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One of the most pathetic incidents in connection with Hampstead Heath is the remembrance of Charles Lamb and his sister which Talfourd has left us, ‘mournfully crossing it hand-in-hand, and going on sadly through the quiet fields to the retreat at Finchley, where the poor sufferer sought shelter from herself ... whence, after a time, she would return in her right mind ... a gentle, amiable woman, beloved by all who knew her,’ but most of all by her brother, whose young manhood was in a measure blighted by the tragedy of which she who enacted it was wholly unconscious. He might be said to have devoted himself to her, and in life they were never parted.

Few even of their contemporaries knew the particulars of that household tragedy; the reporters of the inquest, with a respectful pity rare in their craft, withheld the names; and compassion was universally felt for the naturally inoffensive and all-unconscious perpetrator of it, and for him, the dutiful son and loving brother, whose affectionate and sensitive nature suffered in silence the double horror and the double grief. This is how the ‘Annual Register’ tells the melancholy tale (September 23, 1796):