Here, in November of that year, happened the accident to George Dyer that supplied Lamb with the subject of his whimsical Elian essay, Amicus Redivivus. Dyer was an odd, eccentric, very absent-minded old bookworm who lived in Clifford’s Inn; Lamb delighted in his absurdities, and loved him, and loved to make merry over his quaint sayings and doings. “You have seen our house,” he writes to Mrs. Hazlitt, in the week after Dyer’s adventure. “What I now tell you is literally true. Yesterday week George Dyer called upon us at one o’clock (bright noonday) on his way to dine with Mrs. Barbauld at Newington. He sat with Mary about half-an-hour, and took leave. The maid saw him go out, from her kitchen window, but suddenly losing sight of him, ran up in a fright to Mary. G. D., instead of keeping the slip that leads to the gate, had deliberately, staff in hand, in broad open day, marched into the New River. He had not his spectacles on, and you know his absence. Who helped him out they can hardly tell, but between ’em they got him out, drenched through and through. A mob collected by that time, and accompanied him in. ‘Send for the Doctor,’ they said: and a one-eyed fellow, dirty and drunk, was fetched from the public-house at the end, where it seems he lurks for the sake of picking up water practice; having formerly had a medal from the Humane Society for some rescue. By his advice the patient was put between blankets; and when I came home at four to dinner, I found G. D. abed and raving, light-headed with the brandy and water which the doctor had administered. He sang, laughed, whimpered, screamed, babbled of guardian angels, would get up and go home; but we kept him there by force; and by next morning he departed sober, and seems to have received no injury.”
Before he left Islington the India Company bestowed upon Lamb the pension that at last emancipated him from his “dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood,” and he communicates the great news exultantly to Wordsworth in a letter dated “Colebrook Cottage,” 6th April 1825: “Here I am, then, after thirty-three years’ slavery, sitting in my own room at eleven o’clock this finest of all April mornings, a freed man, with £441 a year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at ninety: £441, i. e. £450, with a deduction of £9 for a provision secured to my sister, she being survivor, the pension guaranteed by Act Georgii Tertii, &c. I came home FOR EVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three, i. e. to have three times as much real time (time that is my own) in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not. But the tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift. Holydays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys; their conscious fugitiveness; the craving after making the most of them. Now, when all is holyday, there are no holydays. I can sit at home in rain or shine without a restless impulse for walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall soon find it as natural to me to be my own master as it has been irksome to have had a master. Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good has happened to us.”
He made use of these experiences in one of the best of his essays, that on The Superannuated Man, in which also you find echoes of a letter he wrote to Bernard Barton just after he had written to Wordsworth:
“I am free, B. B. – free as air.
‘The little bird that wings the sky
Knows no such liberty!’
“I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o’clock.
‘I came home for ever!’
“I have been describing my feelings as well as I can to Wordsworth in a long letter and don’t care to repeat. Take it briefly that for a few days I was painfully oppressed by so mighty a change, but it is becoming daily more natural to me. I went and sat among ’em all at my old thirty-three years’ desk yester morning; and deuce take me if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry, sociable lads, at leaving them in the lurch, fag, fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me anything but pleasure. B. B. I would not serve another seven years for seven hundred thousand pounds.”
From Islington Lamb journeyed over to Highgate every now and then to visit Coleridge at Mr. Gilman’s; and a-visiting him at Colebrooke Cottage came Coleridge, Southey, William Hone, and among many another, Hood, to whom he took an especial liking. Coleridge thought he was the author of certain Odes that were then appearing in the London Magazine, but writing in reply Lamb assured him he was mistaken: “The Odes are four-fifths done by Hood, a silentish young man you met at Islington one day, an invalid. The rest are Reynolds’s, whose sister H. has recently married.”
During the two years or more after his release from the India House, Lamb and his sister spent two or three short holidays lodging with a Mrs. Leishman at The Chase, Enfield; in 1827 they rented the house of her, and Lamb wrote from that address on the 18th September to Hood, who was then living at 2 Robert Street, Adelphi: “Give our kind loves to all at Highgate, and tell them we have finally torn ourselves outright away from Colebrooke, where I had no health, and are about to domicilate for good at Enfield, where I have experienced good.
‘Lord, what good hours do we keep!
