[Transcriber's note: The spellings in this book are inconsistent inthe original, and have not been corrected except in the index asexplicitly noted below. ]

[Illustration: Fanny Kemble]

RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD

BY

FRANCES ANN KEMBLE

_SECOND EDITION. _

[Illustration]

NEW YORKHENRY HOLT AND COMPANY1880. 

COPYRIGHT, 1879, BYHENRY HOLT & CO. 

JOHN A. GRAY, Agent, TYPE-SETTING MACHINERY, 16 & 18 JACOB STREET, NEW YORK. 

PREFATORY NOTE. 

Considerable portions of this work originally appeared in the _AtlanticMonthly_, but there is added to these a large amount of new matter nothitherto published, and the whole work has been thoroughly revised. 

RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD. 

CHAPTER I. 

A few years ago I received from a friend to whom they had been addresseda collection of my own letters, written during a period of forty years, and amounting to thousands--a history of my life. 

The passion for universal history (_i. E. _ any and every body's story)nowadays seems to render any thing in the shape of personalrecollections good enough to be printed and read; and as the publicappetite for gossip appears to be insatiable, and is not unlikely sometime or other to be gratified at my expense, I have thought that my owngossip about myself may be as acceptable to it as gossip about mewritten by another. 

I have come to the garrulous time of life--to the remembering days, which only by a little precede the forgetting ones. I have much leisure, and feel sure that it will amuse me to write my own reminiscences;perhaps reading them may amuse others who have no more to do than Ihave. To the idle, then, I offer these lightest of leaves gathered inthe idle end of autumn days, which have succeeded years of labor oftensevere and sad enough, though its ostensible purpose was only that ofaffording recreation to the public. 

 * * * * *

There are two lives of my aunt Siddons: one by Boaden, and one by thepoet Campbell. In these biographies due mention is made of my paternalgrandfather and grandmother. To the latter, Mrs. Roger Kemble, I amproud to see, by Lawrence's portrait of her, I bear a personalresemblance; and I please myself with imagining that the likeness ismore than "skin deep. " She was an energetic, brave woman, who, in thehumblest sphere of life and most difficult circumstances, together withher husband fought manfully a hard battle with poverty, in maintainingand, as well as they could, training a family of twelve children, ofwhom four died in childhood. But I am persuaded that whatever qualitiesof mind or character I inherit from my father's family, I am morestrongly stamped with those which I derive from my mother, a woman who, possessing no specific gift in such perfection as the dramatic talent ofthe Kembles, had in a higher degree than any of them the peculiarorganization of genius. To the fine senses of a savage rather than acivilized nature, she joined an acute instinct of correct criticism inall matters of art, and a general quickness and accuracy of perception, and brilliant vividness of expression, that made her conversationdelightful. Had she possessed half the advantages of education which sheand my father labored to bestow upon us, she would, I think, have beenone of the most remarkable persons of her time. 

My mother was the daughter of Captain Decamp, an officer in one of thearmies that revolutionary France sent to invade republican Switzerland. He married the daughter of a farmer from the neighborhood of Berne. Frommy grandmother's home you could see the great Jungfrau range of theAlps, and I sometimes wonder whether it is her blood in my veins that soloves and longs for those supremely beautiful mountains. 

Not long after his marriage my grandfather went to Vienna, where, on theanniversary of the birth of the great Empress-King, my mother was born, and named, after her, Maria Theresa. In Vienna, Captain Decamp made theacquaintance of a young English nobleman, Lord Monson (afterwards theEarl of Essex), who, with an enthusiasm more friendly than wise, eagerlyurged the accomplished Frenchman to come and settle in London, where histalents as a draughtsman and musician, which were much above those of amere amateur, combined with the protection of such friends as he couldnot fail to find, would easily enable him to maintain himself and hisyoung wife and child. 

In an evil hour my grandfather adopted this advice, and came to England. It was the time when the emigration of the French nobility had filledLondon with objects of sympathy, and society with sympathizers withtheir misfortunes. Among the means resorted to for assisting the manyinteresting victims of the Revolution, were representations, given underthe direction of Le Texier, of Berquin's and Madame de Genlis's juveniledramas, by young French children. These performances, combined with hisown extraordinary readings, became one of the fashionable frenzies ofthe day. I quote from Walter Scott's review of Boaden's life of my unclethe following notice of Le Texier: "On one of these incidental topics wemust pause for a moment, with delighted recollection. We mean thereadings of the celebrated Le Texier, who, seated at a desk, and dressedin plain clothes, read French plays with such modulation of voice, andsuch exquisite point of dialogue, as to form a pleasure different fromthat of the theatre, but almost as great as we experience in listeningto a first-rate actor. We have only to add to a very good account givenby Mr. Boaden of this extraordinary entertainment, that when itcommenced Mr. Le Texier read over the _dramatis personæ_, with thelittle analysis of character usually attached to each name, using thevoice and manner with which he afterward read the part; and so accuratewas the key-note given that he had no need to name afterward the personwho spoke; the stupidest of the audience could not fail to recognizethem. "

Among the little actors of Le Texier's troupe, my mother attracted thegreatest share of public attention by her beauty and grace, and thetruth and spirit of her performances. 

