infrequently, and then only to find that, “with all my native hankering after it, it is not what it was.... The streets and shops entertaining as ever, else I feel as in a desert, and get me home to my care.” It is a touching sight, as we may picture it, that of the lonely man, with worn face and wistful eyes, wandering forlornly up and down his once familiar streets, seeing so seldom any of the once familiar faces. One day he met Mrs. Shelley in the Strand, and was—she wrote to Leigh Hunt—very entertaining and amiable, though a little deaf. He asked her if they made puns in Italy, and told her that Captain Burney once made a pun in Otaheite, the first that was ever made in that country. The natives could not make out what he meant; but all at once they discovered the pun, and danced round him in transports of joy!
During these lamentable days he saw his sister but seldom: “Alas! I too often hear her!... Her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world.” That is to me the most tender and touching utterance in all the letters since letters were invented.
At times, when her mind was not too turbid, she played piquet with him, and they talked of death; which they did not fear, nor yet wish for. Neither had been ever quite able to say with Sir Thomas Browne, in Lamb’s favourite “Religio Medici”: “I thank God I have not those strait ligaments, or narrow obligations to the world, as to dote on life, or be convulsed and tremble at the name of death.” Both wished that Mary should go first. Mrs. Cowden Clarke has told us how he said abruptly, one day—his blunt words covering his intense tenderness—“You must die first, Mary.” And she replied, with her little quiet nod and kindly smile: “Yes, I must die first, Charles!”
Death was much in their thoughts during these days. Hazlitt had died in 1830, Lamb being with him at the last; and in July, 1834, Coleridge ended, after long suffering, a life of “blighted utility,” as he himself truly put it. The passing away of this dearest of the old familiar faces profoundly affected Lamb. “His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him.” Nor did he linger long alone. One day, in the winter of that year, taking his customary walk, he stumbled, fell, and bruised his face. The wound did not seem serious, until erysipelas suddenly set in, and rapidly drained him of his insufficient vitality. So, on the 27th of December, 1834, the Festival of St. John and the Eve of the Innocents, sank to sleep forever, in the fine words of Archbishop Leighton, “this sweet diffusive bountiful soul, desiring only to do good.” He was happy in not living, as he had said long before, “after all the strength and beauty of existence is gone, when all the ‘life of life is fled,’ as poor Burns expresses it.”
It was a peaceful and painless ending, yet infinitely pitiful in its loneliness for one so essentially social in his life; his sister’s mind being too clouded to comprehend what was passing, and his only two friends who happened to be within reach—Talfourd and Crabb Robinson—arriving too late for his recognition. They heard him murmuring, with his faint voice, the names of his dear old companions. Only a few days before he had shown to a friend the mourning-ring left him by Coleridge, crying out, as he was wont to do, “Coleridge is dead.” And it had been but two weeks since, when, during a walk, he had pointed out to his sister the spot in the churchyard where he would like to lie.
They laid him there, and she loved to walk to the grave of an evening, so long as she stayed in Edmonton. Indeed, she was with difficulty induced to go away for short visits to the Moxons and other friends. She was still at the Waldens in July, 1836, for an indenture has been shown to me lately, of that date and of that place, by which she disposes of the copyright of the “Tales from Shakespear” and of “Mrs. Leicester’s School.” This document was witnessed by Edward Moxon and Frederick Walden. Her signature to it is in distinct and unshaken characters, and her middle name is written without the final e, thus, curiously enough, spelling it Ann; for it was always elsewhere and by every one spelled Anne.
Later, her lucid intervals becoming less frequent and less prolonged, and her malady growing so nearly chronic that there was only “a twilight of consciousness in her,” she was kept under care and restraint in St. John’s Wood until her death, thirteen years after his. She rests by his side, in the same grave, as they both wished. His pension had been, with rare generosity, continued to her by the East India Company, and, in addition, she enjoyed the income of his small savings (£2,000) during her life; at her death it went to Emma Isola Moxon. This was the sum total of coin which he had gathered together; his real riches were lavishly dispensed during his life, and are hoarded now by all of us who love his memory.
We walk from Enfield by the same path across the fields through which Lamb escorted Wordsworth and his other visitors to the Bell at Edmonton, there to take a parting glass with them, before the return coach to town should come along. That famous inn is no longer as it was in his day, even then still in the same state as it was when Cowper laughed all night at the diverting history of John Gilpin, just heard from Lady Austen, and said that he “must needs turn it into a ballad when he got up,” to relieve his reaction of melancholy. The balcony from which the thrifty wife gazed on Johnny’s mad career is gone, the very walls are levelled, a vilely vulgar gin-palace rises in their place, and the ancient sign, bearing the legend, The Bell and John Gilpin’s Ride, is now replaced by a great aggressive gilt emblem.
From here we turn, following Lamb’s last footsteps, perchance none too steady, along the London Road, past the old wooden taverns, steep-roofed and dormer-windowed, set well back from the highway, and on the green in front a mighty horse-trough—relic of ancient coaching conveniences. The Golden Fleece and the Horse and Groom are all unchanged; in his odd irony the modern builder has left them untouched, because they have no historic memories! Then we wind around under the railway arch, and so through dull, straggling Church Street; passing the little shop in which—then a surgery—John Keats served his apprenticeship, and wrote his “Juvenile Poems;” and by the one-storied Charity School, “A structure of Hope, Founded in
