EDMONTON CHURCH, FROM LAMB’S GRAVE.
Faith, on the basis of Charity, 1784,” as the legend reads over the head of the queer little female figure in the niche. Its mistress, drawn by Lamb’s cheery voice as he came out, used to run to her window to look at the “spare, middle-sized man in pantaloons,” as she described him.
For Bay Cottage—so called in his day, now well re-named Lamb’s Cottage, next to the rampant lions on the gate-posts of Lion House—stands nearly opposite the small school; and it was through this long, narrow strip of front garden, cut by a gravelled footpath, and railed in by iron palings, that Charles Lamb walked for the last time, and was carried to his final resting-place. At its farther end squats the small cottage, darkened and made more diminutive by the projecting houses on both sides. On the left of the hall—large by contrast—is their snug sitting-room, not more than twelve feet square, low-ceilinged, deep-windowed, with a great beam above. Mounting by a narrow, winding, tiny staircase, with its Queen Anne balustrade—under which partly lies the dingy dining-room—we find ourselves in his front bedroom, his death-room, with one window only, as in the sitting-room beneath. Mary’s large bedroom is behind, with two good windows, looking out on the long strip of back garden, wherein are aged trees and young vegetables. Nothing within these walls has suffered any change.
It is but two minutes’ walk to the great, desolate graveyard, encircling all about the ancient church; whose square, squat, battlemented tower shows its mellow tints through dark masses of ivy. Service was going on when I went for the first time to this spot, a few years since, and I waited until the officiating clergyman had finished his functions, that I might learn from him the location of the grave I had come so far to see. He could not tell me! He had heard that Charles Lamb was buried in his churchyard, but he had never seen the grave, nor had he been unduly inquisitive about it. After we had found it, a crippled impostor, lounging on the lookout for stray pence, scrambled up with affectation of mute sympathy, and swarmed down with scissors on the long grass about the small mound. That parson’s ignorance, the obscurity and desolation of the grave, the shocking structure of the stone-mason order of architecture dominating it, well-cared for, and aggressively commemorating one “Gideon Rippon, of the Eagle House, Edmonton, and of the Bank of England”: all this is typical of the relation borne by literature to Genteel Society in England. Its combined cohorts of The Nobility, Clergy, and Gentry do not know, and do not want to know, about the burial-place of their only Charles Lamb; but they do due reverence, with naïve and unconscious vulgarity, to the memory of the bank official who kept Books or handled Money. Lamb himself, with his large sense of the ludicrous and his small sense of the decorous, would have been tickled by the harmony between this state of affairs and his whole life. To this grave—a peopled solitude it is to us—come pilgrims from the other side of the ocean, and sometimes the Blue-Coat boys in small groups. The dreary and tasteless head-stone bears Cary’s feeble lines, affectionate enough, no doubt; but who cares to wade through a deluge of doggerel, to learn that Lamb’s “meek and harmless mirth no more shall gladden our domestic hearth”? The acutest criticism on this epitaph was made by a knowing “navvy,” who, having spelled it through painfully, said to his companion: “I’m blest if it isn’t as good as any in the churchyard; but a bit too long, eh, mate?”
They have quite lately put up, in the church’s single aisle, a mural monument, in which, under twin arches, perked up with crocketed commonplaces, are the medallion busts of Charles Lamb and William Cowper. Under the former—the only one which concerns us now—is cut this inscription, fitly followed by Wordsworth’s impressive lines: “In Memory of Charles Lamb, the gentle Elia, and author of the Tales from Shakespeare. Born in the Inner Temple, 1775, educated at Christ’s Hospital, Died at Bay Cottage, Edmonton, 1834, and buried beside his sister Mary in the adjoining churchyard—
“‘At the centre of his being lodged
A soul by resignation sanctified:
Oh, he was good, if e’er a good man lived.’”
THE GRAVE OF CHARLES AND MARY ANNE LAMB AT EDMONTON.