The little French fairy was eagerly seized upon by admiring fine ladiesand gentlemen, and snatched up into their society, where she was fondledand petted and played with; passing whole days in Mrs. Fitzherbert'sdrawing-room, and many a half hour on the knees of her royal anddisloyal husband, the Prince Regent, one of whose favorite jokes was toplace my mother under a huge glass bell, made to cover some large groupof precious Dresden china, where her tiny figure and flashing faceproduced even a more beautiful effect than the costly work of art whosecrystal covering was made her momentary cage. I have often heard mymother refer to this season of her childhood's favoritism with the finefolk of that day, one of her most vivid impressions of which was theextraordinary beauty of person and royal charm of manner and deportmentof the Prince of Wales, and his enormous appetite: enormous perhaps, after all, only by comparison with her own, which he compassionatelyused to pity, saying frequently, when she declined the delicacies thathe pressed upon her, "Why, you poor child! Heaven has not blessed youwith an appetite. " Of the precocious feeling and imagination of the poorlittle girl, thus taken out of her own sphere of life into one sodifferent and so dangerous, I remember a very curious instance, told meby herself. One of the houses where she was a most frequent visitor, andtreated almost like a child of the family, was that of Lady Rivers, whose brother, Mr. Rigby, while in the ministry, fought a duel with somepolitical opponent. Mr. Rigby had taken great notice of the littleFrench child treated with such affectionate familiarity by his sister, and she had attached herself so strongly to him that, on hearing thecircumstance of his duel suddenly mentioned for the first time, shefainted away: a story that always reminded me of the little Spanish girlFlorian mentions in his "Mémoires d'un jeune Espagnol, " who, at sixyears of age, having asked a young man of upward of five and twenty ifhe loved her, so resented his repeating her question to her elder sisterthat she never could be induced to speak to him again. 

Meantime, while the homes of the great and gay were her constant resort, the child's home was becoming sadder, and her existence and that of herparents more precarious and penurious day by day. From my grandfather'sfirst arrival in London, his chest had suffered from the climate; theinstrument he taught was the flute, and it was not long before decideddisease of the lungs rendered that industry impossible. He endeavored tosupply its place by giving French and drawing lessons (I have severalsmall sketches of his, taken in the Netherlands, the firm, free delicacyof which attest a good artist's handling); and so struggled on, underthe dark London sky, and in the damp, foggy, smoky atmosphere, while thepoor foreign wife bore and nursed four children. 

It is impossible to imagine any thing sadder than the condition of sucha family, with its dark fortune closing round and over it, and its onelittle human jewel, sent forth from its dingy case to sparkle andglitter, and become of hard necessity the single source of light in thegrowing gloom of its daily existence. And the contrast must have beencruel enough between the scenes into which the child's geniusspasmodically lifted her, both in the assumed parts she performed and inthe great London world where her success in their performance carriedher, and the poor home, where sickness and sorrow were becoming abidinginmates, and poverty and privation the customary conditions oflife--poverty and privation doubtless often increased by the very outlaynecessary to fit her for her public appearances, and not seldom by thefear of offending, or the hope of conciliating, the fastidious taste ofthe wealthy and refined patrons whose favor toward the poor littlechild-actress might prove infinitely helpful to her and to those whoowned her. 

The lives of artists of every description in England are not unapt tohave such opening chapters as this; but the calling of a player alonehas the grotesque element of fiction, with all the fantasticaccompaniments of sham splendor thrust into close companionship with thesordid details of poverty; for the actor alone the livery of labor is aharlequin's jerkin lined with tatters, and the jester's cap and bellstied to the beggar's wallet. I have said artist life in England is aptto have such chapters; artist life everywhere, probably. But it is onlyin England, I think, that the full bitterness of such experience isfelt; for what knows the foreign artist of the inexorable element ofRespectability? In England alone is the pervading atmosphere ofrespectability that which artists breathe in common with all othermen--respectability, that English moral climate, with its neutral tintand temperate tone, so often sneered at in these days by its new Germantitle of Philistinism, so often deserving of the bitterest scorn in someof its inexpressibly mean manifestations--respectability, thepre-eminently unattractive characteristic of British existence, butwhich, all deductions made for its vulgar alloys, is, in truth, only thegeneral result of the individual self-respect of individual Englishmen;a wholesome, purifying, and preserving element in the homes and lives ofmany, where, without it, the recklessness bred of insecure means andobscure position would run miserable riot; a tremendous power ofomnipotent compression, repression, and oppression, no doubt, quiteconsistent with the stern liberty whose severe beauty the people ofthese islands love, but absolutely incompatible with license, or evenlightness of life, controlling a thousand disorders rampant in societieswhere it does not exist; a power which, tyrannical as it is, andludicrously tragical as are the sacrifices sometimes exacted by it, saves especially the artist class of England from those worst forms ofirregularity which characterize the Bohemianism of foreign literary, artistic, and dramatic life. 

Of course the pleasure-and-beauty-loving, artistic temperament, which isthe one most likely to be exposed to such an ordeal as that of mymother's childhood, is also the one liable to be most injured by it, andto communicate through its influence peculiar mischief to the moralnature. It is the price of peril, paid for all that brilliant order ofgifts that have for their scope the exercise of the imagination throughthe senses, no less than for that crown of gifts, the poet's passionateinspiration, speaking to the senses through the imagination. 

