This visitor, of such peculiar and piquant personality--externally “a rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel,” to use his own words of the singer Braham--is Charles Lamb, a clerk in the East India House, living with his sister Mary in chambers in the Inner Temple. Let us walk with him as he returns to those peaceful precincts, still of signal interest, despite the ruin wrought by recent improvements. Here, as in the day of Spenser, “studious lawyers have their bowers,” and “have thriven;” here, on every hand, we see the shades of Evelyn, Congreve, Cowper, the younger Colman, Fielding, Goldsmith, Johnson, Boswell; here, above all, the atmosphere is still redolent with sweet memories of the “best beloved of English writers,” as Algernon Swinburne well calls Charles Lamb. Closer and more compact than elsewhere are his footprints in these Temple grounds; for he was born within their gates, his youthful world was bounded by their walls, his happiest years, as boy and as man, were passed in their buildings. And out beyond these borders we shall track his steps mainly through adjacent streets, almost always along the City’s streets, of which he was as fond as Samuel Johnson or Charles Dickens. He loved, all through life, “enchanting London, whose dirtiest, drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn.... O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardware men, pastry-cooks, St. Paul’s Churchyard, the Strand, Exeter ’Change, Charing Cross, with the man _upon_ a black horse! These are thy gods, O London!” He couldn’t care, he said, for the beauties of nature, as they have been confinedly called; and used to persist, with his pleasing perversity, that when he climbed Skiddaw he was thinking of the ham-and-beef shop in St. Martin’s Lane! “Have I not enough without your mountains?” he wrote to Wordsworth. “I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with anything”--even with scenery! It was a serious step which Lamb took in later life, out from his beloved streets into the country; a step which certainly saddened, and doubtless shortened, the last stage of his earthly journey.