“We have now drawn out our hero’s existence to the period when he was about to meet for the first time the sympathies of a London audience.  The particulars of his success since have been too much before our eyes to render a circumstantial detail of them expedient.  I shall only mention, that Mr. Willoughby, his resentments having had time to subside, is at present one of the fastest friends of his old renegado factor; and that Mr. Listen’s hopes of Miss Parker vanishing along with his unsuccessful suit to Melpomene, in the autumn of 1811 he married his present lady, by whom he has been blest with one son, Philip, and two daughters, Ann and Angustina.”

* * * * *

“Ask anybody you meet,” writes Lamb to Miss Wordsworth, then visiting some friends in Cambridge, “who is the biggest woman in Cambridge, and I’ll hold a wager they’ll say Mrs. ——.  She broke down two benches in Trinity Gardens,—­one on the confines of St. John’s, which occasioned a litigation between the societies as to repairing it.  In warm weather she retires into an ice-cellar, (literally,) and dates from a hot Thursday some twenty years back.  She sits in a room with opposite doors and windows, to let in a thorough draft, which gives her slenderer friends toothaches.  She is to be seen in the market every morning at ten, cheapening fowls, which I observe the Cambridge poulterers are not sufficiently careful to stump.”

On the person thus briefly sketched Elia wrote an article for the “London Magazine.”  As it is not to be found in the standard editions of its author’s works, we herewith present it to our readers.  They will find it to be a clever specimen of Lamb’s peculiar and delightful humor.  In truth, it is one of the very best things he ever conjured up.  We observe he has changed the locality of the stout woman, and places her in Oxford, instead of Cambridge.

* * * * *

“THE GENTLE GIANTESS.

“The widow Blacket, of Oxford, is the largest female I ever had the pleasure of beholding.  There may be her parallel upon the earth, but surely I never saw it.  I take her to be lineally descended from the maid’s aunt of Brainford, who caused Master Ford such uneasiness.  She hath Atlantean shoulders; and as she stoopeth in her gait,—­with as few offences to answer for in her own particular as any of Eve’s daughters,—­her back seems broad enough to bear the blame of all the peccadilloes that have been committed since Adam.  She girdeth her waist—­or what she is pleased to esteem as such—­nearly up to her shoulders, from beneath which that huge dorsal expanse, in mountainous declivity, emergeth.  Respect for her alone preventeth the idle boys, who follow her about in shoals, whenever she cometh abroad, from getting up and riding.  But her presence infallibly commands a reverence.  She is, indeed, as the Americans would express it, something awful.  Her person is a burden to herself, no less than to the ground which bears her.