Are the traditional freaks of a Dame of Ephesus, or a Wife of Bath, or a Queen of Denmark, to cast so broad a shadow over a whole sisterhood. There must be, methinks, some more general infirmity--common, probably, to all Eve-kind--to justify so sweeping a stigma.
Does the satiric spirit, perhaps, institute splenetic comparisons between the lofty poetical pretensions of posthumous tenderness and their fulfilment? The sentiments of Love especially affect a high heroical pitch, of which the human performance can present, at best, but a burlesque parody. A widow, that hath lived only for her husband, should die with him. She is flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone; and it is not seemly for a mere rib to be his survivor. The prose of her practice accords not with the poetry of her professions. She hath done with the world,--and you meet her in Regent Street. Earth hath now nothing left for her--but she swears and administers. She cannot survive him--and invests in the _Long_ Annuities.
The romantic fancy resents, and the satiric spirit records, these discrepancies. By the conjugal theory itself there ought to be no Widows; and, accordingly, a class, that by our milder manners is merely ridiculed, on the ruder banks of the Ganges is literally _roasted_. C. LAMB.
"Miss M. and her tragedy." I fancy Miss M. would be Miss Mitford, and her tragedy "Rienzi," produced at Drury Lane October 9, 1828. It was a success. Hood's rib would probably be the play I have not identified. See letter to Barton of October 11.
Here, a little out of its order, might come a letter from Lamb to Hood, December 17, 1828, which is facsimiled in a privately-printed American bibliography of Lamb, the owner of which declines to let not only me but the Boston Bibliophile Society include it with the correspondence. In it Lamb expresses regret, not so much that Hood had signed "The Widow" with Lamb's name, but that an unfortunately ambiguous jest, pointed out to him by certain friends, had crept into it. He asks that the subject may never be referred to again.
Here perhaps should come a note to Miss Reynolds, Hood's sister-in-law, accompanying Lamb's Essay on Hogarth.]
Dear M.,--As I see no blood-marks on the Green Lanes Road, I conclude you got in safe skins home. Have you thought of inquiring Miss Wilson's change of abode? Of the 2 copies of my drama I want one sent to Wordsworth, together with a complete copy of Hone's "Table Book," for which I shall be your debtor till we meet. Perhaps Longman will take charge of this parcel. The other is for Coleridge at Mr. Gilman's, Grove, Highgate, which may be sent, or, if you have a curiosity to see him you will make an errand with it to him, & tell him we mean very soon to come & see him, if the Gilmans can give or get us a bed. I am ashamed to be so troublesome. Pray let Hood see the "Ecclectic Review"--a rogue! The 2'd parts of the Blackwood you may make waste paper of. Yours truly,