The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 705 pages of information about The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6.

The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 705 pages of information about The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6.
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!
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.

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The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.