Colebrook Cottage.
"In the first place, we may agree that this London suburb is very odd, without going into the vexed question of whether it was very 'merry.' In the second place, this same Colebrook Row was built a few years before our dear old friend was born—I believe, in 1770. In the third place, it was called a 'Row,' though 'Lane' or 'Walk' would have been as old and as good; but 'Terrace' or 'Crescent' would have rendered it unbearable. The New River flowed calmly past the cottage walls—as poor George Dyer found to his cost—bringing with it fair memories of Isaak Walton and the last two centuries. The house itself had also certain peculiarities to recommend it. The door was so constructed that it opened into the chief sitting-room; and this, though promising much annoyance, was really a source of fun and enjoyment to our dear old friend. He was never so delighted as when he stood on the hearth-rug receiving many congenial visitors as they came to him on the muddiest-boot and the wettest-of-umbrella days. His immediate neighbourhood was also peculiar.
"It was there that weary wanderers came to seek the waters of oblivion. Suicide could pitch upon no spot so favourable for its sacrifice as the gateway leading into the river inclosure before Charles Lamb's cottage. Waterloo Bridge had not long been built, and was not then a fashionable theatre for self-destruction. The drags were always kept ready in Colebrook Row, at a small tavern a few doors from the cottage. The landlord's ear, according to his own account, had become so sensitive by repeated practice, that when aroused at night by a heavy splash in the water, he could tell by the sound whether it was an accident or a wilful plunge. He never believed that poor George Dyer tumbled in from carelessness, though it was no business of his to express an opinion on the matter. After the eighth suicide within a short period, Charles Lamb began to grow restless.
"'Mary,' he said to his sister, 'I think it's high time we left this place;' and so they went to Edmonton."
[Thomas Hood.]
This remarkable man of genius whose wit and humour entitle him to high rank in English literature, was born in 1798, in the Poultry, London, where his father was, for many years, acting partner in the firm of Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, extensive booksellers and publishers. "There was a dash of ink in my blood," he writes: "my father wrote two novels, and my brother was decidedly of a literary turn, to the great disquietude, for a time, of an anxious parent." Thomas Hood was sent to a school in Tokenhouse Yard, in the City, as a day-boarder. The two maiden sisters, who kept the school, and with whom Hood took his dinner, had the odd name of Hogsflesh, and they had a sensitive brother, who was always addressed as "Mr. H.," and who subsequently became the prototype of Charles Lamb's unsuccessful farce, called "Mr. H."
In 1812, Hood was sent to a day-school, his account of which is as follows:—"In a house formerly a suburban seat of the unfortunate Earl of Essex, over a grocer's shop, up two pair of stairs, there was a very select day-school, kept by a decayed Dominie, as he would have been called in his native land. In his better days, when my brother was his pupil, he had been master of one of those wholesale concerns in which so many ignorant men have made fortunes, by favour of high terms, low ushers, gullible parents, and victimized little boys. Small as was our college, its principal maintained his state, and walked gowned and covered. His cap was of faded velvet, of black, or blue, or purple, or sad-green, or, as it seemed, of altogether, with a sad nuance of brown; his robe of crimson damask lined with the national tartan. A quaint, carved, high-backed elbowed article, looking like an émigré from a set that had been at home in an aristocratical drawing-room under the ancien régime, was his professional chair, which, with his desk, was appropriately elevated on a dais some inches above the common floor. From this moral and material eminence he cast a vigilant yet kindly eye over some dozen of youngsters: for adversity, sharpened by habits of authority, had not soured him, or mingled a single tinge of bile with the peculiar red-streak complexion so common to the wealthier natives of the north...." "In a few months, my education progressed infinitely farther than it had done in as many years under the listless superintendence of B.A. and LL.D. and assistants. I picked up some Latin, was a tolerable grammarian, and so good a French scholar, that I earned a few guineas—my first literary fee—by revising a new edition of Paul et Virginie for the press. Moreover, as an accountant, I could work a summum bonum, that is, a good sum."
Young Hood finished his education at Wanostrocht's Academy at Camberwell; and removed thence to a merchant's counting-house in the City, where he realized his own inimitable sketch of the boy "Just set up in Business:"—