,” “As You Like It,” “Winter’s Tale,” “Midsummer
     Night,” “Much Ado,” “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “Cymbeline,” “All’s
     Well that Ends Well,” “Pericles,” “Taming of Shrew,” “Comedy of
     Errors,” “Measure for Measure,” “Twelfth Night;” the others by
     Charles Lamb: viz., “Othello,” “Merchant of Venice,” “Macbeth,”
     “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet,” “Timon of Athens.” These
     volumes seem to have been issued in sheep, there being no copies in
     original boards known. Each volume has ten illustrations, engraved
     by William Blake, from the designs of Mulready.

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


1808.

[11]

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

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

     _Note._ “I have done two books since the failure of my farce: they
     will both be out this summer. The one is a juvenile book--the
     ‘Adventures of Ulysses,’ intended to be an introduction to the
     reading of Telemachus! It is done out of the Odyssey, not from the
     Greek (I would not mislead you) nor yet from Pope’s Odyssey, but
     from an older translation of one Chapman.” See Letter to Manning,
     February 26, 1808.

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


1808.

[12]

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

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

     _Note._ “It is done out of the old Plays at the Museum and out of
     Dodsley’s Collection, etc. It is to have Notes.” [See Letter to
     Manning, February 26, 1808.]

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


1809.

[13]

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

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

     _Note._ Lamb contributed to this “The Three Friends,” “To a River
     in which a Child was Drowned,” “Queen Oriana’s Dream,” besides
     other poems not certainly identified; the rest were by Mary. The
     Frontispiece to Vol. I. is a little boy seated in a Landscape, with
     the line “Keep on your own side, do Grey Pate. Page 29.” Vol. II.,
     the Frontispiece is “Penitent Richard standing in a Landscape,”
     with three lines of poetry. At the time of the Locker Catalogue,
     1886, only one perfect copy was known [see _Gentleman’s Magazine_,
     July, 1877, for account of its discovery]. It was reprinted at
     Boston in 1812. A Mrs. Tween, daughter of Lamb’s friend Mr. Randall
     Norris, has a copy of “Poetry for Children” given her by Mary Lamb.

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


1811.

[14]

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

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

     _Note._ Only a few copies known to exist. The authenticity of this
     volume is established by a reference in Crabb Robinson’s Diary, May
     15, 1811. There are two editions, plain and colored, not differing
     in any other particular. The back cover should be preserved, as it
     contains a curious woodcut of Prince Dorus (The Long-nosed King)
     and Aged Fairy. There are copies with Title-page put on cover
     within a key border.

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


1811 (?).

[15]

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

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

     _Note._ The original is in paper-covered boards, roxburghe backs,
     with woodcut, underneath which are written the words “‘Go, be a
     Beast!’ Homer.” The engravings are supposed to be by Maria Flaxman,
     sister of the sculptor. On page 3 there is a water-mark dated 1810.

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


1813.

[16]

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

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

     _Note._ The Prologue was written by Lamb and spoken by Mr. Carr.
     The Play, written in 1797, was originally entitled “Osorio.” It was
     brought out, revised, and re-named “Remorse,” at Drury Lane, on
     January 23, 1813, and had a run of twenty nights. The London
     _Times_ of January 25 said of the Prologue: “The Prologue was, we
     hope, by some ‘d--d good natured friend,’ who had an interest in
     injuring the play. It was abominable.”

_Price._ Scribner & Welford [half calf], $6.50.


1814.

[17]

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

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

     _Note._ Charles Lamb contributed sixteen pages to this volume
     anonymously, viz.: pp. 201-216, entitled “Confessions of a
     Drunkard.” The author and compiler was Basil Montagu. The Essay,
     with a few additional pages, was reprinted in the _London
     Magazine_, August, 1822, and signed “Elia.”

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


1818.

[18]

_Title_: THE | WORKS | OF | CHARLES LAMB. | IN TWO VOLUMES. | vol I |
(vol II) | London: | Printed for C. and J. Ollier, | Vere-street,
Bond-street | 1818. 2 vols 16mo

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

     _Note._ The dedication is to Coleridge, and in it Lamb says: “My
     friend Lloyd and myself came into our first battle (authorship is a
     sort of warfare) under cover of the great Ajax.” There are two
     different issues of this date, one on thicker paper and a trifle
     taller than the other.

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


1823.

[19]

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

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

     _Note._ These Essays were contributed mainly to the _London
     Magazine_ between August, 1820, and October, 1822.

_Price._ Sotheby’s, 1887 [calf], £1. [Elia and Last Essays together]
Sotheby’s, 1888 [russia, uncut], £11 15_s._


1825-6.

[20]

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

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

     _Note._ This was issued in weekly parts and a new title-page
     printed when bound. The Dedication of the first volume is to
     Charles Lamb. To these volumes he contributed “The Months,” April
     16, 1826 [Vol. II.]; “Reminiscence of Sir Jeffrey Dunstan,” June
     22, 1826 [Vol. II.]; “Captain Starkey,” July 21, 1825 [Vol. I.];
     “The Ass,” October 5, 1825 [Vol. I.]; “In Re Squirrels,” October
     17, 1825 [Vol. I.]; “Remarkable Correspondent,” May i, 1825 [Vol.
     I.]; “The Humble petition of an unfortunate Day,” August 12, 1826
     [Vol. I.]; “Quatrains to the Editor,” July 9, 1825 [Vol. I.].

_Price._ Sotheby’s, 1889, £2 8_s._


1827.

[21]

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

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

     _Note._ This, like the other books of Hone, was issued in Parts,
     every Saturday, commencing January 1, 1827, Lamb’s contributions
     being, p. 454, “Mrs. Gilpin riding to Edmonton,” and p. 387, “Gone
     or Going,” and the Introductions to the Garrick plays, which are on
     pages 56, 67, 80, 96, 112, 128, 150, 162, 178, 192, 209, 224, 243,
     256, 280, 291, 304, 320, 338, 352, 368, 394, 400, 417, 440, 449,
     467, 480, 500, 514, 530, 547, 578, 595, 610, 642, 663, 676, 690,
     704, 724, 737, 770, 784, 800, 817. In a note addressed to Hone,
     dated January 27, 1827, written on the fly-leaf of a copy of
     “Specimens of English Dramatic Poets,” Lamb proposed this series,
     to which the editor gladly acceded. The copy named is now owned in
     New York.

_Price._ £1 10_s._


1830.

[22]

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

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

     _Note._ On pages 428-9, Vol. III., appears Lamb’s criticism on “De
     Foe’s Works of Genius.” [Mr. Wilson says: “The following remarks
     upon De Foe’s Works of Genius are from the pen of the Author’s
     highly esteemed friend, Charles Lamb, and are original.”] Pages
     636, 7, 8, 9, Lamb’s remarks on “De Foe’s Secondary Novels” appear.
     These are of so characteristic a nature that they are well worth
     perusal. [Wilson adds: “To recall the attention of the public to
     his other fictions, the present writer is happy to enrich his work
     with some original remarks upon his Secondary Novels, by his early
     friend Charles Lamb, whose competency to form an accurate judgment
     upon the subject, no one will doubt who is acquainted with his
     genius.”]

_Price._ Scribner & Welford [Full calf], $18.00.


1830.

[23]

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

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

     _Note._ Dedication to Moxon. “Enfield, 1st June,” 1830. This volume
     contains “Album Verses,” “Miscellaneous,” “Sonnets,” “Commendatory
     Verses,” “Acrostics,” “Translations from the Latin of Vincent
     Bourne,” “Pindaric ode to the Treadmill,” “Epicedium,” and “The
     Wife’s Trial.”

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


1831.

[24]

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

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

     _Note._ See “Letter to Moxon, October 24, 1831.” Illustrations,
     [woodcuts,] should face pages 8, 21, 32, with tail-piece [“To
     delicate bosoms, that have sighed over the ‘Loves of the Angels,’
     this poem is with tenderest regard consecrated”]. The original
     cover should be preserved.

_Price._ Sotheby’s, 1888 [calf, gilt edge], £2 3_s._ Sotheby’s, 1890
[original wrappers], £8.


1833.

[25]

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

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

     _Note._ The Epilogue was written by Charles Lamb and spoken by Miss
     Ellen Tree. Knowles, in the edition of his plays 1833, speaks of
     his debt to Lamb, etc.

_Price._ $2.50.


1833.

[26]

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

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

     _Note._ The Preface, somewhat changed, was originally published in
     the _London Magazine_ and signed Phil-Elia.

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


1796.

[27]

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

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

     _Note._ Canon Ainger states [See page 404 “Elia”] that Southey
     believed Lamb had a hand in this work. The Preface in particular
     bears some traces of his peculiar vein. See also Letter from Gutch
     to Mr. Bliss, page 155, Hazlitt’s “Charles and Mary Lamb.”

