Read Ebook: In the Footprints of Charles Lamb by Martin Benjamin Ellis North Ernest Dressel Contributor Fulleylove John Illustrator Railton Herbert Illustrator

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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!

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!"

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

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:

"When maidens such as Hester die."

"I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be agreeable, at Our Lady's next feast. I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms, which look out over the Thames and Surrey Hills, at the upper end of King's Bench Walk, in the Temple. There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance, and shall be able to lock my friends out, as often as I desire to hold free converse with any immortal mind--for my present lodgings resemble a minister's lev?e, I have so increased my acquaintance since I have resided in town." In this letter, written to Manning early in 1801, three significant points call for comment. The phrase "in town," referring to his residence in Southampton Buildings, shows how his previous abode in Islington was then in the country, and how the squalid houses of the foul Chapel Street of to-day have supplanted those pleasant cottages set in gardens, with rural lanes cutting the fields between. His curt reference to their "having received a hint" to move, proves how pitifully they were "marked," as he had already put it, and how soon even the kindly Gutch withdrew his offer of shelter. The few words, "I have so increased my acquaintance" give a wide suggestion of the already growing attraction of this odd, original young character to all bright minds and sweet natures with whom he came in contact.

And so, on Lady Day, March 25, 1801, he and Mary moved into the Temple, there to begin, near their childhood home, that life of "dual loneliness," never again broken in upon: consoled by their mutual affection, cheered by their common tastes, brightened by the companionship of congenial beings. In the Temple they remained for seventeen years, living in two sets of chambers during that period. After eight years' abode at No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, they were compelled to quit, their landlord wanting the rooms for himself. Towards the end of March, 1809, in a letter to Manning, then in China, Lamb wrote as if he were in the next street: "While I think of it, let me tell you we are moved. Don't come any more to Mitre Court Buildings. We are at 34 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, and shall be here till about the end of May, when we remove to No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, where I mean to live and die."

Their home in Southampton Buildings during these few months while changing chambers still stands intact; a delightful old square, solid, brick house, just in front of the tiny garden of Staple Inn. But both blocks of buildings in which he lived during those seventeen years in the Temple have been torn down and replaced by modern structures.

Although he disliked leaving the old chambers, he found the new set, on the third and fourth floors of No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, "far more commodious and roomy.... The rooms are delicious, and the best look back into Hare Court, where there is a pump always going. Just now it is dry. Hare Court trees come in at the window, so that it is like living in a garden!" This was written to Coleridge, in June, 1809; and to Manning, in letters during this period, Lamb spoke of the churchyard-like court having "three trees and a pump in it. Do you know it? I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old ... the water of which is excellent cold, with brandy, and not very insipid without. Here I hope to set up my rest and not quit till Mr. Powell, the undertaker, gives me notice that I may have possession of my last lodging. He lets lodgings for single gentlemen.... I should be happy to see you any evening. Bring any of your friends, the Mandarins, with you."

He did, indeed, as he often complained, hate and dread unaccustomed places, but he was well content to discover that this new habitation had "more aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see."

It was here that Mary made the memorable find of an empty adjoining garret of four untenanted, unowned rooms; of which they took possession by degrees, and to which Charles could escape from his too frequent friends, who had more leisure than himself. Here he did his literary work in secrecy and silence, "as much alone as if he were in a lodging in the midst of Salisbury Plain." They never knew to whom these chambers rightly belonged, and they were never dispossessed. So all was well with him, and even in his whimsical perversity he was able to complain only that there was another "Mr. Lamb" not far from him; "his duns and his girls frequently stumble up to me, and I am obliged to satisfy both in the best way I am able."

The capricious Coleridge had once more become constant, after his refusal for two years to write, and his needless estrangement, which had called forth Lamb's lines, "I had a friend, a kinder friend had no man;" and of whom, after many years, he yet was able to say: "The more I see of him in the quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind, the more cause I see to love him and believe him a very good man." There was Hazlitt--trying to paint when Lamb first met him, finding later his true calling as art critic and essayist; easily first of all in that field, before or after him, in insight, breadth, and vigour; arrogant, intense, bitter, brooding forever over the fall of Napoleon: the only male creature he reverenced except Coleridge. He must needs respect, in Coleridge, the one man known to him who alone could surpass him in untiring fluency, even under the influence of strongest tea--sole stimulus allowed himself by Hazlitt at that time. Him, Lamb finds to be, "in his natural state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing." And he, too, had tried to quarrel with the Lambs, and had failed, as did all who made the sorry attempt! There was William Wordsworth, ascetic, self-centred, quite sure of himself; whose true powers, and all that was genuine in his genius, Lamb was one of the first to recognize and to celebrate. There was Godwin, so bold in his speculations, so daring with his pen, so placid in person, and so mild of voice. This terrifying radical used to prattle on trivial topics till after supper, and then invariably fall fast asleep. "A very well-behaved decent man, ... quite a tame creature, I assure you; a middle-sized man, both in stature and understanding," wrote his keen-eyed host. There was old Captain Burney, afterward admiral, son of the famous organist, brother of the more famous writing-woman, Fanny, Madame d'Arblay. He had been taught by Eugene Aram, he had sailed all around the globe with Captain Cook, and was still young and tender in heart under his rough exterior. There was his son, Martin, of whom Lamb said, "I have not found a whiter soul than thine;" Leigh Hunt, airy, sprightly, full of fine fancies; Charles Lloyd, poetic and intense; Tom Hood, slight of figure, feeble of voice, face of a Methodist parson, silent save for his sudden puns; Thomas Manning, the Cambridge mathematical tutor, "a man of a thousand;" Basil Montagu, the philanthropized courtier; stalwart Allan Cunningham; Haydon, the painter, eager everywhere for controversy; the preacher, Edward Irving, content to listen, there; Bernard Barton, Quaker poet, bank drudge; gentle and genial Barry Cornwall; Talfourd, the sympathetic chronicler of these scenes; constant and trusty Crabb Robinson; De Quincey, self-involved and sometimes spiteful, yet not behind any one of that brilliant band in his love for Lamb, whom he earnestly attests to be "the noblest of human beings."