How quietly we sleep!’…
We have got our books into our new house. I am a dray-horse if I was not ashamed of the undigested dirty lumber, as I toppled ’em out of the cart, and blest Becky that came with ’em for her having an unstuffed brain with such rubbish… ’Twas with some pain we were evulsed from Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh sticking to the doorposts. To change habitations is to die to them; and in my time I have died seven deaths. But I don’t know whether every such change does not bring with it a rejuvenescence. ’Tis an enterprise; and shoves back the sense of death’s approximating which, though not terrible to me, is at all times particularly distasteful. My house-deaths have generally been periodical, recurring after seven years; but this last is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrook!” He mentions that the rent is 10s. less than he paid at Islington; that he pays, in fact, £35 a year, exclusive of moderate taxes, and thinks himself lucky.
But the worry of moving brought on one of Mary Lamb’s “sad, long illnesses”; and whilst she was absent, Lamb fled from the loneliness of his country home to spend ten days in town. “But Town,” he writes to Barton, “with all my native hankering after it, is not what it was. The streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. And in London I was frightfully convinced of this as I past houses and places – empty caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about anybody. The bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old Clubs, that lived so long and flourished so steadily, are crumbled away. When I took leave of our adopted young friend at Charing Cross, ’twas heavy unfeeling rain and I had nowhere to go. Home have I none – and not a sympathising house to turn to in the great city. Never did the waters of the heaven pour down on a forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend’s house, but it was large and straggling – one of the individuals of my long knot of friends, card-players, pleasant companions – that have tumbled to pieces into dust and other things – and I got home on Thursday convinced that I was better to get home to my hole at Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my corner. Less than a month, I hope, will bring home Mary. She is at Fulham, looking better in her health than ever, but sadly rambling, and scarce showing any pleasure in seeing me, or curiosity when I should come again. But the old feelings will come back again, and we shall drown old sorrows over a game of Picquet again. But ’tis a tedious cut out of a life of sixty-four, to lose twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two.”
The cares of housekeeping, however, sat too heavily on them, and in October 1829 they abandoned those responsibilities, gave up their cottage on Chase Side, and went to lodge and board with their next-door neighbours, an old Mr. and Mrs. Westwood, and in this easier way of living their spirits and their health revived. Nevertheless, by January 1830 Lamb had lost all his contentment with rural life, and was yearning desperately for the remembered joys of London. “And is it a year since we parted from you at the steps of Edmonton stage?” he writes to Wordsworth. “There are not now the years that there used to be.” He frets, he says, like a lion in a net, and then goes on to utter that yearning to be back in London that I have quoted already in my opening chapter. “Back-looking ambition,” he continues, “tells me I might still be a Londoner! Well, if we ever do move, we have incumbrances the less to impede us; all our furniture has faded under the auctioneer’s hammer, going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon or two left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must go out of it. I would live in London shirtless, bookless.” And to Bernard Barton he says, “With fire and candle-light I can dream myself in Holborn… Give me old London at Fire and Plague times, rather than these tepid gales, healthy country air, and purposeless exercise.”
Early in 1833 he removed from Enfield, and his reasons for doing so he explains in a letter to Mrs. Hazlitt, on the 31st May of that year: “I am driven from house to house by Mary’s illness. I took a sudden resolution to take my sister to Edmonton, where she was under medical treatment last time, and have arranged to board and lodge with the people. Thank God I have repudiated Enfield. I have got out of hell, despair of heaven, and must sit down contented in a half-way purgatory. Thus ends this strange eventful history. But I am nearer to town, and will get up to you somehow before long.” About the same date he wrote to Wordsworth: “Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months, followed by two of depression most dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing – nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration – shocking as they were to me then. In short, half her life she is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the next shock. With such prospects it seemed to me necessary that she should no longer live with me, and be fluttered with continual removals; so I am come to live with her, at a Mr. Walden’s, and his wife, who take in patients, and have arranged to lodge and board us only. They have had the care of her before. I see little of her: alas! I too often hear her. Sunt lachrymæ rerum! and you and I must bear it… I am about to lose my old and only walk-companion, whose mirthful spirits were the ‘youth of our house,’ Emma Isola. I have her here now for a little while, but she is too nervous properly to be under such a roof, so she will make short visits – be no more an inmate. With my perfect approval and more than concurrence she is to be wedded to Moxon at the end of August – so ‘perish the roses and the flowers’ – how is it? Now to the brighter side. I am emancipated from the Westwoods, and I am with attentive people and younger. I am three or four miles nearer the great city; coaches half-price less and going always, of which I will avail myself. I have few friends left there; one or two though, most beloved. But London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though not one known of the latter were remaining.”
