He took lodgings for a while at No. 24 Southampton Buildings, within sight of his former quarters at No. 34 of the same street--a house in which Hazlitt frequently had put up, not far from the house famed for his “ancillary affection!” The numbers remain unchanged; and you may look at the queer old [Illustration: NO. 34 SOUTHAMPTON BUILDINGS.] stuccoed front on any day you choose to turn out from Chancery Lane. The house has a strange, sloping roof of tiles, and altogether it is quite unlike any of its neighbours. But this impermanent residence in town brought no real relief, for he found that the bodies he cared for were in graves or dispersed. He sought solace in work, and made extracts for Hone’s _Table Book_ from among the two thousand old plays left by Garrick to the British Museum. Hone had been grateful to Lamb for having contributed already to his _Every Day Book_; and had dedicated the issue for 1826 to him and to Mary. In doing so, he published his gratitude, most distastefully to them, saying in his preface that he could not forget “your and Miss Lamb’s sympathy and kindness when glooms outmastered me; and that your pen spontaneously sparkled in the book when my mind was in clouds and darkness. These ‘trifles,’ as each of you would call them, are benefits scored upon my heart.” Forgiving this fulsome gush, Lamb set his pen to sparkling again in the following year, and found relief in it. “It is a sort of office-work to me--hours ten to four, the same. It does me good.” The reading-room wherein he worked is now the print-room, a venerable and musty chamber, famous in those days for its fine specimens of the Pulex literarius, or Museum flea; and doubtless infested, too--for Lamb’s irritation, as for Carlyle’s, since the latter has left it on record--by that reader, still startling us there to-day, who blows his nose “like a Chaldean trumpet in the new moon;” and by that other, who slumbers peacefully with his head in a ponderous tome, and wakes suddenly, snorting. The assistant-librarian of the Museum at that time was the Reverend Mr. Cary--“the Dante man”--a friend of the Lambs of recent years; and Charles found congenial companionship at his table, where he was frequently invited to dine. Near the Museum, in Hart Street, F. S. Cary, the son of the librarian, had his studio; and there Charles would wander, on Thursdays, during the summer of 1834, and sit for his portrait, with Mary. He is portrayed seated in a chair, and Mary stands behind him; the figures full length and half-life size. This painting was never completed, and from it the artist made a copy of Charles alone, after death. Of this, Crabb Robinson said, a few years later: “In no one respect a likeness; thoroughly bad; complexion, figure, expression unlike. But for ‘Elia’ on a paper, I should not have thought it possible that it could have been meant for Charles Lamb.”