He had taken Mary to Margate in early years—or, maybe, she took him, for she was then twenty-six and he only fifteen—and he has told us, in “The Old Margate Hoy,” of this their first seaside experience, and how many things combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of his life. Neither of them had ever seen the sea, then, and had never been so long together alone and from home. Many years after, during his holidays, they went together again to the seaside at Brighton and at Hastings. In 1802, he was seized with a strong desire to go to remote regions, and hurried Mary off for a stay with Coleridge at the Lakes. There they passed three delightful weeks, although not in the fairy-land which their first sunset made them think they had come into.
Then they had a “dear, quiet, lazy, delicious month” with the Hazlitts, at Winterslow, near Salisbury, in 1809. This visit, but not its pleasure, they repeated in the following year; and journeyed from there to Oxford, Hazlitt accompanying them, and adding to their delight in the noble university town, and in the Blenheim pictures.
This trip, like most of their trips, was dearly paid for by Mary’s illness. The fatigues, the changes, and the reaction after the excitement of society, disturbed her accustomed balance, nearly always; sometimes even before they reached home. So surely was this foreseen that she used to pack a strait waistcoat among her effects, on starting on any journey, however short. Her most distressing attack occurred on their way to Paris; a tour taken with needless rashness in the summer of 1822. She was seized with her mania in the diligence, not far from Amiens, and had to be left there in charge of the nurse, whom they had taken with them for just this emergency. It pleases us to learn that the friend who met and helped them there was an American, John Howard Payne. He escorted Mary to Paris, when she was fit to travel, two months later. There Crabb Robinson met them, and says: “Her only male friend is a Mr. Payne, whom she praises exceedingly for his kindness and attention to Charles. He is the author of ‘Brutus,’ and has a good face.”
In the following year, the Lambs were able to make partial requital for Payne’s good services then, by helping him in his attempts to produce his plays and adaptations on the London and Paris boards.
With but a short holiday before him, and friends awaiting him at Versailles, Charles had gone on from Amiens as soon as he could be spared; and had to leave Paris before Mary’s arrival. She found there a characteristic note from him for her guidance. After pointing out a few pictures in the Louvre for her scrutiny—he had a pretty taste in painting as well as in engraving—he told her: “You must walk all along the borough side of the Seine, facing the Tuileries. There is a mile and a half of print-shops and book-stalls. If the latter were but English! Then there is a place where Paris people put all their dead people, and bring them flowers and dolls and gingerbread nuts and sonnets, and such trifles. And that is all, I think, worth seeing as sights, except that the streets and shops of Paris are themselves the best sight.” This was about all—these sights, the folios he loved, the fricasseed frogs he learned to love, and his meeting with Talma—that he brought away from Paris. Nor has he left any record of his visit, or of its impressions on him, such as we should have cherished.
V.
“When you come Londonward you will find me no longer in Covent Garden; I have a cottage in Colebrook 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.” Thus Lamb wrote on September 2, 1823, to Bernard Barton.
As early as in 1806, while living in Mitre Court Buildings, and anxious to finish his farce, Lamb had hired a room outside the Temple. Here he could work in quiet, free from his nocturnal visitors—knock-eternal, he called them, in one of his poorest puns. He had tried the same experiment in Russell Street, and when that refuge failed to secure privacy, he and
LAMB’S TWO HOUSES AT ENFIELD.