The mother’s body is laid in the graveyard of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, the aunt is sent to other relatives, and the father’s wound having speedily healed, Charles removed with him to lodgings at No. 45 Chapel Street, Pentonville, on the corner of Liverpool Road. It was a plain little wooden house, as you may see it portrayed in the cut copied from W. Carew Hazlitt’s “Charles and Mary Lamb.” Now, there stands in its place a blazing brazen “pub,” quite in keeping with the squalid street. Its bar, like that favourite bar of Newman Noggs, “faces both ways,” in a hopeless attempt to cope all around with the unquenchable thirst of that quarter! [Illustration: THE HOUSE IN PENTONVILLE.] The new home, however, brought but slight brightening to the gloom and horror from which Charles had fled in the old home. It was shadowed by the almost actual presence of the dead mother, and made even more dismal by the living ghost of the aged father, now “in the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of human weakness, a remnant most forlorn of what he was.” He was released by death early in 1799, and laid by his wife’s side in the burying-ground of St. Andrew’s, Holborn; the ground since then having been cut through and wiped out by the construction of the Holborn viaduct. Old Aunt Hetty, “the kindest, goodest creature,” had come back to them, but only to die; and their faithful servant, who had followed their fortunes and their misfortunes, sickened slowly unto death. Mary had been allowed to return home for a while, from the rooms at Hackney, where Charles had placed her on her release from the asylum, and where he passed his Sundays and holidays with her. Now, she again broke down, and was forced to go back into seclusion at Hoxton. Then, for the one time in all his life, Charles gave way under these successive strokes, and made his only moan in a letter to Coleridge, early in 1800: “Mary, in consequence of fatigue and anxiety, is fallen ill again, and I was obliged to remove her yesterday. I am left alone in a house, with nothing but Hetty’s dead body to keep me company. To-morrow I bury her, and then I shall be quite alone, with nothing but a cat to remind me that the house has been full of living beings like myself. My heart is quite sunk, and I don’t know where to look for relief. Mary will get better again, but her constantly being liable to these attacks is dreadful; nor is it the least of our evils that her case and all our story is so well known around us. We are in a manner _marked_.... I am going to try and get a friend to come and be with me to-morrow--I am completely shipwrecked.” No, he was not completely wrecked, but terribly tempest-tossed for a time; and so at last--in the high phrase of Coleridge--“called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness.”