LAMB, CHARLES English essayist and critic, was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, London, on Feb. Jo, 1775. His father, John Lamb, a Lincolnshire man, who filled the situation of clerk and servant-companion to Samuel Salt, a member of parliament and one of the benchers of the Inner Temple, was successful in obtaining for Charles, the youngest of three surviving children, a presentation to Christ's hospital, where the boy remained from his eighth to his 15th year (1782 1789). Here he had for a schoolfellow Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his senior by rather more than two years, and a close and tender friendship began which lasted for the rest of the lives of both. When the time came for leaving school, where he had learned some Greek and acquired considerable facility in Latin composition, Lamb, after a brief stay at home (probably spent, as his school holidays had often been, over old English authors in Salt's library) was condemned to the labours of the desk—"an inconquerable impediment" in his speech disqualifying him for the clerical profession, which, as the school exhibitions were usually only given to those preparing for the church, thus deprived him of the only means by which he could have obtained a university educa tion. For a short time he was in the office of Joseph Paice, a London merchant, and then for 23 weeks, until Feb. 8, 1792, he held a small post in the Examiner's Office of the South Sea House, where his brother John was established, a period which, although his age was but 16, was to provide him nearly 3o years later with materials for the first of the Essays of Elia. On April 5, 1792, he entered the Accountant's Office in the East India House, where during the next 33 years the 1 oo official folios of what he used to call his true "works" were produced.
Of the years 1792-1795 we know little. At the end of 1794 he saw much of Coleridge and joined him in writing sonnets in the Morning Post, addressed to eminent persons : early in 1795 he met Southey and was much in the company of James White, whom he probably helped in the composition of the Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff; and at the end of the year for a short time he became so unhinged mentally as to necessitate confinement in an asylum. The cause, it is probable, was an unsuccessful love
affair with Ann Simmons, the Hertfordshire maiden to whom his first sonnets are addressed, whom he would have seen when on his visits as a youth to Blakesware House, near Widford, the country home of the Plumer family, of which Lamb's grandmother, Mary Field, was for many years, until her death in 1792, sole custodian.
It was in the late summer of 1796 that a dreadful calamity came upon the Lambs, which seemed to blight all Lamb's prospects in the very morning of life. On Sept. 22, his sister Mary, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night," was suddenly seized with acute mania, in which she stabbed her mother to the heart. The calm self-mastery and loving self-renunciation which Charles Lamb, by constitution excitable, nervous and self-mis trustful, displayed at this crisis in his own history and in that of those nearest him, will ever give him an imperishable claim to the reverence and affection of all who are capable of appreciating the heroisms of common life. With the help of friends he succeeded in obtaining his sister's release from the life-long restraint to which she would otherwise have been doomed, on the express condition that he himself should undertake the responsibility for her safe-keeping. It proved no light charge : for though no one was capable of affording a more intelligent or affectionate com panionship than Mary Lamb during her periods of health, there was ever present the apprehension of the recurrence of her malady; and when from time to time the premonitory symptoms had be come unmistakable, there was no alternative but her removal, which took place in quietness and tears. How deeply the whole course of Lamb's domestic life must have been affected by his singular loyalty as a brother needs not to be pointed out.