330 Notes of the Month on [SEPT. 



Cavatina to the lovely land where all above is moonshine, and all below 

 is heroism and piracy. Thus goes the world of widows. 



Without knowing or caring what kind of match Heber's masculine 

 and managing widow may have carved out for her tender fancies, it is 

 enough for us to know that she has made eleven thousand pounds by 

 his " Remains/' and is now worrying the public again with his " Life 

 and Travels ;" the book is a miserable one at best, a compilation of 

 schoolboy stuff and letters of insufferable self-sufficiency, unctuated with 

 a good share of the twaddle gathered in his later years, to be used for the 

 especial catching of the devout ; in short, it is exactly the book of " a 

 first-class man of Oxford," and of course, to all men of sense and taste, 

 a perfectly trivial and obnoxious performance. But we should be sorry 

 to impede the progress of the lady's prosperity, or the goodness of the 

 catch which the man of moustachios has made in her, and we recom- 

 mend its purchase to all those who patronize the Widow of Ephesus 

 class of marriageable dames above forty-five. 



Another of the weepers and she-editors was Mrs. Bowdich. Nothing 

 could be prettier than this lady's sorrow, except herself and her little 

 subscription book of gold and silver fish drawings. The dear departed 

 Bowdich was never to be replaced in her desolate heart. The world 

 believed her blue eyes, steeped as they were in perpetual agony ; 

 gave their subscriptions, and lo! Mrs. Widow Bowdich married on 

 the spot. 



Before her came Mrs. . The earth rang with her afflictions 



when her poor husband, the artist, broke his neck by a fall in some 

 country church, where he was sketching. The quarto was rapidly 

 prepared, every thing that her " angelic, and ever to be lamented, and 

 never to be forgotten" Adolphus, had ever said, scribbled or sketched, was 



fathered into a book, and his undone widow bored all ears, from the 

 ing's, down to the coterie of literary spinsters who act as (t managing 

 committee for the Inverness and John-o' Groat's reading-club," with her 

 sorrows, her fidelity, the premature loss of her Adolphus, the infant 

 memory of her Blanche, and her whole host of personal desolations 

 besides. 



But the book was scarcely in the hands of the spinsters, when their 

 souls were electrified by a paragraph in their solitary paper. " Yesterday, 



married Mrs. A. , by special license, &c. We understand that 



she has married the parson of the church in which her late husband 

 broke his neck, as a tribute of respect to his memory." 



Lady Raffles, too, has written her book, and made the most of poor 

 Sir Stamford. However, she is not a Duchess yet, and we conclude 

 that the cause of the delay is, her having abstained from the usual lofty 

 pledges of eternal sorrow and perpetual widowhood. If she had sworn 

 like the rest, of course, she would have done like the rest, and the 

 widow been no more. So much for the she-editors. It actually gives 

 us an uncontrollable disgust to see the name. It is a sure forerunner 

 of man-hunting. 



Brougham, whose foulness of tongue is always getting him into 

 scrapes, has just had the honour of receiving a message from Mr. 

 Martin Bree, the quack doctor, formerly of the Strand a fellow who 

 cured the diseases of man and the metropolis at sixpence a head, and 

 figured as the Dr. Eady of his day, within the last dozen years. 



