her during his holidays at his grandmother’s place. For, with all his delightful egoistic frankness in prattling about himself, this was the one point too tender to be touched on, seriously or jocularly, ever to any one. It is of her, surely, that he is thinking in two of his four sonnets in the Coleridge collection, wherein he speaks of his “fancied wanderings with a fair-haired maid.” He placed the scene of “Rosamund Gray” in the cottage where lived Ann Simmons, near Widford, not far from Blakesware; and they show to sentimental strangers that portion of the cluster of cottages still left. They claim that it is her portrait which he drew for that of his heroine, even as he is the Allan Clare of the little story. He certainly hints, just for once, at this love scrape in that letter to Coleridge in which he speaks of his six weeks’ stay in the Hoxton Asylum: “It may convince you of my regard for you when I tell you that my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.” But his recovery from both derangements was radical and permanent, and he was able to say, only a little later: “I am pleased and satisfied with myself that this weakness troubles me no longer. I am wedded, Coleridge, to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father.” That wedding to the fortunes of his sister was his life-long union, and haply saved him from any other, which would have harmed, rather than have helped, this man; and would have sacrificed deplorably this vivid personality on the altar of the greatly-glorified god, the infestive Humdrum.
His serene good sense asserted its strength, at no time and in no way, so signally as in his absolute emancipation from this transient enslavement; and in his sedate statement of the fact—true in so many cases where the victim is too stupid to know it or too timorous to own it—that, “if it drew me out of some vices, it also prevented the growth of many virtues.”
As is usual, however, with the amatory infirmity, he suffered from that slight and superficial relapse, later in life, to which I have already referred. In his daily goings to and fro in Islington, he used to meet the lovely Quakeress, to whom he never spoke, and whom he adored silently and from afar. He only knew that she was named Hester, and it is her name which he has made immortal and her sweet memory which he has embalmed imperishably in his exquisite verses:
“When maidens such as Hester die.”
And his first, his serious, affair may have justified its existence by recalling to us his well-known wish that no incident, no untoward accident even, of his life might have been reversed. So it is, that in his “New Year’s Eve” he avers that “it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair and fairer eyes of Alice W——n, than that so passionate a love-adventure should be lost.”
III.
“I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be agreeable, at Our Lady’s next feast. I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms, which look out (when you stand a-tiptoe) over the Thames and Surrey Hills, at the upper end of King’s Bench Walk, in the Temple. There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance, and shall be able to lock my friends out, as often as I desire to hold free converse with any immortal mind—for my present lodgings resemble a minister’s levée, I have so increased my acquaintance (as they call ’em) since I have resided in town.” In this letter, written to Manning early in 1801, three significant points call for comment. The phrase “in town,” referring to his residence in Southampton Buildings, shows how his previous abode in Islington was then in the country, and how the squalid houses of the foul Chapel Street of to-day have supplanted those pleasant cottages set in gardens, with rural lanes cutting the fields between. His curt reference to their “having received a hint” to move, proves how pitifully they were “marked,” as he had already put it, and how soon even the kindly Gutch withdrew his offer of shelter. The few words, “I have so increased my acquaintance” give a wide suggestion of the already growing attraction of this odd, original young character to all bright minds and sweet natures with whom he came in contact.
And so, on Lady Day, March 25, 1801, he and Mary moved into the Temple, there to begin, near their childhood home, that life of “dual loneliness,” never again broken in upon: consoled by their mutual affection, cheered by their common tastes, brightened by the companionship of congenial beings. In the Temple they remained for seventeen years, living in two sets of chambers during that period. After eight years’ abode at No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, they were compelled to quit, their landlord wanting the rooms for himself. Towards the end of March, 1809, in a letter to Manning, then in China, Lamb wrote as if he were in the next street: “While I think of it, let me tell you we are moved. Don’t come any more to Mitre Court Buildings. We are at 34 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, and shall be here till about the end of May, when we remove to No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, where I mean to live and die.”
Their home in Southampton Buildings during these few months while changing chambers still stands intact; a delightful old square, solid, brick house, just in front of the tiny garden of Staple Inn. But both blocks of buildings in which he lived during those seventeen years in the Temple have been torn down and replaced by modern structures.
Although he disliked leaving the old chambers, he found the new set, on the third and fourth floors of No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, “far more commodious and roomy.... The rooms are delicious, and the best look back into Hare Court, where there is a pump always going. Just now it is dry. Hare Court trees come in at the window, so that it is like living in a garden!” This was written to Coleridge, in June, 1809; and to Manning, in letters during this period, Lamb spoke of the churchyard-like court having “three trees and a pump in it. Do you know it? I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old ... the water of which is excellent cold, with brandy, and not very insipid without. Here I hope to set up my rest and not quit till Mr. Powell, the undertaker, gives me notice that I may have possession of my last lodging. He lets lodgings for single gentlemen.... I should be happy to see you any evening. Bring any of your friends, the Mandarins, with you.”