_Price._ New York, 1886, [calf, gilt,] $15.00. Robson & Kerslake [calf,
uncut], £3 3_s._ 1888.

       *       *       *       *       *

III. THE “ELIA” ESSAYS.


All Fools’ Day                           April, 1821, _London Magazine_.

Amicus Redivivus                         Dec.   1823,    “      “

Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behaviour
  of Married People (A)                  Sept.  1822,    “      “

Barbara S----                            April, 1825,    “      “

Barrenness of the Imaginative            Jan. }
  Faculty in the Productions                  } 1825, _Athenæum_.
  of Modern Art                          Feb. }

Blakesmoor in H.----shire                Sept.  1824, _London Magazine_.

Captain Jackson                          Nov.   1824,    “       “

Chapter on Ears (A)                      March, 1821     “       “

Character of the Late Elia               Jan.   1823,    “       “

Child Angel: A Dream (The)               June,  1823,    “       “

Christ’s Hospital Five and
  Thirty Years Ago                       Nov.   1820,    “       “

Complaint of the Decay of Beggars
  in the Metropolis (A)                  June,  1822,    “       “

Confessions of a Drunkard                Aug.   1822,    “       “

Convalescent (The)                       July,  1825,    “       “

Detached Thoughts on Books
  and Reading                            July,  1822,    “       “

Dissertation upon Roast Pig (A)          Sept.  1822,    “       “

Distant Correspondents                   Mar.   1822,    “       “

Dream-Children; A Reverie                Jan.   1822, _London Magazine_.

Ellistoniana                             Aug.   1831, _Englishman’s Mag._

Genteel Style in Writing (The)           March, 1826, _New Monthly Mag._

Grace before Meat                        Nov.   1821, _London Magazine_.

Imperfect Sympathies                     Aug.   1821,    “      “

Mackery End, in Hertfordshire            July,  1821,    “      “

Modern Gallantry                         Nov.   1822,    “      “

Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist          Feb.   1821,    “      “

My First Play                            Dec.   1821,    “      “

My Relations                             June,  1821,    “      “

Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago         Oct.   1831, _Englishman’s Mag._

New Year’s Eve                           Jan.   1821, _London Magazine_.

Old and the New Schoolmaster (The)       May,   1821,    “      “

Old Benchers of the Inner Temple (The)   Sept.  1821,    “      “

Old China                                March  1823,    “      “

Old Margate Hoy (The)                    July,  1823,    “      “

On Some of the Old Actors                Feb.   1822,    “      “

On the Artificial Comedy of the
  Last Century                           April, 1822,    “      “

On the Acting of Munden                  Oct.   1822,    “      “

Oxford in the Vacation                   Oct.   1820,    “      “

Poor Relations                           May,   1823,    “      “

Popular Fallacies:                  { Jan. to Sept. }  _New Monthly Mag._
                                    {     1826,     }
  1. That a Bully is always a Coward                     “       “
  2. That Ill-gotten Gain never prospers                 “       “
  3. That a man must  not laugh at his own jest          “       “
  4. That such a one shows his breeding, etc.            “       “
  5. That the Poor copy the vices of the Rich            “       “

   6. That Enough is as good as a Feast                   _New Monthly Mag._

   7. Of two Disputants, the Warmest is
        generally in the Wrong                                “        “

   8. That verbal Allusions are not Wit,
        because they will not bear translation                “        “

   9. That the Worst Puns are the Best                        “        “

  10. That Handsome is that Handsome Does                     “        “

  11. That we must not look a Gift-Horse in the Mouth         “        “

  12. That Home is Home though it is never so Homely          “        “

  13. That you must love me and love My Dog                   “        “

  14. That we should rise with the Lark                       “        “

  15. That we should lie down with the Lamb                   “        “

  16. That a sulky temper is a Misfortune                     “        “

Praise of Chimney-Sweepers (The)              May, 1822, _London Magazine_.

Quakers’ Meeting (A)                          April, 1821,   “      “

Rejoicings upon the New Year’s Coming of Age  Jan.  1823,    “      “

Sanity of True Genius                         May,  1826, _New Monthly Mag._

Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney             Sept. 1823, _London Magazine_.

South-Sea House (The)                         Aug.  1820,    “      “

Stage Illusion                                Aug.  1825,    “      “

Superannuated Man (The)

To the Shade of Elliston                      Aug.  1831, _Englishman’s Mag._

Tombs in the Abbey (The)                      Oct.  1823, _London Magazine_.

Two Races of Men (The)                        Dec.  1820,    “      “

Valentine’s Day                               Feb.  14, 1821, _The Indicator_.

Wedding (The)                                 June, 1825, _London Magazine_.

Witches, and Other Night Fears                Oct.  1821,    “      “

       *       *       *       *       *

IV. REVIEWS, POEMS, ESSAYS, ETC.

     _Annual Anthology_ (Cottle’s), 1799, “Living without God in the
     World.”

     _Athenæum_ (_The_), [Prose] February 11, 1832, “On the Death of
     Munden.” January 12, 19, 26, February 2, 1833, “On the Total Defect
     of the Quality of Imagination observable in the works of Modern
     British Artists.” November 30, 1833, “Thoughts on Presents of
     Game.” January 4, May 31, June 7, July 19, 1834, “Table Talk by the
     Late Elia.” [Poems] January 7, 1832, “The Self Enchanted.” February
     25, “The Parting Speech of the Celestial Messenger to the Poet.”
     July 7, “Existence, considered in itself, no blessing.” March 9,
     1833, “Christian Names of Women.” December 7, “To a friend on his
     Marriage.” December 21, “To T. Stothard, Esq., on his Illustrations
     of the Poems of Mr. Rogers.” February 15, 1834, “Cheap Gifts: A
     Sonnet.” July 26, 1834, “To Clara N.” March 14, 1835, “To Margaret
     W.”

     _Blackwood’s Magazine_, December, 1828, “The Wife’s Trial.”
     January, 1829, “The Gipsy’s Malison.” May, 1829, “The Christening.”

     _Bristol Journal_ (_The_), February 7, 1819, “Miss Kelley at Bath.”
     (Signed, ****)

     _Champion_ (_The_), December 4, 1814, “On the Melancholy of
     Tailors.” (Signed, Burton Junior.)

     _Examiner_ (_The_), 1822, “Work.” June 6, 1813, “The Reynolds
     Gallery,” “Theatrical Notices.” July 4, 1819, “Richard Brome’s
     Jovial Crew,” “Isaac Bickerstaff’s Hypocrite,” August 2, 1819. “New
     Pieces at the Lyceum,” August, 1819. (These were all signed ****)
     January 16, 1820, “First Fruits of Australian Poetry,” (numerous
     Epigrams, etc.)

     _Englishman’s Magazine_, September, 1831, “Recollections of a late
     Royal Academician.”

     _Gentleman’s Magazine_ (_The_), June, 1813, “Recollections of
     Christ’s Hospital.”

     _Gem_ (_The_), 1830, “Saturday Night.”

     _Hone’s Every Day Book_, April 16, 1826, “The Months.” June 22,
     1826, “Reminiscence of Sir Jeffrey Dunstan.” July 21, 1825,
     “Captain Starkey.” October 5, 1825, “The Ass.” October 17, 1825,
     “In Re Squirrels.” May 1, 1825, “Remarkable Correspondent.” August
     12, 1825. “The Humble Petition of an Unfortunate Day.” July 9,
     1825, “Quatrains to the Editor.”

     _Hone’s Table Book_, p. 454 [1827]. “Mrs. Gilpin riding to
     Edmonton.” 1827, “Epicedium,” “Gone or Going,” p. 387.

     _Indicator_ (_The_), January, 1831, “Elia to his Correspondents.”

     _London Magazine_, April, 1821, “Leisure.” December, 1822, “Guy
     Faux.” October, 1823, “Letter to Robert Southey, Esq.” October,
     1823, “Letter of Elia to his Correspondents.” November, 1823, “The
     Gentle Giantess.” November, 1823, “On a Passage in the Tempest.”
     January, 1825, “Letter to an Old Gentleman whose Education has been
     Neglected.” January, 1825, “Biographical Memoirs of Mr. Liston.”
     February, 1825, “Autobiography of Mr. Munden.” March, 1825,
     “Reflections in the Pillory.” April, 1825, “The Last Peach.”

     _Morning Chronicle_, 1794, Sonnet, commencing: “As when a child on
     some long winter’s night.” [Written probably in conjunction with
     Coleridge.]

     _Monthly Magazine_, January, 1797, “To Sara and her Samuel.”

     _New Monthly Magazine_, 1825, “The Illustrious Defunct.” 1826, “The
     Religion of Actors.” June, 1826. “A Popular Fallacy.” April, 1835.
     “Charles Lamb’s Autobiography.” 1835, “On the Death of Coleridge.”

