James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. O! her lamps
of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops,
mercers, hardwaremen, pastry-cooks! St. Paul's churchyard!
the Strand! Exeter Change! Charing Cross, with the man
_upon_ a black horse! These are thy gods, O London! Ain't
you mightily moped on the banks of the Cam? Had you not
better come and set up here? You can't think what a
difference. All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I
warrant you. At least I know an alchemy that turns her mud
into that metal,--a mind that loves to be at home in crowds.

Here we have the voice of the best of London-lovers, and here we have
also a hint of the way in which he was finding himself too much
"accompanied"--to use a phrase from one of his unpublished letters. He
frequently chafed against the number of visitors who ate up his day,
and at times had even to resent the way in which an intimate friend
would be over-zealous in entertaining him, when for his own part he
would rather have been alone. One special evening in each week was set
apart for cards and conversation, and those occasions are perhaps
among the best remembered features of early nineteenth-century
literary life. Representative evenings will be found described in
various works.[3] The company was not limited to literary folk, though
many notable men of letters were to be met there, along with humbler
friends, for the Lambs were catholic in their friendships, and had
nothing of the exclusiveness of more pretentious salons. "We play at
whist, eat cold meat and hot potatoes, and any gentleman that chooses
smokes." At these gatherings Mary Lamb moved about observantly looking
after her diverse guests, while Lamb himself, it has been said, might
be depended upon for at once the wisest and the wittiest utterance of
the evening. Here it was that he made his whimsical reproach to a
player with dirty hands: "I say, Martin, if dirt were trumps what a
hand you'd have." And it was on some such occasion, too, that he
retorted on Wordsworth, who had said that the writing of "Hamlet" was
not so very wonderful: "Here's Wordsworth says he could have written
'Hamlet'--_if he had the mind_."

[Footnote 3: In Talfourd's "Memorials" of Lamb; in Hazlitt's essay "Of
Persons One would wish to have Seen."]

In the opening years of the century Lamb contributed epigrams and
paragraphs to "The Albion," "The Morning Chronicle