MARY LAMB. (1764-1847.)

Seldom is the name of Mary Lamb seen without that of her brother. “The Lambs” still walk hand-in-hand in our mention, as they were wont to walk on pleasant holidays to Enfield, and Potter’s Bar, and Waltham; when Mary “used to deposit in the little hand-basket the day’s fare of savory cold meat and salad,” and Charles “to pry about at noon-tide for some decent house where they might go in and produce their store, only paying for the ale that he must call for.” Still they pass linked together through our thoughts, as on that sadder day when Charles Lloyd met them, crossing the fields to Hoxton—hand-in-hand, and weeping.

It is an act of severance against which the conscience somewhat protests, to present Mary alone to the consideration of the reader. It is like removing her from the protection of his presence who stood so faithfully and long between her and the world.

Mary Lamb was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, December 3d, 1764. She was the daughter of John Lamb, the “clerk, good servant, dresser, friend, flapper, guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer,” as his son describes him, of a barrister named Salt. Charles was eleven years Mary’s junior. In 1795, (the elder Lamb, whose faculties were failing, having been pensioned by Mr. Salt,) the family left the Temple for lodgings in Little Queen Street. Here occurred, on the 21st of September in that year, the tragedy which set its stamp upon the after-life of Mary and Charles, and of which there is a sufficient account among the following extracts.

Mary remained in the asylum at Islington until the spring of 1797, when Charles, having satisfied the authorities by a solemn engagement to care for her during life, took a room for her at Hackney, where he spent his Sundays and holidays. In April, 1799, old John Lamb died, and from that time until death separated them Mary shared her brother’s home—or homes, for indeed they were legion. Procter chronicles the Lambs as lodging, in 1800, in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane; and removing during the same year to Mitre Court Buildings, Temple, where they remained till 1809. No. 4, Inner Temple Lane was their next residence, which they left, in 1817, for Russell Street, Covent Garden. In 1823 they removed to Colebrook Row, Islington; and in 1826 to Enfield. In 1830 they returned to Southampton Buildings. In 1833, Charles, having determined that his sister should remain with him during her illness for the future, they went to live at Mrs. Walden’s, in Church Street, Edmonton; where, on December 27th, 1834, Charles Lamb died.

Mary survived her brother more than twelve years. Age, and the decay of her mind, mitigated her grief for him. On the 28th of May, 1847, she was laid in his grave.

Tales from Shakespeare, published in 1807; in this work, the six great tragedies are by Charles.

Mrs. Leicester’s School, published in 1808, to which Charles contributed three of the ten stories.

Poetry for Children, 1809; here Charles was again her co-laborer, performing one-third of the work, but it is not positively certain which of the poems are his.

On the south side of Fleet Street, near to where it adjoins Temple Bar, lies the Inner Temple. It extends southward to the Thames, and contains long ranges of melancholy buildings, in which lawyers and their followers congregate. It is a district very memorable. About seven hundred years ago it was the abiding-place of the Knights Templars, who erected there a church, which still uplifts its round tower (its sole relic) for the wonder of modern times. Fifty years since, I remember, you entered the precinct through a lowering archway that opened into a gloomy passage—Inner Temple Lane. On the east side rose the church; and on the west was a dark line of chambers, since pulled down and rebuilt, and now called Johnson’s Buildings. At some distance westward was an open court, in which was a sun-dial, and, in the midst, a solitary fountain, that sent its silvery voice into the air above, the murmur of which, descending, seemed to render the place more lonely. Midway, between the Inner Temple Lane and the Thames, was a range of substantial chambers (overlooking the gardens and the busy river), called Crown Office Row.

Bryan W. Procter: ‘Charles Lamb, a Memoir.’ London: Edward Moxon & Co., 1866.

Her education in youth was not much attended to; and she happily missed all that train of female garniture, which passeth by the name of accomplishments. She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading [the library of Mr. Salt, a barrister, to whom her father long acted as clerk] without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they should be brought up exactly in this fashion. I know not whether their chance in wedlock might not be diminished by it, but I can answer for it, that it makes (if the worst comes to the worst) most incomparable old maids.

Charles Lamb: Mackery End, in Hertfordshire, ‘Essays of Elia.’ (‘Works, with a Sketch of his Life,’ by Thomas Noon Talfourd. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838.)