     _Quarterly Review_, October, 1814, “Wordsworth’s Excursion.”

     _Reflector_ (_The_) [Leigh Hunt’s], 1811, Vol. IV., “A Farewell to
     Tobacco.”

     Theatralia (No. 1). “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” 1811.
     “Specimens from the writings of Fuller,” 1811 (No. 4). “On the
     Genius and Character of Hogarth,” 1811 (No. 3). “On Burial
     Societies, and the Character of an Undertaker,” 1811 (No. 2, Art.
     15). “On the Inconveniences resulting from being hanged,” 1811 (No.
     3, Art. 13), “On the Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal
     Deformity,” 1811 (No. 2, Art. 15). “Hospita on the Immoderate
     Indulgence of the Pleasures of the Palate,” 1811 (No. 4). “Edax on
     Appetite,” 1811 (No. 4). “On the Custom of Hissing at Theatres,”
     1811 (No. 3, Art. 11). “The Good Clerk,” 1811 (No. 4, Art. 23).

       *       *       *       *       *

V. COLLECTED WORKS.

1818. The Works of Charles Lamb. In two volumes. London, C. & J. Oilier,
1818. 2 vols. 12mo.

     The first collected edition.

1835. The Prose Works of Charles Lamb. London, Moxon, 1835. 3 vols.
12mo.

1836. Prose Works of Charles Lamb. London, Moxon. 1836. 3 vols. 8vo.

1838. The Prose Works of Charles Lamb. London, Moxon, 1838. 3 vols.
12mo.

---- The Same, 1839.

---- The Same. 4 vols. 1840.

---- Another edition, 1847.

1838. The Works of Charles Lamb, comprising his Letters, Poems, Essays
of Elia, etc., etc., with Sketch of his Life, by T. N. Talfourd. New
York, Harper & Bros., 1838. 2 vols. 12mo.

1840. The Works of Charles Lamb [edited by Talfourd, with Sketch of
Life, portrait and engraved title]. London, Moxon, 1840. 8vo.

---- The Same. 1845. 8vo.

---- The Same. 1852. 8vo.

1850. The Prose and Poetical Works of Charles Lamb, with his Letters and
Life, by T. N. Talfourd. London, Moxon, 1850. 4 vols. 12mo.

---- Another edition. London, 1852.

---- Another edition. London, 1855.

1855. Works, with a Sketch of his Life and Final Memorials, by Sir T. N.
Talfourd. New York, Harper & Bros., 1855. 2 vols. 12mo.

1856.---- Another edition. Philadelphia, W. P. Hazard, 1856. 4 vols.
8vo.

1857. Works, with Life, by Sir T. N. Talfourd. New York, 1857. 2 vols.
12mo.

1859. The Works of Charles Lamb. A new edition. [Portrait by Wageman,
engraved title of Christ’s Hospital.] London, Moxon & Co., 1859. 8vo.

1865. The Works of Charles Lamb. A new edition. In five volumes.
[Portrait by Wageman.] Boston, William Veazie, 1865. 5 vols. 12mo.

     A large paper edition of only 100 copies was issued at the same
     time.

1865. The Works of Charles Lamb, corrected and revised, with Portrait.
New York, Widdleton, 1865. 5 vols. 12mo.

1867. The Works of Charles Lamb, including his most interesting Letters,
collected and edited, with Memorials, by Sir T. N. Talfourd. A new
edition. London, Bell & Daldy, 1867. 8vo.

1868. The Complete Correspondence and Works of Charles Lamb, with an
“Essay on the Genius of Charles Lamb,” by George Augustus Sala [edited
by W. C. Hazlitt]. London, E. Moxon & Co., 1868. 4 vols. 12mo.

     It is only justice to Mr. Hazlitt to say that this edition was
     issued without his name upon the title-page; he did not even see
     the proofs.

1870. The Complete Correspondence and Works of Charles Lamb, with an
Essay on his | Life and Genius, by Thomas Purnell, aided by the
Recollections of the author’s adopted daughter [Mrs. Moxon]. [Portrait
of Charles and Mary, the former seated.] London, Edward Moxon, 1870. 4
vols. 12mo.

     This edition contains a new Preface by Thomas Purnell. It has the
     first volume withdrawn of the issue of 1868.

1870. Works and Letters, by Talfourd. London, Bell & Daldy, 1870. 8vo.

1874. The Complete Works, in Prose and Verse, of Charles Lamb, from the
original editions, with the cancelled passages restored, and many pieces
now first collected. Edited and prefaced by R. H. Shepherd. [Portrait.]
London, Chatto & Windus, 1874. 8vo.

---- The Same, 1875.

---- The Same, 1878.

1875. The Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb, edited, with
Notes and Illustration by Percy Fitzgerald. [Portrait by William
Hazlitt.] London, Edward Moxon, 1875. 6 vols. 8vo.

     In this edition the narrative portion of Talfourd’s two works has
     been retained, condensed into one continuous narrative, with
     additions both in text and notes, while the Letters are separated
     from Talfourd’s original matter and arranged in groups, forty new
     ones being added.

---- The Same, 1876.

---- The Same, 1882-4.

1876. Works. Edited by Charles Kent. [Routledge’s Standard Library.]
London, 1876. Crown 8vo.

---- The Same. London, 1889.

1876. Works, Poetical and Dramatic, Tales, etc. Routledge, 1876. 8vo.

1879. The Complete Works: with a Sketch of his Life, by Sir T. N.
Talfourd. Personal Reminiscences of Lamb, Coleridge, Southey,
Wordsworth, and J. Cottle, by an American Friend. [Enfield Edition.]
Portrait and Engravings. Philadelphia, 1879, Amies Pub. Co. 8vo.

1880. Works, etc., new edition. [Standard.] New York, 1880. 3 vols.
12mo.

1884. Works, etc. New York, 1884. 5 vols. 12mo.

1886. The Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb. Edited, with
Notes and Illustrations, by Percy Fitzgerald. London, John Slark, 1886.
6 vols. 12mo.

     An exact reprint of the edition of 1875.

1883. [Collected edition. Edited, with Notes and Introductions, by
Alfred Ainger.] Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb,
1878.--The Essays of Elia, 1883.--Poems, Plays, and Miscellaneous
Essays, 1884.--Mrs. Leicester’s School and other Writings in Prose and
Verse, 1885.--The Letters of Charles Lamb, newly arranged, with
additions. Portrait. 2 vols. 1888.--Charles Lamb, 1888.

     This is by far the best edition of Lamb’s Works. Excepting the
     biography, the dates given are those of the first editions. The
     latter was published in the “English Men of Letters” Series, in
     1878, but is slightly enlarged so as to be uniform.

       *       *       *       *       *

VI. SINGLE WORKS.

[_Arranged Alphabetically._]

     1808. Adventures of Ulysses (The), by Charles Lamb. London, 1808.
     12mo.

     The First Edition.

1819. Adventures of Ulysses (The) [by C. L.]. A new edition. London,
1819. 12mo.

1827. Adventures of Ulysses [by C. L.]. Designed as a supplement to the
Adventures of Telemachus. A new edition. Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, London,
1827. 12mo.

1839. Adventures of Ulysses (The) [by C. L.]. [Engraving.] London, 1839.
12mo.

1840.---- Another edition. To which are added Mrs. Leicester’s School,
etc. London, 1840. 8vo.

1845.---- Another edition. London, 1845. 12mo.

1848.---- Another edition. London, 1848. 12mo.

1879. Adventures of Ulysses [Half Hour Series]. N. Y., Harper & Bros.,
1879. 32mo.

1886. Adventures of Ulysses. Edited with notes for schools. Boston, Ginn
& Co., 1886. 16mo.

1890. Adventures of Ulysses. With an introduction by Andrew Lang. [Map.]
London, [1890.] Square 12mo.

1830. Album Verses, with a few others, by Charles Lamb. [Engraved
title.] London, 1830. 12mo.

1798. Blank Verse, by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd. London, 1798.
12mo.

[1811.?] Beauty and the Beast; or, a Rough outside with a Gentle Heart.
A poetical version of an ancient Tale. Illustrated with a series of
Elegant Engravings, and Beauty’s Song at her Spinning-wheel, set to
music by Mr. Whitaker. London, n.d. [1811?]. Square 24mo.

     The First Edition.

1813.---- Another edition, 1813. 24mo.

1825. Beauty and the Beast; or, a Rough outside with a Gentle Heart,
etc. London, William Jackson & Co., at the Juvenile Library, 195 St.
Clemens, Strand, 1825. 3_s._ plain, 5_s._ colored.

1886. Beauty and the Beast; or, a Rough outside with a Gentle Heart. A
Poem by Charles Lamb, now first reprinted from the original edition of
1811, with Preface and Notes by Richard Herne Shepherd. London, 1886.
12mo.

