“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

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

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.