It is manifest in certain letters, written toward the close of 1824 and in the beginning of 1825, that Lamb’s confinement was at last telling upon him, and that he was thinking of a release from his bondage to the “desk’s dead wood.”  In February, 1825, he wrote to Barton,—­

“Your gentleman brother sets my mouth watering after liberty.  Oh that I were kicked out of Leadenhall with every mark of indignity, and a competence in my fob!  The birds of the air would not be so free as I should.  How I would prance and curvet it, and pick up cowslips, and ramble about purposeless as an idiot!”

Later in March we learn that he had signified to the directors his willingness to resign,

“I am sick of hope deferred.  The grand wheel is in agitation that is to turn up my fortune; but round it rolls, and will turn up nothing, I have a glimpse of freedom, of becoming a gentleman at large, but I am put off from day to day.  I have offered my resignation, and it is neither accepted nor rejected.  Eight weeks am I kept in this fearful suspense.  Guess what an absorbing state I feel it.  I am not conscious of the existence of friends, present or absent.  The East India directors alone can be that thing to me.  I have just learned that nothing will be decided this week.  Why the next?  Why any week?”

But the “grand wheel” was really turning, to some purpose, and a few days later, April 6, 1825, he joyfully wrote to Barton,—­

“My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent emancipation that I have scarce steadiness of hand, much more mind, to compose a letter, I am free, B.B.,—­free as air!

  “’The little bird that wings the sky
  Knows no such liberty,’

  I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o’clock.  I
  came home forever!”

The quality of the generosity of the East India directors was not strained in Lamb’s case.  It should be recorded as an agreeable commercial phenomenon that these officials, men of business acting in “a business matter,”—­words too often held to exclude all such Quixotic matters as sentiment, gratitude, and Christian equity between man and man,—­were not only just, but munificent. [16] From the path of Charles and Mary Lamb—­already beset with anxieties grave enoughthey removed forever the shadow of want.  Lamb’s salary at the time of his retirement was nearly seven hundred pounds a year, and the offer made to him was a pension of four hundred and fifty, with a deduction of nine pounds a year for his sister, should she survive him.

Lamb lived to enjoy his freedom and the Company’s bounty nearly nine years.  Soon after his retirement he settled with his sister at Enfield, within easy reach of his loved London, removing thence to the neighboring parish of Edmonton,—­his last change of residence.  Coleridge’s death, in July, 1834, was a heavy blow to him.  “When I heard of the death of Coleridge,” he wrote,