The Sun.
London, England, 1866-07-17 00:00:00

other would not wish it, but would be obliged to go with
the stream.'

" This one brother, John Lamb, held a clerkship, with a
Considerable salary, in the South Sea House (the subject of
the first of the collected Essays), and seems to have been
a hard, dry, selfish man, who cared little for his relations ;
but after his mother's terrible death he, too, was in danger
from the family disease. ' I fear for his mind,' writes
Charles to Coleridge ; he has taken his ease in the world
and is not fit to struggle with difficulties.' But the other
brother' did not go with the stream. He made up his mind
at once what to do, and he did it, his whole life through.
To enable him to devote his being entire to his desolate
sister, he began by burning the little journal of ' my foolish
Passion, which I had so long time kept,' and even, under
the exaggeration of the first sense of self-devotion, and to
wean himself off from the occupations and hopes of a
happier past, he got rid of the letters of his best and wisest
friends, and of all his own compositions in verse. Men-
tion nothing of poetry,' ho writes ; ' I have destroyed every
vestige of poor vanities of that kind.' The whole income
of the household at that time was, at the most, not more
than £lBO, out of which,' he says, wo can spare £5O or
£6O for Mary while she stays in an asylum; if I and my
father, and an old maid-servant, cannot live, and live com-
fortably, on £l3O or £l2O a year, we ought to burn by
slow fires. I almost would, so that Mary might not go
into an hospital.' The brother and all the other members
of the family opposed her discharge, but the solemn under-
taking of Charles to act thereafter for life as her protector
prevailed. Whenever some irritability or change of man-
ner prognosticated the returning malady, the brother and
Sister would walk quietly, but often weeping, to Hoxton
Asylum, he carrying the strait-jacket, which at that
time was the indispensable adjunct of insanity. But even
nwohtevniontlheert,e he did not leave her entirely. ' When she is
her rambling chat is better to mo than the
sense and sanity of the world,' and he rarely went else-
where for relief or diversion. am afraid there is some-
thing of dishonesty in any pleasure I take without her.'
With eloquent pathos indeed does Mr. Proctor write—
"'ln this constant and uncomplaining endurance, and
in his steady adherence to a great principle of conduct, his
life was heroic. We read of men giving up all their days
to a 'lngle object ; to religion, to vengeance, to some over-
powering-selfish wish ; of daring acts done to avert death
or disgrace, or some oppressing misfortune. We read
mythical tales of friendship; but wo do not recollect any
tance in which a great object has been so unremittingly
carried out throughout a whole life, in defiance of a thou-
sand difficulties, and of numberless temptations, straining
the good resolution to its utmost, except in the case of our
poor clerk of the India House.'
"But it may be no extravagance of the theory of com-
pensations to believe that something besides the satisfac-
tion of accomplished duty was the result of this devoted
life. Though, in one form of insanity, structural disease
deadens or distorts the perception, and, extending to the
organs of all the faculties, paralyses the intellectual force
and reduces the individual to a simple machine, and, in
another, the inefficiency or misdirection of the intellectual
force is the sole cause of derangement, and produces disease
by the violence of its existence and the want of the habit
of controlling the thoughts and checking the imagination
there will always remain a border-land of sanity and
Madness, in which the saving power is the abstraction from
self--the fixed occupation of the mind in other matters
than its own phenomena. The saddest impression a visitor
takes away from an asylum is the utter lovelessness of its
inmates ; and it seems almost as if the sense of one
passionate sympathy might disperse the darkest of those
,olouds. Certain it is that though, just before that catas-
trophe, Charles Lamb was placed under control, the
Precaution was never necessary again, notwithstanding
cHls all the stress of mind caused by the dreadful event and its
elecillenc°s• Under the regis of that intense fraternal
eve his spirit walked secure."