CHAPTER VII.

COLEBROOK ROW, ISLINGTON.-THE CONTROVERSY WITH SOUTHEY, AND RETIREMENT FROM THE INDIA HOUSE.

[1823-1826.]

THE last six years of Lamb's life, though the most remarkable in his literary annals, had not been fruitful in incident. The death of his elder brother, already mentioned, was the one event that nearly touched his heart and spirits. Its effect had been, with the loss of some other friends about the same time, to produce, he said, “a certain deadness to everything." It had brought home to him his loneliness, and moreover served to increase a longfelt weariness of the monotony of office life. Already, in the beginning of 1822, he was telling Wordsworth, “I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls, without relief, day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four, without ease or interposition. Tædet me harum quotidianarum formarum, these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. . . . I dare not whisper to myself a pension on this side of absolute incapacitation and infirmity, till years have sucked me dry-otium cum indignitate. I had thought in a green old age (O green

thought!) to have retired to Ponder's End, emblematic name, how beautiful! in the Ware Road, there to have made up my accounts with Heaven and the Company, toddling about it between it and Cheshunt, anon stretching, on some fine Izaac Walton morning, to Hoddesden or Amwell, careless as a beggar; but walking, walking ever till I fairly walked myself off my legs, dying walking! The hope is gone. I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing) with my heart against this thorn of a desk." Very touching, by the side of the delightful suggestion of Ponder's End, is the dream of retirement to the Ware Road-the road, that is to say, that led to Widford and Blakesware. If these were not to him exactly what Auburn was to Goldsmith, he still at times had hopes

"His long vexation past,

There to return, and die at home at last."

Three years were, however, to elapse before he was at liberty to choose his own place of residence. It is significant that though he could never bring himself to live quite beyond reach of town, and the "sweet security of streets," it was in the Hertfordshire direction that he turned in his last days, and died as it were half-way between London and that quiet Hertfordshire village, the two places he loved best on earth.

There was one incident in those Russell Street days that would have been an event indeed in the life of most home-keeping men who had reached middle life without having once left English shores. In the summer holiday of 1822 Charles and his sister made a trip to Paris. At whose suggestion, or in obedience to what sudden impulse, they were led to make so violent a change in their usual habits, there is nothing to show. They left England in

the middle of June, and two months later we find Mary Lamb still in Paris, and seeing the sights under the direction of their friend, Crabb Robinson. Charles, who had returned earlier to England, had left a characteristic note of instructions for his sister's guidance, advising her to walk along the "Borough side of the Seine," where she would find a mile and a half of print- shops and bookstalls. "Then," he adds, not unfairly describing a first impression of Père-la-Chaise, "there is a place where the 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." In a note to Barron Field on his return, he adds a few more of his experiences, how he had eaten frogs, fricasseed, "the nicest little delicate things," and how the Seine was "exactly the size to run through a magnificent street."

He finds time, however, to add to his hasty note the pleasant intelligence that he had met Talma. Kenney, the dramatist, was at this time living at Versailles, and to him Lamb owed this introduction. Talma had lately given a thousand francs for what he was assured was an authentic portrait of Shakspeare, and he invited Kenney to bring Lamb to see it. "It is painted," Lamb writes, "on the one half of a pair of bellows, a lovely picture, corresponding with the folio head." It is hard to believe that Lamb had any doubts about the spuriousness of this relic, though his language on the point is dubious. He quotes the rhymes "in old carved wooden letters" that surrounded the portrait, and adds the significant remark that Ireland was not found out by his parchments, but by his poetry. And perhaps he did not wish to hurt Talma's

feelings. It was arranged that the party should see the tragedian in Regulus the same evening, and that he should sup with them after the performance. Lamb, we are told, "could not at all enter into the spirit of French acting, and in his general distaste made no exception in favour of his intended guest. This, however, did not prevent their mutual and high relish of each other's character and conversation, nor was any allusion made to the performance, till, on rising to go, Talma inquired how he liked it. Lamb shook his head and smiled. Ah!' said Talma. 'I was not very happy to-night: you must see me in Sylla.' 'Incidit in Scyllam,' said Lamb, 'qui vult vitare Charybdim.' 'Ah! you are a rogue; you are a great rogue,' said Talma, shaking him cordially by the hand, as they parted."

There is a sad story, only too likely to be true, that Mary Lamb was seized with one of her old attacks on the journey, and had to be left at Amiens in charge of her attendant. If so, it may account for her brother avoiding the subject in later essays and letters. An Elia essay embodying even the surface impressions of a month's stay in Paris would have been a welcome addition to the number. Lamb was usually prompt to seize on the latest incident in his life and turn it to this purpose. When short-sighted George Dyer, leaving the cottage at Islington, walked straight into the New River in broad daylight, the adventure appears the very next month in the London Magazine, under the heading of Amicus Redivivus. But France and the French do not seem to have opened any new vein of humour or observation. In truth, Lamb was unused to let his sympathies go forth save in certain customary directions. Any persons, and any book that he had come to know well-any one of the "old familiar faces".

served to draw out those sympathies. But novelties he almost always passed by unmoved.

Old

The first series of Lamb's essays, under the title of Elia-Essays that have appeared under that signature in the London Magazine-was published in a single volume by Taylor and Hessey at the opening of the year 1823. It contained the contributions of something less than two years. As yet there was assuredly no sign of failing power in the brain and heart that produced them. Nor did Lamb cease to contribute to the magazine and elsewhere after the appearance of the first volume. The second series, published ten years later, is an exception to the rule that sequels must necessarily be failures. China and Poor Relations, the Old Margate Hoy, Blakesmoor, Barbara S., and the Superannuated Man, which are found in the second series, exhibit all Lamb's qualities at their highest. It was perhaps only a passing mood of melancholy that made him write to Bernard Barton, in March, 1823, when the book had already begun to make its mark: "They have dragged me again into the magazine, but I feel the spirit of the thing in my own mind quite gone. Some brains' (I think Ben Jonson says it) 'will endure but one skimming.'' But another cause for

this depression may have been at work. There was a painful incident connected with the Elia volume from the first, for which even the quick appreciation of the public could not compensate. There had been one exception to the welcome with which the book had been greeted. A word of grave disapprobation, or what had seemed such to Lamb, had been heard amid the chorus of approval, and this word had been spoken by a dear and valued friend.

In the Quarterly Review of January, 1823, appeared an article, known to be by Southey, professing to be a review