A little selection would have made the pasturage all the wholesomer to a child of Mary’s sensitive, brooding nature; for the witch stories and the cruel tales of the sufferings of the martyrs on which she pored all alone, as her brother did after her, wrought upon her tender brain and lent their baleful aid to nourish those seeds of madness which she inherited.

The London-born and bred child had occasional tastes of joyous, healthful life in the country, for her mother had hospitable relatives in her native county, pleasant Hertfordshire. In after life she embodied them, mingling fiction with fact, in a story called ‘Louisa Manners; or, the Farmhouse,’ where she tells in sweet and child-like words of the ecstasy of a little four-year-old girl on finding herself for the first time in the midst of fields quite full of bright, shining yellow flowers, with sheep and young lambs feeding; of the inexhaustible interest of the farm-yard, the thresher in the barn with his terrifying flail and black beard, the collection of eggs and searching for scarce violets (“if we could find eggs and violets too, what happy children we were”); of the hay-making and the sheep-shearing, the great wood-fires and the farm-house suppers.

With the cruelty of ignorance Mary’s mother and grandmother [Mrs. Field], suffered her young spirit to do battle, in silent and inward solitariness, with the phantoms imagination conjured up in her too sensitive brain. “Polly, what are those poor, crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking always?” was worthy Mrs. Field’s way of endeavoring to win the confidence of the thoughtful, suffering child. It was simple stupidity, lack of insight or sympathy in the elders; and was repaid by the sweetest affection, and, in after-years, by a self-sacrificing devotion which, carried at last far beyond her strength, led to the great calamity of her life.

On the 10th of February, 1775, arrived a new member into the household group—Charles, the child of his father’s old age, the “weakly but very pretty babe” who was to prove their strong support. And now Mary was no longer a lonely girl. She was just old enough to be trusted to nurse and tend the baby, and she became a mother to it. In after-life she spoke of the comfort, the wholesome curative influence upon her young troubled mind, which this devotion to Charles in infancy brought with it. As his young mind unfolded, he found in her intelligence and love the same genial, fostering influences that had cherished his feeble frame into health and strength. It was with his little hand in hers that he first trod the Temple Gardens, and spelled out the inscriptions on the sun-dials and on the tombstones in the burying-ground, and wondered, finding only lists of the virtues, “where the naughty people were buried?” Like Mary, his disposition was so different from that of his gay, pleasure-loving parents that they but ill understood “and gave themselves little trouble about him,” which also tended to draw brother and sister closer together.

In the Lamb household the domestic outlook grew dark as soon as Mary was grown up, for her father’s faculties and her mother’s health failed early; and when, in his fifteenth year, Charles left Christ’s Hospital, it was already needful for him to take up the burthens of a man on his young shoulders; and for Mary not only to make head against sickness, helplessness, old age, with its attendant exigencies, but to add to the now straitened means by taking in millinery work. For eleven years, as she has told us [in an essay on needle-work, contributed to the British Lady’s Magazine, April, 1815], she maintained herself by the needle; from the age of twenty-one to thirty-two, that is.

The year 1795 witnessed changes for all. The father, now wholly in his dotage, was pensioned off by Mr. Salt, and the family had to exchange their old home in the Temple for straitened lodgings in Little Queen Street, Holborn (the site of which and of the adjoining houses is now occupied by Trinity Church). Meanwhile, Lamb was first tasting the joys and sorrows of love. Alice W—— lingers but as a shadow in the records of his life; the passion, however, was real enough and took deep hold of him, conspiring with the cares and trials of home-life to give a fatal stimulus to the germs of brain-disease, which were part of the family heritage, and for six weeks he was in a mad-house.... No sooner was Charles restored to himself than the elder brother, John, met with a serious accident; and though while in health he had carried himself to more comfortable quarters, he did not now fail to return and be nursed with anxious solicitude by his brother and sister. This was the last ounce. Mary, worn out with years of nightly as well as daily attendance upon her mother, who was now wholly deprived of the use of her limbs, and harassed by a close application to needle-work, to help her in which she had been obliged to take a young apprentice, was at last strained beyond the utmost pitch of physical endurance, “worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery.” About the middle of September, she being then thirty-two years old, her family observed some symptoms of insanity in her.... On the afternoon of the 21st, seized with a sudden attack of frenzy, she snatched a knife from the table and pursued the young apprentice round the room, when her mother, interposing, received a fatal stab and died instantly. Mary was totally unconscious of what she had done.