How far my mother was hurt by the combination of circumstances thatinfluenced her childhood I know not. As I remember her, she was a frank, fearless, generous, and unworldly woman, and had probably found in thesubsequent independent exercise of her abilities the shield for thesevirtues. How much the passionate, vehement, susceptible, and mostsuffering nature was banefully fostered at the same time, I can betterjudge from the sad vantage-ground of my own experience. 

After six years spent in a bitter struggle with disease and difficultiesof every kind, my grandfather, still a young man, died of consumption, leaving a widow and five little children, of whom the eldest, my mother, not yet in her teens, became from that time the bread-winner and solesupport. 

Nor was it many years before she established her claim to theapprobation of the general public, fulfilling the promise of herchildhood by performances of such singular originality as to deserve thename of genuine artistic creations, and which have hardly ever beensuccessfully attempted since her time: such as "The Blind Boy" and "Deafand Dumb;" the latter, particularly, in its speechless power and pathosof expression, resembling the celebrated exhibitions of Parisot andBigottini, in the great tragic ballets in which dancing was asubordinate element to the highest dramatic effects of passion andemotion expressed by pantomime. After her marriage, my mother remainedbut a few years on the stage, to which she bequeathed, as specimens ofher ability as a dramatic writer, the charming English version of "Lajeune Femme colère, " called "The Day after the Wedding;" the littleburlesque of "Personation, " of which her own exquisitely humorousperformance, aided by her admirably pure French accent, has never beenequaled; and a play in five acts called "Smiles and Tears, " taken fromMrs. Opie's tale of "Father and Daughter. "

She had a fine and powerful voice and a rarely accurate musical ear; shemoved so gracefully that I have known persons who went to certainprovincial promenades frequented by her, only to see her walk; she was acapital horsewoman; her figure was beautiful, and her face very handsomeand strikingly expressive; and she talked better, with more originalityand vivacity, than any English woman I have ever known: to all whichgood gifts she added that of being a first-rate _cook_. And oh, howoften and how bitterly, in my transatlantic household tribulations, haveI deplored that her apron had not fallen on my shoulders or round mywaist! Whether she derived this taste and talent from her French blood, I know not, but it amounted to genius, and might have made her apre-eminent _cordon bleu_, if she had not been the wife, and _cheffe_, of a poor professional gentleman, whose moderate means were soskillfully turned to account, in her provision for his modest table, that he was accused by ill-natured people of indulging in the expensiveluxury of a French cook. Well do I remember the endless supplies ofpotted gravies, sauces, meat jellies, game jellies, fish jellies, thewhite ranges of which filled the shelves of her store-room--which shelaughingly called her boudoir--almost to the exclusion of the usualcurrant jellies and raspberry jams of such receptacles: for she had thereal _bon vivant's_ preference of the savory to the sweet, and left allthe latter branch of the art to her subordinates, confining the exerciseof her own talents, or immediate superintendence, to the production ofthe above-named "elegant extracts. " She never, I am sorry to say, encouraged either my sister or myself in the same useful occupation, alleging that we had what she called better ones; but I would joyfully, many a time in America, have exchanged all my boarding-schoolsmatterings for her knowledge how to produce a wholesome and palatabledinner. As it was, all I learned of her, to my sorrow, was a detestationof bad cookery, and a firm conviction that that which was exquisite wasboth wholesomer and more economical than any other. Dr. Kitchener, theclever and amiable author of that amusing book, "The Cook's Oracle" (hisname was a _bonâ fide_ appellation, and not a drolly devised appropriate_nom de plume_, and he was a doctor of physic), was a great friend andadmirer of hers; and she is the "accomplished lady" by whom severalpages of that entertaining kitchen companion were furnished to him. 

The mode of opening one of her chapters, "I always bone my meat" (_bone_being the slang word of the day for steal), occasioned much merrimentamong her friends, and such a look of ludicrous surprise and reprobationfrom Liston, when he read it, as I still remember. 

My mother, moreover, devised a most admirable kind of _jujube_, made ofclarified gum-arabic, honey, and lemon, with which she kept my fathersupplied during all the time of his remaining on the stage; he neveracted without having recourse to it, and found it more efficacious insustaining the voice and relieving the throat under constant exertionthan any other preparation that he ever tried; this she always made forhim herself. 

The great actors of my family have received their due of recordedadmiration; my mother has always seemed to me to have been overshadowedby their celebrity; my sister and myself, whose fate it has been to bearin public the name they have made distinguished, owe in great measure toher, I think, whatever ability has enabled us to do so not unworthily. 

I was born on the 27th of November, 1809, in Newman Street, Oxford Road, the third child of my parents, whose eldest, Philip, named after myuncle, died in infancy. The second, John Mitchell, lived to distinguishhimself as a scholar, devoting his life to the study of his own languageand the history of his country in their earliest period, and to thekindred subject of Northern Archæology. 

