Part 1

Chapter 13,810 wordsPublic domain

IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF CHARLES LAMB

BY BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN AUTHOR OF “OLD CHELSEA,” ETC.

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.

_During the half-century since the death of Charles Lamb, an immense mass of matter has been gathered about him and about his writings. In burrowing among the treasures and the rubbish of this mound, I have been struck by the total absence of what may be called a topographical biography of the man, or of any accurate record of his rovings: with the exception of that necessarily brief one contained in Mr. Laurence Hutton’s invaluable “Literary Landmarks of London.” Such a shortcoming is the more marked, inasmuch as Lamb is so closely identified with the Town. Not one among the men of letters, whose shadows walk the London streets with us, knew them better, or loved them more, than he did. In following his footsteps, I have found still untouched many of the houses that harboured him; and I have taken delight in the task, before the restless hand of reconstruction shall have plucked them forever away, of helping to keep alive the look of all that is left of the walls within which he lived and laboured._

_From this mere memento of brick-and-mortar--all my original intent--I have been led on to a study of the man himself, from our more modern and more humane point of view. The time has long gone by for that kindly compact of reticence which may have been becoming in the years directly after his death. Nothing need be hidden now about the madness of Mary, about the terrible taking-off of her mother, about the early insanity of Charles himself, or his later weaknesses. And, in telling the entire truth, I have found comfort and cheer in the belief that neither apology nor homily can ever again be deemed needful to a decorous demeanour beside these dead._

_So that I have sketched him just as he lives for me--the lines and the wrinkles of his aspect, the shine and the shadow of his soul: just as he moved in the crowd, among his friends, by his sister’s side, and alone. To show exactly what he was, rather than what he did, I have used his own words wherever this was possible; altering them as to their letter alone, where it has seemed essential. In this spirit of affectionate allegiance I have followed him faithfully in all his wanderings, from his cradle close by the Thames to his grave not far from the Lea._

_B. E. M._

_NEW YORK, October, 1890._

List of Illustrations.

CHARLES LAMB, FRONTISPIECE

PAGE

_The Temple Gardens, from Crown Office Row_, 14 _By John Fulleylove._

_A Corner in the Blue-Coat School_, 18 _By Herbert Railton._

_The East India House_, 26 _By Herbert Railton._

_No. 7 Little Queen Street_, 32

_The House in Pentonville_, 39

_The Feathers Tavern_, 48 _By Herbert Railton._

_No. 20 Russell Street, Covent Garden_, 78 _By Herbert Railton._

_The Cottage in Colebrook Row_, 96 _By Herbert Railton._

_Lamb’s two Houses at Enfield_, 102 _By John Fulleylove._

_No. 34 Southampton Buildings_, 122 _By Herbert Railton._

_Charles Lamb--the Maclise Portrait_, 126

_Fac-simile of a Receipt for a Legacy_, 128 _Signed by Charles Lamb as Guardian for his Sister Mary._

_The Walden House at Edmonton_, 130 _By John Fulleylove._

_Edmonton Church, from Lamb’s Grave_, 136 _By John Fulleylove._

_The Grave of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb at Edmonton_, 140 _By John Fulleylove._

“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.

And out beyond these borders we shall track his steps mainly through adjacent streets, almost always along the City’s streets, of which he was as fond as Samuel Johnson or Charles Dickens. He loved, all through life, “enchanting London, whose dirtiest, drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn.... O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardware men, pastry-cooks, St. Paul’s Churchyard, the Strand, Exeter ’Change, Charing Cross, with the man _upon_ a black horse! These are thy gods, O London!” He couldn’t care, he said, for the beauties of nature, as they have been confinedly called; and used to persist, with his pleasing perversity, that when he climbed Skiddaw he was thinking of the ham-and-beef shop in St. Martin’s Lane! “Have I not enough without your mountains?” he wrote to Wordsworth. “I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with anything”--even with scenery! It was a serious step which Lamb took in later life, out from his beloved streets into the country; a step which certainly saddened, and doubtless shortened, the last stage of his earthly journey.

By a happy chance--for they have an unhallowed habit in London town of destroying just those buildings which I should select to save, leaving unmolested those that would not be missed, for all they ever have to say to us--nearly every one of Lamb’s successive homes has been rescued from ruin, and kept inviolate for our reverent regard. “Cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure)”--to use his own words--has been only partly rebuilt; and that end of the block wherein lived his parents stands almost in the same state as when it was erected in 1737; this date told to us to-day by the old-fashioned figures cut on its easterly end. It was then named “The New Building, opposite the Garden-Wall,” and under that division of the Chamber-Book of the Inner Temple I have hunted up its numerous occupants. By this archive, and by the Books of Accounts for the eighteenth century, I have thus been enabled to trace Samuel Salt from his first residence within the Temple in 1746, in Ram Alley Building--now gone--through successive removals, until he settled down in his last chambers, wherein he died in February, 1793. The record reads--a “parliament” meaning one of the fixed meetings in each term of the Benchers of the Temple, for the purpose of transacting business, and of calling students to the bar--“13th May, 1768. At this Parliament: It is ordered that Samuel Salt, Esquire, a Barrister of this Society, aged about Fifty, be and is hereby admitted, for his own life, to the benefit of an Assignment in and to All that Ground Chamber, No. 2, opposite the Garden Walk in Crown Office Row: He, the said Samuel Salt having paid for the Purchase thereof into the Treasury of this Society, the sum of One Hundred and Fifty pounds.”

