resolving to spare £50 or £60 a year to keep Mary at a private asylum at Islington. “I know John will make speeches about it, but she shall not go into an hospital.... If my father, and old maid-servant, and I, can’t live, and live comfortably, on £130 or £120 a year, we ought to burn by slow fires; and I almost would, that Mary might not go into an hospital. Let me not leave an unfavourable impression on your mind respecting my brother. Since this has happened, he has been very kind and brotherly, but I fear for his mind. He has taken his ease in the world, and is not fit to struggle with difficulties, nor has much accustomed himself to throw himself into their way; and I know his language is already, ‘Charles, you must take care of yourself, you must not abridge yourself of a single pleasure you have been used to,’ etc.; and in that style of talking.” Charles goes on to explain that his sister would form one of the family she had been placed with rather than a patient. “They, as the saying is, take to her extraordinarily, if it is extraordinary that people who see my sister should love her. Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister was most thoroughly devoid of the quality of selfishness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, dearest soul, in a future letter for my own comfort, for I understand her thoroughly; and if I mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human being can be found in, she will be found ... uniformly great and amiable. God keep her in her present mind, to whom be thanks and praise for all His dispensations to mankind.” The whole of the rest of Lamb’s life was a fulfilment of the loving resolutions which had sustained him in the terrible hour of his mother’s death. His love for the beautiful Alice W——n was relinquished as one of the “tender fond records” for ever blotted out by a sterner, more imperative claim of affection and duty. As soon as the old father died, Mary and Charles were reunited in one home, and her brother’s guardianship was accepted by the authorities as a sufficient guarantee that any future return of her malady should not be accompanied by danger to the lives of others. He was faithful to his self-imposed task. He himself was never again attacked by the cruel malady, but his sister to the end of her life was subject to recurring periods of insanity, which latterly isolated her from her friends for months in every year. Through their joint care and caution no fatal results again attended these attacks of mania. There is something inexpressibly touching in the fact that on their holiday excursions together, Mary invariably, with her own hands, packed a strait-waistcoat for herself. She was able to foretell, by premonitory symptoms, when she was likely to be attacked; and a friend of the Lambs has related how he had met them walking together, hand in hand, towards the asylum, both weeping bitterly.