Part 6

But of all this the subject of this fervent, true tribute tells us no word. He prattled in print as freely and as frankly as Montaigne, though with none of the sentimental shamelessness of Jean Jacques Rousseau; and his delightful egotism has made plain to us his foibles and his follies. Yet, with all the rest of his life in evidence, we know nothing from _him_ of

“That best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.”

They had need, just then, of the brightness of the young girl’s presence, for they were saddened--albeit needlessly so for all the comfort he had brought to them--by the death of their brother John. Mary’s illnesses were growing more frequent and more prolonged; and Charles was chafing more and more under his unending drudgery at the desk. In 1822 he had already written to 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.” And once he gave irate vent to a great outburst, dear to all but to the shop-keeping soul: “Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization, and wealth, and amity, and links of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and getting a knowledge of the face of the globe; and rotting the very firs of the forest that look so romantic alive, and die into desks! Vale.” And again: “Oh, that I were kicked out of Leadenhall, with every mark of indignity, and a competence in my fob! The birds of the air would not be so free as I should. How I would prance and curvet it, and pick up cowslips and ramble about purposeless as an idiot!”

It was in April, 1825, that his wish was gratified, and his waiting brought to an end, in this very Colebrook cottage. He had nerved himself at length to offer his resignation to the Directors of the East India Company, and was surprised and delighted--having been kept a few weeks in suspense--by the proposal “that I should accept from the house, which I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my accustomed salary--a magnificent offer. I do not know what I answered between surprise and gratitude, but it was understood that I accepted their proposal, and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave their service. I stammered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home--forever.” To Wordsworth he wrote, on April 6, 1825: “I came home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me; it was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three--to have three times as much real time--time that is my own--in it!”

He compared his sensations to those of Leigh Hunt on being released from prison. Indeed, the change proved to be too sudden and too great for his happiness, and he yearned for the “pestilential clerk-faces” which had so long bored him: so one day, soon after, he went back to the office, and sat amid “the old desk companions, with whom I have had such merry hours,” and tried to feel really sorry that he had left them in the lurch! He has told us of all his feelings, good and bad, at this period, in “The Superannuated Man.” He could not quite thoroughly enjoy his freedom, and was put to all sorts of devices to waste his cherished time! He re-hung his Titians, his Da Vincis, his Hogarths, and his other beloved prints. He marshalled his Chelsea China shepherds and shepherdesses in groups and singly all about the rooms. He rearranged the ragged veterans of his library; not longing overmuch for the good leather that would comfortably clothe his shivering folios. Few of them were lettered on the back, and his reply to a silly somebody, who asked how he knew them, was: “How does a shepherd know his sheep?” It was his fantastic humour that, the better a book is the less it demands from binding!

Out of doors, he planted and pruned and grafted; and got into a row with an irascible old lady who owned the next garden. He sat under his own vine and contemplated the growth of vegetable nature. He explored his new neighbourhood, hunted up ancient hostelries, and made comparisons of their sundry and divers taps. He prowled about Bartholomew Fair, drinking in delight of its penny puppet-shows, and its other “celebrated follies,” as they had been contumeliously called by sedate John Evelyn, a visitor there nearly two centuries earlier. He took long walks into the country, with Tom Hood’s erratic dog, Dash, who imposed outrageously on Lamb’s good-nature; and went on excursions with Mary, farther afield--notably to Enfield, where they made short stays with a Mrs. Leishman, into whose house they finally removed in 1827.

“I am settled for life, I hope, at Enfield. I have taken the prettiest compacted house I ever saw,” he wrote. _No_ health in Islington, was his complaint to Tom Hood; and yet, “‘twas with some pains that we were evulsed from Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh sticking to the door-posts. To change habitations is to die to them, and in my time I have died seven deaths.” He hoped for benefit to Mary from the quiet, and to himself from the change, and yet he looked forward to casual trips to town, mainly “to breathe the _fresher_ air of the metropolis.”

In those days they went to Enfield by coach twice a week or so, from one or another of the old inns, left standing to-day in Aldgate or Bishopsgate. No coaches run now, but it is a pleasant walk, up through the long northern suburb, still showing, spite of its being so citified, traces of its old-time gentility in the square, stately, stolid brick mansions, the rural homes of rich city merchants a century since. We pass the High Cross at Tottenham, and beside it the _Swan Inn_, descendant of that _Swan_ in front of which, within sight of their beloved Lea, Anceps and Piscator rested “in a sweet, shady arbour which nature herself has woven with her own fine fingers:” but the stream is polluted now, and the arbour has gone, and Izaak Walton would not care for the new _Swan_. So we pass by Bruce Castle, thus named because it was owned by Robert Bruce, father of the Scotch king--now a boys’ school--and come into that bit of road famous for John Gilpin’s ride, and so on into Edmonton. Here we turn from the highway--by which the stage-coaches kept on northward to Ware and Hatfield--and going three miles farther, along the cross road, we reach Enfield.

