The story of Lamb's working life--latterly an uneventful one, broken
chiefly by changes of abode and by the yearly holiday jaunts,
"migrations from the blue bed to the brown"--from 1796, when the
correspondence with Coleridge begins, is told in the letters. For
thirty-three years he served the East India Company, and he served it
faithfully and steadily. There is, indeed, a tradition that having been
reproved on one occasion for coming to the office late in the morning,
he pleaded that he always left it "so very early in the evening." Poets,
we know, often "heard the chimes at midnight" in Elia's day, and the
plea has certainly a most Lamb-like ring. That the Company's directors,
however, were more than content with the service of their literate
clerk, the sequel shows.

It is manifest in certain letters, written toward the close of 1824 and
in the beginning of 1825, that Lamb's confinement was at last telling
upon him, and that he was thinking of a release from his bondage to the
"desk's dead wood." In February, 1825, he wrote to Barton,--

"Your gentleman brother sets my mouth watering after
liberty. Oh that I were kicked out of Leadenhall with
every mark of indignity, and a competence in my fob! The
birds of the air would not be so free as I should. How
I would prance and curvet it, and pick up cowslips, and
ramble about purposeless as an idiot!"

Later in March we learn that he had signified to the directors his
willingness to resign,

"I am sick of hope deferred. The grand wheel is in agitation
that is to turn up my fortune; but round it rolls,
and will turn up nothing, I have a glimpse of freedom, of
becoming a gentleman at large, but I am put off from day
to day. I have offered my resignation, and it is neither accepted
nor rejected. Eight weeks am I kept in this fearful
suspense. Guess what an absorbing state I feel it. I am
not conscious of the existence of friends, present or absent.
The East India directors alone can be that thing to me. I
have just learned that nothing will be decided this week.
Why the next? Why any week?"

But the "grand wheel" was really turning, to some purpose, and a few
days later, April 6, 1825, he joyfully wrote to Barton,--

"My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my
recent emancipation that I have scarce steadiness of hand,
much more mind, to compose a letter, I am free, B.B.,--free
as air!

"'The little bird that