However disfurnished may be this interior, its tiny hall, its narrow stairway, its walls--on which the Lambs may have put this very same queer marbled paper--all are in the same state as then, when they lived within and loved them. The most marked alteration has been in his once “spacious garden”--around which he challenged that professional jester, the obese, red-nosed Theodore Hook, to race him for a wager. That diminutive domain has dwindled now to an exiguous back yard, and a soda-water factory is built over its vines and vegetables. Here the little household was enlarged and enlivened by the presence of Emma Isola, the orphaned grandchild of an Italian exile, who taught his own tongue in Cambridge, and who had been the Italian teacher of Gray and of Wordsworth. To her the Lambs, then visiting Cambridge, took a strong fancy; Mary especially pouring out on her the bounteous sympathy with which she flowed over for young people, and which won from all of them an equal fondness. They invited the lonely girl to visit them during her holidays, and finally they made her their adopted daughter, and their home her own. Mary helped her with French, Charles taught her Latin, that she might become a governess. Lamb was always quick to serve those who were poorer than himself, and, _giving greatly_ all his life long, in Procter’s words, he always had protégés and pensioners on his bounty. Yet he was curiously provident, and never lived beyond his simple income, never ran into debt. He could and did practise economy with himself, but he was incapable of parsimony in his dealings with others. These are De Quincey’s words about this side of the man: “Many liberal people I have known in this world ... many munificent people, but never any one upon whom, for bounty, for indulgence and forgiveness, for charitable construction of doubtful or mixed actions, and for regal munificence, you might have thrown yourself with so absolute a reliance as upon this comparatively poor Charles Lamb.” But of all this the subject of this fervent, true tribute tells us no word. He prattled in print as freely and as frankly as Montaigne, though with none of the sentimental shamelessness of Jean Jacques Rousseau; and his delightful egotism has made plain to us his foibles and his follies. Yet, with all the rest of his life in evidence, we know nothing from _him_ of “That best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.”