an old friend and as touching a vein of real sorrow and anxiety in his mental history. He replied to the charge in the well-known ‘Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esq.,’ in the ‘London Magazine’ for October 1823. Southey, in reply, wrote a loving and generous letter of explanation to Lamb, and the breach between the old friends was at once healed. The same year that brought Lamb this distress was to bring compensation in a new interest added to his life. He and his sister were in the habit of spending their autumn holiday at Cambridge, where they had a friend, Mrs. Paris, sister of Lamb's old friend, William Ayrton. Here the Lambs met a little orphan girl, Emma Isola, daughter of Charles Isola, one of the esquire bedells of the university. They invited her to spend subsequent holidays with them, and finally adopted her. During the remaining ten years of Lamb's life the companionship of the young girl supplied the truest solace and relief amid the deepening anxieties of the home life. Lamb and his sister devoted themselves to her education, and though in after years she left them at times to become herself a teacher of others, their house was her home until her marriage with Edward Moxon, the publisher, in 1833. Mrs. Moxon died in March 1891.
In August 1823 the Lambs left their rooms in Russell Street, Covent Garden, ‘over the Brazier's,’ and took a cottage in Colebrooke Row, Islington, the New River flowing at the foot of their garden. Lamb describes the house in a letter of 2 Sept. to Bernard Barton [q.v.] , the quaker poet of Woodbridge, who was one of Lamb's later friends, acquired through the ‘London Magazine.’ To him many of Lamb's happiest letters are addressed. Meantime Lamb was writing more ‘Elia’ essays, though with weakening health and increasing restlessness. Already he was considering the chances of retirement from the India House, and a severe illness in the winter of 1824–5 brought the matter to an issue. His doctors urgently supported his application to the directors, and the happy result was made known to him in March 1825, when it was announced that a retiring pension would be awarded him, consisting of three-fourths of his salary, with a slight deduction to insure an allowance for his sister in the event of her surviving. ‘After thirty-three years' slavery,’ he wrote to Wordsworth, ‘here am I a freed man, with 441l. a year for the remainder of my life.’ The first use that Lamb made of his freedom was to pay visits of varying length in the country, always in the direction of his favourite Hertfordshire. The brother and sister took lodgings occasionally at the Chace, Enfield, and after two years became sole tenants of the little house. Meantime the trials of having nothing to do became very real to them both. Lamb was an excellent walker, and in the summer months he found great pleasure in exploring the scenery of Hertfordshire, with the comforting remembrance that he was still in easy touch with London and friends. But old friends were dying, and Lamb's loyal nature found little compensation in the cultivation of new ones. That devoted friend of his childhood, Mr. Randal Norris, sub-treasurer of the Inner Temple, died in January 1827, and is the subject of a pathetic letter to Crabb Robinson—‘To the last he called me Charley. I have none to call me Charley now.’ Randal Norris left two daughters, who set up a school at Widford, to which village their mother had belonged. The younger, Mrs. Arthur Tween, who was well known to the present writer, died at an advanced age at Widford in July 1891. During the few remaining years of Lamb's life it was a favourite excursion for him and Miss Isola to walk over to Widford and beg a half-holiday for the girls and tell them stories.
In 1828 Lamb obtained some literary work of a kind thoroughly congenial. He wished to assist Hone, then producing his ‘Table Book,’ and undertook to make extracts (after the model of his ‘Dramatic Specimens’ of 1808) from the Garrick plays in the British Museum. He had written also for the ‘New Monthly Magazine,’ in 1826, his essays called ‘Popular Fallacies.’ He wrote also occasional verse, and at times in his happiest and most characteristic vein, such as the lines ‘On an Infant dying as soon as born,’ written on the death of Thomas Hood's first child, in 1828. Acrostics also, and other such trifles, and album verses, became increasingly in request among his young lady friends. And in 1830, to help his friend Moxon, then newly starting as publisher, he made a collection of these, under the title of ‘Album Verses, with a few others.’ In the summer of 1829 the brother and sister had again to change their residence. Mary's health was steadily weakening, her attacks and periods of absence from home became longer, and the cares of housekeeping proved intolerable. They moved, accordingly, to the adjoining house in Enfield Chace, and boarded with a retired tradesman and his wife, a Mr. and Mrs. Westwood. The immediate effects were satisfactory, and for a while Mary Lamb seemed to improve in health and spirits. But Charles meantime became less at ease in country life. The next year brought him new distractions. Emma Isola, for whom
