THE EAST INDIA HOUSE.
[From an old print in the British Museum.
]
pile, with its many-columned Ionic portico. Its pediment contained a stone sovereign of Great Britain, holding an absurd umbrella-shaped shield over the sculptured figures of eastern commerce; its front was dominated by Britannia comfortably seated, at her right Europe, on a horse, and at her left Asia, on a camel.
Within its massive walls—holding memories of Warren Hastings and of Cornwallis, of Mill, gathering material for his history of India, and of Hoole, translating Tasso in leisure hours—were spacious halls and lofty rooms, statues and pictures, a museum of countless curiosities from the East. Beneath were vaults stored with a goodly share of the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, and dungeons wherein were found—on the downfall of John Company, in 1860, and the destruction of his fortress a little later—chains and fetters, and a narrow passage leading to a concealed postern: these last for the benefit of the victims of John’s press-gang, entrapped, drugged, shipped secretly down the river, and so sent across water to serve Clive and Coote as food for powder.
Upstairs, at a desk, sat Charles Lamb, keeping accounts in big books during “thirty-three years of slavery,” as he phrased it: of unfailing and untiring—albeit not untired—devotion to his duties, as his employers well knew. It was in April, 1792, just as he became seventeen, that he was first chained to this hard desk; and it came about in this way.
John Lamb, the father, had got nearly to his dotage and quite to uselessness, and was pensioned off by his master about this period. The elder brother, dear little selfish, craving John, had grown into a broad, burly, jovial bachelor, wedded to his own ways; living an easy life apart from them all; “marching in quite an opposite direction,” as his brother kindly puts it—speaking, as was his wont, not without tenderness for him. He contributed nothing to the support of the family, and Mary added but little, beyond her own meagre maintenance by dress-making on a small scale—a trade she had taught herself. In her article on needlework, written in 1814, for the British Lady’s Magazine, she says: “In early life I passed eleven years in the exercise of my needle for a livelihood.” And so it seemed needful that the boy, not yet fifteen years old on leaving Christ’s, should get to work to eke out the family’s scanty income.
John Lamb had a comfortable position in the South Sea House. It stood where now stands the Oriental Bank, at the end of Threadneedle Street, as you turn up into Bishopsgate Within: “its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars.” In his essay entitled “The South Sea House,” Lamb has drawn the picture of the place within: its “stately porticos, imposing staircases, offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces; ... the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors; ... huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated; dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams; and soundings of the Bay of Panama!” All “long since dissipated or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous Bubble.”
Here Charles was given a desk, and here he worked, but at what work and with what wage we do not know. It was not for many months, however, for he soon received his appointment in the East India House through the kindness of Samuel Salt—the final kindness that came to the family from their aged well-doer; for he died during that year, 1792. The young accountant had but little taste for, and still less knowledge of, the mercantile mysteries over which he was set to toil. He knew less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks’ standing, he said in mature manhood; and a map of old Ortelius was as authentic as Arrowsmith to him. Of history and chronology he possessed some vague points, such as he could not help picking up in the course of his miscellaneous reading; but he never deliberately sat down to study any chronicle of any country! His friend Manning once, with great painstaking, got him to think that he understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave him over in despair at the second. And, toil as toughly as he might over his accounts, he had to own, after years of adding, that “I think I lose £100 a year at the India House, owing solely to my want of neatness in making up my accounts.”
And yet, just the more uncongenial as was his labour, by just so much more did it tend in all ways to his good. Wordsworth said truly, with admirable acumen, that Lamb’s submission to this mechanical employment placed him in fine contrast with other men of genius—his contemporaries—who, in sacrificing personal independence, made a wreck of their morality and honour. No such wreck did Charles Lamb make, and his peculiar pride prevented his sacrificing ever one iota of his independence. He could be no man’s debtor nor dependant, and was content to cut his coat to suit his cloth, all his life long. His sole hatred, curiously enough, was for bankrupts; and he has portrayed with delicious irony, in his essay, “The Two Races of Men”—the men who borrow and the men who lend—the contempt of the former for money, “accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross!”