Mary used to slip away for a few days at a time to furnished lodgings at Dalston. But all these strategic devices brought only double discomfort, and they finally resolved to go away from town altogether. Also they thought that they would like to have a whole house of their own, all to themselves. Thus it came that the letter quoted above was written. To that new home I now invite you to go with me.
As we turn from the City Road into Colebrook Row, we find an almost country road to-day, broad, tree-lined, a strip of grass running down its middle, and bordered by large, old-fashioned houses. Beneath it flows that same New River to its reservoir near Sadler’s Wells, hard by. From the top of the hill we catch a glimpse on either hand of the Regent’s Canal, as it comes out from the tunnel underneath; through the mouth of which wheezes and jangles laboriously the round-topped tug, with its chain of canal-boats. It is a pleasant approach to “Elia”—as the present owner has re-christened No. 19 Colebrook Row—for the many pilgrims from all over the English-speaking world to whom it has become a shrine. For these walls hold more memories of the brother and sister than do any of the spots we have yet seen. It stands nearly as when they lived in and left it, though no longer detached; a simple cottage of two stories and an attic, with stone steps mounting sideways. Its tiny front garden, flagged and flower-filled, is fenced off discreetly from the road, a Virginia creeper climbing over the railings.
The New River before it has been sodded over, and even the wool-gathering George Dyer, with his head in the clouds, could not tumble into it now. That was one of the most madly ludicrous scenes ever conceived, and was thus described by Lamb: “I do not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation than on seeing my old friend G. D., who had been paying me a morning visit, a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right-hand path, by which he had entered, with staff in hand and at noon-day, deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear.” B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall) happened to call soon after and “met Miss Lamb in the passage, in a state of great alarm—she was whimpering, and could only utter, ‘Poor Mr. Dyer! poor Mr. Dyer!’ in tremulous tones. I went upstairs aghast, and found that the involuntary diver had been placed in bed, and that Miss Lamb had administered brandy and water as a well-established preventive against cold. Dyer, unaccustomed to anything stronger than the ‘crystal spring,’ was sitting upright in bed, perfectly delirious. His hair had been rubbed up, and stood up like so many needles of iron-gray. He did not (like Falstaff) ‘babble o’ green fields,’ but of the ‘watery Neptune.’ ‘I soon found out where I was,’ he cried to me, laughing; and then he went wandering on, his words taking flight into regions where no one could follow.”
The “cheerful dining-room, all studded over, and rough, with old books,” is level with the front garden, and unchanged except that its several windows have now been cut into one large one: as also has been done above, in the “lightsome drawing-room, three windows, full of choice prints.” The prints and the old books are gone, and rigid rows of decorous volumes stare stonily from their shelves; grim horsehair chairs refuse the aforetime free and unforced invitation; and the stuffed corpses of dead birds, and other framed horrors of the period all about, strike terror to our souls. Against the wall, rears itself rigourously a prim piano, from which he would have fled aghast; for, in her goodness, nature had given him no taste for music, and he never had to pretend to care for it. He was constitutionally susceptible of noises, and a carpenter’s hammer, in a warm summer noon, would fret him into more than midsummer madness; but these single strokes brought no such anguish to his ear as did the “measured malice of music.” He affirmed that he had been goaded to rush out from the Opera, in sheer pain, seeking solace in street sounds!
However disfurnished may be this interior, its tiny hall, its narrow stairway, its walls—on which the Lambs may have put this very same queer marbled paper—all are in the same state as then, when they lived within and loved them. The most marked alteration has been in his once “spacious garden”—around which he challenged that professional jester, the obese, red-nosed Theodore Hook, to race him for a wager. That diminutive domain has dwindled now to an exiguous back yard, and a soda-water factory is built over its vines and vegetables.
Here the little household was enlarged and enlivened by the presence of Emma Isola, the orphaned grandchild of an Italian exile, who taught his own tongue in Cambridge, and who had been the Italian teacher of Gray and of Wordsworth. To her the Lambs, then visiting Cambridge, took a strong fancy; Mary especially pouring out on her the bounteous sympathy with which she flowed over for young people, and which won from all of them an equal fondness. They invited the lonely girl to visit them during her holidays, and finally they made her their adopted daughter, and their home her own. Mary helped her with French, Charles taught her Latin, that she might become a governess. Lamb was always quick to serve those who were poorer than himself, and, giving greatly all his life long, in Procter’s words, he always had protégés and pensioners on his bounty. Yet he was curiously provident, and never lived beyond his simple income, never ran into debt. He could and did practise economy with himself, but he was incapable of parsimony in his dealings with others.
These are De Quincey’s words about this side of the man: “Many liberal people I have known in this world ... many munificent people, but never any one upon whom, for bounty, for indulgence and forgiveness, for charitable construction of doubtful or mixed actions, and for regal munificence, you might have thrown yourself with so absolute a reliance as upon this comparatively poor Charles Lamb.”
But of all this the subject of this fervent, true tribute tells us no word. He prattled in print as freely and as frankly as Montaigne, though with none of the sentimental shamelessness of Jean Jacques Rousseau; and his delightful egotism has made plain to us his foibles and his follies. Yet, with all the rest of his life in evidence, we know nothing from him of
“That best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.”