1887. Beauty and the Beast, by Charles Lamb, with an Introduction by
Andrew Lang. Illustrated. London, n.d. [1887?]. Square 12mo. [Published
with plates in two states.]

1823. Elia. Essays which have appeared under that signature in the
_London Magazine_. London, 1823. 12mo.

     The First Edition.

1828. Elia. Essays which have appeared under that signature in the
_London Magazine_. Philadelphia, Carey, Lea, and Carey, 1828. 18mo.

     The First American Edition. An exact reprint of the English.

1828. Elia. Essays which have appeared under that signature in the
_London Magazine_. Second Series. Philadelphia, Carey, Lea, and Carey,
1828. 18mo.

     A curious fact concerning this is that the second series was
     reprinted five years before the English Edition appeared. It was
     done by some one who did not know Lamb’s style thoroughly, as
     several of his best Essays were not included, and others, not his,
     were, viz.: “Nuns and Ale of Caverswell,” by Allan Cunningham, and
     “Valentine’s Day,” “Twelfth Night: or What you Will,” by B. W.
     Procter.

1833. Elia. Essays which have appeared under that signature, etc. A New
Edition. London, 1833. Post 8vo.

1835. Elia, etc. London, 1835. Post 8vo.

1838. Elia, etc. London, 1838. Post 8vo.

1840. Elia, etc. London, 1840. 12mo.

1833. [Elia.] Last Essays of Elia (The). Being a sequel to Essays
published under that name. [Second Series.] London, 1833. Small 8vo.

     The First Edition, reprinted the same year in Philadelphia, 12mo.

1835.---- The Same. [Both Series.] A New Edition. London, 1835. 8vo. 2
vols.

1836.---- The Same. [Both Series.] A New Edition. London, 1836. 8vo.

1840.---- The Same. [Both Series.] Complete in One Volume. London, 1840.
12mo.

     The series are paged separately.

1843.---- The Same. [Both Series.] A New Edition. Portrait. London,
1843. 8vo.

     The edition was also issued in two volumes.

1845. Essays of Elia (The). [Library of Choice Reading.] New York, Wiley
& Putnam, 1845. 2 vols. 12mo.

1847.---- The Same. [Both Series.] London, 1847. 12mo.

1849.---- The Same. [Both Series.] London, 1849. 12mo.

1852.---- The Same. [Both Series.] New York. 1852. 12mo.

1853.---- The Same. In Two Volumes. A New Edition. [Portrait.] London,
1853. 2 vols. 16mo.

1865.---- The Same. New Edition. New York, Widdleton, 1865. 8vo.

1867.---- The Same. A New Edition, with a Dedication and Preface
hitherto unpublished, and a few Reminiscences by E. Oliver. London, J.
C. Hotten, 1867. 8vo.

1867.---- The Same. London, Moxon, 1867. 12mo.

1867. Essays of Elia, and Eliana (The), with a Biographical Essay by H.
S. London, 1867. 12mo.

     Bohn’s Standard Library.

1872.---- Another edition. London, 1872. 8vo.

1878. Essays of Elia. [Vest-Pocket Series.] Boston, 1878, 32mo.

1879. Essays of Elia, and Eliana, with a memoir by Barry Cornwall [B. W.
Procter]. London, George Bell & Sons, 1879. 2 vols. 18mo.

1879. [Elia.] Twenty Selected Essays by G. H. Greene. London, 1879. 8vo.

1879.---- The Same. [Handy Volume Series.] N. Y., Appleton, 1879, 16mo.

1883.---- The Same, with Introduction and Notes by Alfred Ainger.
London, Macmillan & Co., 1883. 12mo.

     Reprinted 1884-1887, [with corrections and additions], 1888.

1883. Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb. [Illustrated with etchings by R.
Swain Gifford, James D. Smillie, Charles A. Platt, F. S. Church.]
[Islington Edition.] New York, 1883. 4to.

     This edition was limited to 250 copies.

1884.---- The Same, reissued on thinner paper. 1884.

1885.---- Another edition. [Illustrated.] Edinburgh, 1885. 8vo.

1885. Essays of Elia and Other Pieces, with an Introduction by Henry
Morley. [Morley’s Universal Library.] London, 1885. 12mo.

     The notes are by Charles Kent.

1886. [Elia.] Some Essays of Elia [with illustrations by C. O. Murray].
London, 1886. 8vo.

1886. Essays of Elia, etc., with a preface by H. R. Haweis. London,
1886. Square 16mo.

1887.---- The Same. London, 1887.

---- ---- The Same. 1888.

1888. Essays of Elia (The), edited by Augustine Birrell with etchings by
Herbert Railton. [The Temple Library]. London, J. M. Dent & Co., 1888. 2
vols. 24mo.

     This edition was also made in Large Paper.

1889. Essays of Elia (The) [Illustrated from Photographs taken by Walter
Collett.] London, David Stott, 1889. 32mo.

     This was made also in Large Paper, only 100 copies printed.

1802. John Woodvil. A Tragedy; to which are added Fragments of Burton,
the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy. London, 1802. 16mo.

     The First Edition, incorporated in the Works thereafter.

1807. Mrs. Leicester’s School; or, the History of Several Young Ladies
related by themselves. London, 1807.

     The First Edition.

1809. Mrs. Leicester’s School; or, the History of Several Young Ladies
related by themselves. The Second Edition. London, 1809. 16mo.

     The Second Edition.

1810. Mrs. Leicester’s School; or, the History of Several Young Ladies
related by themselves. Third Edition. [Frontispiece.] London, 1810.
16mo.

     The Third Edition.

1814.---- The Same. London, 1814.

     The Fourth Edition.

1825. Mrs. Leicester’s School; or, the History of Several Young Ladies
related by themselves. Ninth Edition. [Frontispiece by Harvey.] London,
1825. 12mo.

1827. Mrs. Leicester’s School; or, the History of Several Young Ladies
related by themselves. Tenth Edition. London, 1827.

1836.---- Another edition. London, 1836. Post 8vo.

1844.---- Another edition. London, 1844. 12mo.

1855.---- Another edition. London, 1855.

1881.---- Another edition, with illustrations. London, 1881. 8vo.

1884. Mrs. Leicester’s School, etc. New Edition. London, 1884. 12mo.

1885. Mrs. Leicester’s School and other writings in Prose and Verse, by
Charles Lamb, with Introduction and Notes by Alfred Ainger. London,
1885. 12mo.

1809. Poetry for Children. Entirely original, by the author of “Mrs.
Leicester’s School.” In two volumes. London, 1809. 2 vols. 12mo.

     The First Edition.

1812. Poetry for Children. Entirely original, by the author of “Mrs.
Leicester’s School.” Boston, West and Richardson, and Edward Cotton,
1812.

     The first copy known, and the first American reprint.

1872. Poetry for Children, by Charles and Mary Lamb. Edited and prefaced
by Richard Herne Shepherd. London, 1872. 16mo.

1877. Poetry for Children, by Charles and Mary Lamb. To which are added
“Prince Dorus,” and some uncollected Poems by Charles Lamb. Edited,
Prefaced, and Annotated by Richard Herne Shepherd. London, Chatto &
Windus, 1877. 12mo.

1877.---- The Same. Reprinted. New York, 1877, Charles Scribner’s Sons.
16mo.

1889. Poetry for Children, by Charles and Mary Lamb. To which are added
“Prince Dorus,” and some uncollected Poems by Charles Lamb. Edited,
Prefaced, and Annotated by Richard Herne Shepherd. New York, 1889.
16mo.

     An exact reprint of the edition of 1877.

1811. [?] Prince Dorus; or, Flattery put out of Countenance. A Poetical
version of an Ancient Tale. Illustrated with a series of Elegant
Engravings. London, 1811. 12mo.

     The First Edition.

1877. [Prince Dorus.] Poetry for Children, by Charles and Mary Lamb. To
which are added “Prince Dorus,” and some uncollected Poems by Charles
Lamb. Edited, Prefaced, and Annotated by Richard Herne Shepherd. London,
Chatto & Windus, 1877. 12mo.

1889. Prince Dorus, by Charles Lamb. With Nine Illustrations in
fac-simile (hand-coloured). London, Field & Tuer, 1889. 8vo.

     Only 500 copies printed, each numbered.

     This contains an Introduction by A. W. T. [A. W. Tuer], and is an
     exact fac-simile of the original edition.

1835. Recollections of Christ’s Hospital, by the late Charles Lamb,
originally published in 1813, now reprinted by some of his schoolfellows
and friends, etc. London, 1835. 8vo.

1831. Satan in Search of a Wife; with the whole process of his Courtship
and Marriage, and who danced at the wedding, by an Eye-Witness. London,
1831. 12mo.

     The First Edition.

1808. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, who lived about the time of
Shakespeare, with Notes, by Charles Lamb. London, 1808. 12mo.

