from College, the two friends contrived to meet for the discussion of poetry and metaphysics. Their favourite rendezvous was at 17, Newgate Street, in a wainscoted back parlour, at the sign of the Salutation and Cat. There nightly, whenever they could come together, they talked on into the small hours, quaffing egg flip, devouring Welsh rabbits, and smoking pipes of Orinooko. Charles Lamb, however, had to buckle to betimes at the more serious business of life, instead of dreamily dawdling after the Muses, like one born to at least a competence. His elder brother by a dozen years, whom Mary in her juvenile poem of the "Broken Doll" apostrophized so significantly, even as a child, as "dear little craving, selfish John," was already enrolled as a clerk at the old South-Sea House. Thither, "where Threadneedle Street abuts upon Bishopsgate," went for a while, in the first bloom of his youth, the "gentlehearted Charles," embryo poet, essayist, critic, dramatist, humorist. There he familiarized himself with the mysteries of tare and tret, and brought into prac tical use whatever knowledge he had already acquired of ciphering. Prior to this, immediately after his leaving Christ's Hospital, Charles had been allowed access to the library of his father's employer, the old bencher. There, among a curiously miscellaneous store of works, he had, to use his own expression, 'browsed," literally in every sense of the phrase, at pleasure. His engage 44 ment at the South-Sea House was of comparatively brief duration, for on the 5th of April, 1792, he obtained, through the influence of Mr. Samuel Salt, his appointment to a clerkship in the Accountant's Office of the East India Company, at the old pro-consular palace, in Leadenhall Street, the site of which is now occupied by what is called East India Avenue. There he continued for three-and-thirty-years in regular employment. His stipend at the outset was barely seventy pounds a year, but it very gradually increased until it reached a maximum of £600 per annum, a sum placing him, not merely in easy, but, for one of his simple tastes, in almost affluent circumstances. Throughout the lengthened period during which he discharged his clerkly duties in the East India House, he was a very model of punctuality. Yetdoubtless, for the sake of the Lambesque humour underlying it-the whimsical story is told of his reply to a Director's complaint about his coming so late; "Oh, y-yes, Sir, but then you see I g-go away so early!" To those uncongenial labours of his, three-and-thirty years, the choicest of his life, were sedulously devoted, from the age, that is, of seventeen to the age of fifty. There, he was wont dolefully to insist-in the ponderous folios ranged upon those familiar bookshelves--his true Works were discoverable. Writing to Coleridge from a desk, the wood of which sometimes entered his soul more piercingly than iron, he said, in allusion to his unsympathetic surroundings, 'Not a soul loves Bowles here; scarce one has heard of Burns; few but laugh at me for reading my Testament: they talk a language I understand not; I conceal sentiments that would be a puzzle to them. I can only converse with you by letter, and with the dead in their books. Yet, in the intervals of toil, even there, in Leadenhall Street, he had his golden fancies. As a Sonneteer, as a Story-teller, as a Critic, having an exquisite relish for nearly everything that is best in literature, but above all as an Essayist whose subtle combination of the humorous with the pathetic has ever since been recognized as simply incomparable, he contrived, not only to make a sunshine in that shady place, but to sweeten existence for himself even under the weight of a calamity as dreadful as any imagined by Dante in the darkest circle of his Purgatorio. " That calamity descended upon him in the autumn of 1796. It sprang directly from the taint of madness lurking in the blood of the family. Nine months previously, he himself for six weeks together, at the turn of the year 1795-96, had succumbed to its terrible influence. Placed under restraint in a lunatic asylum at Hoxton, he had been released at the end of that interval with the balance of his mind completely restored. He returned to his desk work at the India House, and to his home, which was no longer in the Temple, but in humble lodgings near Holborn. During the preceding twelvemonth, his father, who was already lapsing into dotage and decrepitude, had retired, upon a very small pension, from the service of Mr. Salt, the Inner Temple bencher. To add to the domestic misery, Charles Lamb's mother was to all appearance, permanently bedridden. His well-to-do brother John, of the South Sea House, as usual consulting his own interests exclusively, lived elsewhere in great comfort, having nothing whatever to do with the little household, except as an occasional visitor. An old maiden aunt (Hetty) who lived with the Lambs, added her atom