The contrary, however, was the case with Charles and Mary Lamb. Between these two, it was the brother who laid down his life for his sister, sacrificing for her sake, at the outset of his own career, his prospects of love and marriage, the ease and comfort of his life, and his opportunities of devoting himself exclusively to his darling studies. The story of these two beautiful lives is worth more than even their contributions to English literature, and makes us love Lamb and his sister quite independently of the _Essays of Elia_, and the _Tales from Shakespeare_. Mary Lamb was born in 1764, eleven years before her brother Charles. Her childhood, till the birth of this precious brother, seems to have had little brightness in it. There was a tendency to insanity in the Lamb family, and this tendency was probably intensified in Mary’s case by the harshness and want of sympathy with which it was then the fashion to treat children. “Polly, what are those poor crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking, always?” was a speech of her grandmother’s that made a lasting impression on the sensitive child. The love of her parents, her mother especially, seems to have been centred on her brother John, older than herself by two years. “‘Dear little selfish, craving John,’ he was in childhood, and dear big selfish John he remained in manhood” (Mrs. Gilchrist’s _Life of Mary Lamb_, p. 4). The first creature upon whom the wealth of affection in Mary’s nature could be freely bestowed was, therefore, the baby brother. She spoke in after years of the curative influence on her mind of the almost maternal affection which she lavished on the boy who was, to a great extent, committed to her care. Henceforward she was no longer lonely, but had gained a companion and object in life. Her education consisted mainly in having been “tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and she browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage.” This was the library of Mr. Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple, to whom her father was clerk. In 1782, when Charles was seven and Mary eighteen, he became a scholar of the Blue Coat School, where he formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Coleridge. The circumstances of the Lambs gradually narrowed. The father was superannuated, and his income was consequently reduced. The elder brother, John, held a good appointment in the South Sea House, but he was much more intent on enjoying himself and surrounding himself with luxuries than upon providing for the wants of his family. For eleven years, from the age of twenty-one to thirty-two, Mary supported herself by her needle.