Emma Isola is “the adopted young friend” referred to by Lamb in a letter quoted a few pages back. She was the granddaughter of an Italian refugee; her mother was dead; her father was an “Esquire Bedell” of Cambridge, and the Lambs met her at the house of a friend when they were visiting that town in 1823. She was a charming, brown-faced little girl, and they were so taken with her that she was invited to visit them in London during her holidays, and they ended by adopting her and calling her their niece. She brought a great deal of happiness into their lives; Lamb gives whimsical accounts in some of his letters of how he is teaching her Latin, and his sister is prompting her in her French lessons. When she was old enough she became governess in the family of a Mr. and Mrs. Williams at Bury; fell ill and was kindly nursed there; and Lamb tells in one of his most delightful letters how he went to fetch her home to Enfield, when she was convalescent, and it is good to glimpse how sympathetically amused he is at Emma’s covert admonitions and anxiety lest he should drink too much, at dinner with the Williamses, and so bring disgrace upon himself and her.
His beautiful affection for their young ward shines through all the drollery of his several notes to Edward Moxon (the publisher) in which he speaks of their engagement; and it has always seemed to me it is this same underlying affection for her and wistfulness to see her happy that help to make the following letter, written just after the wedding, one of the finest and most pathetic things in literature: —
“August 1833.
“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Moxon, – Time very short. I wrote to Miss Fryer, and had the sweetest letter about you, Emma, that ever friendship dictated. ‘I am full of good wishes, I am crying with good wishes,’ she says; but you shall see it.
“Dear Moxon, I take your writing most kindly, and shall most kindly your writing from Paris. I want to crowd another letter to Miss Fryer into the little time after dinner, before post time. So with twenty thousand congratulations, – Yours,
C. L.
“I am calm, sober, happy. Turn over for the reason. I got home from Dover Street, by Evans, half as sober as a judge. I am turning over a new leaf, as I hope you will now.”
[The turn of the leaf presents the following: – ]
“My dear Emma and Edward Moxon, – Accept my sincere congratulations, and imagine more good wishes than my weak nerves will let me put into good set words. The dreary blank of unanswered questions which I ventured to ask in vain was cleared up on the wedding day by Mrs. W. taking a glass of wine and, with a total change of countenance, begging leave to drink Mr. and Mrs. Moxon’s health. It restored me from that moment, as if by an electrical stroke, to the entire possession of my senses. I never felt so calm and quiet after a similar illness as I do now. I feel as if all tears were wiped from my eyes, and all care from my heart.
Mary Lamb.”“Wednesday.
“Dears again, – Your letter interrupted a seventh game at picquet which we were having, after walking to Wright’s and purchasing shoes. We pass our time in cards, walks, and reading. We attack Tasso soon.
“C. L.
“Never was such a calm, or such a recovery. ’Tis her own words undictated.”
And it was in this plain, commonplace little cottage in Church Street, Edmonton, that Mary Lamb was thus suddenly awakened out of her derangement; that Charles Lamb and she wrote, by turns, that letter to the Moxons; that the Lambs sat contentedly playing picquet when the letter of the bride and bridegroom came to them from Paris. These are the very rooms in which these things happened; the stage remains, but the actors are departed. Within a stone’s throw of the house, in Edmonton Churchyard, Lamb and his sister lie buried. His death was the result of an accident. He had gone on his accustomed walk along the London Road, one day in December, when he stumbled and fell over a stone, slightly injuring his face. So trivial did the wound seem that writing to George Dyer’s wife on the 22nd December 1834, about a book he had lost when he was in London – “it was the book I went to fetch from Miss Buffham’s while the tripe was frying” – he says nothing of anything being the matter with him. But erysipelas supervened, and he grew rapidly worse, and died on the 27th. His sister, who had lapsed into one of her illnesses and was unconscious, at the time, of her loss, outlived him by nearly thirteen years, and reached the great age of eighty-two.
