guide, stop-watch,
auditor, treasurer." Salt's chambers were at 2, Crown Office Row, and
there John Lamb lived with a family consisting of himself, his wife,
an unmarried sister, Sarah Lamb ("Aunt Hetty"), a son John, aged
twelve, and a daughter Mary, aged eleven, when on 10th February, 1775,
there was born to him another son to whom was given the now familiar
name. Seven children had been born from 1762 to 1775, but of them all
these three alone survived. The father and his employer are sketched,
unforgetably, in Lamb's essay on "The Old Benchers of the Inner
Temple," Salt, under his own name, and Lamb under that of Lovel: "I
knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A
good fellow withal and 'would strike.' In the cause of the oppressed
he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his
opponents." The whole passage must be read in the essay itself. From
his father Charles Lamb inherited at once his literary leanings and
his humour, both heightened to an incalculable degree. We have Elia's
word for it that John Lamb the elder "was the liveliest little fellow
breathing" with a face as gay as Garrick's, and we know further that
he published a small volume of simple verse. From the father, too,
the family derived a heavier inheritance, which was to cast its shadow
over their lives from the day of Charles's early manhood to the day
half a century later, when his sister Mary, the last survivor of the
family circle, was laid to rest.

Lamb's mother, Elizabeth Field, is--for obvious reasons--the only
member of the immediate family circle whom we do not meet in his
writings. His maternal grandmother--the grandame who is to be met in
his verses and in some of his essays--was for over half a century
housekeeper at Blakesware in Hertfordshire, and with her, as a small
boy, Charles spent pleasant holidays.

Little Charles Lamb was sent for a time to "a humble day-school, at
which reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning, and
the same slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters,
etc., in the evening." In a letter to Coleridge (5th July, 1796) we
have a hint that Lamb may have had yet earlier teaching in an infant
school in the Temple for he writes: "Mr. Chambers lived in the Temple;
Mrs. Reynolds, his daughter, was my schoolmistress"; though it may be
that the lady referred to was employed in Mr. Bird's school. This
school, kept by William Bird "in the pa