Charles Lamb, that "small, spare man in black,"--who, with his saddest of life-histories, his patient devotion and fortitude, ill deserved Carlyle's crude vituperation,--was a great devotee of the Inns, and especially of the Temple, his birthplace. It was in Little Queen Street, off Holborn, that the early tragedy happened that saddened all his life; the murder of his mother by the hand of his dearly-loved sister, in a fit of insanity. After this terrible occurrence, the brother took his sister Mary into his charge, never after to part from her, except only for her occasional necessary periods of restraint in an asylum. In Colebrook Row, Islington, where Lamb retired on his emancipation from the India Office, was the last abode of this devoted couple; and here occurred the pathetic incident recorded by a friend, that of the brother and sister walking across the fields towards the safety of the neighbouring asylum, hand-in-hand, like two children, and weeping bitterly. [Illustration: _Pepys and his Wife._] The Temple, so beloved of Charles Lamb, is the most widely known of all the Inns; being the largest, and in some ways the most attractive. Its garden-lawns slope gently and pleasantly towards the river; and its quaint, time-honoured, and beautiful old squares have the added charm of a long and romantic history. For here once was the stronghold of the Knights Templars, that powerful fraternity, so masterful in the picturesque Middle Ages; and, though the only substantial relic of them that yet exists here is the old Temple Church, their memory still lingers about these courts and gateways, adorned with their arms. And Charles Lamb,--the real child of the Temple,--has, though born at a later time, invested the place with a double charm. Born in 1775, in Crown Office Row, his father servant to a Bencher of the Inner Temple, the boy, from his earliest years, breathed in the poetry and romance of his surroundings. Has not his touching description of a childhood spent here almost the dignity of a classic? "I was born" (he says), "and passed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said--for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?--these are my oldest recollections.... What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light! How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep! "Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand, Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!"