any time to take care of old age and infirmity--has now, with his bad leg,
exemption from such duties; and I am now left alone."

In about a month after his mother's death (3d October), Charles writes,
"My poor, dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument of
the Almighty's judgment on our house, is restored to her senses; to a
dreadful sense of what has passed; awful to her mind, but tempered with a
religious resignation. She knows how to distinguish between a deed
committed in a fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother's murder."
In another place he says, "She bears her situation as one who has no right
to complain." He himself visits her and upholds her, and rejoices in her
continued reason. For her use he borrows books ("for reading was her daily
bread"), and gives up his time and all his thoughts to her comfort.

Thus, in their quiet grief, making no show, yet suffering more than could
be shown by clamorous sobs or frantic words, the two--brother and sister--
enter upon the bleak world together. "Her love," as Mr. Wordsworth states
in the epitaph on Charles Lamb, "was as the love of mothers" towards her
brother. It may be said that his love for her was the deep life-long love
of the tenderest son. In one letter he writes, "It was not a family where
I could take Mary with me; and I am afraid that there is something of
dishonesty in any pleasures I take without her." Many years afterwards (in
1834, the very year in which he died) he writes to Miss Fryer, "It is no
new thing for me to be left with my sister. When she is not violent, _her
rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of the world."_
Surely there is great depth of pathos in these unaffected words; in the
love that has outlasted all the troubles of life, and is thus tenderly
expressed, almost at his last hour.

John Lamb, the elder brother of Charles, held a clerkship, with some