It is no part of my plan to dwell on Lamb’s religious belief. Suffice it to say that it was, like that of most Unbelievers, too large to be labelled by a set of dogmas, too spacious to be packed within church or cathedral walls. It is a stale truism that credence, less than character, is the criterion of conviction; and all history shows that the doubters are, in nearly all cases, the most deeply devout. “He prayeth well who loveth well,” Coleridge had learned; and it is my fancy that those lives, where love with voluntary humility waited on self-sacrifice, had taught him the immanent truth--“He prayeth _best_, who _loveth_ best.”
As to Lamb’s utterances about these mighty matters, we may be sure that they took the tone of the man’s utterances concerning _all_ matters; and to them we may apply Hazlitt’s phrase: “His jests scald like tears, and he probes a question with a play upon words.” Or, as Haydon put it, “He stuttered out his quaintness in snatches, like the fool in ‘Lear’.”
In the midst of the vast Covent Garden property of the Duke of Bedford is wedged a small piece of alien land, on the corner of Bow and Russell streets. It belongs to a certain Clayton estate, and is covered by three houses, which are worth more to us than all the potentialities of marketable wealth hereabout. These three houses formed but one building, at the time of erection; which was late in the last or early in the present century, as we may be convinced by every architectural point of proof without and within. It was built on the site of that famous ancient structure whose upper floor was occupied by Will’s Coffee-House; its cellars and foundations still to be traced under the estimable Ham and Beef Shop on that corner. To-day, this popular establishment is thronged for us, not with its actual eager buyers of cold baked meats, but with the shades of Addison, Swift, Smollett, Steele, Dryden, Cibber, Gay,
[Illustration: NO. 20 RUSSELL STREET, COVENT GARDEN.]
Pepys, Johnson, revisiting their once favourite foregathering place.
Of the three houses into which this block of buildings has been divided, the corner house remains entirely unaltered. Its neighbour, in Bow Street--now a swarming tavern--has suffered somewhat at the hand of the modern restorer. It retains, on its upper floor, a small barred cell, formerly set apart for some exclusive or elusive prisoner from Bow Street station, just at hand.