B.,--free
as air!
"'The little bird that wings the sky
Knows no such liberty,'
I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o'clock. I
came home forever!"
The quality of the generosity of the East India directors was not
strained in Lamb's case. It should be recorded as an agreeable
commercial phenomenon that these officials, men of business acting in "a
business matter,"--words too often held to exclude all such Quixotic
matters as sentiment, gratitude, and Christian equity between man and
man,--were not only just, but munificent. [16] From the path of Charles
and Mary Lamb--already beset with anxieties grave enoughthey removed
forever the shadow of want. Lamb's salary at the time of his retirement
was nearly seven hundred pounds a year, and the offer made to him was a
pension of four hundred and fifty, with a deduction of nine pounds a
year for his sister, should she survive him.
Lamb lived to enjoy his freedom and the Company's bounty nearly nine
years. Soon after his retirement he settled with his sister at Enfield,
within easy reach of his loved London, removing thence to the
neighboring parish of Edmonton,--his last change of residence.
Coleridge's death, in July, 1834, was a heavy blow to him. "When I heard
of the death of Coleridge," he wrote, "it was without grief. It seemed
to me that he had long been on the confines of the next world, that he
had a hunger for eternity.
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