And yet, just the more uncongenial as was his labour, by just so much more did it tend in all ways to his good. Wordsworth said truly, with admirable acumen, that Lamb’s submission to this mechanical employment placed him in fine contrast with other men of genius--his contemporaries--who, in sacrificing personal independence, made a wreck of their morality and honour. No such wreck did Charles Lamb make, and his peculiar pride prevented his sacrificing ever one iota of his independence. He could be no man’s debtor nor dependant, and was content to cut his coat to suit his cloth, all his life long. His sole hatred, curiously enough, was for bankrupts; and he has portrayed with delicious irony, in his essay, “The Two Races of Men”--the men who borrow and the men who lend--the contempt of the former for money, “accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross!” The new clerk began with an annual salary of £70, to be increased by a small sum each year. Many huge account-books were filled with his figures--who knows what has become of them?--and these he used to call his real works, filling some hundred folios on the shelves in Leadenhall Street. His printed books, he claimed, were the solace and the recreations of his out-of-office hours at home. [Illustration: NO. 7 LITTLE QUEEN STREET.] That home was no longer in the Temple. The home there, of “snug firesides, the low-built roof, parlours ten feet by ten, frugal board, and all the homeliness of home,” had been given up, on the death of Mr. Salt; or, it may be, even earlier, for I am unable to fix the date. The family had moved into poor lodgings, at No. 7 Little Queen Street, Holborn, where we find them during the year 1795. The site of this house, and of its adjoining neighbours on both sides, Nos. 6 and 8, is now occupied by Holy Trinity Church of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The first house of the old row still standing is No. 9, and the side entrance of the Holborn Restaurant is No. 5; so that, you see, the windows of the Lamb lodgings looked out directly down Gate Street, their house exactly facing the western embouchure of that short and narrow street.