In the annals of domestic history it would be difficult to meet with a story more deeply interesting and pathetic than that of Charles and Mary Lamb. If Dorothy Wordsworth bears the palm for sisterly devotion and help, thereby crowning her brother's life with blessing, Charles Lamb stands before us the most signal example as the sharer and sustainer of a sister's lot of suffering. Darkest lives may be illumined by hope and brightened by love; and among lives of noble self-denial, those of Charles Lamb and his sister must always take a prominent place. Although they came into being heavily weighted for the race, their struggle with an adverse fate was noble, and the secret of their strength was their mutual love. Probably no greater calamity can affect a family than an hereditary taint of insanity, entailing, as it does, such constant and tender care and infinite patience. The father of Charles and Mary Lamb had been for many years a clerk to a barrister of the Inner Temple, in whose chambers, in Crown Office Row, he resided when Mary was born on December 3, 1764. There were other children of the family, none of whom, however, seem to have survived infancy with the exception of Mary, John, two years older, and Charles, ten years younger. It would, perhaps, be difficult to imagine a more uncongenial home for a child constituted as was Mary Lamb than the one into which it was her lot to enter. We seek in vain in the immediate parentage of the Lambs for the many excellencies of character and the genius developed in both Mary and Charles. But one thing they both inherited from or through their father--the peculiarity of brain formation which renders its possessor liable to fits of madness. Little Mary was too loving for her early surroundings. Her parents seem to have lived to themselves, and not to have shown much love for the sensitive little one who, above all things, needed a heart-warm atmosphere. Charles, writing of his mother, says that she "in feeling and sentiment and disposition bore so distant a resemblance to her daughter that she never understood her right--never could believe how much she loved her--but met her caresses, her protestations of filial affection, too frequently with coldness and repulse."