Lovel was a
clever little fellow, with a face like Garrick, who could mould heads in
clay, turn cribbage-boards, take a hand at a quadrille or bowls, and
brew punch with any man of his degree in Europe. With Coventry and Salt,
Peter Pierson often perambulated the terrace, with hands folded behind
him. Contemporary with these was Daines Barrington, a burly, square man.
Lamb also mentions Burton, "a jolly negation," who drew up the bills of
fare for the parliament chamber, where the benchers dined; thin, fragile
Wharry, who used to spitefully pinch his cat's ears when anything
offended him; and Jackson, the musician, to whom the cook once applied
for instructions how to write down "edge-bone of beef" in a bill of
commons. Then there was Blustering Mingay, who had a grappling-hook in
substitute for a hand he had lost, which Lamb, when a child, used to
take for an emblem of power; and Baron Mascres, who retained the costume
of the reign of George II.

In his "Essays," Lamb says:--"I was born 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
the king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant
places?--these are of my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no
verses to myself more frequently or with kindlier emotion than those of
Spenser where he speaks of this spot. Indeed, it is the most elegant
spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a countryman visiting
London for the first time--the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet
Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent, ample squares, its
classic green recesses! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion
of it which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden, that goodly
pile

'Of buildings strong, albeit of paper hight,'

confronting with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically
shrouded one named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown Office Row
(place of my kindly engendure), right opposite the stately stream, which
washes the garden foot with her yet scarcely trade--polluted waters, and
seems but just weaned from Twickenham Naiades! A man would give
something to have been born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has
that fine Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have made
to rise and fall, how many times! to the astonishment of the young
urchins, my contemporaries, who