CHAPTER XII
ST. JOHN’S WOOD AND WIMBLEDON
Mary Lamb passed the later years of her life in a sort of nursing home at St. John’s Wood, and in her happier intervals kept up a pleasant acquaintance with some of the notable circle of friends who had gathered about her and her brother aforetime; among others, with the Hoods, who were then living in the same locality. Crabb Robinson mentions in his Diary how he made a call on Mary Lamb, and finding her well over one of her periodical attacks, “quite in possession of her faculties and recollecting nearly everything,” he accompanied her on a visit to the Hoods, who were lodging at 17 Elm Tree Road.
Perhaps one of the most graphic pictures we have of Hood’s home life, and incidentally of Hood himself and his wife and of Charles and Mary Lamb, is contained in the account that has been left by Miss Mary Balmanno of an evening she spent with the Hoods when they were making their home in Robert Street, Adelphi: “Bound in the closest ties of friendship with the Hoods, with whom we also were in the habit of continually associating, we had the pleasure of meeting Charles Lamb at their house one evening, together with his sister, and several other friends… In outward appearance Hood conveyed the idea of a clergyman. His figure slight, and invariably dressed in black; his face pallid; the complexion delicate, and features regular: his countenance bespeaking sympathy by its sweet expression of melancholy and suffering.
“Lamb was of a different mould and aspect. Of middle height, with brown and rather ruddy complexion, grey eyes expressive of sense and shrewdness, but neither large nor brilliant; his head and features well shaped, and the general expression of his countenance quiet, kind, and observant, undergoing rapid changes in conversation, as did his manner, variable as an April day, particularly to his sister, whose saint-like good humour and patience were as remarkable as his strange and whimsical modes of trying them. But the brother and sister perfectly understood each other, and ‘Charles,’ as she always called him, would not have been the Charles of her loving heart without the pranks and oddities which he was continually playing off upon her, and which were only outnumbered by the instances of affection and evidences of ever-watchful solicitude with which he surrounded her.
“Miss Lamb, although many years older than her brother, by no means looked so, but presented the pleasant appearance of a mild, rather stout and comely lady of middle age. Dressed with Quaker-like simplicity in dove-coloured silk, with a transparent kerchief of snow-white muslin folded across her bosom, she at once prepossessed the beholder in her favour by an aspect of serenity and peace. Her manners were very quiet and gentle, and her voice low. She smiled frequently, and seldom laughed, partaking of the courtesies and hospitalities of her merry host and hostess with all the cheerfulness and grace of a most mild and kindly nature. Her behaviour to her brother was like that of an admiring disciple; her eyes seldom absent from his face. And when apparently engrossed in conversation with others, she would, by supplying some word for which he was at a loss, even when talking in a distant part of the room, show how closely her mind waited upon his. Mr. Lamb was in high spirits, sauntering about the room with his hands crossed behind his back, conversing by fits and starts with those most familiarly known to him…”
She goes on to describe how Miss Kelly, the actress, amused them by impersonating a character she was taking in a new play, and “Mrs. Hood’s eyes sparkled with joy, as she saw the effect it had produced upon her husband, whose pale face, like an illuminated comic mask, shone with fun and good humour. Never was a happier couple than the Hoods; ‘mutual reliance and fond faith’ seemed to be their motto. Mrs. Hood was a most amiable woman – of excellent manners, and full of sincerity and goodness. She perfectly adored her husband, tending him like a child, whilst he, with unbounded affection, seemed to delight to yield himself to her guidance. Nevertheless, true to his humorous nature, he loved to tease her with jokes and whimsical accusations, which were only responded to by, ‘Hood, Hood, how can you run on so?’
“The evening was concluded by a supper, one of those elegant social repasts which Flemish artists delight to paint… Mr. Lamb oddly walked round the table, looking closely at any dish that struck his fancy before he would decide where to sit, telling Mrs. Hood that he should by that means know how to select some dish that was difficult to carve and take the trouble off her hands; accordingly, having jested in this manner, he placed himself with great deliberation before a lobster salad, observing that was the thing.
