He delighted in playing all sorts of pranks on his sister, and was quick to improve any occasion to tease her. Such a scene is described by N. P. Willis, in his “Pencillings by the Way;” where he relates his meeting and making acquaintance with them, at a friend’s rooms in London. He and Lamb were chatting, and Mary, not quite catching all their words—she was then slightly deaf—asked, “What are you saying of me, Charles?” Instantly he answered: “Mr. Willis admires your ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ very much, and I was saying that it was no merit of yours that you understood that subject!” She took all his freaks in good part, translating them in the light of her affection for him, and of her fondness for his sweet and stingless banter.
His sense of fun bubbled up at most inapt times. He had been asked once to stand as godfather for a friend’s child, and feared he would disgrace himself at the very font. “I was at Hazlitt’s wedding and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh; I misbehaved once at a funeral.” In all this wayward whimsicality, one can detect that same depth and intensity of feeling which moved Abraham Lincoln to tell trivial stories at the most solemn crises; which suggests a sob beneath the maddest mirth of Sterne, Molière, Cervantes; which drove Charles Lamb to seize the kettle from the hob and hold it on his sister’s head-dress, like the clown in a pantomime, to hide the breaking of his great heart at the signs of the coming mania he had detected in her. He accounted it an excellent thing to play the buffoon sometimes, and was willing to seem supremely silly, that he might save his own sanity.
Acting conversely, this trembling sensibility set the tears trickling down his cheeks, while he was writing a playful paper; and made him even “shed tears in the motley Strand, for fulness of joy of so much life.”
His largeness of soul was never shown in a grander way than in his letter to, and his whole conduct toward, Robert Southey, when the latter attacked, in the Quarterly Review, the first collected “Essays of Elia”—“a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it is original.” In the same paper, he spoke arrogantly and offensively of Leigh Hunt, his own political enemy, and Lamb’s most dear and most unjustly persecuted friend. From so close a companion as Southey had been, and one who knew him so thoroughly, this hurt Lamb deeply, and he wrote to Bernard Barton: “But I love and respect Southey, and will not retort. I hate his review and his being a reviewer.” And in the London Magazine he put forth the manly “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esq.;” of which the latter said that “no resentful letter was ever written less offensively.” Then Southey—an exemplary if over-righteous mortal—sent Lamb a line of regret and affection, and Lamb wrote generously back, and the mists were melted away, and their friendship shone more steadfastly than ever. Indeed, it seems to me that Southey eclipsed Lamb in the spirit he showed in this reconciliation, forasmuch as he proved himself fine enough to forgive the man whom he had outraged. We may commend his conduct; “For right, too rigid, hardens into wrong.”
It is no part of my plan to dwell on Lamb’s religious belief. Suffice it to say that it was, like that of most Unbelievers, too large to be labelled by a set of dogmas, too spacious to be packed within church or cathedral walls. It is a stale truism that credence, less than character, is the criterion of conviction; and all history shows that the doubters are, in nearly all cases, the most deeply devout. “He prayeth well who loveth well,” Coleridge had learned; and it is my fancy that those lives, where love with voluntary humility waited on self-sacrifice, had taught him the immanent truth—“He prayeth best, who loveth best.”
As to Lamb’s utterances about these mighty matters, we may be sure that they took the tone of the man’s utterances concerning all matters; and to them we may apply Hazlitt’s phrase: “His jests scald like tears, and he probes a question with a play upon words.” Or, as Haydon put it, “He stuttered out his quaintness in snatches, like the fool in ‘Lear’.”
IV.
In the midst of the vast Covent Garden property of the Duke of Bedford is wedged a small piece of alien land, on the corner of Bow and Russell streets. It belongs to a certain Clayton estate, and is covered by three houses, which are worth more to us than all the potentialities of marketable wealth hereabout. These three houses formed but one building, at the time of erection; which was late in the last or early in the present century, as we may be convinced by every architectural point of proof without and within. It was built on the site of that famous ancient structure whose upper floor was occupied by Will’s Coffee-House; its cellars and foundations still to be traced under the estimable Ham and Beef Shop on that corner. To-day, this popular establishment is thronged for us, not with its actual eager buyers of cold baked meats, but with the shades of Addison, Swift, Smollett, Steele, Dryden, Cibber, Gay,
NO. 20 RUSSELL STREET, COVENT GARDEN.