We had a merry passage with the widow at the Commons. She was howling--part howling and part giving directions to the proctor--when crash! down went my sister through a crazy chair, and made the clerks grin, and I grinned, and the widow tittered--_and then I knew that she was not inconsolable_. Mary was more frightened than hurt.
She'd make a good match for anybody (by she, I mean the widow).
"If he bring but a _relict_ away, He is happy, nor heard to complain."
Procter has got a wen growing out at the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to have cut off; but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence--like his poetry--redundant. Hone has hanged himself for debt. Godwin was taken up for picking pockets.... Beckey takes to bad courses. Her father was blown up in a steam machine. The coroner found it Insanity. I should not like him to sit on my letter.
Do you observe my direction? Is it Gallic?--Classical?
Do try and get some frogs. You must ask for "grenouilles" (green-eels). They don't understand "frogs," though it's a common phrase with us.
If you go through Bulloign (Boulogne) enquire if old Godfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now.
If there is anything new in politics or literature in France, keep it till I see you again, for I'm in no hurry. Chatty-Briant is well I hope.
I think I have no more news; only give both our loves ("all three," says Dash) to Mrs. Patmore, and bid her get quite well, as I am at present, bating qualms, and the grief incident to losing a valuable relation.
[This is from Patmore's _My Friends and Acquaintances_, 1854; but I have no confidence in Patmore's transcription. After "picking pockets" should come, for example, according to other editors, the sentence, "Moxon has fallen in love with Emma, our nut-brown maid." This is the first we hear of the circumstance and quite probably Lamb was then exaggerating. As it happened, however, Moxon and Miss Isola, as we shall see, were married in 1833.
We do not know the name of the widow; but her husband was Lamb's cousin, the bookbinder.
The doubt about the Hazlitts refers chiefly to William Hazlitt's divorce from his first wife in 1822, and his remarriage in 1824 with a Mrs. Bridgewater.