Benjamin Ellis Martin

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,

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.

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.