By a happy chance--for they have an unhallowed habit in London town of destroying just those buildings which I should select to save, leaving unmolested those that would not be missed, for all they ever have to say to us--nearly every one of Lamb’s successive homes has been rescued from ruin, and kept inviolate for our reverent regard. “Cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure)”--to use his own words--has been only partly rebuilt; and that end of the block wherein lived his parents stands almost in the same state as when it was erected in 1737; this date told to us to-day by the old-fashioned figures cut on its easterly end. It was then named “The New Building, opposite the Garden-Wall,” and under that division of the Chamber-Book of the Inner Temple I have hunted up its numerous occupants. By this archive, and by the Books of Accounts for the eighteenth century, I have thus been enabled to trace Samuel Salt from his first residence within the Temple in 1746, in Ram Alley Building--now gone--through successive removals, until he settled down in his last chambers, wherein he died in February, 1793. The record reads--a “parliament” meaning one of the fixed meetings in each term of the Benchers of the Temple, for the purpose of transacting business, and of calling students to the bar--“13th May, 1768. At this Parliament: It is ordered that Samuel Salt, Esquire, a Barrister of this Society, aged about Fifty, be and is hereby admitted, for his own life, to the benefit of an Assignment in and to All that Ground Chamber, No. 2, opposite the Garden Walk in Crown Office Row: He, the said Samuel Salt having paid for the Purchase thereof into the Treasury of this Society, the sum of One Hundred and Fifty pounds.” So that it was in No. 2--the numbers having remained always unchanged--of Crown Office Row, in one of the rear rooms of the ground floor, which then looked out on Inner Temple Lane, some of which rooms have been swept away since, and others have been slightly altered, that Charles Lamb was born, on the 10th February, 1775.