And Charles Lamb, the central and dominating personality of all these strong characters, towers above them all, not only and not so much by the greatness of his gifts as by that of his character. For simplicity, sincerity, singleness of soul--all that is childlike in genius--all those qualities which go to make up greatness of character--these were his. He was always young. To that scoffer who, sneering at Lamb's habits, said that no man ought to be a Bohemian after the age of thirty, as to all the scoffers since, there is only the one old answer--Lamb never got to be thirty.

Then there was Manning, with his slight sense of humour, and to him--then in China, to his friend's loss--Lamb loved to write the maddest inventions, and let loose his wildest whims about their friends. To Coventry Patmore, on his way to Paris, he wrote, in an amazing letter: "If you go through Boulogne, inquire if old Godfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now."

It was George Dyer, above all, in whom Lamb revelled, and who was meat and drink to him. Dyer was the son of a Wapping watchman and butcher, had been a charity-school boy at Christ's, and had become a publisher's harmless drudge. He was a true bookworm, eating his way through thick tomes, but digesting little. He seemed to find all the nourishment he needed in the husks of knowledge, while Lamb, in radical contrast, bit to the kernel with his incisive teeth. As to Dyer's heart, however, his friend was sure that God never put a kinder into the flesh of man; and his was a simple, unsuspecting soul. He was so absent-minded that he would sometimes empty his snuff-box into his teapot, when making tea for his guests; and so near-sighted that he once walked placidly into the river, as I shall hereafter relate. He used to keep his "neat library" in the seat of his easy-chair. Mary Lamb and Mrs. Hazlitt, going to his chambers one day in his absence, "tidied-up" the rooms and sewed fast that out-of-repair easy-chair, with his books within it: whereat, to use his own violent language, he was greatly disconcerted!

Haydon, the painter, has told of one memorable evening in his own studio, when Lamb was in marvellous vein, and met that immortal Comptroller of Stamps who had begged to be introduced to Wordsworth, and who insisted on having the latter's opinion as to whether Milton and Newton were not great geniuses. Lamb took a candle and walked over to the poor man, saying, "Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?" Haydon and Keats got him away, but he persisted in bursting into the room, shouting, "Do let me have another look at that gentleman's organs." Edgar Poe's Imp of the Perverse took entire possession of Lamb when thrown with uncongenial men, and forced him to give the impression of "something between an imbecile, a brute, and a buffoon." Writing of himself after the imaginary death of Elia, he says, truly: "He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalized he could not help it."

If our friend laughed at others, he was just as ready to laugh at himself; and his hissing his own play is historic. It is strange that, with his keen critical sense, he should have hoped for the success of this "Mr. H., A Farce in Two Acts;" produced at Drury Lane, in 1806, with the great Elliston in the title-r?le. Yet he had written to Manning in boyish glee: "All China shall ring with it--by and by." In the same letter, he made fanciful designs for the orders he was to give for admission, elate with anticipation of the long run his piece was to have. He sat on the opening night with Mary and Crabb Robinson in the front of the pit , and joined with the audience in applauding his really witty prologue. Then, as the luckless farce fell flat and flatter, he was louder than any of them in their hisses. "Damn the word, I write it like kisses--how different!" he growled, in grotesque wrath, in his letter announcing the failure to Wordsworth. Hazlitt, who was present, dreamed of that dreadful damning every night for a month, but Lamb only wrote to him: "I know you'll be sorry, but never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces." He and Mary were "pretty stout" about it, but, after all, they would rather have had success, he had to own. For he not only longed for the fame, but he needed the money, which that success in dramatic authorship would have brought.

His sense of fun bubbled up at most inapt times. He had been asked once to stand as godfather for a friend's child, and feared he would disgrace himself at the very font. "I was at Hazlitt's wedding and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh; I misbehaved once at a funeral." In all this wayward whimsicality, one can detect that same depth and intensity of feeling which moved Abraham Lincoln to tell trivial stories at the most solemn crises; which suggests a sob beneath the maddest mirth of Sterne, Moli?re, Cervantes; which drove Charles Lamb to seize the kettle from the hob and hold it on his sister's head-dress, like the clown in a pantomime, to hide the breaking of his great heart at the signs of the coming mania he had detected in her. He accounted it an excellent thing to play the buffoon sometimes, and was willing to seem supremely silly, that he might save his own sanity.

Acting conversely, this trembling sensibility set the tears trickling down his cheeks, while he was writing a playful paper; and made him even "shed tears in the motley Strand, for fulness of joy of so much life."

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,

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.

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 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!"

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."

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 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 , 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," --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."

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.

"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 runs close to the foot of the house; and behind is a spacious garden with vines , 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 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 '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."

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