It was under the quickening influence of the eloquent, precocious genius
of the "inspired charity boy" that Charles Lamb's ideals and ambitions
shaped themselves out of the haze of a child's conceptions. Coleridge at
sixteen was already a poet, his ear attuned to the subtlest melody of
verse, and his hand rivalling, in preluding fragments, the efforts of
his maturer years; he was already a philosopher, rapt in Utopian,
schemes and mantling hopes as enchanting--and as chimerical--as the
pleasure-domes and caves of ice decreed by Kubla Khan; and the younger
lad became his ardent disciple.
Lamb quitted Christ's Hospital, prematurely, in November, 1787, and the
companionship of the two friends was for a time interrupted. To part
with Coleridge, to exchange the ease and congenial scholastic atmosphere
of the Hospital for the _res angusta domi_, for the intellectual
starvation of a life of counting-house drudgery, must have been a bitter
trial for him. But the shadow of poverty was upon the little household
in the Temple; on the horizon of the future the blackening clouds of
anxieties still graver were gathering; and the youngest child was called
home to share the common burden.
Charles Lamb was first employed in the South Sea House, where his
brother John [3]--a cheerful optimist, a _dilettante_ in art, genial,
prosperous, thoroughly selfish, in so far as the family fortunes were
concerned an outsider--already held a lucrative post.
Pages:
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26