My first motive in writing, and, indeed, in calling on you, was to ask if you were enough acquainted with any of the Benchers, to lay a plain statement before them of the circumstances of the family.  I almost fear not, for you are of another hall.  But if you can oblige me and my poor friend, who is now insensible to any favours, pray exert yourself.  You cannot say too much good of poor Norris and his poor wife.

Yours ever, CHARLES LAMB.

[This letter, describing the death of Randal Norris, Sub-Treasurer and Librarian of the Inner Temple, was printed with only very slight alterations in Hone’s Table Book, 1827, and again in the Last Essays of Elia, 1833, under the title “A Death-Bed.”  It was, however, taken out of the second edition, and “Confessions of a Drunkard” substituted, in deference to the wishes of Norris’s family.  Mrs. Norris, as I have said, was a native of Widford, where she had known Mrs. Field, Lamb’s grandmother.  With her son Richard, who was deaf and peculiar, Mrs. Norris moved to Widford again, where the daughters, Miss Betsy and Miss Jane, had opened a school—­Goddard House; which they retained until a legacy restored the family prosperity.  Soon after that they both married, each a farmer named Tween.  They survived until quite recently.

Mrs. Coe, an old scholar at the Misses Morris’s school in the twenties, gave me, in 1902, some reminiscences of those days, from which I quote a passage or so:—­

When he joined the Norrises’ dinner-table he kept every one laughing.  Mr. Richard sat at one end, and some of the school children would be there too.  One day Mr. Lamb gave every one a fancy name all round the table, and made a verse on each.  “You are so-and-so,” he said, “and you are so-and-so,” adding the rhyme.  “What’s he saying?  What are you laughing at?” Mr. Richard asked testily, for he was short-tempered.  Miss Betsy explained the joke to him, and Mr. Lamb, coming to his turn, said—­only he said it in verse—­“Now, Dick, it’s your turn.  I shall call you Gruborum; because all you think of is your food and your stomach.”  Mr. Richard pushed back his chair in a rage and stamped out of the room.  “Now I’ve done it,” said Mr. Lamb:  “I must go and make friends with my old chum.  Give me a large plate of pudding to take to him.”  When he came back he said, “It’s all right.  I thought the pudding would do it.”  Mr. Lamb and Mr. Richard never got on very well, and Mr. Richard didn’t like his teasing ways at all; but Mr. Lamb often went for long walks with him, because no one else would.  He did many kind things like that.

There used to be a half-holiday when Mr. Lamb came, partly because he would force his way into the schoolroom and make seriousness impossible.  His head would suddenly appear at the door in the midst of lessons, with “Well, Betsy!  How do, Jane?” “O, Mr. Lamb!” they would say, and that was the end of work for that day.