Charles Lamb | Page 5

always with loving solicitude,
though ever and again she had to be removed during recurring attacks
of her mental malady. In this brief summary of the story of Charles
Lamb's life it is not necessary to keep referring to this fact, though it
should be borne in mind that from time to time throughout their lives,
Mary, affected now by solitariness and now by the over-excitement of
seeing many friends, had to be placed under restraint for periods
varying from a few weeks to several months. In this spring of 1799, too,
with Mary's return to share her brother's life, began a new trouble. They
were, as Lamb put it, "in a manner marked," and had frequently to
change their lodgings until they were once more domiciled in the
sanctuary of the Temple, where they had been born and where they had

passed their childhood and youth.
[Illustration: CHRIST'S HOSPITAL: THE DINING HALL.]
In the first feeling of his horror after his mother's death, and with a
sense of all the responsibility that had fallen upon his shoulders Lamb
had disclaimed any further interest in literature, had asked Coleridge
not to mention it, not to include his name in a projected volume. Yet he
was to find in reading and in writing--and in the friendship of those
who cared for reading and writing--at once a solace and a joy in his
own life and a passport to the affections of generations of readers. In
1797 there was published a new edition of Coleridge's Poems, "to
which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd." In
the summer of the same year he spent a week at Nether Stowey with
Coleridge,[2] and in the autumn he and Lloyd passed a fortnight with
Southey in Hampshire. He was consolidating the friendships which
were to bind him ever closer to letters. With Coleridge, as we have seen,
he was on terms of intimacy, and when that poet went abroad for a
while Southey became Lamb's most intimate correspondent. The
keenly sensitive young man later resented being dubbed
"gentle-hearted," and an apparent assumption of lofty superiority on the
part of his friend, stung him to a memorable retort. We may take the
story from one of Lamb's own letters to Southey:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the eternal regret of his native Devonshire,
emigrates to Westphalia: "poor Lamb" (these were his last words), if he
wants any knowledge, he may apply to me. In ordinary cases I thank
him. I have an "Encyclopaedia" at hand; but on such an occasion as
going over to a German University, I could not refrain from sending
him the following proposition to be by him defended or oppugned (or
both) at Leipsic or Gottingen.
[Footnote 2: Coleridge, disabled by some slight accident, was unable to
accompany his friends on their walks during this visit of the Lambs,
and once when they had left him he wrote the beautiful poem, "This
Lime Tree Bower My Prison," which he "addressed to Charles Lamb,
of the India House, London." In it that friend was referred to in this
passage:

Yes! they wander on In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad, My
gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined And hungered after Nature,
many a year, In the great City pent, winning thy way With sad yet
patient soul, through evil and pain And strange calamity! ]
The Theses, as given in the letter to Coleridge, are as follows:
Theses Quædam Theologicæ.
First, Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?
Second, Whether the Archangel Uriel could affirm an untruth? and if
he could, whether he would?
Third, Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather to be
reckoned among those qualities which the school men term virtutes
minus splendidæ?
Fourth, Whether the higher order of Seraphim illuminati ever sneer?
Fifth, Whether pure intelligences can love?
Sixth, Whether the Seraphim ardentes do not manifest their virtues by
the way of vision and theory; and whether practice be not a
sub-celestial and merely human virtue?
Seventh, Whether the vision beatific be anything more or less than a
perpetual re-presentment to each individual angel of his own present
attainments and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal
looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and
self-satisfaction?
Eighth, and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may not
come to be condemned at last, and the man never suspect it before
hand?
The poet did not reply, and the misunderstanding between the two was
happily not long continued. I have sometimes doubted whether
Coleridge ever knew Lamb so well as Lamb knew Coleridge, though of

his affection for the brother and sister there can be no doubt; of them he
wrote at the end of his life:
Dear to my heart, yea as it