Such as it was, it became the next home of the Lambs, in 1817. At that time they had lived for nine years in their chambers in Inner Temple Lane, and it is strange that they should have been willing to leave their beloved Temple, after having been born into it again, and after having grown up in it again. For Lamb’s household gods planted a terrible fixed foot, as he put it, and were not rooted up without blood. “I thought we could never have been torn up from the Temple,” he wrote; yet they did so tear themselves up, and we are left to conjecture, for their reasons. Mary told Dorothy Wordsworth that the rooms had got dirty and out of repair, and that the cares of living in chambers had grown more irksome each year. More weighty among their motives, no doubt, was the desire to escape the incessant invasion of their privacy by welcome, and yet unwelcome, friends. From this wear and tear they were not freed by their flight, however. In November, 1817, Lamb wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth: “We are in the individual spot I like best in all this great city. The theatres with all their noises; Covent Garden, dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinous, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and ’sparagus; Bow Street, where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and, casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way, with a constable to conduct the ceremony. These little incidents agreeably diversify a female life.” Besides these novel sights, they found strange sounds in their new abode. A brazier’s hammers were rankling all day long within, and by night without--but let Mary tell it, in her letter to Dorothy Wordsworth: “Here we are living at a brazier’s shop, No. 20, in Russell Street, Covent Garden--a place all alive with noise and bustle; Drury Lane Theatre in sight from our front, and Covent Garden from our back windows.... The hubbub of the carriages returning from the play doesn’t annoy me in the least--strange that it doesn’t, for it is quite tremendous. I quite enjoy looking out of the window, and listening to the calling up of the carriages, and the squabbles of the coachmen and link-boys.” They squabble still of a foggy night--“a real London partic’ler”--and the noise is even greater now than it was then, and Covent Garden is filthier than ever, and the thieves go by escorted by a “bobby,” and attended by a crowd; but the brazier no longer brazes, and his discordant shop is now inoffensive with noiseless fruits.