When only fourteen years old, Lamb left the charity school and was soon at work as a clerk in the South Sea House.  Two years later he became a clerk in the famous India House, where he worked steadily for thirty-three years, with the exception of six weeks, in the winter of 1795-1796, spent within the walls of an asylum.  In 1796 Lamb’s sister Mary, who was as talented and remarkable as Lamb himself, went violently insane and killed her own mother.  For a long time after this appalling tragedy she was in an asylum at Hoxton; then Lamb, in 1797, brought her to his own little house, and for the remainder of his life cared for her with a tenderness and devotion which furnishes one of the most beautiful pages in our literary history.  At times the malady would return to Mary, giving sure warning of its terrible approach; and then brother and sister might be seen walking silently, hand in hand, to the gates of the asylum, their cheeks wet with tears.  One must remember this, as well as Lamb’s humble lodgings and the drudgery of his daily work in the-big commercial house, if he would appreciate the pathos of “The Old Familiar Faces,” or the heroism which shines through the most human and the most delightful essays in our language.

When Lamb was fifty years of age the East India Company, led partly by his literary fame following his first Essays of Elia, and partly by his thirty-three years of faithful service, granted him a comfortable pension; and happy as a boy turned loose from school he left India House forever to give himself up to literary work.[231] He wrote to Wordsworth, in April, 1825, “I came home forever on Tuesday of last week—­it was like passing from life into eternity.”  Curiously enough Lamb seems to lose power after his release from drudgery, and his last essays, published in 1833, lack something of the grace and charm of his earlier work.  He died at Edmonton in 1834; and his gifted sister Mary sank rapidly into the gulf from which his strength and gentleness had so long held her back.  No literary man was ever more loved and honored by a rare circle of friends; and all who knew him bear witness to the simplicity and goodness which any reader may find for himself between the lines of his essays.

WORKS.  The works of Lamb divide themselves naturally into three periods.  First, there are his early literary efforts, including the poems signed “C.  L.” in Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects (1796); his romance Rosamund Gray (1798); his poetical drama John Woodvil (1802); and various other immature works in prose and poetry.  This period comes to an end in 1803, when he gave up his newspaper work, especially the contribution of six jokes, puns, and squibs daily to the Morning Post at sixpence apiece.  The second period was given largely to literary criticism; and the Tales from Shakespeare (1807)—­written by Charles and Mary Lamb, the former reproducing the tragedies,