By rail it is ten miles from Liverpool Street Station, and we whisk there in forty minutes by many trains each day; underground, behind houses, over their roofs; along by Bethnal Green and Hackney Downs and London Fields--where now can be seen no green nor downs nor any fields--past Silver Street and Seven Sisters and White Hart Lane, and many such prettily named places; and last of all through a stretch of real country into the dapper little station of Enfield.

“Enfield Chase” was a favourite hunting-ground of royalty until it was divided into parcels and sold after the execution of Charles I. Some of the old hunting-lodges still stand in gardens, one of them once tenanted by William Pitt. I have talked with aged men in the village who have seen, when they were boys, the “King’s red deer” come into “The Chase” to drink from the New River: which winds through the land here, its waters drawn from the springs of Amwell and Chadwell, and from slopes with sunshine on them, and led later underground through pipes to supply London town. This _new_ river was cut and engineered by Mr. Hugh Myddelton, citizen and goldsmith, who, “with his choice men of art and painful labourers set roundly to this business,” in the year of grace 1609, and was knighted by the first James for his enterprise and success in his stupendous work. Tom Hood got out “Walton Redivivus, a New River Eclogue,” and Lamb wrote a preface for it, in which he referred to his new home having the same neighbour as his cottage at Colebrook. Doubtless he recalled, too, his out-of-town bathing-excursions with the other boys at Christ’s, and how they would wanton like young dace in this same stream. “My old New River has presented no extraordinary novelties lately. But there Hope sits, day after day, speculating on traditionary gudgeons. I think she hath taken the fisheries. I now know the reason why our forefathers were denominated the East and West Angles.”

We pass the town’s old inns, with steep-sloping roofs, and many a stately mansion set in great gardens; among them the ancient manor-house, renovated by Edward VI. for the residence of his sister, the Princess Elizabeth. From here she wrote letters which you may see in the British Museum; and in the Bodleian at Oxford is the MS. translation, in her own hand, of an Italian sermon preached here by Occhini. This building--now The Palace School--contains one of her rooms, oak-panelled and richly ceilinged; and in the grounds is a noble cedar of Lebanon, planted in 1670. We look up at the swinging signs of the _Rising Sun_ and the _Crown and Horseshoes_, past all of which Lamb often went, and, doubtless, too often did _not_ get past without going in. It tickled him to urge truly proper people to tipple with him in these two taverns; and even lady-like Miss Kelly--the actress with the “divine, plain face”--and the austere Wordsworth were enticed to enter, and persuaded to have “a pull at the pewter!”

And so, through a leafy lane bordered by stately elms, with cosey cottages on either hand, across a cheerful green, alongside the rippling stream, we reach the “Manse,” as Lamb’s home was called for many years--a name it has only lately lost, when it was newly stuccoed and painted. It has been re-christened “The Poplars,” from the four tall trees of that species which rear themselves in its front garden. In the garden behind, the old yew and the bent apple-trees, and beyond the pleasant fields stretching away, are all as they were when he looked through and over them to the Epping Hills. The house has been enlarged and changes have been made inside, and all is hideously and shamelessly “smart.”

Nothing in this interior speaks to us of its old tenants. They were seen, on their coming to take the house, by a schoolboy next door, who has given this pleasing description of them: “Leaning idly out of a window, I saw a group of three issuing from the ‘gambogy-looking cottage’ close at hand--a slim, middle-aged man in quaint, uncontemporary habiliments, a rather shapeless bundle of an old lady, in a bonnet like a mob-cap, and a young girl; while before them bounded a riotous dog [Hood’s immortal ‘Dash’], holding a board, with ‘This House To Let’ on it, in his jaws. Lamb was on his way back to the house-agent’s, and that was his fashion of announcing that he had taken the premises.”

In the summer of 1829, the family of three left this home, the care of which was wearing too heavily on Mary. “We have taken a farewell of the pompous, troublesome trifle called housekeeping, and are settled down into poor boarders and lodgers, at next door, with an old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield.... Our providers are an honest pair, Dame Westwood and her husband; he, when the light of prosperity shined on them, a moderately thriving haberdasher within Bow Bells, retired since with something under a competence ... and has _one anecdote_, upon which, and about £40 a year, he seems to have retired in green old age.” It was “forty-two inches nearer town,” Lamb wrote, and it still is there, next door to their first Enfield home, as you see it in our cut: a comfortable cottage set back from the road, vines clambering over its small entrance-porch and hiding all the walls. In its little back sitting-room were written the “Last Essays of Elia.” In this house he remained for almost four years, and in 1833 he made his last remove--except the final one we all must make--to Edmonton.

