Benjamin Ellis Martin

“ It is but two minutes’ walk to the great, desolate graveyard, encircling all about the ancient church; whose square, squat, battlemented tower shows its mellow tints through dark masses of ivy. Service was going on when I went for the first time to this spot, a few years since, and I waited until the officiating clergyman had finished his functions, that I might learn from him the location of the grave I had come so far to see. He could not tell me! He had heard that Charles Lamb was buried in his churchyard, but he had never seen the grave, nor had he been unduly inquisitive about it. ”

“ Edgar Poe’s Imp of the Perverse took entire possession of Lamb when thrown with uncongenial men, and forced him to give the impression of “something between an imbecile, a brute, and a buffoon.” Writing of himself after the imaginary death of Elia, he says, truly: “He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalized (and offences were sure to arise) he could not help it.”
No, nor did he try to help it, and we love him all the more for this antic disposition he was so fond of showing unshamed. ”

“ He must needs respect, in Coleridge, the one man known to him who alone could surpass him in untiring fluency, even under the influence of strongest tea—sole stimulus allowed himself by Hazlitt at that time. Him, Lamb finds to be, “in his natural state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing.” And he, too, had tried to quarrel with the Lambs, and had failed, as did all who made the sorry attempt! There was William Wordsworth, ascetic, self-centred, quite sure of himself; whose true powers, and all that was genuine in his genius, Lamb was one of the first to recognize and to celebrate. ”

“ 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! ”

“ His income had slowly increased with each added year of service in the East India House, and the earnings of his literary work swelled it slightly. That work had never yet received its recognition. It was collected and published in two handsome volumes in 1818, and the reading world of that day suddenly awakened to see in the obscure clerk, plodding daily to his desk in Leadenhall Street, its most delicate humourist, its most acute critic, its most perfect essayist. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a pleasant approach to “Elia”—as the present owner has re-christened No. 19 Colebrook Row—for the many pilgrims from all over the English-speaking world to whom it has become a shrine.{104} For these walls hold more memories of the brother and sister than do any of the spots we have yet seen. It stands nearly as when they lived in and left it, though no longer detached; a simple cottage of two stories and an attic, with stone steps mounting sideways. Its tiny front garden, flagged and flower-filled, is fenced off discreetly from the road, a Virginia creeper climbing over the railings. ”

“ Then, as the luckless farce fell flat and flatter, he was louder than any of them in their hisses. “Damn the word, I write it like kisses—how different!” he growled, in grotesque wrath, in his letter announcing the failure to Wordsworth. Hazlitt, who was present, dreamed of that dreadful damning every night for a month, but Lamb only wrote to him: “I know you’ll be sorry, but never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ The staircase of the new building is still stumbled up by duns and girls, you may drink from that same pump to-day, you may see those trees still in that court, but his windows no longer look out on trees and pump and court.
Talfourd and Procter have left vivid pictures of the memorable Wednesday evenings in the Temple, the former contrasting them with the stately assemblages of Holland House. “Like other great men, I have a public day,” Lamb wrote. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Both wished that Mary should go first. Mrs. Cowden Clarke has told us how he said abruptly, one day—his blunt words covering his intense tenderness—“You must die first, Mary.” And she replied, with her little quiet nod and kindly smile: “Yes, I must die first, Charles!”
Death was much in their thoughts during these days. Hazlitt had died in 1830, Lamb being with him at the last; and in July, 1834, Coleridge ended, after long suffering, a life of “blighted utility,” as he himself truly put it. The passing away of this dearest of the old familiar faces profoundly affected Lamb. ”

“ We are glad and proud to take him as we find him—full of frailties, just as we poorer mortals are; it is not for us to sit in judgment on him; we say to the Philistines, in Wordsworth’s benignant words, “Love him or leave him alone.”
It was during the latter period of their residence in the Temple, and during their six years in Russell Street, that Lamb produced the greater part of the work he has left—small in sum but great in achievement. ”

