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Updated: June 10, 2025
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."
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!
If it don't, I assure you no letter was ever welcomer from, you, from Paris or Macao. See the Elia essay, "Mackery End, in H -shire." November 25, 1819.
Who or what sort of persons inherited Mackery End kindred or strange folk we were afraid almost to conjecture, but determined some day to explore. By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton in our way from Saint Alban's, we arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about noon.
Free-thinkers ... William Godwin, perhaps alone among Lamb's friends, quite answers to the description of leader of novel philosophies and systems; but there had been also Thomas Holcroft and John Thelwall among the Lambs' acquaintance. And Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt would come within this description. Good old English reading. Mackery End.
With what corresponding kindness we were received by them also how Bridget's memory, exalted by the occasion, warmed into a thousand half-obliterated recollections of things and persons, to my utter astonishment, and her own and to the astoundment of B.F. who sat by, almost the only thing that was not a cousin there, old effaced images of more than half-forgotten names and circumstances still crowding back upon her, as words written in lemon come out upon exposure to a friendly warmth, when I forget all this, then may my country cousins forget me; and Bridget no more remember, that in the days of weakling infancy I was her tender charge as I have been her care in foolish manhood since in those pretty pastoral walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in Hertfordshire.
Much of the description of the farm and country is probably from memory of the old days at Mackery End, where we know Mary Lamb to have gone with her little brother Charles some time about 1780, and perhaps herself earlier. It is, however, possible that Blakesware is meant, since Mary Lamb speaks of the grandmother: Mrs. Bruton of Mackery End was her great aunt. III. Ann Withers. "The Changeling."
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