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. It is true, the forty or sixty days would, in
all probability, be as foolishly spent on shore as in the ship; but
one like's to have one's choice, nevertheless. Town is awfully
empty; but not the worse for that. I am really puzzled with my
perfect ignorance of what I mean to do;--not stay, if I can help
it, but where to go?[77] Sligo is for the North;--a pleasant place,
Petersburgh, in September, with one's ears and nose in a muff, or
else tumbling into one's neckcloth or pocket-handkerchief! If the
winter treated Buonaparte with so little ceremony, what would it