During the two years or more after his release from the India House, Lamb and his sister spent two or three short holidays lodging with a Mrs. Leishman at The Chase, Enfield; in 1827 they rented the house of her, and Lamb wrote from that address on the 18th September to Hood, who was then living at 2 Robert Street, Adelphi: “Give our kind loves to all at Highgate, and tell them we have finally torn ourselves outright away from Colebrooke, where I had no health, and are about to domicilate for good at Enfield, where I have experienced good.

‘Lord, what good hours do we keep!
How quietly we sleep!’...

We have got our books into our new house. I am a dray-horse if I was not ashamed of the undigested dirty lumber, as I toppled ’em out of the cart, and blest Becky that came with ’em for her having an unstuffed brain with such rubbish.... ’Twas with some pain we were evulsed from Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh sticking to the doorposts. To change habitations is to die to them; and in my time I have died seven deaths. But I don’t know whether every such change does not bring with it a rejuvenescence. ’Tis an enterprise; and shoves back the sense of death’s approximating which, though not terrible to me, is at all times particularly distasteful. My house-deaths have generally been periodical, recurring after seven years; but this last is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrook!” He mentions that the rent is 10s. less than he paid at Islington; that he pays, in fact, £35 a year, exclusive of moderate taxes, and thinks himself lucky.

But the worry of moving brought on one of Mary Lamb’s “sad, long illnesses”; and whilst she was absent, Lamb fled from the loneliness of his country home to spend ten days in town. “But Town,” he writes to Barton, “with all my native hankering after it, is not what it was. The streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. And in London I was frightfully convinced of this as I past houses and places—empty caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about anybody. The bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old Clubs, that lived so long and flourished so steadily, are crumbled away. When I took leave of our adopted young friend at Charing Cross, ’twas heavy unfeeling rain and I had nowhere to go. Home have I none—and not a sympathising house to turn to in the great city. Never did the waters of the heaven pour down on a forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend’s house, but it was large and straggling—one of the individuals of my long knot of friends, card-players, pleasant companions—that have tumbled to pieces into dust and other things—and I got home on Thursday convinced that I was better to get home to my hole at Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my corner. 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 sixty-four, to lose twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two.”

CHARLES LAMB

The cares of housekeeping, however, sat too heavily on them, and in October 1829 they abandoned those responsibilities, gave up their cottage on Chase Side, and went to lodge and board with their next-door neighbours, an old Mr. and Mrs. Westwood, and in this easier way of living their spirits and their health revived. Nevertheless, by January 1830 Lamb had lost all his contentment with rural life, and was yearning desperately for the remembered joys of London. “And is it a year since we parted from you at the steps of Edmonton stage?” he writes to Wordsworth. “There are not now the years that there used to be.” He frets, he says, like a lion in a net, and then goes on to utter that yearning to be back in London that I have quoted already in my opening chapter. “Back-looking ambition,” he continues, “tells me I might still be a Londoner! Well, if we ever do move, we have incumbrances 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.” And to Bernard Barton he says, “With fire and candle-light I can dream myself in Holborn.... Give me old London at Fire and Plague times, rather than these tepid gales, healthy country air, and purposeless exercise.”

Early in 1833 he removed from Enfield, and his reasons for doing so he explains in a letter to Mrs. Hazlitt, on the 31st May of that year: “I am driven from house to house by Mary’s illness. I took a sudden resolution to take my sister to Edmonton, where she was under medical treatment last time, and have arranged to board and lodge with the people. Thank God I have repudiated Enfield. I have got out of hell, despair of heaven, and must sit down contented in a half-way purgatory. Thus ends this strange eventful history. But I am nearer to town, and will get up to you somehow before long.” About the same date he wrote to Wordsworth: “Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months, followed by two of depression most dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing—nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration—shocking as they were to me then. In short, half her life she is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the next shock. With such prospects it seemed to me necessary that she should no longer live with me, and be fluttered with continual removals; so I am come to live with her, at a Mr. Walden’s, and his wife, who take in patients, and have arranged to lodge and board us only. They have had the care of her before. I see little of her: alas! I too often hear her. Sunt lachrymæ rerum! and you and I must bear it.... I am about to lose my old and only walk-companion, whose mirthful spirits were the ‘youth of our house,’ Emma Isola. I have her here now for a little while, but she is too nervous properly to be under such a roof, so she will make short visits—be no more an inmate. With my perfect approval and more than concurrence she is to be wedded to Moxon at the end of August—so ‘perish the roses and the flowers’—how is it? Now to the brighter side. I am emancipated from the Westwoods, and I am with attentive people and younger. I am three or four miles nearer the great city; coaches half-price less and going always, of which I will avail myself. I have few friends left there; one or two though, most beloved. But London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though not one known of the latter were remaining.”

Emma Isola is “the adopted young friend” referred to by Lamb in a letter quoted a few pages back. She was the granddaughter of an Italian refugee; her mother was dead; her father was an “Esquire Bedell” of Cambridge, and the Lambs met her at the house of a friend when they were visiting that town in 1823. She was a charming, brown-faced little girl, and they were so taken with her that she was invited to visit them in London during her holidays, and they ended by adopting her and calling her their niece. She brought a great deal of happiness into their lives; Lamb gives whimsical accounts in some of his letters of how he is teaching her Latin, and his sister is prompting her in her French lessons. When she was old enough she became governess in the family of a Mr. and Mrs. Williams at Bury; fell ill and was kindly nursed there; and Lamb tells in one of his most delightful letters how he went to fetch her home to Enfield, when she was convalescent, and it is good to glimpse how sympathetically amused he is at Emma’s covert admonitions and anxiety lest he should drink too much, at dinner with the Williamses, and so bring disgrace upon himself and her.

His beautiful affection for their young ward shines through all the drollery of his several notes to Edward Moxon (the publisher) in which he speaks of their engagement; and it has always seemed to me it is this same underlying affection for her and wistfulness to see her happy that help to make the following letter, written just after the wedding, one of the finest and most pathetic things in literature:—