Of Newman Street I have nothing to say, but regret to have heard thatbefore we left our residence there my father was convicted, during anabsence of my mother's from town, of having planted in my baby bosom theseeds of personal vanity, while indulging his own, by having anespecially pretty and becoming lace cap at hand in the drawing-room, tobe immediately substituted for some more homely daily adornment, when Iwas exhibited to his visitors. In consequence, perhaps, of which, I am adisgracefully dress-loving old woman of near seventy, one of whose minormiseries is that she can no longer find _any_ lace cap whatever that iseither pretty or becoming to her gray head. If my father had not been sofoolish then, I should not be so foolish now--perhaps. 

The famous French actress, Mlle. Clairon, recalled, for the pleasure ofsome foreign royal personage passing through Paris, for one night to thestage, which she had left many years before, was extremely anxious torecover the pattern of a certain cap which she had worn in her youngdays in "La Coquette corrigée, " the part she was about to repeat. Thecap, as she wore it, had been a Parisian rage; she declared that halfher success in the part had been the cap. The milliner who had made it, and whose fortune it had made, had retired from business, grown old;luckily, however, she was not dead: she was hunted up and adjured toreproduce, if possible, this marvel of her art, and came to her formerpatroness, bringing with her the identical head-gear. Clairon seizedupon it: "Ah oui, c'est bien cela! c'est bien là le bonnet!" It was onher head in an instant, and she before the glass, in vain trying toreproduce with it the well-remembered effect. She pished and pshawed, frowned and shrugged, pulled the pretty _chiffon_ this way and that onher forehead; and while so doing, coming nearer and nearer to theterrible looking-glass, suddenly stopped, looked at herself for a momentin silence, and then, covering her aged and faded face with her hands, exclaimed, "Ah, c'est bien le bonnet! mais ce n'est plus la figure!"

Our next home, after Newman Street, was at a place called WestbourneGreen, now absorbed into endless avenues of "palatial" residences, whichscoff with regular-featured, lofty scorn at the rural simplicity impliedby such a name. The site of our dwelling was not far from the PaddingtonCanal, and was then so far out of town that our nearest neighbors, people of the name of Cockrell, were the owners of a charming residence, in the middle of park-like grounds, of which I still have a faint, pleasurable remembrance. The young ladies, daughters of Mr. Cockrell, really made the first distinct mark I can detect on the _tabula rasa_ ofmy memory, by giving me a charming pasteboard figure of a little girl, to whose serene and sweetly smiling countenance, and pretty person, awhole bookful of painted pasteboard petticoats, cloaks, and bonnetscould be adapted; it was a lovely being, and stood artlessly by a stile, an image of rustic beauty and simplicity. I still bless the MissCockrells, if they are alive, but if not, their memory for it!

Of the curious effect of dressing in producing the _sentiment_ of acountenance, no better illustration can be had than a series of caps, curls, wreaths, ribbons, etc. , painted so as to be adaptable to oneface; the totally different _character_ imparted by a helmet, or agarland of roses, to the same set of features, is a "caution" toirregular beauties who console themselves with the fascinating varietyof their _expression_. 

At this period of my life, I have been informed, I began, after themanner of most clever children, to be exceedingly troublesome andunmanageable, my principal crime being a general audacious contempt forall authority, which, coupled with a sweet-tempered, cheerfulindifference to all punishment, made it extremely difficult to know howto obtain of me the minimum quantity of obedience indispensable in therelations of a tailless monkey of four years and its elders. I nevercried, I never sulked, I never resented, lamented, or repented either myill-doings or their consequences, but accepted them alike with aphilosophical buoyancy of spirit which was the despair of my poorbewildered trainers. 

Being hideously decorated once with a fool's cap of vast dimensions, andadvised to hide, not my "diminished head, " but my horrible disgrace, from all beholders, I took the earliest opportunity of dancing down thecarriage-drive to meet the postman, a great friend of mine, and attracthis observation and admiration to my "helmet, " which I called aloud uponall wayfarers also to contemplate, until removed from an elevated bank Ihad selected for this public exhibition of myself and my penal costume, which was beginning to attract a small group of passers-by. 

My next malefactions were met with an infliction of bread and water, which I joyfully accepted, observing, "Now I am like those poor dearFrench prisoners that everybody pities so. " Mrs. Siddons at that timelived next door to us; she came in one day when I had committed some ofmy daily offenses against manners or morals, and I was led, nothingdaunted, into her awful presence, to be admonished by her. 

Melpomene took me upon her lap, and, bending upon me her "controllingfrown, " discoursed to me of my evil ways in those accents which curdledthe blood of the poor shopman, of whom she demanded if the printedcalico she purchased of him "would wash. " The tragic tones pausing, inthe midst of the impressed and impressive silence of the assembledfamily, I tinkled forth, "What beautiful eyes you have!" all my smallfaculties having been absorbed in the steadfast upward gaze I fixed uponthose magnificent orbs. Mrs. Siddons set me down with a smothered laugh, and I trotted off, apparently uninjured by my great-aunt's solemn moralsuasion. 

A dangerous appeal, of a higher order, being made to me by my aunt'smost intimate friend, Mrs. F----, a not very judicious person, to theeffect, "Fanny, why don't you pray to God to make you better?"immediately received the conclusive reply, "So I do, and he makes meworse and worse. " Parents and guardians should be chary of handling thedeep chords upon whose truth and strength the highest harmonies of thefully developed soul are to depend. 

