), an
_Edinburgh Reviewer_, was familiarly called her "tame
atheist" (All the company were of the Holland House "set").
"Bobus"--Robert Percy Smith, Sydney's elder brother, a great
wit and scholar. "Cosher," an Irish word, is not always used
in this sense of "chat."

41. TO HIS SISTER

LONDON: November 1833.

Dear Hannah,

Things stand as they stood; except that the report of my appointment is
every day spreading more widely; and that I am beset by advertising
dealers begging leave to make up a hundred cotton shirts for me, and
fifty muslin gowns for you, and by clerks out of place begging to be my
secretaries. I am not in very high spirits to-day, as I have just
received a letter from poor Ellis, to whom I had not communicated my
intentions till yesterday. He writes so affectionately and so
plaintively that he quite cuts me to the heart. There are few indeed
from whom I shall part with so much pain; and he, poor fellow, says
that, next to his wife, I am the person for whom he feels the most
thorough attachment, and in whom he places the most unlimited
confidence.

On the 11th of this month there is to be a dinner given to Lushington by
the electors of the Tower Hamlets. He has persecuted me with
importunities to attend and make a speech for him; and my father has
joined in the request. It is enough, in these times, Heaven knows, for a
man who represents, as I do, a town of a hundred and twenty thousand
people to keep his own constituents in good humour; and the Spitalfields
weavers and Whitechapel butchers are nothing to me. But, ever since I
succeeded in what everybody allows to have been the most hazardous
attempt of the kind ever made,--I mean in persuading an audience of
manufacturers, all Whigs or Radicals, that the immediate alteration of
the corn-laws was impossible,--I have been considered as a capital
physician for desperate cases in politics. However, to return from that
delightful theme, my own praises, Lushington, who is not very popular
with the rabble of the Tower Hamlets, thinks that an oration from me
would give him a lift. I could not refuse him directly, backed as he was
by my father. I only said that I would attend if I were in London on the
11th, but I added that, situated as I was, I thought it very probable
that I should be out of town.

I shall go to-night to Miss Berry's _soiree_. I do not know whether I
told you that she resented my article on Horace Walpole