the near vicinity of
London, which he had enjoyed in anticipation a few years before he had
the leisure actually to take them,--those long walks on "fine
Isaac-Walton mornings," were found to be, it must be confessed, rather
tiresome and unsatisfactory. They were most melancholy failures, when
compared--as Elia could not help comparing them--with the pleasant walks
he and Mary had taken years before to Enfield, and Potter's-Bar, and
Waltham. Nay, even the "saunterings in Bond Street," the "digressions
into Soho," to explore book-stalls, the visits to print-shops and
picture-galleries, soon ceased to afford Lamb much real pleasure or
enjoyment. Yea, London itself, with all its wonders and marvels, with
all its (to him) memories and associations, he found to be, to one who
had nothing to do but wander idly and purposeless through her thronged
and busy streets and thoroughfares,--a mere looker-on in Vienna,--a
somewhat dreary and melancholy place. Indeed, the London of 1825-30 was
a far different place to Elia from the London of twenty years before,
when he resided at No. 4, Inner-Temple Lane, (near the place of his
"kindly engendure,") and gave his famous Wednesday-evening parties,
("Oh!" exclaims Hazlitt, "for the pen of John Buncle to consecrate a
_petit souvenir_ to their memory!") and when Jem White, and Ned P----,
and Holcroft, and Captain Burney, and other of his old friends and
jovial companions were alive and merry.

And now, in these later years and altered times, when even the old
memories and the old associations seemed to have lost their power over
him, and gone were most of "the old familiar faces," and when he felt as
if the game of life were scarcely worth the candle, our melancholy and
forlorn old humorist thus sadly and pathetically writes to the Quaker
poet:--"But town, with all my native hankering after it, is not what it
was. The streets, the shops, are left, but all old friends are gone. And
in London I was frightfully convinced of this, as I passed houses and
places, empty caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about anybody.
The bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old chums, that
lived so long and flourished so steadily, are crumbled away. When I took
leave of our adopted young friend at Charing Cross, 'twas a heavy
unfeeling rain, and I had nowhere to go. Home have I none, and not a
sympathizing house to turn to in the great city. Never did the waters of
heaven pour down on a forl