“ Mary especially pouring out on her the bounteous sympathy with which she flowed over for young people, and which won from all of them an equal fondness. They invited the lonely girl to visit them during her holidays, and finally they made her their adopted daughter, and their home her own. Mary helped her with French, Charles taught her Latin, that she might become a governess. Lamb was always quick to serve those who were poorer than himself, and, giving greatly all his life long, in Procter’s words, he always had protégés and pensioners on his bounty. ”

“ There was his son, Martin, of whom Lamb said, “I have not found a whiter soul than thine;” Leigh Hunt, airy, sprightly, full of fine fancies; Charles Lloyd, poetic and intense; Tom Hood, slight of figure, feeble of voice, face of a Methodist parson, silent save for his sudden puns; Thomas Manning, the Cambridge mathematical tutor, “a man of a thousand;” Basil Montagu, the philanthropized courtier; stalwart Allan Cunningham; Haydon, the painter, eager everywhere for controversy ”

“ The house which chiefly concerns us, No. 20 Russell Street, has been made higher by one story, re-roofed, and re-faced with stucco; but it has not been distinctly disfeatured.
Such as it was, it became the next home of the Lambs, in 1817. At that time they had lived for nine years in their chambers in Inner Temple Lane, and it is strange that they should have been willing to leave their beloved Temple, after having been born into it again, and after having grown up in it again. For Lamb’s household gods planted a terrible fixed foot, as he put it, and were not rooted up without blood. ”

“ To that scoffer who, sneering at Lamb’s habits, said that no man ought to be a Bohemian after the age of thirty, as to all the scoffers since, there is only the one old answer—Lamb never got to be thirty. ”

“ Anne Gilchrist, in her admirable monograph, has called attention to the rare tact—excellent thing in woman!—shown by Mary in dealing with her brother’s caprices and foibles, all{92} through his life. Indeed, there was absolute inspiration in her way of looking at, and acting upon, these matters. It seemed to her to be a vexatious kind of tyranny, which women use towards men, just because the women have better judgment—the italics are her own! ”

“ With but a short holiday before him, and friends awaiting him at Versailles, Charles had gone on from Amiens as soon as he could be spared; and had to leave Paris before Mary’s arrival. She found there a characteristic note from him for her guidance. After pointing out a few pictures in the Louvre for her scrutiny—he had a pretty taste in painting as well as in engraving—he told her: “You must walk all along the borough side of the Seine, facing the Tuileries. There is a mile and a half of print-shops and book-stalls. ”

“ She pours forth profuse strains of unpremeditated wisdom, in this same letter to Sarah Stoddart: “Let men alone, and at last we find they come around to the right way, which we, by a kind of intuition, perceive at once. But better, far better that we should let them often do wrong, than that they should have the torment of a monitor always at their elbows.” Guided by such priceless principles, it is no wonder that she succeeded in never crossing that thin line which divides the domain of the judicious adviser, the opportune helper, from that of the untimely, incessant, ineffective Nagger. ”

“ 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. ”

“ During another vacation, Lamb spent a few{98} days with Hazlitt in Wiltshire, and in other summer holidays he visited Oxford and Cambridge. He bore the country always very bravely for the sake of the friends with whom he was staying.
He had taken Mary to Margate in early years—or, maybe, she took him, for she was then twenty-six and he only fifteen—and he has told us, in “The Old Margate Hoy,” of this their first seaside experience, and how many things combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of his life. ”

“ It is no part of my plan to dwell on Lamb’s religious belief. Suffice it to say that it was, like that of most Unbelievers, too large to be labelled by a set of dogmas, too spacious to be packed within church or cathedral walls. It is a stale truism that credence, less than character, is the criterion of conviction; and all history shows that the doubters are, in nearly all cases, the most deeply devout. “He prayeth well who loveth well,” Coleridge had learned ”