Another favourite resort of the three cronies was _The Feathers_, a dirty, dingy, delightful tavern, as I have seen it, in Hand Court, Holborn, nearly opposite the Great Turnstile leading into Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was only two minutes’ walk from the lodgings in Little Queen Street, and but a few houses distant from the oil-shop of Charles’s godfather, at the corner of Featherstone Buildings and Holborn. _The Feathers_ has gone to its own place, a modern something maddens me on its site, and all that I have been able to rescue is the quaint sign which hung until lately above the entrance of the court in Holborn, and looked down on the frequent goings in and out of our friends. It was while living in Pentonville that Lamb passed through his second, and his final, love-sickness. His first attack had been caused by undue exposure, when a guileless youth, unprotected by proper prophylactics, to the provocative charms of the “Alice Winterton” of his later writings. It is believed that her real name was Ann Simmons, and that he used to meet [Illustration: THE FEATHERS TAVERN.] her during his holidays at his grandmother’s place. For, with all his delightful egoistic frankness in prattling about himself, _this_ was the one point too tender to be touched on, seriously or jocularly, ever to any one. It is of her, surely, that he is thinking in two of his four sonnets in the Coleridge collection, wherein he speaks of his “fancied wanderings with a fair-haired maid.” He placed the scene of “Rosamund Gray” in the cottage where lived Ann Simmons, near Widford, not far from Blakesware; and they show to sentimental strangers that portion of the cluster of cottages still left. They claim that it is her portrait which he drew for that of his heroine, even as he is the Allan Clare of the little story. He certainly hints, just for once, at this love scrape in that letter to Coleridge in which he speaks of his six weeks’ stay in the Hoxton Asylum: “It may convince you of my regard for you when I tell you that my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.” But his recovery from both derangements was radical and permanent, and he was able to say, only a little later: “I am pleased and satisfied with myself that this weakness troubles me no longer. I am wedded, Coleridge, to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father.” That wedding to the fortunes of his sister _was_ his life-long union, and haply saved him from any other, which would have harmed, rather than have helped, this man; and would have sacrificed deplorably _this_ vivid personality on the altar of the greatly-glorified god, the infestive Humdrum.