     The First Edition.

1813. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, who lived about the time of
Shakespeare, with Notes. Second Edition. London, John Bumpus, 1813.

     The Second Edition.

1814. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, who lived about the time of
Shakespeare, with Notes. London, 1814, Moxon. 2 vols. 12mo.

1835. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, who lived about the time of
Shakespeare, with Notes. A new edition. In two volumes. London, 1835.
16mo.

1844. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, of about the time of
Shakespeare, etc. London, 1844. 2 vols.

1845.---- Another edition. New York, 1845. 2 vols. in 1.

1847. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, who lived about the time of
Shakespeare, with Notes, by Charles Lamb. A new edition, including the
extracts from the Garrick Plays. [Bohn’s Antiquarian Library.] London,
1847. 12mo.

     This edition contains a short Prefatory note by H. G. Bohn.

1852.---- The same, London, 1852. Crown 8vo.

1854. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, etc. London, 1854. Crown 8vo.

1854. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, etc. N. Y., W. P. Hazard,
1854. 12mo.

1798. Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret (A). London, 1798.
12mo.

1835. Tale of Rosamund Gray, Recollections of Christ’s Hospital (A),
etc., etc. London, 1835. 8vo.

1838. Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret (A), etc. London,
1838. 8vo.

1841. Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret (A). London, 1841.
12mo.

     Essays, Letters, etc. [Double column.]

1849. Tale of Rosamund Gray, etc. London, 1849. 12mo.

1850. Tale of Rosamund Gray, etc. (Bohn.) London, 1850. 12mo.

1807. Tales from Shakespear, designed for the Use of Young Persons, by
Charles Lamb. Embellished with Copper. Plates. In two volumes. London,
1807. 2 vols. 12mo.

     The First Edition.

1809. Tales from Shakespear, designed for the Use of Young Persons. [20
plates, engraved by Blake.] [Portrait of Shakespeare.] London, 1809. 2
vols. 12mo.

     The Second Edition.

1810.---- Another edition. London. 12mo. 2 vols.

1813. Tales from Shakespear, designed for the Use of Young Persons.
Philadelphia, Bradford and Inskeep, 1813. 2 vols. 12mo.

     The First American Edition.

1816. Tales from Shakespear, designed for the Use of Young Persons. The
Third Edition. [20 plates, engraved by Blake]. London 1816. 2 vols.
12mo.

     This edition contains the “Advertisement” to the second, but is in
     other respects a reprint.

1822. Tales from Shakespear, designed for the Use of Young Persons. The
Fourth Edition. London, 1822. 2 vols. 12mo.

     The Fourth Edition, omitting the “Advertisement.”

1831. Tales from Shakespeare, designed for the Use of Young Persons
[with designs by Harvey]. London, Moxon, 1831. 12mo.

     The Fifth Edition, the printers being changed from M. J. Godwin to
     Moxon.

1837.---- Another edition. London, 1837. 12mo.

1838. Tales from Shakespeare, designed for the Use of Young Persons, by
Mr. and Miss Lamb. Sixth Edition, ornamented with designs by Harvey.
London, Baldwin and Cradock, 1838.

     The Sixth Edition.

1839. Tales from Shakespeare. London, Baldwin [Godwin], 1839. 12mo.

1843. Tales from Shakespeare. London, H. G. Bohn, 1843. 12mo.

1844. Tales from Shakespeare. London, 1844, Groombridge. 32mo.

---- ---- The Same. London, 1844, Cox. 2 vols. 18 mo.

---- ---- The Same. London, Moxon, 1844. 24mo.

1846. Tales from Shakespeare, with vocabulary, compiled by E. Amchor.
Leipsic, 1846. 16mo.

1859. Tales from Shakespeare. Edited by Charles Knight. London, 1859,
Griffin. 18mo.

     Reprinted, London, 1865. 12mo.

1861. Tales from Shakespeare. London, 1861, Bell & Daldy. 24mo.

1863. Tales from Shakespeare, with woodcuts, by Harvey. London, 1863.
12mo.

1864. Tales from Shakespeare. New York, F. H. Dodd, 1864. 32mo.

1864. Tales from Shakespeare. New York, Hurd & Houghton, 1864. 12mo.

1865. Tales from Shakespeare. London, 1865. 12mo.

1866.---- Another edition. London, 1866. 8vo.

1867. Tales from Shakespeare. London, Routledge, 1867.

1873.---- Another edition. London, 1873. 8vo.

1875. Tales from Shakespeare. [Illustrated.] London, 1875. 12mo.

1876. Tales from Shakespeare. London, Barrett, 1876. Crown 8vo.

1877. Tales from Shakespeare. [Half-Hour Series.] N. Y., Harper Bros.,
1877. 32mo.

1877. Tales from Shakespeare. London, Lockwood, 1877. 12mo.

1877. Tales from Shakespeare. [Little Classics.] Boston, Osgood. 18mo.

1877. Tales from Shakespeare. New edition. [Illustrated by Gilbert.]
London, 1877. 16mo.

1878. Tales from Shakespeare. [Illustrated.] London, 1878, Chatto &
Windus. 4to.

1878. Tales from Shakespeare. London, Warne, 1878.

1878. Tales from Shakespeare. With twelve illustrations in permanent
photography from the Boydell Gallery. London, Bickers & Son, 1878. Crown
8vo.

1879. Tales from Shakespeare. London, 1879. 2 vols. 12mo.

1879. Tales from Shakespeare. London, Whittaker, 1879. 32mo.

1879. Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb. Edited, with an
Introduction, by Alfred Ainger. London, Macmillan & Co. [Golden Treasury
Series.] 16mo.

     Reprinted, 1883, 1886, in 12mo.

---- Another edition. London, 1887.

1879.---- Another edition. London, 1879. 4to.

1881. Tales from Shakespeare. [Colored Plates.] London, Routledge, 1881.
12mo.

1881. Tales from Shakespeare. [Illustrated Chandos Classics.] London,
Warne, 1881. 12mo.

1882. Tales from Shakespeare. [Illustrated by Gilbert.] London, 1882,
Routledge. 4to.

1883. Tales from Shakespeare. Edited by Ainger. London, 1883. 12mo.

1883.---- Another edition. Edited by Alfred Ainger. [Globe Readings.]
London, 1883. 12mo.

1885. Tales from Shakespeare, designed for the Use of Young Persons.
16th Edition. [With steel Portrait. Engravings by Harvey.] London, 1885.
Lockwood. 12mo.

1886.---- Another edition. [Routledge’s World Library.] 1886. 16mo.

1888. Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb. [Chiswick
Series.] London, 1888. 18mo.

1888.---- Another edition. Edited by A. Gardiner. [Heywood’s Literary
Readers.] London, 1888. 8vo.

       *       *       *       *       *

VII. LETTERS.

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

     The Letters in this edition are not published entire. A mistaken
     scrupulousness prompted the omission of much.

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

     Not published until after Mary’s death. The first full-length
     portrait of Lamb the public had obtained.

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

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

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

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

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

     Printed in Bohn Library. This edition contains Talfourd’s original
     prefaces, and gives the Letters in full but rearranged, with
     additions, freely interspersed with original matter. They are also
     arranged chronologically.

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

     The recension of the Manning and Barton correspondence, a set of
     letters to Dibdin, a letter to Chambers and Dodwell, and a complete
     chronological arrangement of the Letters are the chief features of
     this, by all means, best edition.

       *       *       *       *       *

VIII. POETICAL WORKS.

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

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

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

     An exact reprint of the edition of 1836.

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

1840.---- The Same. London, 1840. 12mo.

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

1849.---- The Same. London, 1848. 8vo.

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

IX. LAMBIANA.

BIOGRAPHY, CRITICISMS, ETC.

     Ainger (Alfred). Charles Lamb [English Men of Letters Series].
     London, 1882. 16mo.

     Ainger (Alfred). Charles Lamb. London, 1888. 12mo.

     Rewritten and enlarged from the former work.

Allibone (S. A.). Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British
and American authors. Philadelphia, 1870. 3 vols. 8vo.

     Vol. II. Article: Charles Lamb.

Allsop (Thomas). Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T.
Coleridge. London, 1836. 2 vols. 12mo.

     This contains many items of interest concerning Lamb.

American Cyclopedia (Appleton’s). New York, 1873. 16 vols. 8vo.

     Article: Charles Lamb.

Babson (J. E.). Eliana: being the hitherto uncollected writings of
Charles Lamb. New York and Boston, 1865. 12mo.

     Contents: Preface, Essays and Sketches, The Pawnbroker’s Daughter,
     The Adventures of Ulysses, Tales, Poems, Letters, etc. This was a
     valuable addition to the knowledge of Lamb.

Balmanno (Mary). Pen and Pencil. New York, 1858. Square 8vo.

