Page:Mary Lamb (Gilchrist 1883).djvu/161

Rh to turn lecturer, on Taste, at the Royal Institution," Charles tells Manning. And the Farce came out and failed. "We are pretty stout about it," he says to Wordsworth; "but, after all, we had rather it had succeeded. You will see the prologue in most of the morning papers. It was received with such shouts as I never witnessed to a prologue. It was attempted to be encored. How hard!—a thing I merely did as a task, because it was wanted, and set no great store by; and Mr. H.!! The number of friends we had in the house, my brother and I being in public offices, was astonishing, but they yielded at length to a few hisses. A hundred hisses! (D—n the word, I write it like kisses—how different!) a hundred hisses outweigh a thousand claps. The former come more directly from the heart. Well 'tis withdrawn and there is an end. Better luck to us."

Sarah's visit came to pass, and proved an eventful one to her. For at the Lambs she now saw frequently their new friend, quite another William than he of "English partridge memory," William Hazlitt; and the intercourse between them soon drifted into a queer kind of courtship, and finally the courtship into marriage. Mary's next letters give piquant glimpses of the wayward course of their love-making. If her sympathies had been ready and unfailing in the case of the unknown lovers, Messrs. White, Dowling, Turner, and mysterious Curse-a-rat, this was an affair of deep and heartfelt interest:—

"Oct. 1807.

"I am two letters in your debt, but it has not been so much from idleness, as a wish to see how your comical love affair would turn out. You know I make a pretence not to interfere, but like all old maids I