Charles Lamb | Page 3

the
Tudor name ... boy patron of boys," the names that stand out most
prominently are those of the two who were at the school
together--Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was at that
old "Hospital," recently, alas, demolished, that these men, so different
in genius, so similar in many of their intellectual tastes, began a
memorable friendship that was only to be broken by death more than
half a century later.
A schoolfellow's description of him may help us to visualize the elusive
figure of which we have no early portraits, and the later portraits of
which are understood to be wanting in one regard or another. His
countenance, says this early observer, was mild; his complexion clear
brown, with an expression that might lead you to think that he was of
Jewish descent. His eyes were not each of the same colour: one was
hazel, the other had specks of grey in the iris, mingled as we see red

spots in the bloodstone. His step was plantigrade, which made his walk
slow and peculiar, adding to the staid appearance of his figure.
[Illustration: CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.]
For seven years--from October 1782 until November 1789--Charles
Lamb remained at Christ's Hospital, and then, close upon fifteen years
of age, returned to his parents in the Temple. His brother John had
obtained an appointment in the South Sea House, probably through the
kindly offices of Samuel Salt, who was a Deputy-Governor, and at
some unascertained date between 1789 and 1792, Charles found
employment in the same office; not, however, for long, for in April of
1792 he was appointed clerk in the accountant's office of the East India
House, at a commencing salary of £70 per annum. This same year
which thus saw the founding of Charles Lamb's humble fortunes, saw
also the beginning of the break-up of his home, for the immortal old
Bencher, Samuel Salt, died, and the Lamb family was left without its
mainstay. John Lamb the elder was past work, already, we may believe,
passing into senility; and John Lamb the younger, who appears to have
been prospering in the South Sea House, had presumably set up his
bachelor home elsewhere. Salt bequeathed to his clerk and factotum a
pension of £10 a year, and various legacies amounting to about £700.
The old home in the Temple had to be given up, but whither the family
first removed is not known. Four years later they were living in Little
Queen Street--now a portion of Kingsway--off Holborn, in a house on
the west side, the site of which is now covered by a church.
At the end of 1794--though his first known verses are dated five years
earlier--Charles Lamb had, so far as we are aware, the pleasure of
seeing himself for the first time "in print," and curiously enough here at
the earliest beginning of his life as author he was intimately associated
with Coleridge; indeed, his "effusion," a sonnet addressed to Mrs.
Siddons, appeared in "The Morning Chronicle" on 29th December,
with the signature "S. T. C." Coleridge, we learn from Lamb's letters,
altered the sonnet and was welcome to do so, and the poem properly
appears in both of their collected works; the recension is certainly not
an improvement on the original. In the spring of 1796 a small volume

of Coleridge's poems was published, four sonnets by Lamb being
included in it; and in May, 1796, was written the earliest of the rich
collection of Lamb's letters which have come down to us. In this letter
we have the first mention of the shadow which overhung the Lamb
family.
My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that
finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very
agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now,
and don't bite any one. But mad I was; and many a vagary my
imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were
told.... Coleridge, it may convince you of my regard for you when I tell
you my head ran on you in my madness as much almost as on another
person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of
my temporary frenzy.
It is assumed that the closing reference here is to Lamb's romantic love
for A---- W----; the "Anna" of some of his sonnets written about this
time, the "Alice W----" of the later "Dream Children," and other of the
essays, and that it was to the unhappy course of a deep love that
Charles Lamb owed his brief period of mental aberration. This year,
1796, which was to close in tragic gloom, was indeed marked almost
throughout by unhappiness, lightened only by the close and friendly
correspondence with Coleridge. From