     Pp. 121-146.

Barton (Bernard), Memoirs, Letters, and Poems of. Edited by his
daughter. Philadelphia, 1856. 12mo.

     Charles Lamb, pp. 168-184.

Bates (William). The Maclise Portrait Gallery of “Illustrious Literary
Characters,” with Memoirs, etc. London, 1883. 8vo.

     Charles Lamb, pp. 290-300.

[Birrell (Augustine).] Obiter Dicta. [Second Series.] London, 1887.
12mo.

     Charles Lamb, pp. 222-236. A review of “Works” reprinted from
     _Macmillan’s Magazine_.

Blessington (Countess of). The Literary Life and Correspondence of.
Edited by R. R. Madden, London, 1855. 3 vols. 8vo.

     Vol. II. p. 369; Vol. III. p. 176.

Bric à Brac Series [edited by R. H. Stoddard]. Personal Recollections of
Lamb, Hazlitt, and others. New York, 1875. 12mo.

     Introductory Preface, p. 1-47.

Bulwer-Lytton (E. L.). Prose Works. London, 1868. 3 vols. 12mo.

     Vol. I. pp. 89-123.

Calvert (George H.). The Gentleman. Boston, 1861. 12mo.

     Pp. 32-42.

Carlyle (Thomas). A History of the First Forty Years of his Life,
1795-1835. By J. A. Froude. London, 1882. 2 vols. 8vo.

     Vol. I. p. 222; Vol. II. pp. 209, 210.

Chambers’s Cyclopedia of English Literature. London, 1876. 2 vols. 8vo.

     Vol. II. pp. 90-95.

Chambers’s Encyclopedia, etc. Revised Edition. Edinburgh, 1882. 8vo.

     Article: Charles Lamb.

Chorley (H. F.). The Authors of England. A series of Medallion
Portraits, etc. London, 1838. 4to.

     Charles Lamb.

Clarke (Charles and Mary Cowden). Recollections of Writers, with
Letters. New York, 1878. 12mo.

     Charles Lamb and his Letters--Mary Lamb, pp. 158-189.

Clarke (F. L.). Golden Friendships, etc. London, 1884. 8vo.

     Lamb and Coleridge, pp. 160-188.

Clayden (P. W.). Rogers and his Contemporaries. London, 1886. 2 vols.
Crown 8vo.

     Vol. I. p. 350.

Coleridge (S. T.). Life of, by Hall Caine [Great Writers’ Series.]
London, 1887. 8vo.

     Numerous references to Charles Lamb.

Collins (Stephen). Autobiography and Miscellanies. Philadelphia, 1872.
12mo.

     P. 39.

Cottle (Joseph). Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert
Southey. London, 1847. 12mo.

     Frequent mention of Lamb.

Craddock (Thomas). Charles Lamb. Liverpool. 1867. 12mo.

Craik (G. L.). Compendious History of English Literature, &c. New York,
1875. 12mo.

     Vol. II. pp. 478, 534, 553, 554, 555.

Cunningham (Allan). Biographical and Critical History of the Literature
of the last Fifty Years. [Waldie’s Library, Vol. III.] Philadelphia,
1833-1849. 12 vols. 16mo.

Daniel (George). Love’s Last Labor not Lost. London, 1863. 16mo.

     Recollections of Charles Lamb, pp. 1-31.

De Quincey (Thomas). Biographical Essays. 1851. 12mo.

     Pp. 167-228.

---- Literary Reminiscences. Boston, 1852. 2 vols. 12mo.

     Vol. I. pp. 62-135.

Elliston (R. W.). The Life and Enterprise of. By George Raymond. London,
1857. 12mo.

     Pp. 266, etc.

Encyclopedia Britannica. The Encyclopedia Britannica. Eighth Edition.
Edinburgh, 1856. 4to.

     Article: Lamb, by R. Carruthers.

---- The Same. Ninth Edition. Edinburgh, 1876. 4to.

     Article: Charles Lamb.

English Cyclopedia. A new Dictionary of Universal Knowledge. (Charles
Knight’s.)

     Article: Charles Lamb.

English Poets (The). Selections, with Critical Introductions, etc.
[Edited by T. H. Ward.] London, 1889. 4 vols. 12mo.

     Charles Lamb, Vol. IV. pp. 326-333.

Fields (James T.). Yesterdays with Authors. Boston, 1871. 12mo.

     The Article: “Barry Cornwall and some of his Friends,” contains
     numerous references to Lamb and his sister.

Fitzgerald (Percy). Afternoon Lectures. Second Series. London, 1864.
12mo.

     Vol. II. pp. 67-101.

---- Art of the Stage (The), as set out in Lamb’s Dramatic Essays, with
a Commentary. London, 1885. 12mo.

---- Charles Lamb: His Friends, his Haunts, and his Books. [Portraits.]
London, 1866. Square 12mo.

---- Little Essays, Sketches, and Characters, by C. L. Selected from his
Letters. London, 1884. 12mo.

---- Recreations of a London Literary Man. London, 1882. 2 vols. 12mo.

     Vol. I. p. 235.

Fox (Caroline). Memoirs of Old Friends, etc., 1835-1871. Edited by H. N.
Pym. London, 1882. 8vo.

     Mentions Lamb, pp. 12, 19, 46, 52, 145.

Francis (John). Literary Chronicle of a Half Century. London, 1882. 2
vols. 12mo.

     Frequent mention of Lamb and his connection with _The Athenæum_.

Gilchrist (Mrs.). Mary Lamb. [Famous Women Series.] 16mo. London, W. H.
Allen, 1883. 16mo.

     Numerous mention of her brother.

Gilfillan. (George). A Gallery of Literary Portraits. London, 1845-54. 3
vols. 12mo.

     Vol. I. pp. 338-345. Sketch of Lamb, with Portrait.

Godwin (William). His Friends and Acquaintances. By C. Kegan Paul.
London, 1876. 2 vols. 8vo.

     Vol. I., p. 362; Vol. II., p. 321.

Hall (S. C.). Retrospect of a Long Life. From 1815 to 1883. London,
1883. 2 vols. 8vo.

     Vol. II. contains Anecdotes, etc., of Lamb.

Hall (Mr. and Mrs. S. C.). Memories of Great Men and Women. London,
1876. 8vo.

     P. 11.

Haydon (B. R.). Life of. Edited by Tom Taylor. London, 1853. 3 vols.
12mo.

     Numerous references to Lamb.

Hazlitt (W. Carew). Mary and Charles Lamb. Poems, Letters, and Remains.
Now first collected. With Reminiscences and Notes. Portraits,
Fac-similes, and Illustrations. London, 1874. 4to.

     Unusually interesting and important, containing matter not in any
     of the earlier editions. Issued also in 8vo.

---- Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits. London, 1825. 12mo.

     Pp. 395-405.

---- Table Talk. London, 1845-6. 2 vols. 16mo.

     Vol. II. On Conversation of Authors.

---- Memoirs. With Portions of his Correspondence. By W. C. Hazlitt.
London, 1867. 2 vols. 12mo.

     References to Lamb.

---- Literary Remains. By his Son. London, 1836. 2 vols. 12mo.

     References to C. L.

Hood (Thomas). Memorials, by his Daughter. London, 1860. 2 vols. 12mo.

Howitt (William). The Northern Heights of London. London, 1869. 8vo.

     Pp. 882-885.

Hunt (Leigh). Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries, etc. London,
1828. 4to.

     Charles Lamb, pp. 296, 299. [With Portrait by Meyer.]

---- Autobiography. With Reminiscences of Friends and Contemporaries.
London, 1850. 3 vols. 12mo.

     Numerous references to Lamb.

Hutton (Laurence). Literary Landmarks of London. Boston, 1885. 12mo.

     Pp. 182-193. The most accurate account extant.

Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography (The). Glasgow, n.d. 8vo.

     Vol. III. Article: Charles Lamb, by Charles Taylor.

Imitation of Celebrated Authors; or, Imaginary Rejected Articles.
London, 1844. 12mo.

     P. 30 contains imitation of Lamb.

Ireland (Alexander). List of the writings of William Hazlitt and Leigh
Hunt, etc., preceded by a review of, and extracts from Barry Cornwall’s
“Memorials of Charles Lamb,” etc., and a chronological list of the works
of Charles Lamb. London: 1868. 12mo.

     Pp. 3-26. Charles Lamb.

Jesse (J. Heneage). London, its celebrities, characters, and remarkable
places. London, 1851. 3 vols. 12mo.

     Vol. I. pp. 330, 345, 388; Vol. III. pp. 220, 228, 313.

Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia, etc. New York, 1886. 2 vols. 8vo.

     Article. Charles Lamb. P. C. Bliss.

Mathews (William). The Great Conversers and other Essays. Chicago, 1876.
12mo.

