on. Samuel Laman
Blanchard (1804-1845), afterwards known as a journalist, had just
published, through Harrison Ainsworth, a little volume entitled _Lyric
Offerings_, which was dedicated to Lamb. After Lamb's death Blanchard
contributed to the _New Monthly Magazine_ some additional Popular
Fallacies.]

LETTER 465

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD

Late autumn, 1828.

Enfield.

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.

Yours, T. HOOD, ESQ.

Miss Bridget Hood sends love.

[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):--

A WIDOW

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
mour