Anne Gilchrist: ‘Mary Lamb.’ (Famous Women Series.) Boston: Roberts Bros., 1883.

My poor, dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty’s judgment on our house, is restored to her senses; to a dreadful sense and recollection of what has passed, awful to her mind, and impressive (as it must be to the end of life), but tempered with religious resignation and the reasonings of a sound judgment, which in this early stage knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother’s murder. I have seen her. I found her this morning, calm and serene; far, very far, from an indecent, forgetful serenity.

Charles Lamb: Letter to Coleridge, 1796, in ‘Final Memorials of Charles Lamb,’ by Thomas Noon Talfourd. London: Edward Moxon, 1848.

Little could any one, observing Miss Lamb in the habitual serenity of her demeanor, guess the calamity in which she had partaken or the malady which frightfully checkered her life. From Mr. Lloyd ... I learned that she had described herself, on her recovery from the fatal attack, as having experienced, while it was subsiding, such a conviction that she was absolved in Heaven from all taint of the deed in which she had been the agent—such an assurance that it was a dispensation of Providence—such a sense that her mother knew her entire innocence and shed down blessings upon her, as though she had seen the reconcilement in solemn vision—that she was not sorely afflicted by the recollection. It was as if the old Greek notion of the necessity for the unconscious shedder of blood, else polluted though guiltless, to pass through a religious purification, had in her case been happily accomplished.

Her relapses were not dependent on the seasons; they came in hot summers and with the freezing winters. The only remedy seems to have been extreme quiet when any slight symptom of uneasiness was apparent. Charles (poor fellow) had to live, day and night, in the society of a person who was—mad! If any exciting talk occurred, he had to dismiss his friend with a whisper. If any stupor or extraordinary silence was observed, then he had to rouse her instantly.

The constant impendency of this giant sorrow saddened to the Lambs even their holidays; as the journey which they both regarded as the relief and charm of the year was frequently followed by a seizure.

... Miss Lamb experienced, and full well understood, premonitory symptoms of the attack, in restlessness, low fever, and the inability to sleep; and, as gently as possible, prepared her brother for the duty he must soon perform; and thus, unless he could stave off the terrible separation till Sunday, obliged him to ask leave of absence from the office as if for a day’s pleasure—a bitter mockery! On one occasion Mr. Charles Lloyd met them, slowly pacing together a little footpath in Hoxton Fields, both weeping bitterly, and found, on joining them, that they were taking their solemn way to the accustomed asylum.

Miss Lamb would have been remarkable for the sweetness of her disposition, the clearness of her understanding, and the gentle wisdom of all her acts and words, even if these qualities had not been presented in marvellous contrast with the distractions under which she suffered for weeks, latterly for months in every year. There was no tinge of insanity discernible in her manner to the most observant eye.... Hazlitt used to say that he never met with a woman who could reason and had met with only one thoroughly reasonable—the sole exception being Mary Lamb. She did not wish, however, to be made an exception, to the general disparagement of her sex; for in all her thoughts and feelings she was most womanly—keeping under, ever in due subordination to her notion of a woman’s province, an intellect of rare excellence which flashed out when the restraints of gentle habit and humble manner were withdrawn by the terrible force of disease. Though her conversation in sanity was never marked by smartness or repartee, seldom rising beyond that of a sensible, quiet gentlewoman, appreciating and enjoying the talents of her friends, it was otherwise in her madness. Her ramblings often sparkled with brilliant description and shattered beauty. She would fancy herself in the days of Queen Anne or George the First; and describe the brocaded dames and courtly manners as though she had been bred among them, in the best style of the old comedy. It was all broken and disjointed, so that the hearer could remember little of her discourse; but the fragments were like the jewelled speeches of Congreve, only shaken from their settings. There was sometimes even a vein of crazy logic running through them, associating things essentially most dissimilar, but connecting them by a verbal association in strange order. As a mere physical instance of deranged intellect, her condition was, I believe, extraordinary; it was as if the finest elements of the mind had been shaken into fantastic combinations, like those of a kaleidoscope.

