The following is from no less a personage than our fair favourite, Miss Lavinia Ramsbottom:—
"Ma' desires me to write to you, to say that you are quite out in your reckoning as to dry-salters and citizens going to the Opera in hackney-coaches, and she hopes you will correct your calumny about our being in the straw. A friend of Pa's, who lives in the Minories, who is a great friend of Mr. Broom's, the Queen's lawyer, says that you are very malicious, and that, after all your pretended kindness last year, in putting in Ma's account of our party gratis for nothing, you only did it to quiz us; and Ma' says she shall continue to go to the Opera as long as she pleases, and she does not care whether the people have any clothes on, or none, so long as her betters countenances it.
"P.S.—Pa's young men play at Cardinal Puff, with table-beer, after supper every night,—so you see we have got that from the West End."
III.
MISS LAVINIA'S LETTER FROM PARIS, FORWARDING HER MOTHER'S JOURNAL IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE.
To John Bull.
Paris, Dec. 10, 1823.
My dear Mr. B.,—The kindness with which you put in the account of our party last year, induces my Mamma to desire me to write to you again, to know if you would like to insert a journal of her travels.
My Papa has retired from business; he has left the shop in the Minories, and has taken a house in Montague Place—a beautiful street very far west, and near the British Museum—and my two younger sisters have been sent over here, to improve their education and their morals, and Mamma and I came over last week to see them, and if they had got polish enough, to take them home again. Papa would not come with us, because, when he was quite a youth, he got a very great alarm in Chelsea Reach, because the waterman would put up a sail, and from that time to this he never can be prevailed upon to go to sea; so we came over under the care of Mr. Fulmer, the banker's son, who was coming to his family.
Mamma has not devoted much of her time to the study of English, and does not understand French at all, and therefore perhaps her journal will here and there appear incorrect, but she is a great etymologist, and so fond of you, that although I believe Mr. Murray, the great bookseller in Albemarle Street, would give her, I do not know how many thousand pounds for her book, if she published it "all in the lump," as Papa says, she prefers sending it to you piecemeal, and so you will have it every now and then, as a portion of it is done. I have seen Mr. Fulmer laugh sometimes when she has been reading it; but I see nothing to laugh at, except the hard words she uses, and the pains she takes to find out meanings for things. She says if you do not like to print it, you may let Murray have it—but that, of course, she would prefer your doing it.