“Mr. Hood, with inexpressible gravity in the upper part of his face and his mouth twitching with smiles, sang his own comic song of ‘If you go to France be sure you learn the lingo’; his pensive manner and feeble voice making it doubly ludicrous. Mr. Lamb, on being pressed to sing, excused himself in his own peculiar manner, but offered to pronounce a Latin eulogium instead. This was accepted, and he accordingly stammered forth a long stream of Latin words; among which, as the name of Mrs. Hood frequently occurred, we ladies thought it in praise of her. The delivery of this speech occupied about five minutes. On inquiring of a gentleman who sat next me whether Mr. Lamb was praising Mrs. Hood, he informed me that was by no means the case, the eulogium being on the lobster salad! Thus, in the gayest of moods, progressed and concluded a truly merry little social supper, worthy in all respects of the author of Whims and Oddities.”
But all this, when the Hoods came to St. John’s Wood, lay thirteen years behind them, and Lamb had been eight years dead. Quitting the Adelphi in 1829, Hood went to Winchmore Hill, then to Wanstead; then, after some five years of residence in Germany and Belgium, he returned to England, and made his home for a short time at Camberwell, and thence in 1842 removed to St. John’s Wood – at first to rooms at 17 Elm Tree Road, and in 1844 to a house of his own, “Devonshire Lodge,” in the Finchley Road – a house that the guide-books all tell us was demolished, but since I started to write this chapter the London County Council has identified as “Devonshire Lodge” the house that still stands in Finchley Road, immediately adjoining the Marlborough Road station of the Metropolitan Railway; and here it was that Hood died on the 3rd of May 1845.
The room in which he worked at 17 Elm Tree Road gave him a view of Lord’s Cricket Ground, and he complained that this was a drawback, because “when he was at work he could often see others at play.” He caricatured the landlady of the house, who had “a large and personal love of flowers,” and made her the heroine of his Mrs. Gardiner, A Horticultural Romance. From Elm Tree Road he went to attend the dinner at Greenwich that was given to Dickens on his second return from America; and describing this dissipation in a letter to a friend he says, “You will be pleased to hear that, in spite of my warnings and forebodings, I got better and betterer, till by dining, as the physicians did, on turtle soup, white-bait, and champagne, I seemed quite well.” He was to have been chairman at the dinner, but excused himself on the score of ill-health, and Captain Marryat took his place. The diners included, in addition to Dickens himself, Moncton Milnes, Forster, Clarkson Stanfield, Ainsworth, Landseer (another St. John’s Wood resident), Cruikshank, Cattermole, “Ingoldsby” Barham, and Barry Cornwall. Being called upon for a speech, Hood said he supposed they drank his health because he was a notorious invalid, but assured the company that the trembling of his hand was neither from palsy nor ague, but that their wishes had already so improved his circulation and filled him with genial warmth that his hand had a natural inclination to shake itself with every one present. Whereupon everybody within reach, and some who were not, insisted upon shaking hands with him. “Very gratifying, wasn’t it?” he finishes his letter. “Though I cannot go quite so far as Jane, who wants me to have that hand chopped off, bottled, and preserved in spirits. She was sitting up for me, very anxiously, as usual when I go out, because I am so domestic and steady, and was down at the door before I could ring at the gate, to which Boz kindly sent me in his own carriage. Poor girl! what would she do if she had a wild husband instead of a tame one.”
Dickens, at that date, lived at 1 Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone Road; they had probably driven up together from Greenwich, and the carriage had come the mile or so further on with Hood after leaving Dickens at his own door. Dickens was one of the many visitors who have helped to make Hood’s St. John’s Wood residence memorable; there is a record of his being there, with his wife and sister and Daniel Maclise, in December 1842. At Elm Tree Road, for all his broken health, Hood worked hard at editing and writing for the New Monthly Magazine, and, after resigning from that, for Hood’s Monthly Magazine. One letter of his, dated from 17 Elm Tree Road, on the 18th July 1843, is headed “From my bed”; for he was frequently bedridden for days and weeks at a stretch, but sat propped up with pillows, writing and sketching with unabated industry. He was contributing also in these days to Punch, and to Douglas Jerrold’s Illuminated Magazine. In November 1843 he wrote here, for Punch, his grim Drop of Gin:
“Gin! Gin! a drop of Gin!