It was always in a room of moderate size, comfortably but plainly furnished, that he [Charles] lived. An old mahogany table was opened out in the middle of the room, round which, and near the walls, were old, high-backed chairs (such as our grandfathers used), and a long, plain book-case completely filled with old books. These were his “ragged veterans.” In one of his letters he says: “My rooms are luxurious: one for prints, one for books; a summer and winter parlor.” They, however, were not otherwise decorated. I do not remember ever to have seen a flower or an image in them. He had not been educated into expensive tastes. His extravagances were confined to books. These were all chosen by himself, all old, and all in “admired disorder”; yet he could lay his hand on any volume in a moment.... Here Charles Lamb sat, when at home, always near the table. At the opposite side was his sister, engaged in some domestic work, knitting or sewing, or poring over a modern novel. She wore a neat cap, of the fashion of her youth; an old-fashioned dress. Her face was pale and somewhat square, but very placid, with gray, intelligent eyes. She was very mild in her manner to strangers, and to her brother gentle and tender, always. She had often an upward look of peculiar meaning, when directed toward him, as though to give him assurance that all was then well with her. His affection for her was somewhat less on the surface, but always present. There was great gratitude intermingled with it. “In the days of weakling infancy,” he writes: “I was her tender charge, as I have been her care in foolish manhood since.” Then he adds, pathetically, “I wish I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint existences, that we might share them in equal division.”

Her manner was easy, almost homely, so quiet, unaffected, and perfectly unpretending was it. Beneath the sparing talk and retired carriage, few casual observers would have suspected the ample information and large intelligence that lay comprised there. She was oftener a listener than a speaker. In the modest-behaviored woman simply sitting there, taking small share in general conversation, few who did not know her would have imagined the accomplished classical scholar, the excellent understanding, the altogether rarely-gifted being, morally and mentally, that Mary Lamb was.

Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke: ‘Recollections of Writers.’ New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

His sister, whose literary reputation is closely associated with her brother’s, and who, as the original of “Bridget Elia,” is a kind of object for literary affection, came in after him. She is a small, bent figure, evidently a victim to illness, and hears with difficulty. Her face has been, I should think, a fine and handsome one, and her bright, gray eye is still full of intelligence and fire.

In stature Mary was under the middle-size, and her bodily frame was strong. She could walk fifteen miles with ease; her brother speaks of their having walked thirty miles together, and, even at sixty years of age, she was capable of twelve miles “most days.”

Miss Lamb bore a strong personal resemblance to her brother; being in stature under middle height, possessing well-cut features and a countenance of singular sweetness, with intelligence. Her brown eyes were soft, yet penetrating; her nose and mouth very shapely; while the general expression was mildness itself. Her apparel was always of the plainest kind, a black stuff or silk gown, made and worn in the simplest fashion. She took snuff liberally—a habit that had evidently grown out of her propensity to sympathize with and share all her brother’s tastes, and it certainly had the effect of enhancing her likeness to him. She had a small, white, and delicately-formed hand, and as it hovered above the tortoise-shell box containing the powder so strongly approved by them both, in search of the stimulating pinch, the act seemed yet another link of association between the brother and sister, when hanging together over their favorite books and studies.

Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and old maid, in a sort of double singleness.... We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits—yet so, as “with a difference.” We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings, as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather understood than expressed, and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was altered. We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story—well, ill, or indifferently told—so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in fiction—and almost in real life—have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humors and opinions—heads with some diverting twist in them—the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of any thing that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She “holds nature more clever.”

It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine freethinkers—leaders and disciples of novel philosophies and systems; but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her when a child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks with her understanding.

We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive, and I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this: that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out that I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points, upon something proper to be done, or let alone; whatever heat of opposition or steadiness of conviction I set out with, I am sure always, in the long run, to be brought over to her way of thinking.

I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, for Bridget does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in company; at which times she will answer Yes or No to a question without fully understanding its purport—which is provoking and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly; but in matters which are not stuff of the conscience, she hath been known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonable.

In a season of distress she is the truest comforter; but in the teasing accidents and minor perplexities which do not call out the will to meet them, she sometimes maketh matters worse by an excess of participation. If she does not always divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions of life, she is sure always to treble your satisfaction.

