And so, through a leafy lane bordered by stately elms, with cosey cottages on either hand, across a cheerful green, alongside the rippling stream, we reach the “Manse,” as Lamb’s home was called for many years--a name it has only lately lost, when it was newly stuccoed and painted. It has been re-christened “The Poplars,” from the four tall trees of that species which rear themselves in its front garden. In the garden behind, the old yew and the bent apple-trees, and beyond the pleasant fields stretching away, are all as they were when he looked through and over them to the Epping Hills. The house has been enlarged and changes have been made inside, and all is hideously and shamelessly “smart.” Nothing in this interior speaks to us of its old tenants. They were seen, on their coming to take the house, by a schoolboy next door, who has given this pleasing description of them: “Leaning idly out of a window, I saw a group of three issuing from the ‘gambogy-looking cottage’ close at hand--a slim, middle-aged man in quaint, uncontemporary habiliments, a rather shapeless bundle of an old lady, in a bonnet like a mob-cap, and a young girl; while before them bounded a riotous dog [Hood’s immortal ‘Dash’], holding a board, with ‘This House To Let’ on it, in his jaws. Lamb was on his way back to the house-agent’s, and that was his fashion of announcing that he had taken the premises.” In the summer of 1829, the family of three left this home, the care of which was wearing too heavily on Mary. “We have taken a farewell of the pompous, troublesome trifle called housekeeping, and are settled down into poor boarders and lodgers, at next door, with an old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield.... Our providers are an honest pair, Dame Westwood and her husband; he, when the light of prosperity shined on them, a moderately thriving haberdasher within Bow Bells, retired since with something under a competence ... and has _one anecdote_, upon which, and about £40 a year, he seems to have retired in green old age.” It was “forty-two inches nearer town,” Lamb wrote, and it still is there, next door to their first Enfield home, as you see it in our cut: a comfortable cottage set back from the road, vines clambering over its small entrance-porch and hiding all the walls. In its little back sitting-room were written the “Last Essays of Elia.” In this house he remained for almost four years, and in 1833 he made his last remove--except the final one we all must make--to Edmonton. VI.