short journey to Paris--he had no personal contact with the outer
world. He delighted in his devotion to London, and stands pre-eminent
as the Londoner in literature.

Charles Lamb was the son of John Lamb, who had left his native
Lincolnshire--probably from the neighbourhood of Stamford--as a child,
and who finally found himself attached to one Samuel Salt, a Bencher
of the Inner Temple, in the capacity of "his clerk, his good servant,
his dresser, his friend, his 'flapper,' his guide, stop-watch,
auditor, treasurer." Salt's chambers were at 2, Crown Office Row, and
there John Lamb lived with a family consisting of himself, his wife,
an unmarried sister, Sarah Lamb ("Aunt Hetty"), a son John, aged
twelve, and a daughter Mary, aged eleven, when on 10th February, 1775,
there was born to him another son to whom was given the now familiar
name. Seven children had been born from 1762 to 1775, but of them all
these three alone survived. The father and his employer are sketched,
unforgetably, in Lamb's essay on "The Old Benchers of the Inner
Temple," Salt, under his own name, and Lamb under that of Lovel: "I
knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A
good fellow withal and 'would strike.' In the cause of the oppressed
he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his
opponents." The whole passage must be read in the essay itself. From
his father Charles Lamb inherited at once his literary leanings and
his humour, both heightened to an incalculable degree. We have Elia's
word for it that John Lamb the elder "was the liveliest little fellow
breathing" with a face as gay as Garrick's, and we know further that
he published a small volume of simple verse. From the father, too,
the family derived a heavier inheritance, which was to cast its shadow
over their lives from the day of Charles's early manhood to the day
half a century later, when his sister Mary, the last survivor of the