When I first opened upon the just-mentioned poem [‘The Force of Prayer, or the Founding of Bolton Priory,’] in a careless tone, I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, “What is good for a bootless bene?” To which, with infinite presence of mind (as the jest-book has it), she answered, “A shoeless pea.” It was the first she ever made.

Charles Lamb: Letter to Wordsworth, in ‘Final Memorials,’ by T. N. Talfourd.

She had a speaking voice, gentle and persuasive; and her smile was her brother’s own—winning in the extreme. There was a certain catch, or emotional breathingness, in her utterance, which gave an inexpressible charm to her reading of poetry, and which lent a captivating earnestness to her mode of speech when addressing those she liked. This slight check, with its yearning, eager effect in her voice, had something softenedly akin to her brother Charles’ impediment of articulation: in him it scarcely amounted to a stammer, in her it merely imparted additional stress to the fine-sensed suggestions she made to those whom she counselled or consoled. There was a certain old-world fashion in Mary Lamb’s diction which gave it a most natural and quaintly pleasant effect, and which heightened rather than detracted from the more heart-felt or important things she uttered.

You would like to see us as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’; or rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan, I, taking snuff, and he, groaning all the while and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out that he has made something of it.

Mary Lamb: Letter to Sarah Stoddart, June 2nd, 1806, in ‘Mary and Charles Lamb: Poems, Letters and Remains,’ edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. New York: Scribner, Welford & Armstrong, 1874.

Mary is just stuck fast in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well.’ She complains of having to set forth so many female characters in boys’ clothes. She begins to think Shakespeare must have wanted——Imagination. I, to encourage her, for she often faints in the prosecution of her great work, flatter her with telling her how well such a play and such a play is done. But she is stuck fast.

Charles Lamb: Letter to Wordsworth, in ‘Final Memorials,’ by T. N. Talfourd.

I am in good spirits just at this present time, for Charles has been reading over the tale I told you plagued me so much, and he thinks it one of the very best: it is ‘All’s Well that Ends Well.’ You must not mind the many wretchedly dull letters I have sent you: for, indeed, I cannot help it, my mind is so dry always after poring over my work all day. But it will soon be over.

I am cooking a shoulder of lamb (Hazlitt dines with us); it will be ready at two o’clock, if you can pop in and eat a bit with us.

Mary Lamb: Letter to Sarah Stoddart, July, 1806, in ‘Mary and Charles Lamb,’ by W. Carew Hazlitt.

It is not generally known, perhaps, that previously to their circulation in a collective shape, Godwin, the publisher and proprietor of the copyright, offered them to his juvenile patrons and patronesses at No. 41 Skinner Street, in six-penny books, with the plates (by Blake) “beautifully colored.”

It is now several days since I read the book you recommended to me, ‘Mrs. Leicester’s School’; and I feel as if I owed a debt in deferring to thank you for many hours of exquisite delight. Never have I read any thing in prose so many times over, within so short a space of time, as ‘The Father’s Wedding-day.’ Most people, I understand, prefer the first tale—in truth a very admirable one—but others could have written it. Show me the man or woman, modern or ancient, who could have written this one sentence: “When I was dressed in my new frock, I wished poor mamma was alive to see how fine I was on papa’s wedding-day; and I ran to my favorite station at her bedroom door.” How natural, in a little girl, is this incongruity, this impossibility!... A fresh source of the pathetic bursts out before us, and not a bitter one.... The story is admirable throughout—incomparable, inimitable.

Walter Savage Landor: Letter to H. C. Robinson, April, 1831, in the latter’s ‘Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence.’ Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1871.

The first edition sold out immediately, and four more were called for in the course of five years. It has continued in fair demand ever since, though there have not been any thing like so many recent reprints as of the ‘Tales from Shakespeare.’ It is one of those children’s books, which to re-open, in after-life is like revisiting some sunny old garden, some favorite haunt of childhood, where every nook and cranny seems familiar and calls up a thousand pleasant memories.

I shall have to send you, in a week or two, two volumes of juvenile poetry done by Mary and me within the last six months.... Our little poems are but humble, they have no name. You must read them, remembering they were task-work; and perhaps you will admire the number of subjects, all of children, picked out by an old bachelor and an old maid. Many parents would not have found so many.

