housekeeper, he says, is seventy years old; "he has something, under a
competence;" he has one joke, and forty pounds a year, upon which he
retires in a green old age: he laughs when he hears a joke, and when
(which is much oftener) he hears it not. Having served the greater parish
offices, Lamb and his sister become greater, being _his_ lodgers, than
they were when substantial householders. The children of the village
venerate him for his gentility, but wonder also at him for a gentle
indorsation of the person, not amounting to a hump, or, if one, then like
that of the buffalo, and coronative of as mild qualities.

Writing to Wordsworth (and speaking as a great landed proprietor), he
says, "We have ridded ourselves of the dirty acres; settled down into poor
boarders and lodgers; confiding ravens." The distasteful country, however,
still remains, and the clouds still hang over it. "Let not the lying poets
be believed, who entice men from the cheerful streets," he writes. The
country, he thinks, does well enough when he is amongst his books, by the
fire and with candle-light; but day and the green fields return and
restore his natural antipathies; then he says, "In a calenture I plunge
into St. Giles's." So Lamb and his sister leave their comfortable little
house, and subside into the rooms of the Humpback. Their chairs, and
tables, and beds also retreat; all except the ancient bookcase, full of
his "ragged veterans." This I saw, years after Charles Lamb's death, in
the possession of his sister, Mary. "All our furniture has faded," he
writes, "under the auctioneer's hammer; going for nothing, like the
tarnished frippery of the prodigal." Four years afterwards (in 1833) Lamb
moves to his last home, in Church Street, Edmonton, where he is somewhat
nearer to his London friends.

Very curious was the antipathy of Charles to objects that are generally so
pleasant to other men. It was not a passing humor, but a life-long