“Far from me, and from my friends, be such
frigid philosophy as may conduct us, indifferent
and unmoved, over any ground, which has been
dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue.”
—Samuel Johnson.
I.
UCH is the legend that catches one’s eye, plain for all men to see, on many a hoarding in London streets. Behind those boards, wide or high, on which the callous contractor shamelessly blazons his dreadful trade—“Old Houses Bought to be Pulled Down”—he is stupidly pickaxing to pieces historic bricks and mortar which ought to be preserved priceless and imperishable. Within only a few years, I have had to look on, while thus were broken to bits and carted away to chaos John Dryden’s dwelling-place in Fetter Lane, Benjamin Franklin’s and Washington Irving’s lodgings in Little Britain, Byron’s birthplace in Hollis Street, Milton’s “pretty garden-house,” in Petty France, Westminster. The spacious fireplace by which the poet sat, during his fast-darkening days—for in this house he lost his first wife and his eyesight—was knocked down, as only one among other numbered lots, to stolid builders. And the stone, “Sacred to Milton, the Prince of Poets”—placed in the wall facing the garden, by William Hazlitt, living here early in our century, beneath which Jeremy Bentham, occupant of the adjoining house, was wont to make his guests fall on their knees—this stone has gone to “patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw.”
To this house there used to come, to call on Hazlitt, a man of noticeable and impressive presence:—small of stature, fragile of frame, clad in clothing of tightly fitting black, which was clerical as to cut and well-worn as to texture; his “almost immaterial legs,” in Tom Hood’s phrase, ending in gaiters and straps; his dark hair, not quite black, curling crisply about a noble head and brow—“a head worthy of Aristotle,” Leigh Hunt tells us; “full of dumb eloquence,” are Hazlitt’s words; “such only may be seen in the finer portraits of Titian,” John Forster puts it; “a long, melancholy face, with keen penetrating eyes,” we learn from Barry Cornwall; brown eyes, kindly, quick, observant; his dark complexion and grave expression brightened by the frequent “sweet smile, with a touch of sadness in it.”
This visitor, of such peculiar and piquant personality—externally “a rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel,” to use his own words of the singer Braham—is Charles Lamb, a clerk in the East India House, living with his sister Mary in chambers in the Inner Temple. Let us walk with him as he returns to those peaceful precincts, still of signal interest, despite the ruin wrought by recent improvements. Here, as in the day of Spenser, “studious lawyers have their bowers,” and “have thriven;” here, on every hand, we see the shades of Evelyn, Congreve, Cowper, the younger Colman, Fielding, Goldsmith, Johnson, Boswell; here, above all, the atmosphere is still redolent with sweet memories of the “best beloved of English writers,” as Algernon Swinburne well calls Charles Lamb. Closer and more compact than elsewhere are his footprints in these Temple grounds; for he was born within their gates, his youthful world was bounded by their walls, his happiest years, as boy and as man, were passed in their buildings.
And out beyond these borders we shall track his steps mainly through adjacent streets, almost always along the City’s streets, of which he was as fond as Samuel Johnson or Charles Dickens. He loved, all through life, “enchanting London, whose dirtiest, drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn.... O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardware men, pastry-cooks, St. Paul’s Churchyard, the Strand, Exeter ’Change, Charing Cross, with the man upon a black horse! These are thy gods, O London!” He couldn’t care, he said, for the beauties of nature, as they have been confinedly called; and used to persist, with his pleasing perversity, that when he climbed Skiddaw he was thinking of the ham-and-beef shop in St. Martin’s Lane! “Have I not enough without your mountains?” he wrote to Wordsworth. “I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with anything”—even with scenery! It was a serious step which Lamb took in later life, out from his beloved streets into the country; a step which certainly saddened, and doubtless shortened, the last stage of his earthly journey.
By a happy chance—for they have an unhallowed habit in London town of destroying just those buildings which I should select to save, leaving unmolested those that would not be missed, for all they ever have to say to us—nearly every one of Lamb’s successive homes has been rescued from ruin, and kept inviolate for our reverent regard. “Cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure)”—to use his own words—has been only partly rebuilt; and that end of the block wherein lived his parents stands almost in the same state as when it was erected in 1737; this date told to us to-day by the old-fashioned figures cut on its easterly end. It was then named “The New Building, opposite the Garden-Wall,” and under that division of the Chamber-Book of the Inner Temple I have hunted up its numerous occupants. By this archive, and by the Books of Accounts for the eighteenth century, I have thus been enabled to trace Samuel Salt from his first residence within the Temple in 1746, in Ram Alley Building—now gone—through successive removals, until he settled down in his last chambers, wherein he died in February, 1793. The record reads—a “parliament” meaning one of the fixed meetings in each term of the Benchers of the Temple, for the purpose of transacting business, and of calling students to the bar—“13th May, 1768. At this Parliament: It is ordered that Samuel Salt, Esquire, a Barrister of this Society, aged about Fifty, be and is hereby admitted, for his own life, to the benefit of an Assignment in and to All that Ground Chamber, No. 2, opposite the Garden Walk in Crown Office Row: He, the said Samuel Salt having paid for the Purchase thereof into the Treasury of this Society, the sum of One Hundred and Fifty pounds.”
So that it was in No. 2—the numbers having remained always unchanged—of Crown Office Row, in one of the rear rooms of the ground floor, which then looked out on Inner Temple Lane, some of which rooms have been swept away since, and others have been slightly altered, that Charles Lamb was born, on the 10th February, 1775.