describe his countenance, catch its
quivering sweetness, and fix it forever in words? There are
none, alas! to answer the vain desire of friendship. Deep
thought, striving with humor; the lines of suffering wreathed
into cordial mirth, and a smile of painful sweetness, present
an image to the mind it can as little describe as lose. His
personal appearance and manner are not unjustly characterized
by what he himself says in one of his letters to Manning, [1]
'a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel.'"

The writings of Charles Lamb abound in passages of autobiography. "I was
born," he tells us in that delightful sketch, "The Old Benchers of the
Inner Temple," "and passed the first seven years of my life in the
Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I
had almost said,--for in those young years what was this king of rivers
to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?--these are of my
oldest recollections." His father, John Lamb, the "Lovel" of the essay
cited, had come up a little boy from Lincolnshire to enter the service
of Samuel Salt,--one of those "Old Benchers" upon whom the pen of Elia
has shed immortality, a stanch friend and patron to the Lambs, the kind
proprietor of that "spacious closet of good old English reading" upon
whose "fair and wholesome pasturage" Charles and his sister, as
children, "browsed at will."

John Lamb had married Elizabeth Field, whose mother was for fifty years
housekeeper at the country-seat of the Plumers, Blakesware, in
Hertfordshire, the "Blakesmoor" of the Essays, frequent scene of Lamb's
childish holiday sports,--a spacious mansion, with its park and terraces
and "firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel and day-long murmuring
wood-pigeon;" an Eden it must have seemed to the London-bred child, in
whose fancy the dusty trees and sparrows and smoke-grimed fountain of
Temple Court had been a pastoral. Within the cincture of its excluding
garden-walls, wrote Elia in later years, "I could have exclaimed with
that garden-loving poet, [2]--

"'Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines;
Curl me about, ye gadding vines;
And oh, so close your circles lace
That I may never leave this place:
But lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
And, courteous briers, nail me through.'"

At Blakesware, too, was the room whence the spirit of Sarah Battle--that