It was as well that poor Miss Lamb’s “God bless you, and may you be happy together” should come to something at last, and should not be all waste benedicites.

My grandfather, in spite of Miss Lamb’s admonitions to the contrary, went down to Salisbury in the early part of February, 1808, and saw Miss Stoddart.

He had left his father’s, it seems, without saying whither he was bound, and had come up to town, where he saw the Lambs. He did not go to his brother’s this time, but took lodgings somewhere on his own account. On a Saturday afternoon he suddenly disappeared, and the Lambs did not know what had become of him. Meanwhile, Miss Stoddart had written to him, enclosing a drawing of Middleton Cottage, Winterslow, and had sent it, as usual, under cover to him at Mitre Court Buildings; and Miss Lamb, supposing that he had returned to Wem, forwarded it to him there. She at the same time wrote off to Miss Stoddart, to let her know what she had done:—

THE CARTOON.

157

THE CARTOON.

159

The Rev. Mr. Hazlitt had heard nothing of his son since the mysterious departure of the latter from home, and it was his turn to be alarmed. He knew that William frequented the Lambs’, and (John Hazlitt being away from town, as I presume) he despatched a letter of inquiry to Mitre Court Buildings.

Lamb returned the following explanation. The letter is not quite correctly given by Talfourd, and I now print from the original:—

The cartoon here referred to was, of course, the drawing of Middleton Cottage, Winterslow, which had come in Miss Stoddart’s letter. At the time of answering that, Miss Lamb was not aware that William had set out to go to Wiltshire, and imagined, on the contrary, that he had returned to Wem. It was between the 12th and the 18th February that Lamb or his sister discovered where the truant had lodged, and so came at part of the truth, in time to relieve the anxiety of the family. What the exact force, or indeed nature of the “jest” was, is more than existing papers enable us to unravel.

Miss Stoddart was now beginning to be busy with preparations for her marriage, which was to be from her own house at Winterslow, as at present advised. Miss Lamb had been asked to come to the ceremony—to be

DRESSES FOR THE WEDDING.

161

a bridesmaid! and had consented; but Charles was not yet invited. Miss Lamb was not writing quite so often now, because she thought that Sarah would be getting enough correspondence without hers; but in rather more than a month after the “cartoon” letter, she could not forbear writing to know about the dresses—what Sarah was going to wear, and what she had better wear, and such like gossip of the season:—

I thought I might print the whole of this long letter as it stands, on the ground that it is the last in my hands of the correspondence between Miss Lamb and Miss Stoddart. Other letters must have passed, however,

164

THE DAY COMES AT LAST.

for eventually the whole scheme was changed, and the Doctor had his way in regard to the place from which his sister was to be married.

The ceremony, so much talked and written about, at length was solemnized on Sunday morning, the 1st of May, 1808, at St. Andrew’s Church, Holborn; the married couple afterwards breakfasted at Dr. Stoddart’s, and then proceeded to Winterslow. The only persons present at the marriage, so far as I can collect, were Dr. and Mrs. Stoddart, and Mr. and Miss Lamb; but I strongly suspect that there were other guests, of whom there is no remaining record.

Lamb, in a letter to Southey, dated August 9, 1815, more than seven years after the event, thus alludes to his having been present: “I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh.”

It was not an everyday kind of business this, with William Hazlitt for bridegroom, and Charles Lamb for best man, and Miss Lamb for bridesmaid—and all of a Sunday morning! I wonder whether Elia appeared at the altar in his snuff-coloured smalls? I wonder whether Miss Lamb wore, after all, the sprig dress, or the China-Manning silk, or a real white gown? I wonder in what way Lamb misbehaved, so as to leave so strong an impression on his own mind years after? To have been in St. Andrew’s that day, and to have seen the whole thing from a good place, would have been a recollection worth cherishing; and there are plenty of men and women living who are old enough to

THE BROTHERS-IN-LAW.

165

have done so, though of those who mixed in that “set” so early, scarcely one.

Mrs. Hazlitt’s property at Winterslow, which had been left to her by her father, with a reversionary interest in what he bequeathed to Mrs. Stoddart for her life, was settled upon herself at her brother’s instigation, and much to my grandfather’s annoyance. There was about 120l. a year altogether.

Mr. Hazlitt and the Doctor had never been very good friends; and the Doctor’s new politics, and the new prospects in Malta, arising out of his conversion to the more fashionable lay-creed of the day, had produced a decided estrangement before 1806 or 1807. He had set his face against the threatened alliance between the families, and was very anxious to get his sister out of the way of temptation, and marry her more suitably, or more in conformity with his own personal views, in Malta.

When he had found that there was no help for it, he had tried to behave with civility to his future brother-in-law, and had asked him to his house, when he settled again in England. But there was no real heartiness, I am afraid, in the friendship; and Mr. Hazlitt was not blind to the fact. Relations did not improve subsequently; the breach grew wider and wider.

The story goes, too, that Mr. Hazlitt said of an ephemeral newspaper speculation of Dr. Stoddart’s, that if any one wanted to keep a secret, he could not do better than put it in the ‘Correspondent!’ Mr. Hazlitt himself has related the anecdote, which is no doubt sufficiently authentic; and of course, if it came to the

166

JOHN STODDART AND HIS SISTER.

Doctor’s ears, it was not a thing apt to make their communications friendlier.

No two people could be more opposite in their characters than the Doctor and Mrs. Hazlitt. She hated formality and etiquette, while he was all formality and etiquette.

There is an anecdote rather to the purpose, which may at this time of day, perhaps, be repeated without offence. Lieutenant Stoddart, their father, in the old days at Salisbury, would sometimes be drinking his grog when his children were in the room, and he would say to John, “John, will you have some?” to which John would answer, “No, thank you, father;” then he would say to Sarah, “Sarah, will you have some?’ to which she would reply, “Yes, please, father.”

Mr. Hazlitt had rather admired these traits of character in her, meeting her occasionally at Lamb’s or her brother’s, before their marriage, and it still remained

ADVANTAGE OF THE CONNECTION.

167

to be seen whether they would be equally acceptable to him now that she was more than a friend to him. I have heard that her unaffected good sense was one of the things which made him resolve he would have her.

One evening, at Mitre Court Buildings, when my grandfather had escorted Miss Stoddart to the theatre, and had brought her back afterwards, Charles called for warm water, which Miss Lamb did not seem very anxious to produce. But Miss Stoddart unconsciously hunted out the kettle, and set it to boil, not at all to Miss L.’s satisfaction. But Mr. Hazlitt, the tradition runs, was highly pleased, as it seemed to him to show an honesty and sterlingness of character.

This connection with the Stoddarts, thus begun in 1808, was, however, of service in more than one respect; it certainly tended to infuse into the Hazlitt blood certain southern characteristics, among them a taste for formality and method; for my grandmother, with all her inattention and repugnance to domestic matters, was by no means destitute of a love of order, and her brother John was a precisian. The Celtic element may have been thought by some to predominate hitherto too exclusively, to the disadvantage and sacrifice of what are understood as the conventional gentilities. My great-grandfather was an Irishman, and my grandfather after him; nor am I quite positive that the Irish blood is extinct in us Hazlitts to this day, notwithstanding a second intermarriage with the Reynells, a quarter of a century later on.