Charles Lamb: A Memoir | Page 9

time to take care of old age and infirmity--has now,
with his bad leg, exemption from such duties; and I am now left alone."
In about a month after his mother's death (3d October), Charles writes,

"My poor, dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument
of the Almighty's judgment on our house, is restored to her senses; to a
dreadful sense of what has passed; awful to her mind, but tempered
with a religious resignation. She knows how to distinguish between a
deed committed in a fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother's
murder." In another place he says, "She bears her situation as one who
has no right to complain." He himself visits her and upholds her, and
rejoices in her continued reason. For her use he borrows books ("for
reading was her daily bread"), and gives up his time and all his
thoughts to her comfort.
Thus, in their quiet grief, making no show, yet suffering more than
could be shown by clamorous sobs or frantic words, the two--brother
and sister-- enter upon the bleak world together. "Her love," as Mr.
Wordsworth states in the epitaph on Charles Lamb, "was as the love of
mothers" towards her brother. It may be said that his love for her was
the deep life-long love of the tenderest son. In one letter he writes, "It
was not a family where I could take Mary with me; and I am afraid that
there is something of dishonesty in any pleasures I take without her."
Many years afterwards (in 1834, the very year in which he died) he
writes to Miss Fryer, "It is no new thing for me to be left with my sister.
When she is not violent, _her rambling chat is better to me than the
sense and sanity of the world."_ Surely there is great depth of pathos in
these unaffected words; in the love that has outlasted all the troubles of
life, and is thus tenderly expressed, almost at his last hour.
John Lamb, the elder brother of Charles, held a clerkship, with some
considerable salary, in the South Sea House. I do not retain an
agreeable impression of him. If not rude, he was sometimes, indeed
generally, abrupt and unprepossessing in manner. He was assuredly
deficient in that courtesy which usually springs from a mind at
friendship with the world. Nevertheless, without much reasoning power
(apparently), he had much cleverness of character; except when he had
to purchase paintings, at which times his judgment was often at fault.
One of his sayings is mentioned in the (Elia) essay of "My Relations."
He seems to have been, on one occasion, contemplating a group of
Eton boys at play, when he observed, "What a pity it is to think that
these fine ingenuous lads will some day be changed into frivolous
members of Parliament?" Like some persons who, although

case-hardened at home, overflow with sympathy towards distant
objects, he cared less for the feelings of his neighbor close at hand than
for the eel out of water or the oyster disturbed in its shell.
John Lamb was the favorite of his mother, as the deformed child is
frequently the dearest. "She would always love my brother above
Mary," Charles writes in 1796, "although he was not worth one tenth of
the affection which Mary had a right to claim. Poor Mary! my mother
never understood her right." In another place (after he had been
unburdening his heart to Coleridge), he writes cautiously, "Since this
has happened,"-- the death of his mother,--"he has been very kind and
brotherly; but I fear for his mind. He has taken his ease in the world,
and is not fit to struggle with difficulties. Thank God, I can unconnect
myself with him, and shall manage my father's moneys myself, if I take
charge of Daddy, which poor John has not hinted a wish at any future
time to share with me." Mary herself, when she was recovering, said
that "she knew she must go to Bethlehem for life; that one of her
brothers would have it so; the other would not wish it, but would be
obliged to go with the stream."
At this time, reckoning up their several means of living, Charles Lamb
and his father had together an income of one hundred and seventy or
one hundred and eighty pounds; out of which, he says, "we can spare
fifty or sixty pounds at least for Mary whilst she stays in an asylum. If I
and my father and an old maid-servant can't live, and live comfortably,
on one hundred and thirty or one hundred and twenty pounds a year, we
ought to burn by slow fires. I almost would, so that Mary might not go
into a hospital." She was