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May 28, 1819, My Dear M.. I want to know how your brother is, if you have heard lately. I want to know about you, I wish you were nearer. How are my cousins, the Gladmans of Wheathampstead, and Farmer Bruton? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman, "Hail, Mackery End!" This is a fragment of a blank-verse poem which. I once meditated, but got no farther.
She had on her walls two charming oval portraits of ancestresses, possibly for she was uncertain as to their identity two of the handsome sisters whom Lamb extols. Writing to Manning, May 28, 1819, Lamb says: "How are my cousins, the Gladmans of Wheathampstead, and farmer Bruton? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman. "Hail, Mackery End!
The Fields and the Gladmans, with their homely dwellings and hospitality, drew him to them like magnets. There was nothing too fine nor too lofty in these friends for his tastes or his affection; they did not "affront him with their light." His fancy always stooped to moralize; he hated the stilted attitudes and pretensions of poetasters and self-glorifying artists.
If your appetite is keen, by all means visit Bobo, who invented roast pig: if gay, and disposed to saunter through the pleasant lanes of Hertfordshire, go to Mackery End, where the Gladmans and Brutons will bid you welcome: if grave, let your eyes repose on the face of dear old Bridget Elia, "in a season of distress the truest comforter."
The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the county, but the Fields are almost extinct. More than forty years had elapsed since the visit I speak of; and, for the greater portion of that period, we had lost sight of the other two branches also.
Love, stronger than scruple, winged my cousin in without me; but she soon returned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome. It was the youngest of the Gladmans; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had become mistress of the old mansion. A comely brood are the Brutons. Six of them, females, were noted as the handsomest young women in the county.
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