What magnified monsters circle therein!
Ragged, and stained with filth and mud,
Some plague-spotted, and some with blood!
Shapes of misery, shame, and sin!
Figures that make us loathe and tremble,
Creatures scarce human, that more resemble
Broods of diabolical kin,
Ghost and vampyre, demon and Jin!..”
But a far greater poem than this, The Song of the Shirt, was also written at Elm Tree Road. “Now mind, Hood, mark my words,” said Mrs. Hood, when he was putting up the manuscript for the post, “this will tell wonderfully. It is one of the best things you ever did.” And the results justified her. The verses appeared in the Christmas Number of Punch for 1843, and not only trebled the circulation of that paper, but within a very short time had at least doubled Hood’s reputation, though Eugene Aram, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, and Lycus the Centaur, had long preceded it. Probably no poem ever stirred the national conscience more deeply or created a profounder sensation. Shortly after its appearance Cowden Clarke met Hood, and has left a vivid description of his personal appearance in those last months of his life. His worn, pallid look, he says, “strangely belied the effect of jocularity and high spirits conveyed by his writings. He punned incessantly, but languidly, almost as if unable to think in any other way than in play upon words. His smile was attractively sweet; it bespoke the affectionate-natured man which his serious verses – those especially addressed to his wife or his children – show him to be, and it also revealed the depth of pathos in his soul that inspired his Bridge of Sighs, Song of the Shirt, and Eugene Aram.”
There are many interesting points of resemblance between Hood and Lamb. Both were inveterate punsters; each had known poverty, and had come through hard experiences that had left their marks upon them, yet had never soured them or warped their sympathies. You may use the same epithets for both: they were homely, kindly, gentle, given to freakish moods and whimsical jesting; the one was as unselfishly devoted to his sister as the other was to his wife and children; and in descriptions of Hood, as of Lamb, stress is laid on the peculiar wistfulness and sweetness of his smile. But after the East India Company had handsomely pensioned him off, Lamb had no further financial anxieties; whilst Hood had to suppress his finer gifts, and to the end of his days turn his hand to all manner of inferior but more popular work, that would enable him to keep the family pot boiling. And he was all the while fighting against disease as well as poverty. He could not afford to go into exile, like Stevenson, and lengthen his days and foster his wasting strength in a healthfuller climate. He was never rich enough to have any choice but to die in the place where he had to earn his living, and no man ever worked more manfully, or died at his post bravelier or with a more cheery philosophy.
Read the humorous preface he wrote for the volume of Hood’s Own, whilst he lay ill abed there in his St. John’s Wood house: it is the sort of humour that makes your heart ache, for you cannot forget that he was racked with pain and slowly dying whilst he wrote it. He jests about the aristocratic, ghastly slenderness of his fingers; his body, he says, may cry craven, but luckily his mind has no mind to give in. “‘Things may take a turn,’ as the pig said on the spit… As to health? it’s the weather of the body – it rains, it hails, it blows, it snows at present, but it may clear up by-and-by”; and in conclusion he mentions that the doctor tells him, “anatomically my heart is lower hung than usual, but what of that? The more need to keep it up!” Raised up in bed, with an improvised desk across his knees, he was hard at work, writing prose and verse and knocking off grotesque little drawings, and remained, as he said, “a lively Hood to get a livelihood,” almost to his last hour. When, towards the end, his wife was trying to relieve his sufferings by putting a poultice on his emaciated body, he laughed up at her quizzically, and asked if she didn’t think “it seemed a deal of mustard for such a little meat.” He had moved into Devonshire Lodge, and was within sixteen months of his death when he wrote The Haunted House, and The Bridge of Sighs. “I fear that so far as I myself am concerned,” he writes to Thackeray in August 1844, “King Death will claim me ere many months elapse. However, there’s a good time coming, if not in this world, most assuredly in the next.” When he was invited next month to attend a soirée at the Manchester Athenæum, he had to decline, and added, “For me all long journeys are over save one”; but a couple of months later he had written the Lay of the Labourer, for his magazine, and writing to Lord Lytton remarked that though the doctor had ordered him not to work he was compelled to do so, and “so it will be to the end. I must die in harness, like a hero – or a horse.”