In short, I was as hopelessly philosophical a subject as Madame Roland, when, at six years old, receiving her penal bread and water with thecomment, "Bon pour la digestion!" and the retributive stripes which thisdrew upon her, with the further observation, "Bon pour la circulation!"In spite of my "wickedness, " as Topsy would say, I appear to have beennot a little spoiled by my parents, and an especial pet and favorite ofall their friends, among whom, though I do not remember him at thisearly period of our acquaintance, I know was Charles Young, that mostkindly good man and pleasant gentleman, one of whose many amiablequalities was a genuine love for little children. He was an intimatefriend of Mrs. Siddons and her brothers, and came frequently to ourhouse; if the elders were not at home, he invariably made his way to thenursery, where, according to the amusing description he has often sincegiven me of our early intercourse, one of his great diversions was tomake me fold my little fat arms--not an easy performance for smallmuscles--and with a portentous frown, which puckered up my mouth evenmore than my eyebrows, receive from him certain awfully unintelligiblepassages from "Macbeth;" replying to them, with a lisp that must havegreatly heightened the tragic effect of this terrible dialogue, "_Myhandth are of oo tolor_" (My hands are of your color). Years--howmany!--after this first lesson in declamation, dear Charles Young wasacting Macbeth for the last time in London, and I was his "wicked wife;"and while I stood at the side scenes, painting my hands and arms withthe vile red stuff that confirmed the bloody-minded woman's words, hesaid to me with a smile, "Ah ha! _My handth are of oo tolor. _"

Mr. Young's own theatrical career was a sort of curious contradictionbetween his physical and mental endowments. His very handsome andregular features of the Roman cast, and deep, melodious voice, wereundoubtedly fine natural requisites for a tragic actor, and he succeededmy uncle in all his principal parts, if not with any thing like equalgenius, with a dignity and decorum that were always highly acceptable. He had, however, no tragic mental element whatever with these verydecided external qualifications for tragedy; but a perception of andpassion for humor, which he indulged in private constantly, in the mostentertaining and surprising manner. Ludicrous stories; personal mimicry;the most admirable imitation of national accent--Scotch, Irish, andFrench (he spoke the latter language to perfection, and Italian verywell); a power of grimace that equaled Grimaldi, and the mostirresistibly comical way of resuming, in the midst of the broadestbuffoonery, the stately dignity of his own natural countenance, voice, and manner. 

He was a cultivated musician, and sang French and Italian with taste andexpression, and English ballads with a pathos and feeling only inferiorto that of Moore and Mrs. Arkwright, with both which great masters ofmusical declamation he was on terms of friendly intimacy. Mr. Young wasa universal favorite in the best London society, and an eagerly soughtguest in pleasant country-houses, where his zeal for country sports, hisknowledge of and fondness for horses, his capital equestrianism, andinexhaustible fund of humor, made him as popular with the men as hissweet, genial temper, good breeding, musical accomplishments, andinfinite drollery did with the women. 

Mr. Young once told Lord Dacre that he made about four thousand poundssterling per annum by his profession; and as he was prudent and moderatein his mode of life, and, though elegant, not extravagant in his tastes, he had realized a handsome fortune when he left the stage. 

Mr. Young passed the last years of his life at Brighton, and I nevervisited that place without going to see him, confined as he latterly wasto his sofa with a complication of painful diseases and the weight ofmore than seventy years. The last time I saw him in his drawing-room hemade me sit on a little stool by his sofa--it was not long after myfather, his life-long friend and contemporary's death--and he keptstroking my hair, and saying to me, "You look so like a child--a goodchild. " I saw him but once more after this; he was then confined to hisbed. It was on Sunday; he lay propped with pillows in an ample flanneldressing-gown, with a dark-blue velvet skull-cap on his head, and Ithought I had never seen his face look more strikingly noble andhandsome; he was reading the church service and his Bible, and kept meby him for some time. I never saw him again. 

As a proof of the little poetical imagination which Mr. Young brought tosome of his tragic performances, I remember his saying of his dress inCardinal Wolsey, "Well, I never could associate any ideas of grandeurwith this old woman's red petticoat. " It would be difficult to say whathis best performances were, for he had never either fire, passion, ortenderness; but never wanted propriety, dignity, and a certain statelygrace. Sir Pertinax McSycophant and Iago were the best things I ever sawhim act, probably because the sardonic element in both of them gavepartial scope to his humorous vein. 

Not long after this we moved to another residence, still in the sameneighborhood, but near the churchyard of Paddington church, which was athoroughfare of gravel walks, cutting in various directions the greenturf, where the flat tombstones formed frequent "play-tables" for us;upon these our nursery-maid, apparently not given to melancholymeditations among the tombs, used to allow us to manufacture wholedelightful dinner sets of clay plates and dishes (I think I could makesuch now), out of which we used to have feasts, as we called them, ofmorsels of cake and fruit. 