of an annuity to their narrow resources, in their then dwelling place, No. 7, Little Queen Street, Holborn. Charles, the youngest of the group, not merely poured the whole of his small salary into the common stock but, when away from the East India House, devoted himself entirely to his afflicted parents and their surroundings. The mainstay of them all, the prop and pillar of the house, was Mary Lamb. She passed sleepless nights in attending upon her invalid mother and her imbecile father, and lived laborious days" in seeing to the comfort of the household. In between whiles she toiled incessantly at her own needlework, besides superintending that of a little girl who acted as her assistant or apprentice. Wrought up to an unusual pitch of nervous excitement by a long continuance of these weary days and nights, Mary Lamb betrayed such evidence of having been injuriously affected, that, upon the morning of what was to prove for them all the fatal day, her young brother called upon Dr. Pitcairn, the physician, for the purpose of consulting him in her regard. The latter, as it happened, was away from home, going his rounds, so that the timely aid of his advice was unhappily at the moment inaccessible. The afternoon dinnerhour arrived for the little household, upon that deplorable Thursday, the 22nd September, 1796. What occurred may be found recorded, under the next day's date, in that year's "Annual Register." The particulars there given are the epitome of the evidence submitted on the morrow (Friday) to the Coroner's Jury, who brought in, without a moment's hesitation, as their verdict-Lunacy. The facts may be as quickly told as they were accomplished. While, with the cloth laid, the family were waiting dinner, Mary Lamb, seized with a sudden access of frenzy, snatched up a table-knife, and with it brandished in her hand pursued her apprentice round the apartment. Her bedridden mother, screaming to her to desist, she abruptly abandoned her first intentior, and turning upon the helpless invalid with loud shrieks plunged the knife into her heart. Charles Lamb himself was the one-not, as the "Annual Register" states, in error, the landlord of the house- who wrested the bloodstained weapon from the grasp of the unconscious matricide. Swiftly though he did so, more havoc had been effected by the homicidal maniac before she was disarmed. She had hurled the dinner forks frantically about the room, with one of which the poor half-witted father was wounded in the forehead, while the old maiden-aunt lay stretched upon the floor insensible and apparently dying. Charles Lamb used to say that his life might be comprised in an epigram. If so, it must certainly be an epigram having at the heart of it a tragedy. His witnessing so soon after his own confinement in a madhouse, a catastrophe thus appalling, one might have thought, must have unseated his reason anew if not permanently. Instead of which it actually seems, for once and for all, to have given it a perfect equipoise, and in doing so, to have elevated, ennobled, sublimated, the whole nature of that young daydreamer of two-and-twenty. At the first shock of this stupendous calamity, his gentle heart seemed completely overwhelmed. 'Mention nothing of poetry," he cried out in an agony to Coleridge, adding that he had destroyed every vestige of past vanities of " that description. A "fair-haired maid," the Alice W-n of Elia, had just before captivated his imagination. He tore all thought of the tender passion from his breast, as though it had been a profanation. "I am wedded," he said, with pathetic significance, "to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father." Upon the evening of that dreadful day, while preserving, as he expressed it, a tranquillity not of despair," some neighbours coming in and persuading him to take some food, he suddenly sprang to his feet, from the poor meal he had just begun, with a feeling of self-abhorrence. "In an agony of emotion," he wrote to his bosom friend, I found my way mechanically into the adjoining room, and fell on my knees "-observe, he mentions no name !-"by the side of her coffin, asking forgiveness of Heaven, and sometimes of her, for forgetting her so soon!" This incident, though so harrowing by contrast, is as tenderly affecting as that of Steele's first experience of death when his father died, he himself being at the time a little creature under five years of age. "I remember," he writes in the Tatler, I went into the room I had my " " where his body lay, and my mother sate weeping alone by it. battledore in my hand, and fell a beating the coffin, and calling papa; for, I know not how, I had some idea that he was locked up there." And thereupon, as he relates, his mother caught him in her arms, and, transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was in before, almost smothered him in her embraces. However dissimilar in themselves, these are distinctly companion