At the end of that time they decided to return to Colebrook Cottage no more, but to take a house at Enfield. The actual process of taking it was witnessed by a spectator, a perfect stranger at the time, on whose memory it left a lively picture. "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, and that was his fashion of announcing that he had taken the premises.
"I soon grew to be on intimate terms with my neighbours," continues the writer of this pleasant reminiscence—Mr. Westwood, in Notes and Queries, vol. x.—"who let me loose in his library…. My heart yearns even now to those old books. Their faces seem all familiar to me, even their patches and blotches—the work of a wizened old cobbler hard by—for little wotted Lamb of Roger Parkes and Charles Lewises. A cobbler was his book-binder, and the rougher the restoration the better…. When any notable visitors made their appearance at the cottage, Mary Lamb's benevolent tap at my window-pane seldom failed to summon me out, and I was presently ensconced in a quiet corner of their sitting-room, half hid in some great man's shadow.
"Of the discourse of these dii majores I have no recollection now; but the faces of some of them I can still partially recall. Hazlitt's face, for instance, keen and aggressive, with eyes that flashed out epigram. Tom Hood's, a methodist parson's face, not a ripple breaking the lines of it, though every word he dropped was a pun, and every pun roused roars of laughter. Leigh Hunt's, parcel genial, parcel democratic, with as much rabid politics on his lips as honey from Mount Hybla. Miss Kelly [the little Barbara S. of Elia], plain but engaging, the most unprofessional of actresses and unspoiled of women; the bloom of the child on her cheek undefaced by the rouge, to speak in metaphors. She was one of the most dearly welcome of Lamb's guests. Wordsworth's, farmerish and respectable, but with something of the great poet occasionally breaking out, and glorifying forehead and eyes…."
Mary did not escape her usual seizure. "You will understand my silence," writes Lamb to his Quaker friend, "when I tell you that my sister, on the very eve of entering into a new house we have taken at Enfield, was surprised with an attack of one of her sad long illnesses, which deprive me of her society, though not of her domestication, for eight or nine weeks together. I see her, but it does her no good. But for this, we have the snuggest, most comfortable house, with everything most compact and desirable. Colebrook is a wilderness. The books, prints, &c. are come here, and the New River came down with us. The familiar prints, the busts, the Milton, seem scarce to have changed their rooms. One of her last observations was, 'How frightfully like this is to our room at Islington,'—our upstair room she meant. We have tried quiet here for four months, and I will answer for the comfort of it enduring." And again, later: "I have scarce spirits to write. Nine weeks are completed, and Mary does not get any better. It is perfectly exhausting. Enfield and everything is very gloomy. But for long experience, I should fear her ever getting well."
She did get "pretty well and comfortable again" before the year was quite out, but it did not last long. Times grew sadder and sadder for the faithful brother. There are two long, oft-quoted letters to Bernard Barton, written in July 1829, which who has ever read without a pang?
"My sister is again taken ill," he says, "and I am obliged to remove her out of the house for many weeks, I fear, before I can hope to have her again. I have been very desolate indeed. My loneliness is a little abated by our young friend Emma having just come here for her holidays, and a school-fellow of hers that was with her. Still the house is not the same, though she is the same. Mary had been pleasing herself with the prospect of seeing her at this time; and with all their company, the house feels at times a frightful solitude…. But town, with all my native hankering after it, is not what it was…. I was frightfully convinced of this as I passed houses and places—empty caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about anybody. The bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed…. Less than a month I hope will bring home Mary. She is at Fulham, looking better in her health than ever, but sadly rambling, and scarce showing any pleasure in seeing me, or curiosity when I should come again. But the old feelings will come back again, and we shall drown old sorrows over a game of picquet again. But 'tis a tedious cut out of a life of fifty-four to lose twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two. And, to make me more alone, our ill-tempered maid is gone [Becky] who, with all her airs, was yet a home-piece of furniture, a record of better days. The young thing that has succeeded her is good and attentive, but she is nothing; and I have no one here to talk over old matters with. Scolding and quarrelling have something of familiarity and a community of interest; they imply acquaintance; they are of resentment which is of the family of dearness. Well, I shall write merrier anon. 'Tis the present copy of my countenance I send, and to complain is a little to alleviate. May you enjoy yourself as far as the wicked world will let you, and think that you are not quite alone as I am."
