The two lads—along with Middleton, then a Grecian in the school, afterward Bishop of Calcutta—figure together in the fine group in silver which passes from ward to ward each year, according to merit in studies and in conduct. There is a Charles Lamb prize, too, given every year, as fittingly should be, to the best English essayist among the Blue-Coat boys, consisting of a silver medal: on one side a laurel wreath enwrapped about the hospital’s arms; on the reverse, Lamb’s profile, his hair something too curly, his aspect somewhat smug. It would be a solace to his kindly spirit could he know that his memory is thus kept green in the school which he left with sorrow, and to which he always looked back fondly. When a man, he used to go to see the boys; and Leigh Hunt—who entered a little later—has left us a pleasant picture of one of these visits. Charles had been a good student in the musty classical course of the school; not fonder of his hexameters than of his hockey, however; and when he left, in November, 1789, aged nearly fifteen, he had become a deputy Grecian, he was a capital Latin scholar, he probably had a firm conviction that there was a language called Greek, and he had read widely and well in the English classics. Doubtless he was, even then, already familiar with the Elizabethan dramatists, his life-long “midnight darlings;” above all, he had nurtured himself upon the plays of Shakespeare, which were “the strongest and sweetest food of his mind from infancy.”
The somewhat sombre surroundings of his summer holidays, too, helped to form him into an “old-fashioned child.” The earliest thing he could remember, he once wrote, was Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is spelled, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire. He could just recall his visit there, under the care of “Bridget Elia”—as he named his sister in his essays. This youthful visit had been made to a farmer, one Gladman, who had married their grandmother’s sister; and his farm-house was delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. Charles describes his return thither with Mary, more than forty years after; and how, spite of their trepidation as to the greeting they might get, they were joyfully received by a radiant woman-cousin, “who might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome.”
Mainly, however, were the boy’s holidays passed with his grandmother Field, the old and trusted housekeeper of the Plumer family at Blakesware, in Hertfordshire: an ancient mansion, topped by many turrets, gables, carved chimneys, guarded all about by a solid red-brick wall and heavy iron gates. He was not allowed to go outside the grounds, and was content to wander over their trimly-kept terraces and about the tranquil park, wherein aged trees bent themselves in grotesque shapes. Beyond, he fancied that a dark lake stretched silently, striking terror to the lad’s imagination.
“So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though there lay—I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion—half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy.” It was the placid tiny Ashe, which, curving about through this valley, here brawls over one of the wears that have given the place its name, and his lake proved to be only one of its little inlets.
Within doors he would wander through the wainscoted halls and the tapestried bedrooms—“tapestry so much better than painting, not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots ... all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Actæon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more provoking, and almost culinary, coolness of Dan Phœbus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas.” He would gaze long in wonder on the busts of the Twelve Cæsars ranged around the marble hall, and would study the prints of Hogarth’s Progress of the Rake and of the Harlot hung on the walls. “Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it,” he says in the essay on “Blakesmoor in H——shire;” under which name he disguises the place. That is a delightful paper, ending with this most musical passage: “Mine too—whose else?—thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood-pidgeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery.”
Lamb went back in 1822 to revisit these boyhood scenes, only to find that ruin had been done with a swift hand, and that brick-and-mortar knaves had plucked every panel and spared no plank. The ancient mansion entirely disappeared during that year, and a new Blakesware House soon after rose on its site: “worthy in picturesque architecture and fair proportions of its old namesake,” in the words of Canon Ainger.
The boy used to go to church of a Sunday with his grandmother, to Widford; nearer to their place than their own parish church at Ware. On a stone under the noble elms many a transatlantic visitor has read the simple inscription, “Mary Field, August 5th, 1792.” Beneath it lies the grandmother.
II.
Until lately, in the year 1889, when the frenzy for Improvement and the rage for Rent wiped it out, I could have shown you a queer bit of cobble wall, set in and thus saved from ruin by the new wall of the Metal Exchange. These few square feet of stone were the sole remaining relic of the chapel of the old manor-house of Leadenhall—so named from its roofing of lead, rare in those days—which house had been presented to the City of London by the munificent Richard Whittington in 1408, to be used as a granary and market. It escaped the Great Fire, and its chapel was not torn down until June, 1812. This piece of its wall, having been preserved then, was built in with, and so formed part of, the old East India House. That famous structure stretched its stately and severe façade along Leadenhall Street just beyond Gracechurch Street, and so around the corner into Lime Street. It was, withal, a gloomy
