For Samuel Salt, Esquire—one of “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,” whose pensive gentility is portrayed in Elia’s essay of that title—had in his employ, as “his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his ‘flapper,’ his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer,” one John Lamb; who formed, with his wife and children, the greater part of the household. Of him, too, under the well-chosen name of Lovel, we have the portrait, vivid and rounded, in his son’s paper. “He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal and ‘would strike.’ In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents.... Lovel was the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick’s, whom he was said greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry—next to Swift and Prior—moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage-boards and such small cabinet toys, to perfection; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch better than any man of his degree in England; had the merriest quips and conceits, and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of the angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr. Izaak Walton would have chosen to go a-fishing with.” In truth,
“A merry cheerful man. A merrier man,
A man more apt to frame matter for mirth,
Mad jokes and antics for a Christmas-eve,
Making life social, and the laggard time
To move on nimbly, never yet did cheer
The little circle of domestic friends.”
This John Lamb was devoted to the welfare of his master, Samuel Salt; who, in turn, did nothing without consulting him, or failed in anything without expecting and fearing his admonishing. “He put himself almost too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in the world.” To him and to his children Salt was a life-long benefactor, and never, until death had made an end to the good man’s good deeds, did there fall on the family any shadow of change or trouble or penury.
It was in Salt’s chambers that Charles and his sister Mary, in their youthful years, “tumbled into a spacious closet of good old English reading, and browsed at will on that fair and wholesome pasturage:” thus already so early drawn together by kindred tastes and studies, even as they were already at one in their joint heritage of the father’s latent mental malady. They had learned their letters, and picked up crumbs of rudimentary knowledge, at a small school in Fetter Lane, hard by the Temple; the boys being taught in the mornings, the girls in the afternoons. It stood on the edge of “a discoloured, dingy garden in the passage leading into Fetter Lane from Bartlett’s buildings. This was near to Holborn.” Bartlett’s name is still kept alive in Bartlett’s Passage, right there; but no stone of his building now stands; and the only growth of any garden in that turbulent thoroughfare to-day is pavement and mud and obscene urchins.
The inscription painted over their school-door asserted that it was kept by “Mr. William Bird, Teacher of Mathematics and Languages.” “Heaven knows what languages were taught in it, then! I am sure that neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it, but a little of our native English”—so Charles wrote nearly fifty years after to William Hone, the editor of the Every Day Book. In its pages had just appeared a woful narrative of the poverty and desolation of one Starkey, who had been “a gentle usher” in that school. In the letter written by Lamb as a pendant to that paper, he gossips characteristically about the memories of those school-days thus awakened in him and in his sister. He vividly portrays that down-trodden and downcast usher, who “was not always the abject thing he came to;” and who actually had bold and figurative words for the big girls, when they talked together, or teased him during his recitations. “Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those uncomfortable sloping desks, where we sat elbowing each other; and the injunctions to attain a free hand, unattainable in that position!”
They had, also, an aged school-dame here, who was proud to prattle to her pupils about her aforetime friend, Oliver Goldsmith; telling them how the good-natured man, then too poor to present her with a copy of his “Deserted Village,” had lent it to her to read. He had become famous now, and so affluent—by the success of “The Good Natur’d Man,” indeed!—that he had bought chambers on the second floor of No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple. This was but a biscuit toss from Crown Office Row, and perchance little Mary Lamb sometimes met, within the grounds, the short, stout, plain, pock-marked Irish doctor. He died in those chambers, only ten months before the birth of Charles; and was buried somewhere in the burying-ground of the Temple church. Within it, the Benchers put up a tablet to his memory. It is now in their vestry, wherein you shall also find the baptismal records of nearly all the Lamb children. The inscription on the tablet may have been first spelled out by Mary to her small and eager brother. Doubtless the two children knew the exact spot of his grave—known exactly to none of us to-day—even as they knew every corner and cranny of the Temple grounds and buildings. They played in its gardens, and looked down on them from these same upper windows of No. 2 Crown Office Row, which have been selected by Mr. Fulleylove for his point of view. Then these gardens were as Shakespeare saw them, when he, by a blameless anachronism, caused to be enacted in them the famous scene of the Roses; really rehearsed there, years before, when Warwick assigned the rose to Plantagenet. Now, the grounds have been extended riverwards by the construction of the Embankment; and the ancient historic blocks of buildings about them have been vulgarized into something new and fine.
Mary and Charles were always together during these early days. Of the seven children born into the family, only three escaped death in infancy: our two, and their brother John, elder by two years than Mary. Their mother loved them all, but most of all did she love “dear, little, selfish, craving John;” who, as was well written by Charles in later life, was
THE TEMPLE GARDENS, FROM CROWN OFFICE ROW.
not worthy of one-tenth of that affection which Mary had a right to claim. But the mother, like the father, was fond of fun, and found her favourite in her handsome, sportive, noisy boy; showing scant sympathy with and no insight into the “moythered brains”—her own phrase—of her sensitive, brooding daughter, who already gave unheeded evidence of the congenital gloom by which her mind was to become so clouded. Another member of the small household was the father’s queer old-maiden sister, Aunt Hetty, who passed her days sitting silently or mumbling mysteriously as she peered over her spectacles at the two children, huddled together in their youthful fear of her.