The works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Book Description
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 Excerpt: ...only. Miss M. and her tragedy may be dished: so may not you and your rib. Health attend you. Yours, T. Hood, Esa. Miss Bridget Hood sends love. Note In The Oem, 1829, in addition to his poem,...
MoreThis historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 Excerpt: ...only. Miss M. and her tragedy may be dished: so may not you and your rib. Health attend you. Yours, T. Hood, Esa. Miss Bridget Hood sends love. Note In The Oem, 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 438):--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 mourners as my kinswoman: Vol. vu....
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