The two lads--along with Middleton, then a Grecian in the school, afterward Bishop of Calcutta--figure together in the fine group in silver which passes from ward to ward each year, according to merit in studies and in conduct. There is a Charles Lamb prize, too, given every year, as fittingly should be, to the best English essayist among the Blue-Coat boys, consisting of a silver medal: on one side a laurel wreath enwrapped about the hospital’s arms; on the reverse, Lamb’s profile, his hair something too curly, his aspect somewhat smug. It would be a solace to his kindly spirit could he know that his memory is thus kept green in the school which he left with sorrow, and to which he always looked back fondly. When a man, he used to go to see the boys; and Leigh Hunt--who entered a little later--has left us a pleasant picture of one of these visits. Charles had been a good student in the musty classical course of the school; not fonder of his hexameters than of his hockey, however; and when he left, in November, 1789, aged nearly fifteen, he had become a deputy Grecian, he was a capital Latin scholar, he probably had a firm conviction that there was a language called Greek, and he had read widely and well in the English classics. Doubtless he was, even then, already familiar with the Elizabethan dramatists, his life-long “midnight darlings;” above all, he had nurtured himself upon the plays of Shakespeare, which were “the strongest and sweetest food of his mind from infancy.”
The somewhat sombre surroundings of his summer holidays, too, helped to form him into an “old-fashioned child.” The earliest thing he could remember, he once wrote, was Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is spelled, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire. He could just recall his visit there, under the care of “Bridget Elia”--as he named his sister in his essays. This youthful visit had been made to a farmer, one Gladman, who had married their grandmother’s sister; and his farm-house was delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. Charles describes his return thither with Mary, more than forty years after; and how, spite of their trepidation as to the greeting they might get, they were joyfully received by a radiant woman-cousin, “who might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome.”