Part 2

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.

Within doors he would wander through the wainscoted halls and the tapestried bedrooms--“tapestry so much better than painting, not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots ... all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Actæon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more provoking, and almost culinary, coolness of Dan Phœbus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas.” He would gaze long in wonder on the busts of the Twelve Cæsars ranged around the marble hall, and would study the prints of Hogarth’s Progress of the Rake and of the Harlot hung on the walls. “Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it,” he says in the essay on “Blakesmoor in H----shire;” under which name he disguises the place. That is a delightful paper, ending with this most musical passage: “Mine too--whose else?--thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood-pidgeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery.”

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.

II.

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 façade 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, the father, had got nearly to his dotage and quite to uselessness, and was pensioned off by his master about this period. The elder brother, dear little selfish, craving John, had grown into a broad, burly, jovial bachelor, wedded to his own ways; living an easy life apart from them all; “marching in quite an opposite direction,” as his brother kindly puts it--speaking, as was his wont, not without tenderness for him. He contributed nothing to the support of the family, and Mary added but little, beyond her own meagre maintenance by dress-making on a small scale--a trade she had taught herself. In her article on needlework, written in 1814, for the _British Lady’s Magazine_, she says: “In early life I passed eleven years in the exercise of my needle for a livelihood.” And so it seemed needful that the boy, not yet fifteen years old on leaving Christ’s, should get to work to eke out the family’s scanty income.

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 (yours and mine especially) 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.

In the _London Times_ of Monday, September 26, 1796--in which issue the editors “exult in the isolation and cutting off” of the various armies of the French Republic in Germany, and doubt the “alleged successes of the army in Italy reported to the Directory by General Buonaparte;” in which the Right Honourable John, Earl of Chatham, is named Lord President of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council; and in which “Mr. Knowles, nephew and pupil of the late Mr. Sheridan,” advertises that he has “opened an English, French, and Latin preparatory school for a limited number of young gentlemen at No. 15 Brompton Crescent”--in this journal appeared the following:

“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.

“It seems that the young lady had been once before deranged. The jury, of course, brought in their verdict--_Lunacy_.”

The _True Briton_ said: “It appears that she had been before in the earlier part of her life deranged, from the harassing fatigues of too much business. As her carriage toward her mother had always been affectionate in the extreme, it is believed her increased attachment to her, as her infirmities called for it by day and by night, caused her loss of reason at this time. It has been stated in some of the morning papers that she has an insane brother in confinement; but this is without foundation.”

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.

So he was at hand from that day on, all through his life, holding her and helping her in the frequent successive returns of her wretched malady. His gentle, loving, resolute soul proved its fine and firm fibre under the strain of more than forty years of undeviating devotion to which I know no parallel. He quietly gave up all other ties and cares and pleasures for this supreme duty; he never for one hour remitted his vigil; he never repined or posed, he never even said to himself that he was doing something fine. And such is the potency of this intangible tonic of unselfish self-sacrifice, that _his_ tremulous nerves grew tenser under its action, and his reason relaxed her rule thenceforward never any more. The poor guiltless murderess was sent by the authorities to an asylum at Hoxton. There John Lamb and their friends thought it best to isolate her, safely and quietly, for life, spite of her intervals of sanity; but, from the outset, Charles fought against this, offered his life-long personal guardianship--this boy of twenty-two, with only £100 a year!--and at length succeeded in squeezing consent from the crown officials. He counts up, in a letter to Coleridge, the coin “Daddy and I” can spare for Mary, and computes all the care she will bring: “I know John will make speeches about it, _but she shall not go into an hospital_.” So he meets her as she comes out, and they walk away through life hand in hand, even as they used to walk through the fields many a time in later years on the approach of one of her repeated relapses; he leading her back to temporary retirement in the asylum, hand in hand together, both silently crying!

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.

Old Aunt Hetty, “the kindest, goodest creature,” had come back to them, but only to die; and their faithful servant, who had followed their fortunes and their misfortunes, sickened slowly unto death. Mary had been allowed to return home for a while, from the rooms at Hackney, where Charles had placed her on her release from the asylum, and where he passed his Sundays and holidays with her. Now, she again broke down, and was forced to go back into seclusion at Hoxton. Then, for the one time in all his life, Charles gave way under these successive strokes, and made his only moan in a letter to Coleridge, early in 1800: “Mary, in consequence of fatigue and anxiety, is fallen ill again, and I was obliged to remove her yesterday. I am left alone in a house, with nothing but Hetty’s dead body to keep me company. To-morrow I bury her, and then I shall be quite alone, with nothing but a cat to remind me that the house has been full of living beings like myself. My heart is quite sunk, and I don’t know where to look for relief. Mary will get better again, but her constantly being liable to these attacks is dreadful; nor is it the least of our evils that her case and all our story is so well known around us. We are in a manner _marked_.... I am going to try and get a friend to come and be with me to-morrow--I am completely shipwrecked.”

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.