and among these the brother and sister browsed most profitably, to use his own expressive word, acquiring an early liking for good literature and learning to take their best recreation in things of the mind.  But if from the “school room looking into a discoloured dingy garden” Mary Lamb was presumed to be able to acquire a sufficiency of knowledge, it was seen that her younger brother needed something more than Mr. Bird could give to fit him for a life in which he would have to take an early place as bread-winner.  John Lamb’s friendly employer—­whom lovers of Lamb can never recall but to honour—­secured a nomination for the boy to Christ’s Hospital, and thither in his eighth year the little fellow was transferred from the home in the Temple.

Should a zealous compiler seek to arrange an autobiography of Charles Lamb from his writings he would not have a difficult task, and he would find two delightful essays devoted to the famous school—­so long the distinguishing feature of Newgate Street—­where “blue-coat boys” passed the most importantly formative period of their lives.  Handicapped somewhat by a stuttering speech Charles Lamb did not perhaps join in all the boyish sports of his fellows, though there are many testimonies to the regard in which he was held by his school-mates, and the fact is stressed that though the only one of his surname at Christ’s Hospital, he was never “Lamb” but always “Charles Lamb,” as though there were something of an endearment in the constant use of his Christian name.  “The Christ’s Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the public schools.”  In the essay from which this is quoted, Charles Lamb, looking back a quarter of a century after leaving the old foundation, summed up the characteristics of his school as reflected in the character of its boys of whom he and the close friend he made there are the two whose names are the most commonly on the lips of men.  It is, indeed, worthy of remark that from amid the countless boys educated at Christ’s Hospital since it was founded three centuries and a half ago by “the flower of the Tudor name ... boy patron of boys,” the names that stand out most prominently are those of the two who were at the school together—­Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  It was at that old “Hospital,” recently, alas, demolished, that these men, so different in genius, so similar in many of their intellectual tastes, began a memorable friendship that was only to be broken by death more than half a century later.

A schoolfellow’s description of him may help us to visualize the elusive figure of which we have no early portraits, and the later portraits of which are understood to be wanting in one regard or another.  His countenance, says this early observer, was mild; his complexion clear brown, with an expression that might lead you to think that he was of Jewish descent.  His eyes were not each of the same colour:  one was hazel, the other had specks of grey in the iris, mingled as we see red spots in the bloodstone.  His step was plantigrade, which made his walk slow and peculiar, adding to the staid appearance of his figure.