pictures-Steele as a child, with the battledore in his hand, pausing bewildered by the side of his father's coffin; Lamb, in an innocent torment of self-reproach, kneeling by the side of his mother's coffin, imploring God's forgiveness and hers for a momentary forgetfulness. The unhappy matricide herself, immediately upon the close of the coroner's inquest, was placed under rigorous restraint in the Hoxton Asylum, where, but a few months previously, for the first and only time in his life, her younger brother had been immured. There, under rational treatment, her reason was soon restored. Although, upon realizing what had happened, Mary Lamb appears to have been at the first completely appalled, she speedily, and thenceforth permanently, found solace in the conviction that, for an act done thus in a state of mental aberration, she could be held in no way morally responsible. Her selfish elder brother, John, upon the plea of her being able to these sudden outbursts of homicidal mania, was for having her, during the rest of her existence, kept rigidly in confinement. Charles, however, revolted from this proposition. Holding his sister to be quite guiltless, 'and yearning to her only the more tenderly because of her affliction, he entered into a solemn compact that he would take charge of her from that time forward, on the simple understanding that she was confided freely to his protection. For thirty-four years he held unfalteringly by that agreement. Until his own death came he was her devoted protector. His self-sacrifice in this involved his giving up all thought of love and marriage. Such was her chronic condition, that within two years from the date of her first fatal paroxysm he wrote these terrible words: "I consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness." Her insanity, in point of fact, was simply intermittent. It was of deplorably, and at the last of alarmingly, frequent recurrence. Towards her support, from beginning to end, her elder brother never moved a finger, never contributed one sixpence. Upon Charles Lamb devolved the whole cost and the sole responsibility. His first step, on her release from the Hoxton Asylum, was to take lodgings for her at Hackney. Thence he brought her back home, his income at the time being barely a hundred a year. His father, who had sunk in the meanwhile into a state of hopeless imbecility, passed away soon after becoming a widower. The old maiden aunt, Hetty, died a month later on. Brother and sister were then left entirely to themselves, their only pecuniary resources being, from that time forward, derived from Charles's clerkship. Narrow though their means continued to be for several years-the increase of income at the India House being at the outset hardly perceptible-they sufficed. Their happiness in a companionship that was mutually delightful would have been complete but for its many disastrous interruptions. The premonitory symptoms with Mary Lamb were unmistakable. They were restlessness, low fever, and insomnia. When these became apparent beyond the reach of further doubt, he would get leave of absence from the office as if for a day's pleasure. And upon these occasions, the two afflicted ones might be met walking across the fields together to Hoxton, Charles carrying the strait waistcoat in his pocket in case of emergency, brother and sister weeping bitterly. Once, and but once only during this life of noble endurance a cry of anguish seems to have been wrung from him by the crushing weight of his responsibilities. Another death in the home circle had to be recorded. A faithful but tyrannous old servant (Becky) was lying dead upstairs. Mary, as usual, was away at the lunatic asylum. Charles was pouring out his heart to Coleridge. "My heart is quite sick," he wrote, "and I don't know where to look for relief. My head is very bad. I almost wish Mary were dead." That thought of faltering, however, was only for an instant. The awful load he had undertaken to bear was never once laid aside. Down to the very end the formidable ordeal of his life was passed with calm determination. Along a pathway that ended only with his grave, he trod the burning ploughshares. Charles Lamb's career in authorship had its beginning in the very year which saw his home laid waste as by the fall of a thunderbolt. Then, in 1796, he came into his first battle in literature, as he himself expressed it, under that greater Ajax, Coleridge. FOUR SONNETS, included by the latter in a clumsily printed volume entitled Poems on Various Subjects," published at Bristol, marked the first appearance in print of the small poet who was to grow into the great essayist. Another and more important volume of poems, published in the same way, provincially, for Coleridge, within the following year, 1797, comprised among its contents, in addition to a few lyrics from the hand of Charles Lloyd, a cluster of MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, which