Dear Lamb--You are an impudent varlet; but I will keep your secret. We dine at Ayrton's on Thursday, and shall try to find Sarah and her two spare beds for that night only. Miss M. and her tragedy may be dished: so may not you and your rib. Health attend you.
[In _The Gem_, 1829, in addition to his poem, "On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born," Lamb was credited with the following piece of prose, entitled "A Widow," which was really the work of Hood (see letter above):--
Hath always been a mark for mockery:--a standing butt for wit to level at. Jest after jest hath been huddled upon her close cap, and stuck, like burrs, upon her weeds. Her sables are a perpetual "Black Joke."
Satirists--prose and verse--have made merry with her bereavements. She is a stock character on the stage. Farce bottleth up her crocodile tears, or labelleth her empty lachrymatories. Comedy mocketh her precocious flirtations--Tragedy even girdeth at her frailty, and twitteth her with "the funeral baked meats coldly furnishing forth the marriage tables."
I confess when I called the other day on my kinswoman G.--then in the second week of her widowhood--and saw her sitting, her young boy by her side, in her recent sables, I felt unable to reconcile her estate with any risible associations. The Lady with a skeleton moiety--in the old print, in Bowles' old shop window--seemed but a type of her condition. Her husband,--a whole hemisphere in love's world--was deficient. One complete side--her left--was death-stricken. It was a matrimonial paralysis, unprovocative of laughter. I could as soon have tittered at one of those melancholy objects that drag their poor dead-alive bodies about the streets.
It seems difficult to account for the popular prejudice against lone women. There is a majority, I trust, of such honest, decorous mourners as my kinswoman: yet are Widows, like the Hebrew, a proverb and a byeword amongst nations. From the first putting on of the sooty garments, they become a stock joke--chimney-sweep or blackamoor is not surer--by mere virtue of their nigritude.
Are the wanton amatory glances of a few pairs of graceless eyes, twinkling through their cunning waters, to reflect so evil a light on a whole community? Verily the sad benighted orbs of that noble relict--the Lady Rachel Russell--blinded through unserene drops for her dead Lord,--might atone for such oglings!