"For a few days prior to this, the family had observed
some symptoms of insanity in her, which had so much increased
on the Wednesday evening that her brother, early the next
morning, went to Dr. Pitcairn; but that gentleman was not at
home.
"The jury of course brought in their verdict,--_Lunacy_."
I need not supply the omitted names of the actors in this harrowing
scene. Mary Lamb was at once placed in the Asylum at Hoxton, and the
victim of her frenzy was laid to rest in the churchyard of St. Andrew's,
Holborn. It became necessary for Charles and his father to make an
immediate change of residence, and they took lodgings at Pentonville.
There is a pregnant sentence in one of Lamb's letters that flashes with
the vividness of lightning into the darkest recesses of those early
troubles and embarrassments. "We are," he wrote to Coleridge, "_in a
manner marked_."
Charles Lamb after some weeks obtained the release of his sister from
the Hoxton Asylum by formally undertaking her future guardianship,--a
charge which was borne, until Death released the compact, with a
steadfastness, a cheerful renunciation of what men regard as the
crowning blessings of manhood, [8] that has shed a halo more radiant even
than that of his genius about the figure--it was "small and mean," said
sprightly Mrs. Mathews--of the India House clerk.
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