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

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

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

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

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—