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 (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), 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.

The inscription painted over their school-door asserted that it was kept by “Mr. William Bird, Teacher of Mathematics and Languages.” “Heaven knows what languages were taught in it, then! I am sure that neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it, but a little of our native English”--so Charles wrote nearly fifty years after to William Hone, the editor of the _Every Day Book_. In its pages had just appeared a woful narrative of the poverty and desolation of one Starkey, who had been “a gentle usher” in that school. In the letter written by Lamb as a pendant to that paper, he gossips characteristically about the memories of those school-days thus awakened in him and in his sister. He vividly portrays that down-trodden and downcast usher, who “was not always the abject thing he came to;” and who actually had bold and figurative words for the big girls, when they talked together, or teased him during his recitations. “Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those uncomfortable sloping desks, where we sat elbowing each other; and the injunctions to attain a free hand, unattainable in that position!”

They had, also, an aged school-dame here, who was proud to prattle to her pupils about her aforetime friend, Oliver Goldsmith; telling them how the good-natured man, then too poor to present her with a copy of his “Deserted Village,” had lent it to her to read. He had become famous now, and so affluent--by the success of “The Good Natur’d Man,” indeed!--that he had bought chambers on the second floor of No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple. This was but a biscuit toss from Crown Office Row, and perchance little Mary Lamb sometimes met, within the grounds, the short, stout, plain, pock-marked Irish doctor. He died in those chambers, only ten months before the birth of Charles; and was buried somewhere in the burying-ground of the Temple church. Within it, the Benchers put up a tablet to his memory. It is now in their vestry, wherein you shall also find the baptismal records of nearly all the Lamb children. The inscription on the tablet may have been first spelled out by Mary to her small and eager brother. Doubtless the two children knew the exact spot of his grave--known exactly to none of us to-day--even as they knew every corner and cranny of the Temple grounds and buildings. They played in its gardens, and looked down on them from these same upper windows of No. 2 Crown Office Row, which have been selected by Mr. Fulleylove for his point of view. _Then_ these gardens were as Shakespeare saw them, when he, by a blameless anachronism, caused to be enacted in them the famous scene of the Roses; really rehearsed there, years before, when Warwick assigned the rose to Plantagenet. Now, the grounds have been extended riverwards by the construction of the Embankment; and the ancient historic blocks of buildings about them have been vulgarized into something new and fine.

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

“---- half linger, Half run before,”

trying to keep pace with her steps then; even as they always all through life tried to do, wheresoever she walked, until they stopped at the edge of his grave. The story of these two lives of double singleness, from these childish footprints to that grave, is simply the story of their love. He, like his own Child-Angel, was to know weakness and reliance and the shadow of human imbecility; and he was to go with a lame gait; _but, in his goings, he “exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness_.” And so pity springs up in us, as in angelic bosoms; and yearnings touch us, too, at the memory of this “immortal lame one.”

The boy’s next school, to which he obtained a presentation through the influence of Mr. Salt, is known officially as Christ’s Hospital, and is commonly called the Blue-Coat School. It still stands, a stately monument of the munificence of “that godly and royal child, King Edward VI., the flower of the Tudor name--the young flower that was untimely cropped, as it began to fill our land with its early odours--the boy-patron of boys--the serious and holy child, who walked with Cranmer and Ridley.” To-day, as we stay our steps in Newgate Street, and peer through the iron railings at the dingy red brick and stone facings of the ancient walls; or, as we pause under the tiny statue of the boy-king--founder, only ten days before his death, of this noble hospital for poor fatherless children and foundlings--we may look at the out-of-school games going on in the great quadrangle: the foolish flapping skirts of the striplings tucked into their red leathern waistbands to give fair and free play to their lanky yellow legs, their uncapped heads taking sun or shower with equal unconcern.

Among them, unseen of them, seem to move the forms of those other boys, Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt--all students here about this time. _Our_ boy was then a little past seven, a gentle, affectionate lad, “terribly shy,” as he said of himself later, and made all the more sensitive by his slight stammer, which lapsed to a stutter when his nerves were wrought upon and startled. Yet he was no more left alone and isolated now than he was in after life; his schoolfellows indulged him, the masters were fond of him, and he was given special privileges not known to the others. His little complaints were listened to; he had tea and a hot roll o’ mornings; his ancient aunt used to toddle there to bring him good things, when he, schoolboy-like, only despised her for it, and, as he confessed when older, used to be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps near where they went into the grammar-school, and open her apron, and bring out her basin, with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for him. And he was allowed to go home to the Temple for short visits, from time to time, so passing his young days between “cloister and cloister.”

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.”