her. I have not seen her since the event; but merely judge (not
very charitably) from prior observation.

"In a 'mail-coach copy' of the Edinburgh, I perceive The Giaour is
second article. The numbers are still in the Leith smack--_pray,
which way is the wind?_ The said article is so very mild and
sentimental, that it must be written by Jeffrey _in love_;--you
know he is gone to America to marry some fair one, of whom he has
been, for several _quarters, eperdument amoureux_. Seriously--as
Winifred Jenkins says of Lismahago--Mr. Jeffrey (or his deputy)
'has done the handsome thing by me,' and I say _nothing_. But this
I will say, if you and I had knocked one another on the head in
this quarrel, how he would have laughed, and what a mighty bad
figure we should have cut in our posthumous works. By the by, I was
called _in_ the other day to mediate between two gentlemen bent
upon carnage, and,--after a long struggle between the natural
desire of destroying one's fellow-creatures, and the dislike of
seeing men play the fool for nothing,--I got one to make an
apology, and the other to take it, and left them to live happy ever
after. One was a peer, the other a friend untitled, and both fond
of high play;--and one, I can swear for, though very mild, 'not
fearful,' and so dead a shot, that, though the other is the
thinnest of men, he would have split him like a cane. They both
conducted themselves very well, and I put them out of _pain_ as
soon as I could.

"There is an American Life of G.F. Cooke, _Scurra_ deceased, lately
published. Such a book!--I believe, since Drunken Barnaby's
Journal, nothing like it has drenched the press. All green-room and
tap-room--drams and the drama--brandy, whisky-punch, and,
_latterly_, toddy, overflow every page. Two things are rather
marvellous,--first, that a man should live so long drunk, and,
next, that he should have found a sober biographer. There are some
very laughable things in it, nevertheless;--but the pints he
swallowed, and the parts he performed, are too regularly
registered.

"All this time you wonder I am not gone; so do I; but the accounts
of the plague are very perplexing--not so much for the thing itself
as the quarantine established in all ports, and from all places,
even from England