So it came to pass that Mary took charge of the “weakly but very pretty babe”—as she recalled him, long years after, when he lay dead at Edmonton, and she, in the next room, was rambling disjointedly on about all their past. With a childish wisdom, born, surely, not of her years, but rather of her loneliness and her unrequited caresses and her craving for companionship, she became at once his big sister, his little mother, his guardian angel. She cared for him in his helpless babyhood, she gave strength to his feeble frame, she nurtured his growing brain, she taught him to talk and to walk. We seem to see the tripping of his feet, that
“—— half linger,
Half run before,”
trying to keep pace with her steps then; even as they always all through life tried to do, wheresoever she walked, until they stopped at the edge of his grave. The story of these two lives of double singleness, from these childish footprints to that grave, is simply the story of their love. He, like his own Child-Angel, was to know weakness and reliance and the shadow of human imbecility; and he was to go with a lame gait; but, in his goings, he “exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness.” And so pity springs up in us, as in angelic bosoms; and yearnings touch us, too, at the memory of this “immortal lame one.”
The boy’s next school, to which he obtained a presentation through the influence of Mr. Salt, is known officially as Christ’s Hospital, and is commonly called the Blue-Coat School. It still stands, a stately monument of the munificence of “that godly and royal child, King Edward VI., the flower of the Tudor name—the young flower that was untimely cropped, as it began to fill our land with its early odours—the boy-patron of boys—the serious and holy child, who walked with Cranmer and Ridley.” To-day, as we stay our steps in Newgate Street, and peer through the iron railings at the dingy red brick and stone facings of the ancient walls; or, as we pause under the tiny statue of the boy-king—founder, only ten days before his death, of this noble hospital for poor fatherless children and foundlings—we may look at the out-of-school games going on in the great quadrangle: the foolish flapping skirts of the striplings tucked into their red leathern waistbands to give fair and free play to their lanky yellow legs, their uncapped heads taking sun or shower with equal unconcern.
Among them, unseen of them, seem to move the forms of those other boys, Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt—all students here about this time. Our boy was then a little past seven, a gentle, affectionate lad, “terribly shy,” as he said of himself later, and made all the more sensitive by his slight stammer, which lapsed to a stutter when his nerves were wrought upon and startled. Yet he was no more left alone and isolated now than he was in after life; his schoolfellows indulged him, the masters were fond of him, and he was given special privileges not known to the others. His little complaints were listened to; he had tea and a hot roll o’ mornings; his ancient aunt used to toddle there to bring him good things, when he, schoolboy-like, only despised her for it, and, as he confessed when older, used to be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps near where they went into the grammar-school, and open her apron, and bring out her basin, with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for him. And he was allowed to go home to the Temple for short visits, from time to time, so passing his young days between “cloister and cloister.”
As he walks down the Old Bailey, or through Fleet Market—then in the full foul odour of
A CORNER IN THE BLUE-COAT SCHOOL.
its wickedness and nastiness—and so up Fleet Street on his way home, we may be sure that his eager eye alights on all that is worth its while, and that the young alchemist is already putting into practice that process by which he transmuted the mud of street and pavement into pure gold, and so found all that was always precious to him in their stones. After treading them for many years, as boy and as man, he asks: “Is any night-walk comparable to a walk from St. Paul’s to Charing Cross for lighting and paving, for crowds going and coming without respite, the rattle of coaches, and the cheerfulness of shops?”
Among his schoolfellows, Charles formed special friendships with a few select spirits; and in Coleridge—“the inspired charity-boy,” who entered the school at the same time, though three years older—he found a life-long companion. He looked up to the elder lad—dreamy, dejected, lonely—with an affection and a reverence which never failed all through life, though in after years subject to the strain of Coleridge’s alienation, absence, and silence. “Bless you, old sophist,” he wrote once to Coleridge, “who, next to human nature taught me all the corruption I was capable of knowing.”