Charles Lamb: Letter to Coleridge, June, 1809, in ‘Final Memorials,’ by T. N. Talfourd.

‘Poetry for Children, Entirely Original, by the Author of Mrs. Leicester’s School,’ as the title-page runs, was published in the summer of 1809, and the whole of the first edition sold off rapidly; but instead of being reprinted entire, selections from it only—twenty-six out of the eighty-four pieces—were incorporated, by a school-master of the name of Mylius, in two books called ‘The First Book of Poetry’ and ‘The Poetical Class Book,’ issued from the same Juvenile Library [Godwin’s] in 1810. These went through many editions, but ultimately dropped quite out of sight, as the original work had already done. Writing to Bernard Barton, in 1827, Lamb says:

“One likes to have one copy of every thing one does. I neglected to keep one of ‘Poetry for Children,’ the joint production of Mary and me, and it is not to be had for love or money.” Fifty years later such specimens of these poems as could be gathered from the Mylius’ collections and from Lamb’s own works were republished by Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, and also by Richard Herne Shepherd, when at last, in 1877, there came to hand from Australia, a copy of the original edition; it had been purchased at a sale of books and furniture at Plymouth, in 1866, and thence carried to Adelaide. It was reprinted entire by Mr. Shepherd (Chatto & Windus, 1878).

I called on Miss Lamb, and chatted with her. She had undergone great fatigue from writing an article about needle-work, for the new Ladies’ British Magazine. She spoke of writing as a most painful occupation which only necessity could make her attempt. She has been learning Latin merely to assist her in acquiring a correct style. Yet, while she speaks of inability to write, what grace and talent has she not manifested in ‘Mrs. Leicester’s School,’ etc.

Once, when some visitors chanced to drop in unexpectedly upon her and her brother, just as they were going to sit down to their plain dinner of a bit of roast mutton, with her usual frank hospitality, she pressed them to stay and partake, cutting up the small joint into five equal portions, and saying in her simple, easy way, so truly her own, “There’s a chop apiece for us, and we can make up with bread and cheese if we want more.” With such a woman to carve for you and eat with you, neck of mutton was better than venison, while bread and cheese more than replaced various courses of richest or daintiest dishes.

Let it be any autumn or winter month, when the fire is blazing steadily, and the clean-swept hearth and whist-tables speak of the spirit of Mrs. Battle.... The furniture is old-fashioned and worn; the ceiling low, and not wholly unstained by traces of “the great plant”; but the Hogarths, in narrow black frames, abounding in infinite thought, humor, and pathos, enrich the walls; and all things wear an air of comfort and hearty English welcome. Lamb himself, yet unrelaxed by the glass, is sitting with a sort of Quaker primness at the whist-table, the gentleness of his melancholy smile half lost in his intentness on the game; his partner, the author of ‘Political Justice,’ is regarding his hand with a philosophic but not a careless eye; Captain Burney, only not venerable because so young in spirit, sits between them; and H. C. R., who alone now and then breaks the proper silence to welcome some in-coming guest, is his happy partner—true winner in the game of life, whose leisure, achieved early, is devoted to his friends!... In one corner of the room, you may see the pale, earnest countenance of Charles Lloyd, who is discoursing “of fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute,” with Leigh Hunt.... Soon the room fills; in slouches Hazlitt from the theatre, where his stubborn anger for Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo has been softened by Miss Stephens’ angelic notes.... Now and then an actor glances in on us from “the rich Cathay” of the world behind the scenes.... Meanwhile, Becky lays the cloth on the side-table, under the direction of the most quiet, sensible, and kind of women—who soon compels the younger and more hungry of the guests to partake largely of the cold roast lamb, or boiled beef, the heaps of smoking roasted potatoes, and the vast jug of porter. Perfect freedom prevails. As the hot water and its accompaniments appear, and the severities of whist relax, the light of conversation thickens: Hazlitt, catching the influence of the spirit from which he has lately begun to abstain, utters some fine criticism with struggling emphasis; Lamb stammers out puns suggestive of wisdom; the various driblets of talk combine into a stream, while Miss Lamb moves gently about to see that each modest stranger is duly served; turning, now and then, an anxious loving eye on Charles, which is softened into a half-humorous expression of resignation to inevitable fate, as he mixes his second tumbler!