     Pp. 32, 117, 165, 173.

Macmillan (Daniel). Memoirs of. By Thomas Hughes. London, 1822. 12mo.

     P. 141.

Mathews (Charles). Life and Correspondence, etc. Edited by his Widow.
London, 1838. 4 vols. 8vo.

     Numerous references to Lamb.

Minto (William), A Manual of English Prose Literature, etc. London,
1886. 12mo.

     Pp. 537, 539.

Moir (D. M.), Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the past Half
Century. Edinburgh, 1851. 16mo.

Moore (Thomas). Journal and Correspondence. Edited by Lord John Russell.
London, 1853. 8 vols. 8vo.

     Lamb Anecdotes, etc., Vol. III. p. 136; Vol. IV. pp. 50, 51; Vol.
     V. p. 317; Vol. VI. p. 249.

Munden (J. S.). Memoirs of. By his Son. London, 1844. 8vo.

     Refers to Charles Lamb.

Mylius (W. F.). The First Book of Poetry for the Use of Schools, etc.
London, 1815. 16mo.

     This contains selections from “Poetry for Children.”

Notes and Queries. General Index to Notes and Queries. Seven Series.
London, 1856, 1890. 4to.

     Numerous references to Lamb.

Oliphant (Mrs.). Literary History of England. London, 1889. 3 vols. 8vo.

     Vol. I. pp. 230, 250; Vol. II. pp. 65, 176, 177, 250, etc.; Vol.
     III. 1, 7, 240.

Pater (W. H.). Appreciations, with an Essay on Style. London, 1889.
12mo.

     Pp. 107-126, Charles Lamb.

Patmore (P. G.). My Friends and Acquaintances. London, 1884. 4 vols.
12mo.

     Numerous and most important references to, and reminiscences of
     Lamb.

[Patmore (P. G.).] Rejected Articles. London, 1826. 12mo.

     Contains imitation of Lamb.

Pen and Ink Sketches of Poets, Preachers, and Politicians. [By John
Dix.] London, 1846. 8vo.

     Lamb and Coleridge, pp. 122, 140.

Penny Cyclopædia (The). [Chas. Knight’s.] London, 1839. 8vo.

     Vol. XIII. Article: Charles Lamb.

Personal Traits of British Authors--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb,
Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Procter. Edited by E. T. Mason. New York, 1885.
12mo.

     Pp. 113-173. Charles Lamb.

Poole (Thomas). Thomas Poole and his Friend. By Mrs. Sandford. London,
1888. 12mo. 2 vols. 8vo.

     Numerous references to Charles Lamb.

Procter (B. W.). Charles Lamb. A Memoir, by Barry Cornwall. London,
1868. 8vo.

     This contains portraits theretofore unknown.

Robinson (Henry Crabb). Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence,
selected and edited by Thomas Sadler. London, 1866. 3 vols. 8vo.

     This is crowded with references to Lamb and his sister.

Russell (W. Clark). The Book of Authors. London, 1876. 8vo.

     Pp. 71, 105, 144, 204, 392, 399, 427, 447.

St. Albans (Duchess of). Memoirs of Miss Mellon, by Mrs. C.
Barron-Wilson. London, 1840. 2 vols. 12mo.

     Account of the production of “Mr. H.”--a Farce. Vol I. p. 296.

Shaw (Thomas B.). Complete Manual of English Literature, etc. New York,
1867. 12mo.

     Pp. 470-472.

Southey (Robert). Life and Correspondence. Edited by C. C. Southey.
London, 1850. 6 vols. 8vo.

     Many references to Lamb.

Swinburne (A. C.). “William Blake,” a critical Essay. London, 1868. 8vo.

     P. 8.

---- Miscellanies. London, 1886. 12mo.

     Charles Lamb and George Wither, pp. 152-200. Originally published
     in the _Nineteenth Century_.

Taine, H. A. History of English Literature. Translated by H. Van Laun.
London, 1886. 4 vols. 8vo.

     Charles Lamb, Vol. III. pp. 423-427.

Thompson (Mrs. K. B.). Celebrated Friendships. London, 1881. 2 vols.
12mo.

     Vol. II. pp. 53-98.

Ticknor (George). Life, Letters, and Journals of. [Edited by G. S.
Hilliard, George Stillman, and others.] Boston, 1876. 2 vols. 8vo.

     Vol. I. p. 294, contains a curious account of an evening with Lamb.

Timbs (J.). Anecdote Lives of the Later Wits and Humourists. London,
1874. 2 vols. 12mo.

     Vol. I. contains numerous allusions, etc., to Lamb.

Trollope (Wm.). A History of the Royal Foundation of Christ’s Hospital,
with an account of the plan of education, etc., and Memoirs of Eminent
Blues, etc. London, 1834. 4to.

     Numerous references to Lamb.

Tuckerman (H. T.). Characteristics of Literature. First Series.
Philadelphia, 1849. 12 mo.

     Pp. 130, 170. Charles Lamb, the Humourist.

Universal Pronouncing Dictionary of Biography and Mythology. [Edited by
Joseph Thomas.] Philadelphia, 1889. 4to.

     Article: Charles Lamb.

Wainewright (Thomas Griffiths). Essays and Criticisms. Now first
collected, with some account of the author, by W. C. Hazlitt. London,
1880. 12mo.

     Numerous references to Lamb.

Wilson (John). Noctes Ambrosianæ. New York, 1863. 5 vols. 8vo.

     Vol. I. pp. 170, 224; Vol. II. p. 106.

Willis (N. P.). Pencillings by the Way. New York. 1853. 12mo.

Wordsworth (William). Life, by William Knight. Edinburgh, 1889. 3 vols.
8vo.

     Full of references to Charles Lamb.

       *       *       *       *       *

MAGAZINE ARTICLES.

     Lamb (Charles). _Overland Monthly_ (N. S.), Vol. IV. p. 284, H.
     Colbach.--_The Academy_, Vol. XXI. p. 168, R. C. Browne.--_The
     Athenæum_, Vol. II. p. 566 (1886), A. Ainger.--_Eclectic Magazine_,
     Vol. XXIII. p. 491; Vol. XXXI. p. 399.--_Fraser’s Magazine_, Vol.
     LXXV. p. 657, G. Massey.--_Living Age_ (Littell’s), Vol. L. p. 145;
     Vol. LXI. p. 771.--_Monthly Review_, Vol. XC. p. 253; Vol.
     CXXXVIII. p. 110; Vol. CXLIII. p. 467.--_Modern Review_, Vol. C.
     pp. 1-202.--_Methodist Quarterly Review_, Vol. XVIII. p. 566, W. H.
     Barnes.--_Macmillan’s Magazine_, Vol. XXIX. p. 431, A.
     Black.--_New England Magazine_, Vol. IX. p. 233.--_People’s
     Journal_, Vol. XI. p. 357.--_Pioneer_ (_The_), Vol. II. p. 144, C.
     H. Washburn.--_Southern Literary Messenger_, Vol. VI. p.
     652.--_Sharpe’s London Magazine_, Vol. XXVIII. p. 239.--_All the
     Year Round_, Vol. XXXV. p. 275.--_Canada Monthly_, Vol. XVII. p.
     350, J. C. Duncan.--_Dial_ (_The_) [Chicago], Vol. IX. p. 38, E. G.
     Johnson.--_Every Saturday_, Vol. XII. p. 292.--_Gentleman’s
     Magazine_ (N. S.), Vol. XLI. p. 55, W. Summers.--_Hogg’s Weekly
     Instructor_, Vol. XI. p. 145. _Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine_ (N. S.),
     Vol. IV. p. 575; Vol. V. pp. 237-559, De Quincey; Vol. XV. p.
     782.--_Universalist Quarterly_, Vol. II. p. 289, M. Davis; Vol. XI.
     p. 90, J. Washburne; Vol. XVII. p. 113, A. L. Barry.--_Harper’s
     Magazine_, Vol. XXI. p. 811; Vol. LIV. p. 916; Vol. LV. p. 464
     [Easy Chair].

    ---- A Memoir. By Barry Cornwall. _British Quarterly Review_, Vol.
     XLV. p. 335.--_Living Age_ [Littell’s], Vol. XC. p.
     771.--_Edinburgh Review_, Vol. CXXIV. p. 261.

    ---- About Essayists and Reviewers.--Charles Lamb. _Bentley’s
     Magazine_, Vol. XXIX. p. 430.

    ---- About. _Eclectic Magazine_, Vol. LXXVIII. p. 675.--_Temple
     Bar_, Vol. LXXXV. p. 33.

    ---- An Autobiographical Sketch. _New Monthly Magazine_
     [Colburn’s], Vol. XLIII. p. 499.

    ---- Ainger’s Life of. _The Academy_, Vol. XXI. p. 168, R. C.
     Browne.--_The Athenæum_, Vol. I. p. 371 [1882].

