The Fenwicks send their love, and Mrs. Reynolds her love, and the little old lady her best respects.
Mrs. Jefferies, who I see now and then, talks of you with tears in her eyes, and, when she heard you was taken prisoner, Lord! how frightened she was. She has heard, she tells me, that Mr. Stoddart is to have a pension of two thousand a year, whenever he chuses to return to England.
God bless you, and send you all manner of comforts and happinesses.
Your most affectionate friend,
MARY LAMB.
How-do? how-do? No time to write. S.T.C. going off in a great hurry. CH.
LAMB.
[Miss Stoddart was now in Malta. Governor Ball was Sir Alexander Ball, to whom Coleridge was to act as private secretary and of whom he wrote some years later in The Friend.
"Charles has lost the newspaper"—his work on the Morning Post. Lamb's
principal period on this paper had begun after Stuart sold it in
September, 1803, and it lasted until February, 1804 (see notes in Vol.
II. of this edition).
"We heard you were taken prisoners"—by the French.
"Mrs. Reynolds"—Lamb's old schoolmistress and pensioner. Mrs. Jefferies
I do not know.]