“A merry cheerful man. A merrier man, A man more apt to frame matter for mirth, Mad jokes and antics for a Christmas-eve, Making life social, and the laggard time To move on nimbly, never yet did cheer The little circle of domestic friends.”
This John Lamb was devoted to the welfare of his master, Samuel Salt; who, in turn, did nothing without consulting him, or failed in anything without expecting and fearing his admonishing. “He put himself almost too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in the world.” To him and to his children Salt was a life-long benefactor, and never, until death had made an end to the good man’s good deeds, did there fall on the family any shadow of change or trouble or penury.
It was in Salt’s chambers that Charles and his sister Mary, in their youthful years, “tumbled into a spacious closet of good old English reading, and browsed at will on that fair and wholesome pasturage:” thus already so early drawn together by kindred tastes and studies, even as they were already at one in their joint heritage of the father’s latent mental malady. They had learned their letters, and picked up crumbs of rudimentary knowledge, at a small school in Fetter Lane, hard by the Temple; the boys being taught in the mornings, the girls in the afternoons. It stood on the edge of “a discoloured, dingy garden in the passage leading into Fetter Lane from Bartlett’s buildings. This was near to Holborn.” Bartlett’s name is still kept alive in Bartlett’s Passage, right there; but no stone of his building now stands; and the only growth of any garden in that turbulent thoroughfare to-day is pavement and mud and obscene urchins.
The inscription painted over their school-door asserted that it was kept by “Mr. William Bird, Teacher of Mathematics and Languages.” “Heaven knows what languages were taught in it, then! I am sure that neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it, but a little of our native English”--so Charles wrote nearly fifty years after to William Hone, the editor of the _Every Day Book_. In its pages had just appeared a woful narrative of the poverty and desolation of one Starkey, who had been “a gentle usher” in that school. In the letter written by Lamb as a pendant to that paper, he gossips characteristically about the memories of those school-days thus awakened in him and in his sister. He vividly portrays that down-trodden and downcast usher, who “was not always the abject thing he came to;” and who actually had bold and figurative words for the big girls, when they talked together, or teased him during his recitations. “Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those uncomfortable sloping desks, where we sat elbowing each other; and the injunctions to attain a free hand, unattainable in that position!”