The visit to Oxford was paid, Hazlitt accompanying them and much enhancing the enjoyment of it, especially of a visit to the picture gallery at Blenheim. "But our pleasant excursion has ended sadly for one of us," he tells Hazlitt on his return. "My sister got home very well (I was very ill on the journey) and continued so till Monday night, when her complaint came on, and she is now absent from home. I think I shall be mad if I take any more journeys with two experiences against it. I have lost all wish for sights."
It was a long attack; at the end of October Mary was still "very weak and low-spirited," and there were domestic misadventures not calculated to improve matters.
"We are in a pickle," says Charles to Wordsworth. "Mary, from her affectation of physiognomy, has hired a stupid, big, country wench, who looked honest as she thought, and has been doing her work some days, but without eating; and now it comes out that she was ill when she came, with lifting her mother about (who is now with God) when she was dying, and with riding up from Norfolk four days and nights in the waggon, and now she lies in her bed a dead weight upon our humanity, incapable of getting up, refusing to go to an hospital, having nobody in town but a poor asthmatic uncle, and she seems to have made up her mind to take her flight to heaven from our bed. Oh for the little wheelbarrow which trundled the hunchback from door to door to try the various charities of different professions of mankind! Here's her uncle just crawled up, he is far liker death than she. In this perplexity such topics as Spanish papers and Monkhouses sink into insignificance. What shall we do?"
The perplexity seems to have cleared itself up somehow speedily, for in a week's time Mary herself wrote to Mrs. Hazlitt, not very cheerfully, but with no allusion to this particular disaster:—
"Nov. 30, 1810.
"I have taken a large sheet of paper, as if I were going to write a long letter; but that is by no means my intention, for I have only time to write three lines to notify what I ought to have done the moment I received your welcome letter; namely, that I shall be very much joyed to see you. Every morning lately I have been expecting to see you drop in, even before your letter came; and I have been setting my wits to work to think how to make you as comfortable as the nature of our inhospitable habits will admit. I must work while you are here, and I have been slaving very hard to get through with something before you come, that I may be quite in the way of it, and not teize you with complaints all day that I do not know what to do.
"I am very sorry to hear of your mischance. Mrs. Rickman has just buried her youngest child. I am glad I am an old maid, for you see there is nothing but misfortunes in the marriage state. Charles was drunk last night, and drunk the night before; which night before was at Godwin's, where we went, at a short summons from Mr. G., to play a solitary rubber, which was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. and little Mrs. Liston; and after them came Henry Robinson, who is now domesticated at Mr. Godwin's fireside, and likely to become a formidable rival to Tommy Turner. We finished there at twelve o'clock, Charles and Liston brim full of gin and water and snuff, after which Henry Robinson spent a long evening by our fireside at home, and there was much gin and water drunk, albeit only one of the party partook of it, and H. R. professed himself highly indebted to Charles for the useful information he gave him on sundry matters of taste and imagination, even after Charles could not speak plain for tipsiness. But still he swallowed the flattery and the spirits as savourily as Robinson did his cold water.
"Last night was to be a night, but it was not. There was a certain son of one of Martin's employers, one young Mr. Blake, to do whom honour Mrs. Burney brought forth, first rum, then a single bottle of champaine, long kept in her secret hoard; then two bottles of her best currant wine, which she keeps for Mrs. Rickman, came out; and Charles partook liberally of all these beverages, while Mr. Young Blake and Mr. Ireton talked of high matters, such as the merits of the Whip Club, and the merits of red and white champaine. Do I spell that last word right? Rickman was not there, so Ireton had it all his own way.
"The alternating Wednesdays will chop off one day in the week from your jolly days, and I do not know how we shall make it up to you, but I will contrive the best I can. Phillips comes again pretty regularly, to the great joy of Mrs Reynolds. Once more she hears the well-loved sounds of 'How do you do, Mrs. Reynolds? and how does Miss Chambers do?'
"I have spun out my three lines amazingly; now for family news. Your brother's little twins are not dead, but Mrs. John Hazlitt and her baby may be for anything I know to the contrary, for I have not been there for a prodigious long time. Mrs. Holcroft still goes about from Nicholson to Tuthill, and Tuthill to Godwin, and from Godwin to Nicholson, to consult on the publication or no publication of the life of the good man, her husband. It is called The Life Everlasting. How does that same Life go on in your parts? Goodbye, God bless you. I shall be glad to see you when you come this way.