    ---- and Dr. Johnson. _Temple Bar_, Vol. LXXXVI. p. 237, P. W.
     Roose.

    ---- and George Wither. _Nineteenth Century_, Vol. XVII. p. 66, A.
     C. Swinburne.

    ---- and Hood. _Christian Examiner_, Vol. LXIX. p. 415, T. B. Fox.

    ---- and his Friends. _Fraser’s Magazine_, Vol. CV. p. 606, J.
     Dennis.--_North American Review_, Vol. CIV. p. 3863.

    ---- and his Sister. _Eclectic Magazine_, Vol. XV. p. 257.

    ---- and Joseph Cottle. _The Athenæum_, Vol. II. p. 468 [1886], A.
     Ainger.--The Same, Vol. II. p. 535 [1886], R. H. Shepherd.--The
     Same, Vol. II. p. 566 [1886], A. Ainger.

    ---- and Keats. _Southern Literary Messenger_, Vol. XIV. p. 711, H.
     T. Tuckerman.

    ---- and Mary. _Tinsley’s Magazine_, Vol. XXXVIII. p. 496.--_The
     Dial_ [Chicago], Vol. IV. p. 110, F. F. Browne.

    ---- and Mary Lamb, their Editors and Biographers. _Westminster
     Review_, Vol. CII. p. 419.

    ---- and Sydney Smith. _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. III. p. 290, W. L.
     Symonds.

    ---- and Thomas Carlyle. _New England Magazine_, Vol. XLIV. p. 605,
     N. W. Wells.

    ---- Another Dish of Lamb. _Old and New Magazine_, Vol. X. p. 613,
     J. E. Babson.

    ---- at Edmonton. _Dublin University Magazine_ (N. S.), Vol. VII.
     p. 469.--The Same, Vol. XCII. p. 467, H. F. Cox.

    ---- at his Desk. _Gentleman’s Magazine_ (N. S.), Vol. VI. p. 285.
     C. Pebody.

    ---- Books of. _Historical Magazine_, Vol. IX. p. 45.

    ---- Boyhood of. _Dublin University Magazine_, Vol. LXXIX. p. 149.

    ---- Character of the Humourist--Charles Lamb. _Fortnightly_, Vol.
     XXX. p. 466, W. H. Pater.

    ---- Concerning. _Scribner’s Monthly_, Vol. II. p. 720, J. H.
     Twitchell.

    ---- Discovery of Lamb’s “Poetry for Children.” _Gentleman’s
     Magazine_ (N. S.), Vol. XIX. p. 113, R. H. Shepherd.

    ---- Dramatic Attempts of. _Lippincott’s Magazine_, Vol. XXI. p.
     493, J. Brander Matthews.

    ---- Essays of Elia. _American Quarterly Review_, Vol. XIX. p. 185,
     H. T. Tuckerman.--_Museum of Foreign Literature_ [Littell’s], Vol.
     IV. p. 33.--_Quarterly Review_, Vol. LIV. p. 58, “E. B.”
     [Bulwer.]--_Methodist Review_, Vol. XLVII. p. 382, D. Wise.

    ---- Eliana [with a Portrait]. _London Society_, Vol. XLII. p. 182.

    ----Fairy Tales in Verse, by. _Gentleman’s Magazine_ (N. S.). Vol.
     XXXV. p. 188.

    ----Final Memorials [edited by Talfourd]. _British Quarterly
     Review_, Vol. VIII. p. 381.--_Christian Remembrancer_, Vol. XVI. p.
     424.--_New Monthly Magazine_ (Colburn’s), Vol. LXXXIII. p.
     532.--_North British Review_, Vol. X. p. 179.

    ---- Genius and Character of. _Westminster Review_, Vol. CXXVI. p.
     16.

    ---- Gleanings from his Biographers. _Macmillan’s Magazine_, Vol.
     XV. p. 473.

    ---- Grave of. _Living Age_ [Littell’s], Vol. LXXIV. p. 316.

    ---- His Friends, his Haunts, and his Books. _British Quarterly
     Review_, Vol. XLV. p. 335.

    ---- His Last Words on Coleridge. _New Monthly Magazine_
     (Colburn’s).

    ---- Humour of. _Gentleman’s Magazine_ (N. S.), Vol. XXVI. p. 699,
     A. H. Japp.

    ---- In the Footprints of. _Scribner’s Magazine_, Vol. VII. pp.
     267, 471. B. E. Martin.

    ---- John Woodvil. _Edinburgh Review_, Vol. II. p. 90.

    ---- Last Records of. _Chambers’s Journal_, Vol. XLIII. p. 763.

    ---- Leigh Hunt and. _The Athenæum_, Vol. I. p. 344 [1889], A.
     Ainger.--The Same, Vol. I. p. 374 [1889], E. Gosse.--The Same, Vol.
     I. p. 108, Ainger.--J. A. C. Cox. H. R. Fox-Bourne.

    ---- Letters [edited by Ainger]. _The Academy_, Vol. XXXIII. p.
     265, R. C. Browne.--_The Athenæum_, Vol. I. p. 427 [1887]. The
     _Spectator_, Vol. LXI. p. 754.--_Saturday Review_, Vol. LXV. p.
     453.--_Macmillan’s Magazine_, Vol. LV. p. 161, A. Ainger.--The
     Same, Vol. LVIII. p. 95, A. Birrell.

    ---- Letters [edited by Hazlitt]. _The Athenæum_, Vol. I. p. 474
     [1884].--_The Spectator_, Vol. LIX. p. 1242.

    ---- Letters [edited by Talfourd]. _British and Foreign Review_,
     Vol. V. p. 507.--_American Quarterly Review_, Vol. XXII. p.
     473.--_American Whig Review_, Vol. LIII. p. 381, G. W.
     Peck.--_Eclectic Review_, Vol. LXVI. p. 380.--_Edinburgh Review_,
     Vol. LXVI. p. 1.--_North American Review_, Vol. XLVI. p. 55, C. C.
     Felton.--_New York Review_, Vol. II. p. 213.--_Westminster Review_,
     Vol. XXVII. p. 229.--_American Monthly Magazine_, Vol. II. p. 73.

    ---- Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, _Museum of Foreign
     Literature_, Vol. II. p. 561.

    ---- Lord Byron, words with. _Harper’s Magazine_, Vol. I. p. 272
     [1850].

    ---- Matilda Betham, Letters of Coleridge, Southey, and Lamb to.
     _Fraser’s Magazine_, Vol. XCVIII. p. 73. “B.E.” [Betham-Edwards?]

    ---- New English Edition of Works. _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. XXVII.
     p. 745.

    ---- Notes of, to Thomas Allsop. _Harper’s Magazine_ [December,
     1859. Edited by G. W. Curtis.]

    ---- On the Economy of. _Knickerbocker Magazine_, Vol. XXXIX. p.
     347, F. W. Shelton.

    ---- Recollections of. _The Athenæum_, January 24, February 7,
     1833.--_Living Age_ [Littell’s], Vol. LX. p. 381.

    ---- Reviewing Oneself. _The Athenæum_, Vol. II. p. 164 [1886], J.
     D. Campbell.

    ---- Robert Southey. _Bentley’s Magazine_, Vol. XXXVI. p. 603.

    ---- Some Letters of, with Reminiscences of Himself awakened by.
     _Gentleman’s Magazine_ (N. S.), Vol. XI. p. 617, M. C. Clarke.

    ---- Tales from Shakespeare. _The Portfolio_ (Dennie’s), Vol. X. p.
     472 [1813].--_The Spectator_, Vol. LVIII. p. 162.

    ---- Tribute to his Memory. _The Athenæum_, January 3, 1835, B. W.
     Procter.

    ---- Two neglected Letters of. _The Critic_, Vol. XIII. p. 167.

    ---- Uncollected Writings. _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. XI. p. 529--The
     Same, Vol. XII. p. 401.--The Same, Vol. XIV. pp. 478-552, J. E.
     Babson.

    ---- Works. _American Whig Review_, Vol. VII. p. 508, J. H.
     Barrett.--_Blackwood’s Magazine_, Vol. III. p. 599.--The Same, Vol.
     LVI. p. 133.--_British Quarterly Review_, Vol. VII. p. 292; Vol.
     XLV. p. 335--_Boston Quarterly_, Vol. IV. p. 214,
     [“B.A.B”].--_Christian Examiner_, Vol. XXXIII. p. 434, W. H.
     Furness.--_Living Age_ [Littell’s], Vol. LX. p. 771.--_Macmillan’s
     Magazine_, Vol. LIV. p. 276, A. Birrell.

    ---- Writings of. _Knickerbocker Magazine_, Vol. XXXV. p. 500, F.
     W. Shelton.--_Democratic Review_, Vol. XIX. p. 123, J. W. Shelton.





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