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Illustrator: Herbert Railton John Fulleylove

IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF CHARLES LAMB

IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF CHARLES LAMB

ILLUSTRATED BY HERBERT RAILTON AND JOHN FULLEYLOVE

WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY BY E. D. NORTH

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1890

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

TO L. H. F.

CHARLES LAMB, FRONTISPIECE

PAGE

"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.

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.

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 , 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 fa?ade along Leadenhall Street just beyond Gracechurch Street, and so around the corner into Lime Street. It was, withal, a gloomy

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 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 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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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