Do try and get some frogs. You must ask for "grenouilles" (green-eels).
They don't understand "frogs," though it's a common phrase with us.
If you go through Bulloign (Boulogne) enquire if old Godfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now.
If there is anything new in politics or literature in France, keep it till I see you again, for I'm in no hurry. Chatty-Briant is well I hope.
I think I have no more news; only give both our loves ("all three," says Dash) to Mrs. Patmore, and bid her get quite well, as I am at present, bating qualms, and the grief incident to losing a valuable relation.
C.L.
Londres, July 19, 1827.
[This is from Patmore's My Friends and Acquaintances, 1854; but I have no confidence in Patmore's transcription. After "picking pockets" should come, for example, according to other editors, the sentence, "Moxon has fallen in love with Emma, our nut-brown maid." This is the first we hear of the circumstance and quite probably Lamb was then exaggerating. As it happened, however, Moxon and Miss Isola, as we shall see, were married in 1833.
We do not know the name of the widow; but her husband was Lamb's cousin, the bookbinder.
The doubt about the Hazlitts refers chiefly to William Hazlitt's divorce from his first wife in 1822, and his remarriage in 1824 with a Mrs. Bridgewater.
"Your book." Patmore, in My Friends and Acquaintances, writes:—