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!

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 coenoeque 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

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:

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.”