To the friends who came to see him he made no complaints, nor showed a sad countenance; but it was hard that he might not relieve his drear solitude by the sights and sounds of beloved London. "O never let the lying poets be believed," he writes to Wordsworth, "who 'tice men from the cheerful haunts of streets; or think they mean it not of a country village. In the ruins of Palmyra I could gird myself up to solitude, or muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleepers; but to have a little teazing image of a town about one; country folks that do not look like country folks; shops two yards square; half-a-dozen apples and two penn'orth of over-looked ginger-bread for the lofty fruiterers of Oxford Street; and for the immortal book and print stalls, a circulating library that stands still, where the show-picture is a last year's valentine…. The very blackguards here are degenerate; the topping gentry, stock-brokers; the passengers too many to insure your quiet or let you go about whistling or gaping, too few to be the fine, indifferent pageants of Fleet Street…. A garden was the primitive prison till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, satires, epigrams, puns,—these all came in on the town part and the thither side of innocence…." In the same letter he announces that they have been obliged to give up home altogether, and have "taken a farewell of the pompous, troublesome trifle called house-keeping, and settled down into poor boarders and lodgers at next door with an old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield. Here we have nothing to do with our victuals but to eat them, with the garden but to see it grow, with the tax-gatherer but to hear him knock, with the maid but to hear her scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things unknown to us save as spectators of the pageant. We are fed, we know not how; quietists, confiding ravens…. Mary must squeeze out a line propria manu, but indeed her fingers have been incorrigibly nervous to letter-writing for a long interval. 'Twill please you all to hear that, though I fret like a lion in a net, her present health and spirits are better than they have been for some time past. She is absolutely three years and a half younger since we adopted this boarding plan!… Under this roof I ought now to take my rest, but that back-looking ambition, more delightful, tells me I might yet be a Londoner! Well, if ever we do move, we have encumbrances the less to impede us; all our furniture has faded under the auctioneer's hammer, going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon or two left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must go out of it. I would live in London shirtless, bookless."
Now that Mary was recovered they did venture to try once more the experiment of London lodgings at 24 Southampton Buildings, Holborn, where Hazlitt had often stayed. But the result was worse even than could have been anticipated. May 12, 1830, Lamb writes: "I have brought my sister to Enfield, being sure she had no hope of recovery in London. Her state of mind is deplorable beyond any example. I almost fear whether she has strength, at her time of life, ever to get out of it. Here she must be nursed and neither see nor hear of anything in the world out of her sick chamber. The mere hearing that Southey had called at our lodgings totally upset her. Pray see him or hear of him at Mr. Rickman's and excuse my not writing to him. I dare not write or receive a letter in her presence."
Another old friend, the one whom, next to Coleridge, Wordsworth and Manning, Lamb valued most, died this year. Hazlitt's strength had been for some time declining; and during the summer of 1830 he lay at his lodgings, 6 Frith Street, Soho, languishing in what was to prove his death illness, though he was but fifty-two; his mind clear and active as ever, looking back, as he said, upon his past life which 'seemed as if he had slept it out in a dream or shadow on the side of the hill of knowledge, where he had fed on books, on thoughts, on pictures and only heard in half-murmurs the trampling of busy feet or the noises of the throng below.' 'I have had a happy life,' were his last words. Unfortunate in love and marriage, perhaps scarcely capable of friendship, he found the warmth of life, the tie that bound him to humanity in the fervour of his admiration for all that is great, or beautiful, or powerful in literature, in art, in heroic achievement. His ideas, as he said of himself, were "of so sinewy a character that they were in the nature of realities" to him. Lamb was by his death-bed that 18th of September.
Godwin still lived, but there seems to have been little intercourse between the old friends. Manning was often away travelling on the Continent. Martin Burney maintained his place 'on the top scale of the Lambs' friendship ladder, on which an angel or two were still climbing, and some, alas! descending,' and oftenest enlivened the solitude of Enfield. He "is as good and as odd as ever," writes Charles to Mrs. Hazlitt. "We had a dispute about the word 'heir,' which I contended was pronounced like 'air.' He said that might be in common parlance, or that we might so use it speaking of the 'Heir-at-Law,' a comedy, but that in the law courts it was necessary to give it a full aspiration and to say Hayer; he thought it might even vitiate a cause if a counsel pronounced it otherwise. In conclusion he 'would consult Serjeant Wilde'—who gave it against him. Sometimes he falleth into the water; sometimes into the fire. He came down here and insisted on reading Virgil's 'Eneid' all through with me (which he did), because a Counsel must know Latin. Another time he read out all the Gospel of St. John, because Biblical quotations are very emphatic in a Court of Justice. A third time he would carve a fowl, which he did very ill-favouredly, because 'we did not know how indispensable it was for a barrister to do all those things well. Those little things were of more consequence than we supposed.' So he goes on, harassing about the way to prosperity and losing it; with a long head, but somewhat a wrong one—harum-scarum. Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one; may-be he has tired him out."