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                         IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF
                             CHARLES LAMB

                     [Illustration: CHARLES LAMB.]




                         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


                          COPYRIGHT, 1890, BY
                       CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.

                      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._




                            [Illustration:

                       _In the_ Footprints _of_
                            Charles Lamb.]

    “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.




I.


[Illustration: “Old Bricks for Sale.”]

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

[Illustration: THE TEMPLE GARDENS, FROM CROWN OFFICE ROW.]

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

[Illustration: