ners 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!

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