She had a way of repeating her brother’s words assentingly when he spoke to her. He once said (with his peculiar mode of tenderness, beneath blunt, abrupt speech), “You must die first, Mary.” She nodded with her little, quiet nod and sweet smile, “Yes, I must die first, Charles.”

I resolved to-day to discharge a melancholy duty, and went down by the Edmonton stage to call on poor Miss Lamb. It was a melancholy sight; but more so to the reflection than to the sense. A stranger would have seen little remarkable about her. She was neither violent nor unhappy; nor was she entirely without sense. She was, however, out of her mind, as the expression is; but she could combine ideas, although imperfectly.... She gave me her hand with great cordiality, and said: “Now this is very kind—not merely good-natured, but very, very kind, to come and see me in my affliction.” It would be useless to attempt to remember all she said; but it is to be remarked that her mind seemed turned to subjects connected with insanity as well as with her brother’s death. She is nine years and nine months older than he, and will soon be seventy. I have no doubt that if ever she be sensible of her brother’s loss it will overset her again. She will live forever in the memory of her friends as one of the most amiable and admirable of women.

I went down to Edmonton, and found dear Mary Lamb in very good health. She has now been so long well that one may hope for a continuance. I took a walk with her, and she led me to Charles Lamb’s grave.

He was there, asleep in the old churchyard, beneath the turf near which they had stood together, and had selected for a resting-place; to this spot she used, when well, to stroll out mournfully in the evening, and to this spot she would contrive to lead any friend who came in the summer evenings to drink tea and went out with her afterwards for a walk. At length, as her illness became more frequent, and her frame much weaker, she was induced to take up her abode under genial care, at a pleasant house in St. John’s Wood, where she was surrounded by the old books and prints, and was frequently visited by her reduced number of surviving friends.

It is well known that Miss Lamb survived her brother many years. I remember that when she visited my father’s house at Brompton, about 1843, she was accompanied by three or four snuff-boxes, which came empty and went away full; and by at least four large silk pocket-handkerchiefs, one of which was devoted to the reception of some article from the dinner-table, which happened to strike her fancy, and which she conveyed back with much satisfaction to St. John’s Wood.... I met her also at Sir John Stoddart’s, in the immediate neighborhood of our house at Brompton, and the same thing took place. It was the poor old lady’s whim, and of course she was humored in it by every one. Sir John had to send out to the nearest tobacconist’s, and get all the boxes filled; and a leg of a fowl, or some other dainty morsel which had been selected, was duly wrapped up in a bandana.

Mary Lamb departed, eighty-two years old, on the 20th of May. She had survived her mind in great measure, but much of the heart remained. Miss Lamb had a very fine feeling for literature, and was refined in mind, though homely, almost coarse, in personal habits. Her departure is an escape out of prison, to her sweet, good soul.

Sara Coleridge: Letter to Miss Fenwick, 1847, in the former’s ‘Memoir and Letters,’ edited by her daughter. New York: Harper & Bros., 1874.

Repeated attacks of her malady weakened her mind, but she retained to the last her sweetness of disposition unimpaired, and gently sank into death on the 20th of May, 1847.

A few survivors of the old circle, now sadly thinned, attended her remains to the spot in Edmonton churchyard, where they were laid above those of her brother.... In accordance with Lamb’s own feeling, so far as it could be gathered from his expressions on a subject to which he did not often or willingly refer, he had been interred in a deep grave, simply dug, and wattled round, but without any affectation of stone or brickwork to keep the human dust from its kindred earth. So dry, however, is the soil of the quiet churchyard that the excavated earth left perfect walls of stiff clay, and permitted us just to catch a glimpse of the still untarnished edges of the coffin in which all the mortal part of one of the most delightful persons who ever lived was contained, and on which the remains of her he had loved were henceforth to rest. We felt, I believe, after a moment’s strange shuddering, that the reunion was well accomplished; and although the true-hearted son of Admiral Burney, who had known and loved the pair we quitted from a child, refused to be comforted—even he will now join the scanty remnant of their friends in the softened remembrance that “they were lovely in their lives,” and own with them the consolation of adding, at last, that “in death they are not divided.”