VI.

These years at Enfield were not happy years. They were both getting old; Mary’s malady was growing on her, taking her more frequently _from home_; and even the visits of their child, Emma Isola--she was now a governess--mitigated his loneliness but slightly. His removal to the country had left his friends a long way behind, and, for all his urging, they could not come often so far afield for informal calls. “We see scarce anybody,” he laments. Hazlitt and Hood and Hunt came occasionally; faithful Martin Burney fetched forth his newest whim for their amusement; and loyal Crabb Robinson often walked out to take tea or to play whist, or for a stroll in the fields with Charles. Once, as he has recorded in his “Diary,” he brought the mighty Walter Savage Landor for a call: “We had scarcely an hour to chat with them, but it was enough to make both Landor and Worsley express themselves delighted with the person of Mary Lamb, and pleased with the conversation of Charles Lamb; though I thought him by no means at his ease, and Miss Lamb was quite silent. Nothing in the conversation recollectable. Lamb gave Landor White’s ‘Falstaff’s Letters.’ Emma Isola just showed herself. Landor was pleased with her, and has since written verses on her.” Only this once did Lamb and Landor come face to face.

Lamb had always hated the country. “Let not the lying poets be believed, who entice men from the cheerful streets,” he querulously complains; and he asks, “What have I gained by health? Intolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate meals? A total blank.... Let no native Londoner imagine that health and rest, innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.”

He was unable to read or write to any extent in hot weather; “what I can do, and do over-do, is to walk; but deadly long are the days, these summer all-day days, with but a half-hour’s candle-light, and no firelight.” Sometimes, of a “genial hot day,” he would do his twenty miles and over. Once he took charge of a little school during the master’s short absence; and his first exercise of authority was to give the boys a holiday! But nothing abated his boredom, and even in his bed he repined: “In dreams I am in Fleet Street, but I wake and cry to sleep again.” And when he went to town, and sought in Fleet Street fresh sights and fresher air, he found no content: “The streets, the shops, are left, but all old friends are gone.... Home have I none, and not a sympathizing house to turn to in the great city.”

He took lodgings for a while at No. 24 Southampton Buildings, within sight of his former quarters at No. 34 of the same street--a house in which Hazlitt frequently had put up, not far from the house famed for his “ancillary affection!” The numbers remain unchanged; and you may look at the queer old

stuccoed front on any day you choose to turn out from Chancery Lane. The house has a strange, sloping roof of tiles, and altogether it is quite unlike any of its neighbours.

But this impermanent residence in town brought no real relief, for he found that the bodies he cared for were in graves or dispersed. He sought solace in work, and made extracts for Hone’s _Table Book_ from among the two thousand old plays left by Garrick to the British Museum. Hone had been grateful to Lamb for having contributed already to his _Every Day Book_; and had dedicated the issue for 1826 to him and to Mary. In doing so, he published his gratitude, most distastefully to them, saying in his preface that he could not forget “your and Miss Lamb’s sympathy and kindness when glooms outmastered me; and that your pen spontaneously sparkled in the book when my mind was in clouds and darkness. These ‘trifles,’ as each of you would call them, are benefits scored upon my heart.”

Forgiving this fulsome gush, Lamb set his pen to sparkling again in the following year, and found relief in it. “It is a sort of office-work to me--hours ten to four, the same. It does me good.” The reading-room wherein he worked is now the print-room, a venerable and musty chamber, famous in those days for its fine specimens of the Pulex literarius, or Museum flea; and doubtless infested, too--for Lamb’s irritation, as for Carlyle’s, since the latter has left it on record--by that reader, still startling us there to-day, who blows his nose “like a Chaldean trumpet in the new moon;” and by that other, who slumbers peacefully with his head in a ponderous tome, and wakes suddenly, snorting.

The assistant-librarian of the Museum at that time was the Reverend Mr. Cary--“the Dante man”--a friend of the Lambs of recent years; and Charles found congenial companionship at his table, where he was frequently invited to dine. Near the Museum, in Hart Street, F. S. Cary, the son of the librarian, had his studio; and there Charles would wander, on Thursdays, during the summer of 1834, and sit for his portrait, with Mary. He is portrayed seated in a chair, and Mary stands behind him; the figures full length and half-life size. This painting was never completed, and from it the artist made a copy of Charles alone, after death. Of this, Crabb Robinson said, a few years later: “In no one respect a likeness; thoroughly bad; complexion, figure, expression unlike. But for ‘Elia’ on a paper, I should not have thought it possible that it could have been meant for Charles Lamb.”

