Nothing in this interior speaks to us of its old tenants. They were seen, on their coming to take the house, by a schoolboy next door, who has given this pleasing description of them: “Leaning idly out of a window, I saw a group of three issuing from the ‘gambogy-looking cottage’ close at hand—a slim, middle-aged man in quaint, uncontemporary habiliments, a rather shapeless bundle of an old lady, in a bonnet like a mob-cap, and a young girl; while before them bounded a riotous dog [Hood’s immortal ‘Dash’], holding a board, with ‘This House To Let’ on it, in his jaws. Lamb was on his way back to the house-agent’s, and that was his fashion of announcing that he had taken the premises.”
In the summer of 1829, the family of three left this home, the care of which was wearing too heavily on Mary. “We have taken a farewell of the pompous, troublesome trifle called housekeeping, and are settled down into poor boarders and lodgers, at next door, with an old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield.... Our providers are an honest pair, Dame Westwood and her husband; he, when the light of prosperity shined on them, a moderately thriving haberdasher within Bow Bells, retired since with something under a competence ... and has one anecdote, upon which, and about £40 a year, he seems to have retired in green old age.” It was “forty-two inches nearer town,” Lamb wrote, and it still is there, next door to their first Enfield home, as you see it in our cut: a comfortable cottage set back from the road, vines clambering over its small entrance-porch and hiding all the walls. In its little back sitting-room were written the “Last Essays of Elia.” In this house he remained for almost four years, and in 1833 he made his last remove—except the final one we all must make—to Edmonton.
VI.
These years at Enfield were not happy years. They were both getting old; Mary’s malady was growing on her, taking her more frequently from home; and even the visits of their child, Emma Isola—she was now a governess—mitigated his loneliness but slightly. His removal to the country had left his friends a long way behind, and, for all his urging, they could not come often so far afield for informal calls. “We see scarce anybody,” he laments. Hazlitt and Hood and Hunt came occasionally; faithful Martin Burney fetched forth his newest whim for their amusement; and loyal Crabb Robinson often walked out to take tea or to play whist, or for a stroll in the fields with Charles. Once, as he has recorded in his “Diary,” he brought the mighty Walter Savage Landor for a call: “We had scarcely an hour to chat with them, but it was enough to make both Landor and Worsley express themselves delighted with the person of Mary Lamb, and pleased with the conversation of Charles Lamb; though I thought him by no means at his ease, and Miss Lamb was quite silent. Nothing in the conversation recollectable. Lamb gave Landor White’s ‘Falstaff’s Letters.’ Emma Isola just showed herself. Landor was pleased with her, and has since written verses on her.” Only this once did Lamb and Landor come face to face.
Lamb had always hated the country. “Let not the lying poets be believed, who entice men from the cheerful streets,” he querulously complains; and he asks, “What have I gained by health? Intolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate meals? A total blank.... Let no native Londoner imagine that health and rest, innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.”
He was unable to read or write to any extent in hot weather; “what I can do, and do over-do, is to walk; but deadly long are the days, these summer all-day days, with but a half-hour’s candle-light, and no firelight.” Sometimes, of a “genial hot day,” he would do his twenty miles and over. Once he took charge of a little school during the master’s short absence; and his first exercise of authority was to give the boys a holiday! But nothing abated his boredom, and even in his bed he repined: “In dreams I am in Fleet Street, but I wake and cry to sleep again.” And when he went to town, and sought in Fleet Street fresh sights and fresher air, he found no content: “The streets, the shops, are left, but all old friends are gone.... Home have I none, and not a sympathizing house to turn to in the great city.”
He took lodgings for a while at No. 24 Southampton Buildings, within sight of his former quarters at No. 34 of the same street—a house in which Hazlitt frequently had put up, not far from the house famed for his “ancillary affection!” The numbers remain unchanged; and you may look at the queer old
NO. 34 SOUTHAMPTON BUILDINGS.
stuccoed front on any day you choose to turn out from Chancery Lane. The house has a strange, sloping roof of tiles, and altogether it is quite unlike any of its neighbours.