458 City Sketches. 



purpose, but he lacked action. As it was, however, how he turned 

 the tables upon her, in spirit! how ke hauled her over the coals, 

 in thought! how he mentally wreaked his vengeance upon her! In 

 these, his wolfish moods, he perfectly scouted the prescribed thick- 

 ness of a cudgel with which a man may legally visit the shoulders 

 of his helpmate. It was a perfect delight to him (a luxury which a 

 peep into the street sometimes afforded him) to. behold the genero 

 indignation of Punch, when, hugging one end of a sensible staff 

 his bosom, he applied the other to the ligneous pericranium of the 

 " cantankerous" Judith. With what incredulity he perused police 

 cases, which occasionally appeared in the newspapers headed " Brutal 

 Conduct of a Husband," or " Savage Assault on a Wife." He smiled 

 at these fictions; the thing could not be; it was impossible ; but who 

 believed any thing that appeared in the newspapers? He thought 

 the celebrated " sarve her right" jury the most rational and clear- 

 headed body of men it had ever been his fortune to read of. It is 

 astonishing, also, how often he beheld himself, with his mind's eye, 

 clothed in black, with a white cambric handkerchief at his nose, step- 

 ping sedately into what has been sarcastically termed a mourning 

 coach. 



Three years rolled, or, rather, grovelled on under the weight C4| 

 Cobb and his afflictions, when an event fell out which had taken pre- 

 cedence of all others in the breast, and bosom, and heart, and soul 

 of the tobacconist. Mrs. Cobb had been long ailing became un- 

 well sent for the doctor grew worse and then was no better 

 and then was pretty much the same until, to adopt, with a slight 

 alteration, the poetical pathos of the stone-cutter, 



; "Till Death did please. 



Her for to seize, 

 And ease him of his pain (or bane)." 



It is but justice to state, that Mr. Cobb bore his bereavement with 

 extraordinary equanimity. He neither laughed nor cried, lest the 

 world should ascribe his laughter to phrenzy or the tears to mirth. 

 He only said that it was " a happy release," and people believed him. 

 It is not my province to account for, or philosophically to analyze 

 the respective humours or dispositions of men ; it is my business with 

 a feeble, and sometimes with a trembling pen, to record them. It 

 is well that a man should overlook his destiny from as elevated a 

 position as possible, that he should, as it were, 



" See, as from a tower, the end of all," 



that he should take a bird's eye view of his own prospects ; but it is 

 not so well, that the bird taking such survey should be a goose. 

 Whether it was that Mr. Drinkwater Cobb argued, on the doctrine 

 of chances, that he must necessarily have better luck next time, 

 whether he held it to be impossible that there could be worse than 

 the worst, or that there was in the lowest deep a lower deep, or 

 whether he thought, since too negatives make an affirmative, two bad 

 wives would form one good one, cannot be ascertained ; but, it is 

 certain, that very soon after the "death of his first, Mr. Cobb began 



