relief to his mind when wearied by labor.

On this subject hear him speaking to Bernard Barton, to whom, as to
others, he had formerly complained of his harassing duties at the India
House, and of his delightful prospect of leisure. Now he writes, "Deadly
long are the days, with but half an hour's candle-light and no fire-light.
The streets, the shops remain, but old friends are gone." "I assure you"
(he goes on) "_no_ work is worse than overwork. The mind preys on itself--
the most unwholesome food. I have ceased to care almost for anybody." To
remedy this tedium, he tries visiting; for the houses of his old friends
were always open to him, and he had a welcome everywhere. But this
visiting will not revive him. His spirits descended to zero--below it. He
is convinced that happiness is not to be found abroad. It is better to go
"to my hole at Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my corner." Again he
says, "Home, I have none. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a
forlornes head. What I can do, and overdo, is to walk. I am a sanguinary
murderer of time. But the snake is vital. Your forlorn--C. L."

These are his meditations in 1829, four years only after he had rushed
abroad, full of exaltation and delight, from the prison of a "work-a-day"
life, into the happy gardens of boundless leisure. Time, which was once
his friend, had become his enemy. His letters, which were always full of
goodness, generally full of cheerful humor, sink into discontent. "I have
killed an hour or two with this poor scrawl," he writes. It is unnecessary
to inflict upon the reader all the points of the obvious moral that
obtrudes itself at this period of Charles Lamb's history. It is clear that
the Otiosa Eternitas was pressing upon his days, and he did not know how
to find relief. Although a good Latin scholar,--indeed, fond of writing
letters in Latin,--he did not at this period resort to classical
literature. I heard him indeed once (and once only) quote the well-known