By the autumn of this year he has flitted from Covent Garden, and on the 2nd September writes to Bernard Barton: “When you come London-ward you will find me no longer in Covent Garden. I have a cottage in Colebrooke Row, Islington. A cottage, for it is detached; a white house, with six good rooms, the New River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if a moderate walking pace can be so termed) close to the foot of the house; and behind is a spacious garden, with vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight the heart of old Alcinous. You enter without passage into a cheerful dining-room, all studded over and rough with old books, and above is a lightsome drawing-room, three windows, full of choice prints. I feel like a great lord, never having had a house before”; and writing at the end of that week to invite Allsop to dinner on Sunday he supplies him with these directions: “Colebrook Cottage, left hand side, end of Colebrook Row, on the western brink of the New River, a detached whitish house.” To Barton, when he has been nearly three weeks at Islington, he says, “I continue to estimate my own roof-comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a lodger! My garden thrives (I am told), though I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny salad and withered carrots. But a garden’s a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in London.”
Here, in November of that year, happened the accident to George Dyer that supplied Lamb with the subject of his whimsical Elian essay, Amicus Redivivus. Dyer was an odd, eccentric, very absent-minded old bookworm who lived in Clifford’s Inn; Lamb delighted in his absurdities, and loved him, and loved to make merry over his quaint sayings and doings. “You have seen our house,” he writes to Mrs. Hazlitt, in the week after Dyer’s adventure. “What I now tell you is literally true. Yesterday week George Dyer called upon us at one o’clock (bright noonday) on his way to dine with Mrs. Barbauld at Newington. He sat with Mary about half-an-hour, and took leave. The maid saw him go out, from her kitchen window, but suddenly losing sight of him, ran up in a fright to Mary. G. D., instead of keeping the slip that leads to the gate, had deliberately, staff in hand, in broad open day, marched into the New River. He had not his spectacles on, and you know his absence. Who helped him out they can hardly tell, but between ’em they got him out, drenched through and through. A mob collected by that time, and accompanied him in. ‘Send for the Doctor,’ they said: and a one-eyed fellow, dirty and drunk, was fetched from the public-house at the end, where it seems he lurks for the sake of picking up water practice; having formerly had a medal from the Humane Society for some rescue. By his advice the patient was put between blankets; and when I came home at four to dinner, I found G. D. abed and raving, light-headed with the brandy and water which the doctor had administered. He sang, laughed, whimpered, screamed, babbled of guardian angels, would get up and go home; but we kept him there by force; and by next morning he departed sober, and seems to have received no injury.”
Before he left Islington the India Company bestowed upon Lamb the pension that at last emancipated him from his “dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood,” and he communicates the great news exultantly to Wordsworth in a letter dated “Colebrook Cottage,” 6th April 1825: “Here I am, then, after thirty-three years’ slavery, sitting in my own room at eleven o’clock this finest of all April mornings, a freed man, with £441 a year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at ninety: £441, i.e. £450, with a deduction of £9 for a provision secured to my sister, she being survivor, the pension guaranteed by Act Georgii Tertii, &c. I came home FOR EVER 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, i.e. to have three times as much real time (time that is my own) in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not. But the tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift. Holydays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys; their conscious fugitiveness; the craving after making the most of them. Now, when all is holyday, there are no holydays. I can sit at home in rain or shine without a restless impulse for walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall soon find it as natural to me to be my own master as it has been irksome to have had a master. Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good has happened to us.”
He made use of these experiences in one of the best of his essays, that on The Superannuated Man, in which also you find echoes of a letter he wrote to Bernard Barton just after he had written to Wordsworth:
“I am free, B. B.—free as air.
‘The little bird that wings the sky
Knows no such liberty!’
“I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o’clock.
‘I came home for ever!’
“I have been describing my feelings as well as I can to Wordsworth in a long letter and don’t care to repeat. Take it briefly that for a few days I was painfully oppressed by so mighty a change, but it is becoming daily more natural to me. I went and sat among ’em all at my old thirty-three years’ desk yester morning; and deuce take me if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry, sociable lads, at leaving them in the lurch, fag, fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me anything but pleasure. B. B. I would not serve another seven years for seven hundred thousand pounds.”
From Islington Lamb journeyed over to Highgate every now and then to visit Coleridge at Mr. Gilman’s; and a-visiting him at Colebrooke Cottage came Coleridge, Southey, William Hone, and among many another, Hood, to whom he took an especial liking. Coleridge thought he was the author of certain Odes that were then appearing in the London Magazine, but writing in reply Lamb assured him he was mistaken: “The Odes are four-fifths done by Hood, a silentish young man you met at Islington one day, an invalid. The rest are Reynolds’s, whose sister H. has recently married.”