Charles Lamb and the Law. Charles Lamb's life, as he tells us, were spent in the Temple; and we are to think of him at this time as a dreamy, dark-eyed boy, playing about the Temple courts with his sister, " astounding the young urchins, his contemporaries," by his manipulation of the fountain in Fountain court, and no doubt wandering down at times to the garden foot to watch the boats go by on his beloved river. His first school was in a little court off Fetter lane, and very familiar to him must have been King's Bench walk and Mitre court and Fleet street, in those early days. It is not difficult to see why Charles Lamb loved the Temple. " A man would give something to have been born in such places." One day, long after Lamb had finally left the Temple, John Forster was asked by Mary Lamb to " go and look for Charles." He found him at Crown Office row, looking up at the house where he was born : "Ghost-like I paced round the haunts ofmy childhood, Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse." Lamb came back to the Temple at the earliest opportunity. In 1801, nine years after the family had left Crown Office row, he writes to Manning as follows : " I have partly fixed on most delectable rooms, which look out (when you stand on tip- toe), over the Thames and Surrey hills, at the upper end of King's Bench walk, Temple." This was No. 16 Mitre Court buildings, where Lamb and his sister spent the next eight years. Mitre Court buildings have been re built, so that the chambers where the Lambs lived cannot now be identified. In 1809 they moved for a few months to a house in Southampton buildings (on the site of the new Birbeck bank), whence Charles writes to Manning: "About the end of May we remove to No. 4 Inner Temple lane, where I mean to die." And in the same year he writes to Coleridge: "The rooms are deli cious and the best look back into Hare court, where there is a pump always going. Just now it is dry. Hare Court trees come in at
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the windows, so that it is like living in a garden." This was the pump where, as he says in another letter, " I used to drink when I was a Rechabite of six years old . . . the water of which is excellent cold with brandy, and not very insipid without." The pump in Hare court is gone, but the trees remain. The next eight years ( 1809—1 817), were probably the happiest in Charles Lamb's sad life. In the old chambers in Inner Temple lane he gathered round him a brilliant circle of men who, like himself, ac knowledged Samuel Taylor Coleridge as their master, and hailed Wordsworth as the rising sun. But Lamb was not to die in the Temple, as he hoped to do. In 181 7 he left Inner Temple lane and went to reside in Great Russell street, Covent Garden. " It is well I am in a cheerful place," he writes to Miss Wordsworth, "or I should have many misgivings about leaving the Temple." From Covent Garden he moved to Isling ton, thence to Enfield, and thence to Ed monton, where he died. Charles Lamb's " Wednesday evenings" in Inner Temple lane were almost as famous in their way as the contemporaneous gath erings at Holland House. If the latter could boast the presence and patronage of the great Macaulay, the former had the attrac tion of an occasional visit from Wordsworth and Coleridge. Besides these two great men — who only came at rare intervals, when they had a subduing effect on the merryparty — the Inner Temple coterie in cluded Hazlitt, Crabb Robinson, Benjamin Haydon, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Noon Talfourd, the Lloyds, and several others. One who sometimes looked in was Wainwright, the poisoner, whose friendship with Charles Lamb was not the least curious incident in an extraordinary career. Lamb's informal invitation to these gatherings was good. "Swipes exactly at nine; punch to com mence at ten with argument; difference of opinion expected to take place about eleven; perfect unanimity with some haziness and
