But this impermanent residence in town brought no real relief, for he found that the bodies he cared for were in graves or dispersed. He sought solace in work, and made extracts for Hone’s Table Book from among the two thousand old plays left by Garrick to the British Museum. Hone had been grateful to Lamb for having contributed already to his Every Day Book; and had dedicated the issue for 1826 to him and to Mary. In doing so, he published his gratitude, most distastefully to them, saying in his preface that he could not forget “your and Miss Lamb’s sympathy and kindness when glooms outmastered me; and that your pen spontaneously sparkled in the book when my mind was in clouds and darkness. These ‘trifles,’ as each of you would call them, are benefits scored upon my heart.”
Forgiving this fulsome gush, Lamb set his pen to sparkling again in the following year, and found relief in it. “It is a sort of office-work to me—hours ten to four, the same. It does me good.” The reading-room wherein he worked is now the print-room, a venerable and musty chamber, famous in those days for its fine specimens of the Pulex literarius, or Museum flea; and doubtless infested, too—for Lamb’s irritation, as for Carlyle’s, since the latter has left it on record—by that reader, still startling us there to-day, who blows his nose “like a Chaldean trumpet in the new moon;” and by that other, who slumbers peacefully with his head in a ponderous tome, and wakes suddenly, snorting.
The assistant-librarian of the Museum at that time was the Reverend Mr. Cary—“the Dante man”—a friend of the Lambs of recent years; and Charles found congenial companionship at his table, where he was frequently invited to dine. Near the Museum, in Hart Street, F. S. Cary, the son of the librarian, had his studio; and there Charles would wander, on Thursdays, during the summer of 1834, and sit for his portrait, with Mary. He is portrayed seated in a chair, and Mary stands behind him; the figures full length and half-life size. This painting was never completed, and from it the artist made a copy of Charles alone, after death. Of this, Crabb Robinson said, a few years later: “In no one respect a likeness; thoroughly bad; complexion, figure, expression unlike. But for ‘Elia’ on a paper, I should not have thought it possible that it could have been meant for Charles Lamb.”
Another portrait of him had been painted in 1805 by William Hazlitt; his last work with the brush, we are told by his grandson. This figure, in the costume of a Venetian senator, is well known in its engravings, and is considered an interesting presentation of the man. But, beyond the fine and forcible poise of the head—the noble head which resembled that of Bacon, said Leigh Hunt, except that it had less worldly vigour and more sensibility—this is to me an unpleasing picture. It robs Lamb of just that sensibility, and transforms him into a burly, truculent, ill-conditioned creature! He was thirty years old at the time this was painted. When he was twenty-three, an admirable drawing in chalk had been made by Hancock; a profile likeness, in which the superb sweep of the cranial arch and the subtle sweet lines about the mouth are most noticeable. This, the first portrait known of him, was engraved on steel for Cottle’s “Early Recollections of Coleridge.”
A striking piece of portraiture of his mature manhood has been found within a few years. It is a water-colour sketch by Mr. Joseph, A. R. A., and had been inserted, along with many other portraits, in a copy of Byron’s “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.” This volume had been thus enlarged, in 1819, by Mr. William Evans, Lamb’s desk-companion in the East India House, and he had doubtless induced Lamb to sit for this portrait with this intent. Another admirable likeness was painted in oil, in 1827, by Henry Meyer, and this was engraved for the quarto edition of Leigh Hunt’s “Lord Byron and his Contemporaries,” published by Colburn, in 1828.
The frontispiece of our volume is a reproduction of the portrait first engraved for Talfourd’s “Letters,” published in 1837. It is known as the Wageman portrait, engraved by Finden, and is perhaps the most noted and
THE MACLISE PORTRAIT.
the most attractive of any likeness we have. Our Maclise portrait is made from an etching done by Daniel Maclise, R. A., for Fraser’s Magazine; in which pages it appeared, as one of “A Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters,” published from the year 1830 to 1838. Of all the portraits of Lamb, however, it was always held by those who had seen him that Brook Pulham’s etching on copper was the most life-like in every way ever done. We are fortunate in having so many portraits, some of them so good; for Lamb never liked to sit, regarding the desire to pose for a picture as an avowal of personal vanity.
Of serious literary work, during this period, Lamb did but little; his main pen product being his letters to his many absent friends, which give us such valuable and characteristic glimpses into the man’s lovable nature. He wrote a series of short essays, with the title “Popular Fallacies,” for the New Monthly Magazine in 1828; and a little prose miscellany—chat and souvenirs of the Royal Academy—called “Peter’s Net,” for the Englishman’s Magazine in 1831. The year before, Moxon had published a small volume of small poems by Lamb—“Album Verses”—concerning which a curious secret has only lately come to light. The critics found little to praise in these verses—and with good reason—and a review was sent to the Englishman’s Magazine, with a line to Moxon from Lamb: “I have ingeniously contrived to review myself. Tell me if this will do.” He did not praise or puff his own work, let me hasten to say; but his paper is rather a protest against the errors and carelessness of those same “indolent reviewers.” Still, it is a clear case of surreptitious self-reviewing, and of it we may say, in the words of the coy Quakeress—not Lamb’s Islington Quakeress—when she reluctantly consented to let her ardent wooer enforce his threat to kiss her—“it must not be made a practice of.”