They had, also, an aged school-dame here, who was proud to prattle to her pupils about her aforetime friend, Oliver Goldsmith; telling them how the good-natured man, then too poor to present her with a copy of his “Deserted Village,” had lent it to her to read. He had become famous now, and so affluent--by the success of “The Good Natur’d Man,” indeed!--that he had bought chambers on the second floor of No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple. This was but a biscuit toss from Crown Office Row, and perchance little Mary Lamb sometimes met, within the grounds, the short, stout, plain, pock-marked Irish doctor. He died in those chambers, only ten months before the birth of Charles; and was buried somewhere in the burying-ground of the Temple church. Within it, the Benchers put up a tablet to his memory. It is now in their vestry, wherein you shall also find the baptismal records of nearly all the Lamb children. The inscription on the tablet may have been first spelled out by Mary to her small and eager brother. Doubtless the two children knew the exact spot of his grave--known exactly to none of us to-day--even as they knew every corner and cranny of the Temple grounds and buildings. They played in its gardens, and looked down on them from these same upper windows of No. 2 Crown Office Row, which have been selected by Mr. Fulleylove for his point of view. _Then_ these gardens were as Shakespeare saw them, when he, by a blameless anachronism, caused to be enacted in them the famous scene of the Roses; really rehearsed there, years before, when Warwick assigned the rose to Plantagenet. Now, the grounds have been extended riverwards by the construction of the Embankment; and the ancient historic blocks of buildings about them have been vulgarized into something new and fine. Mary and Charles were always together during these early days. Of the seven children born into the family, only three escaped death in infancy: our two, and their brother John, elder by two years than Mary. Their mother loved them all, but most of all did she love “dear, little, selfish, craving John;” who, as was well written by Charles in later life, was [Illustration: THE TEMPLE GARDENS, FROM CROWN OFFICE ROW.] not worthy of one-tenth of that affection which Mary had a right to claim. But the mother, like the father, was fond of fun, and found her favourite in her handsome, sportive, noisy boy; showing scant sympathy with and no insight into the “moythered brains”--her own phrase--of her sensitive, brooding daughter, who already gave unheeded evidence of the congenital gloom by which her mind was to become so clouded. Another member of the small household was the father’s queer old-maiden sister, Aunt Hetty, who passed her days sitting silently or mumbling mysteriously as she peered over her spectacles at the two children, huddled together in their youthful fear of her.