ghtful "Elia" essay. He had before expatiated on the
excellent position of the authors who were not "authors for
bread"--men who like himself were employed in business during the day
and had to dally with literature in off hours. Certainly Lamb's "hack
work," the work done for the booksellers during the early part of the
century, was his least memorable achievement, and we cannot help
feeling what a boon it was to Lamb himself and to Letters that he was
chained so long to the desk's dead wood, instead of being dependent on
the favour of the booksellers for his livelihood, and upon the popular
taste of the moment for his themes.

In 1820, during a summer holiday at Cambridge, Lamb met an orphan
girl, Emma Isola, then eleven years of age, whom he and Mary later
adopted, and the letters have many references to the welcome
companionship of Emma, who gave something of a new interest in life to
the brother and sister.[4] In 1827 the household removed again, this
time to the Chase, Enfield. Two years later they gave up the house of
their own and boarded with a Mr. and Mrs. Westwood, their next-door
neighbours. In 1833 Mary, who had had frequently to be "from home," as
it has been euphemistically put, was under the charge of Mr. and Mrs.
Walden at Bay Tree Cottage, Edmonton, when Charles decided to live
under the same roof with her, even during her periods of mental
derangement, and followed her thither, in

The not unpeaceful evening of a day
Made black by morning storms.

[Footnote 4: Emma Isola married Edward Moxon, the publisher.]

How much Mary's companionship meant to him may be gathered from an
open-hearted letter which he had written in 1805 to Dorothy
Wordsworth--and it meant no less in the years that followed:

I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all
her former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always
feel so. Meantime she is dead to me and I miss a prop. All
my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her
co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong;
so used am I to look up to her in the least and the biggest
perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than
I think anybody could believe, or even understand; and when
I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning
against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can
conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and wiser