I have passed all my days in London ... the lighted shops of
the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades,
tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all
the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the
very women of the town; the watchmen, drunken scenes,
rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the
night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the
crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses
and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons
cheapening books, coffee houses, steams of soups from
kitchens, the pantomimes--London itself a pantomime and a
masquerade--all these things work themselves into my mind,
and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of
these sights impels me into night walks about her crowded
streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from
fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be
strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But
consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to
have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such
scenes?

In whimsical exaggeration Lamb sometimes wrote of his aversion from
country sights and sounds, adopting that method partly perhaps for the
purpose of rallying his correspondents, and partly for the purpose of
accentuating his own "unrural notions." He was a Londoner of
Londoners. In London he was born and educated, and in London--with a
few of his later years in what is now but an outer suburb--he passed
the fifty-nine years of his life. Beyond some childish holidays in
pleasant Hertfordshire, a few brief trips into the country--to
Coleridge at Stowey and at Keswick, to Oxford and Cambridge, and one