Another portrait of him had been painted in 1805 by William Hazlitt; his last work with the brush, we are told by his grandson. This figure, in the costume of a Venetian senator, is well known in its engravings, and is considered an interesting presentation of the man. But, beyond the fine and forcible poise of the head--the noble head which resembled that of Bacon, said Leigh Hunt, except that it had less worldly vigour and more sensibility--this is to me an unpleasing picture. It robs Lamb of just that sensibility, and transforms him into a burly, truculent, ill-conditioned creature! He was thirty years old at the time this was painted. When he was twenty-three, an admirable drawing in chalk had been made by Hancock; a profile likeness, in which the superb sweep of the cranial arch and the subtle sweet lines about the mouth are most noticeable. This, the first portrait known of him, was engraved on steel for Cottle’s “Early Recollections of Coleridge.”

A striking piece of portraiture of his mature manhood has been found within a few years. It is a water-colour sketch by Mr. Joseph, A. R. A., and had been inserted, along with many other portraits, in a copy of Byron’s “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.” This volume had been thus enlarged, in 1819, by Mr. William Evans, Lamb’s desk-companion in the East India House, and he had doubtless induced Lamb to sit for this portrait with this intent. Another admirable likeness was painted in oil, in 1827, by Henry Meyer, and this was engraved for the quarto edition of Leigh Hunt’s “Lord Byron and his Contemporaries,” published by Colburn, in 1828.

The frontispiece of our volume is a reproduction of the portrait first engraved for Talfourd’s “Letters,” published in 1837. It is known as the Wageman portrait, engraved by Finden, and is perhaps the most noted and

the most attractive of any likeness we have. Our Maclise portrait is made from an etching done by Daniel Maclise, R. A., for _Fraser’s Magazine_; in which pages it appeared, as one of “A Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters,” published from the year 1830 to 1838. Of all the portraits of Lamb, however, it was always held by those who had seen him that Brook Pulham’s etching on copper was the most life-like in every way ever done. We are fortunate in having so many portraits, some of them so good; for Lamb never liked to sit, regarding the desire to pose for a picture as an avowal of personal vanity.

Of serious literary work, during this period, Lamb did but little; his main pen product being his letters to his many absent friends, which give us such valuable and characteristic glimpses into the man’s lovable nature. He wrote a series of short essays, with the title “Popular Fallacies,” for the _New Monthly Magazine_ in 1828; and a little prose miscellany--chat and souvenirs of the Royal Academy--called “Peter’s Net,” for the _Englishman’s Magazine_ in 1831. The year before, Moxon had published a small volume of small poems by Lamb--“Album Verses”--concerning which a curious secret has only lately come to light. The critics found little to praise in these verses--and with good reason--and a review was sent to the _Englishman’s Magazine_, with a line to Moxon from Lamb: “I have ingeniously contrived to review myself. Tell me if this will do.” He did not praise or puff his own work, let me hasten to say; but his paper is rather a protest against the errors and carelessness of those same “indolent reviewers.” Still, it is a clear case of surreptitious self-reviewing, and of it we may say, in the words of the coy Quakeress--not Lamb’s Islington Quakeress--when she reluctantly consented to let her ardent wooer enforce his threat to kiss her--“it must not be made a practice of.”

In 1833 appeared the “Last Essays of Elia,” collected in one volume, from the _London_, the _Englishman’s_, and the _New Monthly Magazines_, and the _Athenæum_. This work closed his literary life, not long before the closing of his bodily life.

For the scene darkens swiftly now. “Mary

is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months, followed by two of depression most dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing. Nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration, shocking as they were to me, then. In short, half her life is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious with fears and lookings-forward to the next shock.” This was in May, 1833, when he decided to remove to Edmonton: “With such prospects it seemed to me necessary that she should no longer live with me, and be fluttered with continual removals; so I am come to live with her at a Mr. Walden’s and his wife, who take in patients, and have arranged to lodge and board us only.”

To lay a little more load on him, he lost Emma Isola, one month later, in July, 1833, by her marriage with Edward Moxon: their betrothal having been entered into “with my perfect approval and more than concurrence,” he writes. In the same letter he says, as unselfishly as always: “I am about to lose my only walk companion, whose mirthful spirits were the youth of our house.” He gave her, for a marriage gift, his most cherished possession, a portrait of John Milton. Mary’s reason was too clouded, at the time, to take interest in this affair, or even to understand it; but on the day of the wedding, being at table with them all, Mrs. Walden proposed the health of Mr. and Mrs. Moxon. The utterance of the unwonted name restored Mary to her composedness of mind, as if by an electrical stroke; she wrote afterward to the young couple: “I never felt so calm and quiet after a similar illness as I do now. I feel as if all tears were wiped from my eyes, and all care from my heart.”