At this time I was about five years old, and it was determined that Ishould be sent to the care of my father's sister, Mrs. Twiss, who kept aschool at Bath, and who was my godmother. On the occasion of my settingforth on my travels, my brother John presented me with a wholecollection of children's books, which he had read and carefullypreserved, and now commended to my use. There were at least a rounddozen, and, having finished reading them, it occurred to me that to makea bonfire of them would be an additional pleasure to be derived fromthem; and so I added to the intellectual recreation they afforded me themore _sensational_ excitement of what I called "a blaze;" a proceedingof which the dangerous sinfulness was severely demonstrated to me by mynew care-takers. 

Camden Place, Bath, was one of the lofty terraces built on the charmingslopes that surround the site of the Aquæ Solis of the Romans, and heremy aunt Twiss kept a girls' school, which participated in the favorwhich every thing belonging to, or even remotely associated with, Mrs. Siddons received from the public. It was a decidedly "fashionableestablishment for the education of young ladies, " managed by my aunt, her husband, and her three daughters. Mrs. Twiss was, like every memberof my father's family, at one time on the stage, but left it very soon, to marry the grim-visaged, gaunt-figured, kind-hearted gentleman andprofound scholar whose name she at this time bore, and who, I have heardit said, once nourished a hopeless passion for Mrs. Siddons. Mrs. Twissbore a soft and mitigated likeness to her celebrated sister; she hadgreat sweetness of voice and countenance, and a graceful, refined, feminine manner, that gave her great advantages in her intercourse withand influence over the young women whose training she undertook. Mr. Twiss was a very learned man, whose literary labors were, I believe, various, but whose "Concordance of Shakespeare" is the only one withwhich I am acquainted. He devoted himself, with extreme assiduity, tothe education of his daughters, giving them the unusual advantage of athorough classic training, and making of two of them learned women inthe more restricted, as well as the more general, sense of the term. These ladies were what so few of their sex ever are, _really wellinformed_; they knew much, and they knew it all thoroughly; they wereexcellent Latin scholars and mathematicians, had read immensely and atthe same time systematically, had prodigious memories stored withvarious and well-classed knowledge, and, above all, were mistresses ofthe English language, and spoke and wrote it with perfect purity--anaccomplishment out of fashion now, it appears to me, but of theadvantage of which I retain a delightful impression in my memory ofsubsequent intercourse with those excellent and capitally educatedwomen. My relations with them, all but totally interrupted for upward ofthirty years, were renewed late in the middle of my life and toward theend of theirs, when I visited them repeatedly at their pretty ruraldwelling near Hereford, where they enjoyed in tranquil repose the easyindependence they had earned by honorable toil. There, the lovelygarden, every flower of which looked fit to take the first prize at ahorticultural show, the incomparable white strawberries, famousthroughout the neighborhood, and a magnificent Angola cat, were thedelights of my out-of-door life; and perfect kindness and variousconversation, fed by an inexhaustible fund of anecdote, an immenseknowledge of books, and a long and interesting acquaintance withsociety, made the indoor hours passed with these quiet old ladygovernesses some of the most delightful I have ever known. The twoyounger sisters died first; the eldest, surviving them, felt the sadsolitude of their once pleasant home at "The Laurels" intolerable, andremoved her residence to Brighton, where, till the period of her death, I used to go and stay with her, and found her to the last one of themost agreeable companions I have ever known. 

At the time of my first acquaintance with my cousins, however, neithertheir own studies nor those of their pupils so far engrossed them as toseclude them from society. Bath was then, at certain seasons, the gayestplace of fashionable resort in England; and, little consonant as such athing would appear at the present day with the prevailing ideas of thelife of a teacher, balls, routs, plays, assemblies, the Pump Room, andall the fashionable dissipations of the place, were habitually resortedto by these very "stylish" school-mistresses, whose position at onetime, oddly enough, was that of leaders of "the ton" in the prettyprovincial capital of Somersetshire. It was, moreover, understood, aspart of the system of the establishment, that such of the pupils as wereof an age to be introduced into society could enjoy the advantage of thechaperonage of these ladies, and several did avail themselves of it. 

What profit I made under these kind and affectionate kinsfolk I knownot; little, I rather think, ostensibly; perhaps some beneath thesurface, not very manifest either to them or myself at the time; butpainstaking love sows more harvests than it wots of, wherever orwhenever (or if never) it reaps them. 

I did not become versed in any of my cousins' learned lore, oraccomplished in the lighter labors of their leisure hours--to wit, theshoemaking, bread-seal manufacturing, and black and white Japan, tableand screen painting, which produced such an indescribable medley ofmaterials in their rooms, and were fashionable female idle industries ofthat day. 

Remote from the theatre, and all details of theatrical life, as myexistence in my aunt's school was, there still were occasionalinfiltrations of that element which found their way into my smallsphere. My cousin John Twiss, who died not very long ago, an elderlygeneral in her Majesty's service, was at this time a young giant, studying to become an engineer officer, whose visits to his home wereseasons of great delight to the family in general, not unmixed on mypart with dread; for a favorite diversion of his was enacting my uncleJohn's famous rescue of Cora's child, in "Pizarro, " with me clutched inone hand, and exalted to perilous proximity with the chandelier, whilehe rushed across the drawing-rooms, to my exquisite terror and triumph. 

