So his growing need and his growing want to be alone were never gratified. “Except my morning’s walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so--I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered--evening company I should always like, had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (_divine_, forsooth) and voices all the golden morning.... I am never C. L., but always C. L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself.” He could not even eat in peace, for his familiars were with him putting questions--presumably inopportune questions--asking his opinions, and interrupting him in every way. “Up I go, mutton on table, hungry as a hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication. Knock at the door; in comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Mr. Burney, or Morgan Demi Gorgon, or my brother, or somebody to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely necessary to my poor, wretched digestion. Oh, the pleasure of eating alone!--eating my dinner alone! let me think of it.” He did think of it, but to no practicable remedial end; for, if he hated to have the intruders come, he hated still more to have them go; and he had to avow, “God bless ’em! I love some of ’em dearly!” All this was a ceaseless drain on his vitality, and a ceaseless strain on the nerves already so overstrung. He wondered how “some people keep their nerves so nicely balanced as they do, or have they any? or are they made of pack-thread? He” (I know not of whom he spoke) “is proof against weather, ingratitude, meat underdone, every weapon of fate.” Lamb was not proof against good friends, his sympathetic nature going out perpetually to them to his own loss. Of Coleridge he said: “The neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons.... If I lived with him, or with the author of ‘The Excursion,’ I should in a very little time lose my own identity.” Only those of his susceptible temperament can comprehend this confession, or his characteristic commendation of John Rickman, Clerk of the House of Commons, a newly made and highly valued friend: “He understands you the first time. _You need never twice speak to him._”