able pride
to his carrying off the first premium for spelling. Long after,
certainly thirty years, the school was still going on, only there was a
Latin inscription over the entrance in the lane, unknown in our humbler
days." In the evening was a short attendance of girls, to which Miss
Lamb went, and she recollected the theatricals, and even _Cato_ being
performed by the young gentlemen. "She describes the cast of the
characters with relish. 'Martha,' by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who
afterwards went to Africa."

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE MORAVIAN CHAPEL IN FETTER LANE (_see page
100_).]

The Starkey mentioned by Lamb was a poor, crippled dwarf, generally
known at Newcastle in his old age as "Captain Starkey," the butt of the
street-boys and the pensioner of benevolent citizens. In 1818, when he
had been an inmate of the Freemen's Hospital, Newcastle, for twenty-six
years, the poor old ex-usher of the Fetter Lane school wrote "The
Memoirs of his Life," a humble little pamphlet of only fourteen pages,
upon which Hone good-naturedly wrote an article which educed Lamb's
pleasant postscript. Starkey, it appears, had been usher, not in Lamb's
own time, but in that of Mary Lamb's, who came after her brother had
left. She describes Starkey running away on one occasion, being brought
back by his father, and sitting the remainder of the day with his head
buried in his hands, even the most mischievous boys respecting his utter
desolation.

That clever but mischievous advocate of divine right and absolute power,
Hobbes of Malmesbury, was lodging in Fetter Lane when he published his
"Leviathan." He was not there, however, in 1660, at the Restoration,
since we are told that on that _glorious_ occasion he was standing at
the door of Salisbury House, the mansion of his kind and generous
patron, the Earl of Devonshire; and that the king, formerly Hobbes's
pupil in mathematics, nodded to his old tutor. A short duodecimo sketch
of Hobbes may not be uninteresting. This sceptical philosopher, hardened
into dogmatic selfishness by exile, was the son of a Wiltshire
clergyman, and he first saw the light the year of the Armada, his mother
being prematurely confined during the first panic of the Spanish
invasion. Hobbes, with that same want of self-respect and love of
independence that actuated Gay and Thomson, remained his whole life a
tolerated pensioner of his former pupil, the Earl of Devonshire;
bearing, no doubt, in his time ma