Charles Lamb was the son of John Lamb, who had left his native Lincolnshire—­probably from the neighbourhood of Stamford—­as a child, and who finally found himself attached to one Samuel Salt, a Bencher of the Inner Temple, in the capacity of “his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his ‘flapper,’ his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer.”  Salt’s chambers were at 2, Crown Office Row, and there John Lamb lived with a family consisting of himself, his wife, an unmarried sister, Sarah Lamb ("Aunt Hetty"), a son John, aged twelve, and a daughter Mary, aged eleven, when on 10th February, 1775, there was born to him another son to whom was given the now familiar name.  Seven children had been born from 1762 to 1775, but of them all these three alone survived.  The father and his employer are sketched, unforgetably, in Lamb’s essay on “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,” Salt, under his own name, and Lamb under that of Lovel:  “I knew this Lovel.  He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty.  A good fellow withal and ‘would strike.’  In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents.”  The whole passage must be read in the essay itself.  From his father Charles Lamb inherited at once his literary leanings and his humour, both heightened to an incalculable degree.  We have Elia’s word for it that John Lamb the elder “was the liveliest little fellow breathing” with a face as gay as Garrick’s, and we know further that he published a small volume of simple verse.  From the father, too, the family derived a heavier inheritance, which was to cast its shadow over their lives from the day of Charles’s early manhood to the day half a century later, when his sister Mary, the last survivor of the family circle, was laid to rest.

Lamb’s mother, Elizabeth Field, is—­for obvious reasons—­the only member of the immediate family circle whom we do not meet in his writings.  His maternal grandmother—­the grandame who is to be met in his verses and in some of his essays—­was for over half a century housekeeper at Blakesware in Hertfordshire, and with her, as a small boy, Charles spent pleasant holidays.

Little Charles Lamb was sent for a time to “a humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning, and the same slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters, etc., in the evening.”  In a letter to Coleridge (5th July, 1796) we have a hint that Lamb may have had yet earlier teaching in an infant school in the Temple for he writes:  “Mr. Chambers lived in the Temple; Mrs. Reynolds, his daughter, was my schoolmistress”; though it may be that the lady referred to was employed in Mr. Bird’s school.  This school, kept by William Bird “in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett’s Buildings,” was the one to which Mary Lamb appears to have owed her regular training; but Samuel Salt had a goodly collection of old books in his chambers,