were announced in the preface as by Charles Lamb, of the India House. During the following twelvemonth, 1798, Lloyd and Lamb, gaining courage, issued from the press, together, in London, an unpretending little book of their own entitled BLANK VERSE. Small in quantity and unambitious in design, their productions passed not unnoticed. In the opening number of the now famous AntiJacobin, Gilray's pencil caricatured Coleridge and Southey with asses' heads, and Lloyd and Lamb as toad and frog respectively. There, too, in the July number, under the cynical heading of "The New Morality," appeared, among other audacious rhymes, the following apostrophe : Couriers and Stars, sedition's evening host, the probability being, as has been remarked, that Charles Lamb for one, up to that moment, had never even heard of the Republican charlatan. Another allusion was made to them in a precisely similar strain through a parody on Collins' "Ode to the Passions," called " The Anarchists," in the Anti-Jacobin for September: See, faithful to their mighty dam, Soft moving like the widowed dove: the first-mentioned of the four being yet further infamously denounced, elsewhere in the letter-press, as beginning a Citizen of the World, by leaving his poor children fatherless and his wife destitute: the scurrile satirist adding, Ex uno disce his friends Lamb and Southey." Such at that time were the amenities of literature. Before 1798 had run out, Charles Lamb had given to the world as his first prose work, his charming novelette, or miniature romance, "Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret." The name of his heroine he appears to have borrowed from a small volume of poems by Charles Lloyd, published three years previously (in 1795) at Carlisle. Speaking of this exquisite little story, Shelley, twenty years after its first publication, exclaimed in a letter to Leigh Hunt, dated 8th September, 1819: "What a lovely thing is 'Rosamund Gray!' How much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest parts of our nature is in it!" The child-heroine's reputed dwelling-place, it may be interesting to add, is still shown at Blenheim, as one of a couple of cottages near Healin Green, some two miles from Blakesweir. From an exceedingly early period in his literary life, Charles Lamb's attention had been directed stagewards. His love of the drama, as his Elian Essay, My First Play," clearly shows, dated from his very childhood. As a stripling he had penned what was probably his first work, the MS. libretto of a Comec Opera, still treasured up in the British Museum, and now published for the first time (infra, pp. 172-195) in this Popular Centenary Edition, together with facsimiles proving it to be unmistakably in Charles Lamb's handwriting. His love for the old dramatists, pre-eminently for Shakspere and his immediate contemporaries, as he afterwards, in truth, made plain enough to the world's comprehension, amounted to little less than a passion. He himself, as the eighteenth century drew towards its close, was labouring assiduously at a tragedy. In 1799 the writing of this five-act drama in blank verse was completed. As it was not published, however, until three years afterwards, more particular allusion to it for the moment may be judiciously postponed. Lamb at this period, it is worthy of note, moreover, was contributing in common with Coleridge and Southey to the Annual Anthology. Early in 1800 the Lambs moved from 7, Little Queen Street, Holborn, with all its terrible associations-the site of 6, 7, 8, by the way, is now occupied by Trinity Church-to 45, Chapel Street, Pentonville. It was during his residence there that a tender Platonic fancy was inspired in his breast by the sight of Hester Savory, a pretty young Quakeress, whose memory upon the occasion of her premature death, three years afterwards, he embalmed in a lovely elegy. Tarrying but a few months in Pentonville, the Lambs, still in 1800, moved townwards, to 34, Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, within three minutes' walk from their birthplace. As if this near neighbourhood to it were not enough, however, before the new century had dawned, they had passed once more, after an absence of barely five years from it, within the familiar precincts of the Temple, taking up their abode, as it proved, for nine years together, at 16, Mitre Court Buildings. It was at an earlier date than this that Lamb is reported to have. written political squibs for sixpence in the opposition newspapers. At the beginning of 1800, however, Coleridge, on coming up to London, widened his field of operations in that way, by introducing him to the then editor of the Morning Post, Daniel Stuart. Lamb's frolic fun as an epigrammatist was always of the free-and-easy, or harum-scarum character. It was thus, for example, when he wrote in the Examiner on the Disappointment of the Whig Associates of the Prince Regent : |