The Hazlitts again.—Letters to Mrs. Hazlitt, and Two Visits to Winterslow.—Birth of Hazlitt's Son.
1808-13.—Æt. 44-49.
Hazlitt and his Bride had, for the present, settled down in Sarah's cottage at Winterslow; so Mary continued to send them every now and then a pretty budget of gossip:—
"Dec. 10, 1808.
"I hear of you from your brother, but you do not write yourself, nor does Hazlitt. I beg that one or both of you will amend this fault as speedily as possible, for I am very anxious to hear of your health…. You cannot think how very much we miss you and H. of a Wednesday evening. All the glory of the night, I may say, is at an end. Phillips makes his jokes, and there is none to applaud him; Rickman argues, and there is no one to oppose him. The worst miss of all to me is that, when we are in the dismals, there is now no hope of relief from any quarter whatsoever. Hazlitt was most brilliant, most ornamental as a Wednesday-man; but he was a more useful one on common days, when he dropt in after a quarrel or a fit of the glooms. The Sheffington is quite out now, my brother having got drunk with claret and Tom Sheridan. This visit and the occasion of it is a profound secret, and therefore I tell it to nobody but you and Mrs. Reynolds. Through the medium of Wroughton, there came an invitation and proposal from T. S. that C. L. should write some scenes in a speaking Pantomime, the other parts of which Tom now, and his father formerly, have manufactured between them. So, in the Christmas holidays, my brother and his two great associates, we expect, will be all three damned together, that is, I mean, if Charles' share, which is done and sent in, is accepted.
"I left this unfinished yesterday in the hope that my brother would have done it for me; his reason for refusing me was 'no exquisite reason'; for it was because he must write a letter to Manning in three or four weeks, and therefore he could not be always writing letters, he said. I wanted him to tell your husband about a great work which Godwin is going to publish, [an Essay on Sepulchres] to enlighten the world once more, and I shall not be able to make out what it is. He (Godwin) took his usual walk one evening, a fortnight since, to the end of Hatton Garden and back again. During that walk a thought came into his mind which he instantly set down and improved upon till he brought it, in seven or eight days, into the compass of a reasonable sized pamphlet. To propose a subscription to all well-disposed people to raise a certain sum of money, to be expended in the care of a cheap monument for the former and the future great dead men—the monument to be a white cross with a wooden slab at the end, telling their names and qualifications. This wooden slab and white cross to be perpetuated to the end of time. To survive the fall of empires and the destruction of cities by means of a map which was, in case of an insurrection among the people, or any other cause by which a city or country may be destroyed, to be carefully preserved, and then when things got again into their usual order, the white-cross-wooden-slab-makers were to go to work again and set them in their former places. This, as nearly as I can tell you, is the sum and substance of it; but it is written remarkably well, in his very best manner, for the proposal (which seems to me very like throwing salt on a sparrow's tail to catch him) occupies but half a page, which is followed by very fine writing on the benefits he conjectures would follow if it were done. Very excellent thoughts on death and on our feelings concerning dead friends and the advantages an old country has over a new one, even in the slender memorials we have of great men who once flourished.
"Charles is come home and wants his dinner, and so the dead men must be no more thought on. Tell us how you go on and how you like Winterslow and winter evenings. Noales (Knowles) has not got back again, but he is in better spirits. John Hazlitt was here on Wednesday, very sober. Our love to Hazlitt.
"There came this morning a printed prospectus from S. T. Coleridge, Grasmere, of a weekly paper to be called The Friend—a flaming Prospectus—I have no time to give the heads of it—to commence first Saturday in January. There came also a notice of a Turkey from Mr. Clarkson, which I am more sanguine in expecting the accomplishment of than I am of Coleridge's prophecy."
A few weeks after the date of this letter Sarah had a little son. He lived but six months; just long enough for his father's restless, dissatisfied heart to taste for once the sweetness of a tie unalloyed with any bitterness, and the memory of it never faded out. There is a pathetic allusion in one of his latest essays to a visit to the neglected spot where the baby was laid, and where still "as the nettles wave in a corner of the churchyard over his little grave, the welcome breeze helps to refresh me and ease the tightness at my breast."