Lamb's metropolitanism emerges in this chapter through dialogue with two kinds of Romantic pedestrian, Coleridge's countryside rambler and De Quincey's opium-induced wanderer of the London streets. The sentimentality of Coleridge's representation of Lamb in 1800, as a pathetic figure incarcerated in and by the ‘great city’ in ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’, provokes an uncharacteristically angry response from Lamb, which in turn informs an ebullient rejection of the Lakes for the metropolis in several letters and an early essay eulogizing life in the city. Thus is the seed of Elia sown, a London-loving figure for whom the dual motifs of lameness and enclosure are seemingly predicated against the Lake School's liberalist association of freedom with walking in the country. Elia finally arrives in 1820, sometime after the demise of the Lake School and just as an urban version of the supposedly emancipated pedestrian is about to emerge. A concurrent persona in the London Magazine, the compulsive night-time wanderings of De Quincey's opium-eater suggest a prototype of the strolling, idling observer of city life, the flâneur, a metropolitan figure to which Elia bears a more complex relationship than he does to the demonized Cockney in Chapter 1. Whereas Lamb is defined more or less by a sense of difference from the Cockney author, his relationship with the flâneur seems to embody at the same time the antithesis of its most obvious characteristics, and an affinity with its emancipatory spirit. A paradoxically domesticated mode of flâneur ensues.