There is a pregnant sentence in one of Lamb's letters that flashes with
the vividness of lightning into the darkest recesses of those early
troubles and embarrassments. "We are," he wrote to Coleridge, "_in a
manner marked_."

Charles Lamb after some weeks obtained the release of his sister from
the Hoxton Asylum by formally undertaking her future guardianship,--a
charge which was borne, until Death released the compact, with a
steadfastness, a cheerful renunciation of what men regard as the
crowning blessings of manhood, [8] that has shed a halo more radiant even
than that of his genius about the figure--it was "small and mean," said
sprightly Mrs. Mathews--of the India House clerk.

As already stated, the mania that had once attacked Charles never
returned; but from the side of Mary Lamb this grimmest of spectres never
departed. "Mary A is again _from home_;" "Mary is _fallen ill_ again:"
how often do such tear-fraught phrases--tenderly veiled, lest! some
chance might bring them to the eye of the blameless sufferer--recur in
the Letters! Brother and sister were ever on the watch for the symptoms
premonitory of the return of this "their sorrow's crown of sorrows."
Upon their little holiday excursions, says Talfourd, a strait-waistcoat,
carefully packed by Miss Lamb herself, was their constant companion.
Charles Lloyd relates that he once met them slowly pacing together a
little footpath in Hoxton fields, both weeping bitterly, and found on
joining them that they were taking their solemn way to the old asylum.
Thus, upon this guiltless pair were visited the sins of their fathers.

With the tragical events just narrated, the storm of calamity seemed to
have spent its force, and there were thenceforth plenty of days of calm
and of sunshine for Charles Lamb. The stress of poverty was lightened