rks had struck her aged father
in the head and wounded him severely, Mary sprang upon him and would
certainly have killed the feeble old man then and there had not Charles
caught her and in a terrible struggle overpowered her and wrested the
knife from her grasp. Friends and neighbors came in, and the poor woman
was taken to an asylum, where in a short time she recovered her reason
and learned of the awful consequences of her madness. In those days
hospitals for the insane were much more poorly managed than they are at
present, and Charles could not be contented to think of his sister
confined within their walls. Accordingly he went to the authorities, and
after much persuasion they released her, under the condition that she
should be constantly under care.

Then began the long career of brotherly devotion which can scarcely be
matched, and which never fails to excite our sympathy and admiration. We
may well think it a terrible penance, for Mary's attacks recurred again
and again, and more than once Charles had to take her back to the
hospital for a brief time while her violence remained too great for him
to control. There were long lucid intervals, however, and after a while
both learned to recognize the symptoms which preceded an attack, and the
two would wend their way to the asylum, where she could take refuge.
They carried a straight-jacket with them for use in case she should
suddenly become violent, for never could either escape from the
nightmare of that first awful catastrophe.

For forty years this companionship, this sublime devotion continued,
even to the time of Charles Lamb's death in 1834. Both made many
friends, and when the brother was laid away these friends came forward
and took up the burden of Mary's care until she, too, died, nearly
thirteen years later. The last years of Lamb's life were full of
further trouble, that, combined with his crushing anxiety for Mary,
broke his genial spirit and left him sad and melancholy.

One of the greatest blows he suffered in his later life was the death of
his life-long friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. See how fondly he wrote
of this friend:

"Since I feel how great a part he was of me his great and dear spirit
haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or
books without an ineffectual turning and reference to him.... He was my
fifty-years-old friend without a dissension. I seem to love the house he
died at more passionately than whe