And there was solace for all his privations to be found in his beloved books, and he “browsed” in many a field. “I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I call a book. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.” He had a spiritual kinship with the Elizabethans, and was worthy, in his own words, of listening to Shakespeare read aloud one of his scenes hot from his brain. Yet he was fond of the writers of the last century, and wished that he might be able to forget Fielding and Swift and the rest for the sake of reading them anew. For modern literature, save for a few favourite poems and for the works of his personal friends, he cared but little. For modern affairs he cared nothing, and knew nearly nothing about them. There is hardly a hint in his letters of the grim Napoleonic drama which was enacted during the younger years of the century; he only grieved that War and Nature and Mr. Pitt should have conspired to increase the cost of coals and bread and beer! He once heard a butcher in the market-place of Enfield say something about a change of ministry; and it struck him that he neither knew nor cared who was in and who was out. Indeed, he could not make these present times present to himself, and lived in the past, so that the so-called realities of life seemed its mockeries to him. “Hang the age! I will write for antiquity,” he told the able editor who criticised his style as not in keeping with the taste of the age. In truth, he was a walking anachronism, and beneath his nineteenth-century waistcoat pulsated a heart of the seventeenth century—that of Sir Thomas Browne, perchance.
Lamb’s first appearance in print was made anonymously during these dreary days, in the Morning Chronicle, and consisted of a sonnet to Mrs. Siddons, whom he had seen for the first time, and who had profoundly impressed him. This sonnet and three others formed his share of a small volume of “Poems on Various Subjects,” mainly by Coleridge, issued under the latter’s name in the spring of 1796. His preface says: “The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House. Independently of the signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them.” In the summer of 1797 appeared a second edition, “to which are now added poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd”—the former contributing about fifteen short poems. This Lloyd was the son of a Birmingham banker, a morbid young man addicted to rhyme and to melancholy—a recent acquaintance of Lamb’s, and one who could not have been a cheerful comrade for him, just then.
In 1798 appeared “A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret,” as its original title ran. It is the best known of his works after his essays, and we all echo Shelley’s words to Leigh Hunt: “What a lovely thing is ‘Rosamund Gray’! How much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest part of our nature in it!” And yet this “miniature romance,” as Talfourd well named it, surely seems somewhat unreal and artificial, for all its charm!
Lamb found constant comfort, too, during these dark years, in his only two intimate friends: Coleridge, with whom he had renewed his companionship, broken by Coleridge’s visit to Germany, and by his six months’ service in the Light Dragoons; and Southey, whose healthy and wholesome common-sense was just then a timely tonic for Lamb. These three youthful dreamers used to sit and smoke and speculate of nights in a little den at the back of the Salutation and Cat—a tavern at No. 17 Newgate Street, nearly opposite the old School. Two of them may haply have learned their way there while still scholars! “I image to myself that little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat, where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with poesy,” Lamb wrote, later; and he refers more than once to “that nice little smoky room at the Salutation, which is even now continually presenting itself to my recollection, with all its associated train of pipes, tobacco, egg-hot, welsh-rabbit, metaphysics, and poetry.” They say that the wary landlord, to whom Coleridge’s rhapsodies were quite unintelligible, yet who fully understood their value in drawing a knot of thirsty listeners, offered the Talker free quarters for life, if he would stay and talk!
The men who sit and smoke and soak in tap-rooms, and who never know when they are full in any sense, are just the sort to find copious refreshment in such eternal monologue. Carlyle’s concise dictum thereanent would have fallen flat on their pendulous ears: “To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether one like it or not, can in the end be exhilarating to no creature!”
The old tavern—so old, that within its walls Sir Christopher Wren used to sit often with his pipe, coming in tired from the rebuilding of St. Paul’s, just around the corner—has itself been rebuilt, the little smoky room is wiped out, the Cat has vanished, and the Salutation greets us as a slap-bang City eating-house and bar. Before the destruction of the original inn, an old fellow, who had been a Grecian in Lamb’s time, used to hobble up the entrance-way, once a year, when he came to some great function of the Blue-Coats, and look longingly into that once “murmurous haunt” through the glass door. Invited to enter one day, he stood in the smoking-room for a while, his eyes wet and his voice husky; then he went away, never to reappear. Doubtless he had drunk and smoked through many of those “O noctes cœnœque Deûm! Anglice—Welsh rabbit, punch, and poesy,” in Lamb’s words.
Another favourite resort of the three cronies was The Feathers, a dirty, dingy, delightful tavern, as I have seen it, in Hand Court, Holborn, nearly opposite the Great Turnstile leading into Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was only two minutes’ walk from the lodgings in Little Queen Street, and but a few houses distant from the oil-shop of Charles’s godfather, at the corner of Featherstone Buildings and Holborn. The Feathers has gone to its own place, a modern something maddens me on its site, and all that I have been able to rescue is the quaint sign which hung until lately above the entrance of the court in Holborn, and looked down on the frequent goings in and out of our friends.
It was while living in Pentonville that Lamb passed through his second, and his final, love-sickness. His first attack had been caused by undue exposure, when a guileless youth, unprotected by proper prophylactics, to the provocative charms of the “Alice Winterton” of his later writings. It is believed that her real name was Ann Simmons, and that he used to meet
THE FEATHERS TAVERN.