"I am very much obliged to you for your excellent and most welcome
present [it is below the dignity of the Epopee to say goose and
sausages] which reached me on Sunday, and the note which you were so
kind as to send with it, I can only repay you in this the old paper of
unproductive thanks, but the sincerity of them will be held in some
estimation by the mind actuated by the kindness that has excited them,
and, therefore, flimsy as they are, I venture to beg your acceptance
of them. I have nothing new, Madam, to send you for your
entertainment from this great city. That the Regent is going to
divorce the Princess of Wales, and excite the hope of the husbands and
the fear of the wives--that under such an example, all the legal
restraints to repudiation will be removed, and the practice become
wide, and quite fashionable; you have, of course, heard long ago from
the newspapers, they are eternally depriving us by anticipation of the
power of writing agreeable and interesting letters to the Ladies in
the country.
Sir James Cockburn arrived in town last Saturday from Bermudas. He is
quite well, and neither seems nor believes himself an hour older for
having been three years at Bermudas, since he was last in England. I
have been much with him and his brother, the Admiral, lately. I have
not (for your sex has not ALL the curiosity, though all of a peculiar
kind) omitted to ply him with questions about Buonaparte. He is now
admirably qualified to be Emperor in that country of which I have
read, where they elect the fattest man in the state to the Empire. His
legs are as bulky as my body, the ribs in proportion; and since this
girth is all attained in little more than five-feet five-inches of
length, he is not what Miss Cruso or Miss Godfrey [the head milliners
of Norwich at the time] would call a very genteel figure. He eats
with voraciousness of the most luxurious dishes; he has, in Cockburn's
opinion, a very mean assemblage of features with something fearfully
black and vicious about the brows and eyes. His manners are coarse
and repulsive. Did you ever in a litter yard come suddenly on a lady
in the straw that starts up on her fore legs and, dropping fourteen
infant pigs from her teats, salutes you with a fierce jumble of
barking, grunting, and hissing? In exactly such a sound is this
amiable man represented to me to have always replied to every address
of Bertrand, Mouthoulon, and the others, who are his fools and
followers to St. Helena. Sometimes he neglected all restraint on his
nature, and gave the same ferocious and inarticulate answers to the
English officers. He played chess so badly, that Bertrand and
Mouthoulon, who had too much discretion to excel their patron, had, at
times, great difficulty to lose the game to him; after trying for many
nights he could not attain the rudiments of whist, and went back to
vingt-un; but this is the man who has been described to us all as ALL-
INTELLECT. The newspapers, too, said I remember, that at whist he
left all instruction behind him, and soon played so well, that he had
won very large sums of the Admiral by his superior play, even while he
was only a Tyro. I can tell you no more now; but the Admiral has had
the goodness to lend me a journal of his conversation with Buonaparte
on the passage out, and when I have the pleasure of seeing you in the
sessions week, I will give you some extracts from my memory. I am, I
believe, a little better, but the disorder in the upper part of my
stomach still continues and oppresses me. It is now inveterate, the
complaint commenced last March, a twelvemonth past. If I cannot rid
myself of it, it will kill me in time. My best duty to my father,
love to William and 'aliis,'
I am, dear Madam,
Yours very faithfully,
HENRY COOPER.
P.S.--I write in a great hurry for I am making up my parcel for
Bermudas. I should not write to you at all, but I do not like so long
to delay my due thanks to your kindness."
This letter is dated,
2, _Lamb's Buildings_,
27_th_ _January_, 1817.