It was here that Mary made the memorable find of an empty adjoining garret of four untenanted, unowned rooms; of which they took possession by degrees, and to which Charles could escape from his too frequent friends, who had more leisure than himself. Here he did his literary work in secrecy and silence, “as much alone as if he were in a lodging in the midst of Salisbury Plain.” They never knew to whom these chambers rightly belonged, and they were never dispossessed. So all was well with him, and even in his whimsical perversity he was able to complain only that there was another “Mr. Lamb” not far from him; “his duns and his girls frequently stumble up to me, and I am obliged to satisfy both in the best way I am able.” The staircase of the new building is still stumbled up by duns and girls, you may drink from that same pump to-day, you may see those trees still in that court, but _his_ windows no longer look out on trees and pump and court. Talfourd and Procter have left vivid pictures of the memorable Wednesday evenings in the Temple, the former contrasting them with the stately assemblages of Holland House. “Like other great men, I have a public day,” Lamb wrote. He loved men, and he had a rare capacity for getting at the best they had in them, a real reverence for their abilities, a kindly sympathy with their diverse tastes, and a most friendly frankness as to all their foibles. “How _could_ I hate him?” he asked of some one: “Don’t I know him? I never could hate any one I knew.” He looked so constantly and so closely into the strange faces of calamity, that he yearned always for the nearness of friendly features. Above all, he understood, as Goethe did, “how mighty is the goddess of propinquity;” and although he was so untiring and prolific and delightful in his letters to absent friends, he insisted that “one glimpse of the human face and one shake of the human hand is better than whole reams of this thin, cold correspondence; yea, of more worth than all the letters that have sweated the fingers of sensibility from Madame Sévigné and Balzac to Sterne and Shenstone.”