I remember, too, his sisters, all three remarkably tall women (theeldest nearly six feet high, a portentous petticoat stature), amusingthemselves with putting on, and sweeping about the rooms in, certainregal mantles and Grecian draperies of my aunt Mrs. Whitelock's, anactress, like the rest of the Kembles, who sought and found across theAtlantic a fortune and celebrity which it would have been difficult forher to have achieved under the disadvantage of proximity to, andcomparison with, her sister, Mrs. Siddons. But I suppose the dramaticimpression which then affected me with the greatest and most vividpleasure was an experience which I have often remembered, when readingGoethe's "Dichtung und Wahrheit, " and the opening chapters of "WilhelmMeister. " Within a pleasant summer afternoon's walk from Bath, throughgreen meadows and by the river's side, lay a place called ClavertonPark, the residence of a family of the name of A----. I remember nothingof the house but the stately and spacious hall, in the middle of whichstood a portable theatre, or puppet-show, such as Punch inhabits, wherethe small figures, animated with voice and movement by George A----, theeldest son of the family, were tragic instead of grotesque, and where, instead of the squeaking "Don Giovanni" of the London pavement, "Macbeth" and similar solemnities appeared before my enchanted eyes. Thetroupe might have been the very identical puppet performers of HarryRowe, the famous Yorkshire trumpeter. These, I suppose, were the firstplays I ever saw. Those were pleasant walks to Claverton, and pleasantdays at Claverton Hall! I wish Hans Breitmann and his "Avay in dieEwigkeit" did not come in, like a ludicrous, lugubrious burden, to allone's reminiscences of places and people one knew upward of fifty yearsago. 

I have been accused of having acquired a bad habit of _punning fromShakespeare!_--a delightful idea, that made me laugh till I cried thefirst time it was suggested to me. If so, I certainly began early toexhibit a result, of which the cause was, in some mysterious way, longsubsequent to the effect; unless the Puppet Plays of Claverton inspiredmy wit. However that may be, I developed at this period a decidedfaculty for punning, and that is an unusual thing at that age. Childrenhave considerable enjoyment of humor, as many of their favorite fairyand other stories attest; they are often themselves extremely droll andhumorous in their assumed play characters and the stories they invent todivert their companions; but punning is a not very noble species of wit;it partakes of mental dexterity, requires neither fancy, humor, norimagination, and deals in words with double meanings, a subtlety verylittle congenial to the simple and earnest intelligence of childhood. 

_Les enfans terribles_ say such things daily, and make theirgrandmothers' caps stand on end with their precocious astuteness; butthe clever sayings of most clever children, repeated and reported byadmiring friends and relations, are, for the most part, simply theresult of unused faculties, exercising themselves in, to them, an unusedworld; only therefore surprising to worn-out faculties, which havealmost ceased to exercise themselves in, to them, an almost worn-outworld. 

To Miss B---- I was indebted for the first doll I remember possessing--agorgeous wax personage, in white muslin and cherry-colored ribbons, who, by desire of the donor, was to be called Philippa, in honor of my uncle. I never loved or liked dolls, though I remember taking some pride in thesplendor of this, my first-born. They always affected me with a grimsense of being a mockery of the humanity they were supposed torepresent; there was something uncanny, not to say ghastly, in the dollexistence and its mimicry of babyhood to me, and I had a nervousdislike, not unmixed with fear, of the smiling simulacra that girls areall supposed to love with a species of prophetic maternal instinct. 

The only member of my aunt Twiss's family of whom I remember at thistime little or nothing was the eldest son, Horace, who in subsequentyears was one of the most intimate and familiar friends of my father andmother, and who became well known as a clever and successful public man, and a brilliant and agreeable member of the London society of his day. 

My stay of a little more than a year at Bath had but one memorableevent, in its course, to me. I was looking one evening, at bedtime, overthe banisters, from the upper story into the hall below, with tiptoeeagerness that caused me to overbalance myself and turn over the rail, to which I clung on the wrong side, suspended, like Victor Hugo'smiserable priest to the gutter of Notre Dame, and then fell four storiesdown on the stone pavement of the hall. I was not killed, or apparentlyinjured, but whether I was not really irreparably damaged no human beingcan possibly tell. 

My next memories refer to a residence which my parents were occupyingwhen I returned to London, called Covent Garden Chambers, now, Ibelieve, celebrated as "Evans's, " and where, I am told, it isconfidently affirmed that I was born, which I was not; and where, I amtold, a picture is shown that is confidently affirmed to be mine, whichit is not. My sister Adelaide was born in Covent Garden Chambers, andthe picture in question is an oil sketch, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, of mycousin Maria Siddons; quite near the truth enough for history, privateor public. It was while we were living here that Mrs. Siddons returnedto the stage for one night, and acted Lady Randolph for my father'sbenefit. Of course I heard much discourse about this, to us, importantand exciting event, and used all my small powers of persuasion to betaken to see her. 

My father, who loved me very much, and spoiled me not a little, carriedme early in the afternoon into the market-place, and showed me the densemass of people which filled the whole Piazza, in patient expectation ofadmission to the still unopened doors. This was by way of proving to mehow impossible it was to grant my request. However that might thenappear, it was granted, for I was in the theatre at the beginning of theperformance; but I can now remember nothing of it but the appearance ofa solemn female figure in black, and the tremendous _roar_ of publicgreeting which welcomed her, and must, I suppose, have terrified mychildish senses, by the impression I still retain of it; and this is theonly occasion on which I saw my aunt in public. 

