These years at Enfield were not happy years. They were both getting old; Mary’s malady was growing on her, taking her more frequently _from home_; and even the visits of their child, Emma Isola--she was now a governess--mitigated his loneliness but slightly. His removal to the country had left his friends a long way behind, and, for all his urging, they could not come often so far afield for informal calls. “We see scarce anybody,” he laments. Hazlitt and Hood and Hunt came occasionally; faithful Martin Burney fetched forth his newest whim for their amusement; and loyal Crabb Robinson often walked out to take tea or to play whist, or for a stroll in the fields with Charles. Once, as he has recorded in his “Diary,” he brought the mighty Walter Savage Landor for a call: “We had scarcely an hour to chat with them, but it was enough to make both Landor and Worsley express themselves delighted with the person of Mary Lamb, and pleased with the conversation of Charles Lamb; though I thought him by no means at his ease, and Miss Lamb was quite silent. Nothing in the conversation recollectable. Lamb gave Landor White’s ‘Falstaff’s Letters.’ Emma Isola just showed herself. Landor was pleased with her, and has since written verses on her.” Only this once did Lamb and Landor come face to face.
Lamb had always hated the country. “Let not the lying poets be believed, who entice men from the cheerful streets,” he querulously complains; and he asks, “What have I gained by health? Intolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate meals? A total blank.... Let no native Londoner imagine that health and rest, innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.”
He was unable to read or write to any extent in hot weather; “what I can do, and do over-do, is to walk; but deadly long are the days, these summer all-day days, with but a half-hour’s candle-light, and no firelight.” Sometimes, of a “genial hot day,” he would do his twenty miles and over. Once he took charge of a little school during the master’s short absence; and his first exercise of authority was to give the boys a holiday! But nothing abated his boredom, and even in his bed he repined: “In dreams I am in Fleet Street, but I wake and cry to sleep again.” And when he went to town, and sought in Fleet Street fresh sights and fresher air, he found no content: “The streets, the shops, are left, but all old friends are gone.... Home have I none, and not a sympathizing house to turn to in the great city.”