bility before hazarding an acquaintance with the Immortals.
Miss Benger did more than hazard. She pursued the Immortals with insensate zeal. She bribed Mrs. Inchbald's servant-maid into lending her cap, and apron, and tea-tray; and, so equipped, penetrated into the inmost sanctuary of that literary lady, who seems to have taken the intrusion in good part. She was equally adroit in seducing Mary Lamb—as the Serpent seduced Eve—when Charles Lamb was the ultimate object of her designs. Coming home to dinner one day, "hungry as a hunter," he found to his dismay the two women closeted together, and trusted he was in time to prevent their exchanging vows of eternal friendship, though not—as he discovered later—in time to save himself from an engagement to drink tea with the stranger ("I had never seen her before, and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar"), the following night.
What happened is told in a letter to Coleridge; one of the best-known and one of the longest letters Lamb ever wrote,—he is so brimful of his grievance. Miss Benger's lodgings were
