1830.] Affairs in General 329 



Reverend Charles Montague Antonio Belville, with fac-similes of his 

 writing, and his billets-doux and epigrams in the magazines, carefully 

 collected, with notes, by his affectionate and disconsolate widow, the 

 Honourable Amelia Antoinetta Isabinda Seymour" answered in every 

 instance by " Madam, you are an impostor ! No woman who cared for 

 a husband's memory would make such an exhibition of him. You only 

 want to parade yourself before the public, and get money and a second 

 husband as fast as you can." 



There is not one of the scribbling widows that has not " changed her 

 condition " with the greatest alertness possible. The latest candidate 

 on the list has been poor Heber's widow ; this lady was the widow par 

 excellence, all devotedness, all sublime, all the mother of the Gracchi. 

 But nobody better knew what she was about, when softening the <f sen- 

 timental reader" was the question. With an alacrity worthy of an 

 undertaker, she collected every fragment of the dead that she could 

 turn to money, enlisted every friend he had in the scheme,, made a Jew's 

 bargain with a bookseller, and out came the quarto : 



" The late Bishop Heber's Travels in India," &c. " with sketches, 

 engravings, vignettes," and, she ought to have added, in justice to the 

 sentimental reader, with a variety of weak correspondence and of childish 

 and unepiscopal verses. But the whole tenderly blazoned " with notes 

 by his widow !" 



Now, to those who have hearts in their bosoms, and have known the 

 loss of any being for whom they felt even common regard, the idea of 

 hunting over their papers, conning their letters, gathering every scrap 

 that fell from their hands, recalling the familiar penmanship, the fami- 

 liar phrase, till almost the familiar voice is in the ear, and the dead 

 seems to stand before them; is one of the most repulsive thoughts that can 

 come into the mind ; in fact, those who have any heart at all, shrink 

 from it wholly, and cannot prevail upon themselves to go near any object 

 which calls back the image; and if they make any exertion, it is to avoid 

 all recurrence to sensations which cannot return without great pain. 



But not so with a she-editor. The Widow of Ephesus first looks to 

 the market, considers how much better books will sell if they are taken 

 in time ; and then, before the breath is well out of the husband's body, 

 she is neck-deep in his trunks, turning out his portfolios, cutting ex- 

 tracts out of his books, and inditing circulars to all his friends for every 

 fragment of his letters ; then comes, without a moment's delay, the 

 " Proposal for publishing the Life and Remains, with Notes by his 

 Widow !" 



The book is published ; sympathy with some, shame with others, 

 common charity with the rest, make a considerable sum of money; which 

 the world, of course, conceive that they are contributing for the support 

 of a worthy man's children, and giving into the hands of a worthy 

 widow. 



But the money is scarcely lodged, when, lo ! the widow is a wife ; 

 some gay lounger of St. James's air has caught her taste, and wooed her 

 to be his, by virtue of his knowledge of her subscription ; or she has 

 been charmed by the grin and guitar of some exquisite of the sunny 

 south, who, though figuring as a perruquier in the sunny south, figures 

 as a marquis in foggy England ; or the moustachios of some half Turk 

 have charms for her, and she wends her way La Condessa Catapulta 



M.M. New Series.- VOL. X. No. 57. 2 T 