Another circumstance, connected in my mind with Covent Garden Chambers, was a terrible anguish about my youngest brother, Henry, who was forsome hours lost. He was a most beautiful child, of little more thanthree years old, and had been allowed to go out on the door-steps, by anexceedingly foolish little nursery-maid, to look at the traffic of thegreat market-place. Returning without him, she declared that he hadrefused to come in with her, and had run to the corner of HenriettaStreet, as she averred, where she had left him, to come and fetchauthoritative assistance. 

The child did not come home, and all search for him proved vainthroughout the crowded market and the adjoining thoroughfares, throngedwith people and choked with carts and wagons, and swarming with theblocked-up traffic, which had to make its way to and from the great martthrough avenues far narrower and more difficult of access than they arenow. There were not then, either, those invaluable beings, policemen, standing at every corner to enforce order and assist the helpless. Thesethen were not; and no inquiry brought back any tidings of the poorlittle lost boy. My mother was ill, and I do not think she was told ofthe child's disappearance, but my father went to and fro with the faceand voice of a distracted man; and I well remember the look with whichhe climbed a narrow outside stair leading only to a rain-water cistern, with the miserable apprehension that his child might have clambered upand fallen into it. The neighborhood was stirred with sympathy for theagony of the poor father, and pitying gossip spreading the news throughthe thronged market-place, where my father's name and appearance werefamiliar enough to give a strong personal feeling to the compassionexpressed. A baker's boy, lounging about, caught up the story of thelost child, and described having seen a "pretty little chap with curlyhair, in a brown holland pinafore, " in St. James's Square. Thither thesearchers flew, and the child was found, tired out with hisself-directed wandering, but apparently quite contented, fast asleep onthe door-step of one of the lordly houses of that aristocratic square. He was so remarkably beautiful that he must have attracted attentionbefore long, and _might_ perhaps have been restored to his home; but Godknows what an age of horror and anguish was lived through by my fatherand my poor aunt Dall in that short, miserable space of time till he wasfound. 

My aunt Dall, of whom I now speak for the first time, was my mother'ssister, and had lived with us, I believe, ever since I was born. Hername was Adelaide, but the little fellow whose adventure I have justrelated, stumbling over this fine Norman appellation, turned it intoIdallidy, and then conveniently shortened it of its two extremities andmade it Dall, by which title she was called by us, and known to all ourfriends, and beloved by all who ever spoke or heard it. Her story was assad a one as could well be; yet to my thinking she was one of thehappiest persons I have ever known, as well as one of the best. She wasmy mother's second sister, and as her picture, taken when she wastwenty, shows (and it was corroborated by her appearance till upward offifty), she was extremely pretty. Obliged, as all the rest of her familywere, to earn her own bread, and naturally adopting the means of doingso that they did, she went upon the stage; but I can not conceive thather nature can ever have had any affinity with her occupation. She had arobust and rather prosaic common-sense, opposed to any thing exaggeratedor sentimental, which gave her an excellent judgment of character andconduct, a strong genial vein of humor which very often made herrepartees witty as well as wise, and a sunny sweetness of temper andsoundness of moral nature that made her as good as she was easy anddelightful to live with. Whenever any thing went wrong, and she was"vexed past her patience, " she used to sing; it was the only indicationby which we ever knew that she was what is termed "out of sorts. " Shehad found employment in her profession under the kindly protection ofMr. Stephen Kemble, my father's brother, who lived for many years atDurham, and was the manager of the theatre there, and, according to thefashion of that time, traveled with his company, at stated seasons, toNewcastle, Sunderland, and other places, which formed a sort oftheatrical circuit in the northern counties, throughout which he waswell known and generally respected. 

In his company my aunt Dall found employment, and in his daughter, FannyKemble, since well known as Mrs. Robert Arkwright, an inseparable friendand companion. My aunt lived with Mr. And Mrs. Stephen Kemble, who wereexcellent, worthy people. They took good care of the two young girlsunder their charge, this linsey-woolsey Rosalind and Celia--their ownbeautiful and most rarely endowed daughter, and her light-hearted, lively companion; and I suppose that a merrier life than that of theselasses, in the midst of their quaint theatrical tasks and homelyhousehold duties, was seldom led by two girls in any sphere of life. They learned and acted their parts, devised and executed, with smallmeans and great industry, their dresses; made pies and puddings, andpatched and darned, in the morning, and by dint of paste and rougebecame heroines in the evening; and withal were well-conducted, goodyoung things, full of the irrepressible spirits of their age, andturning alike their hard home work and light stage labor into fun. Fannyhad inherited the beauty of her father's family, which in her mostlovely countenance had a character of childlike simplicity and serenesweetness that made it almost angelic. 

Far on in middle age she retained this singularly tender beauty, whichadded immensely to the exquisite effect of her pathetic voice in herincomparable rendering of the ballads she composed (the poetry as wellas the music being often her own), and to which her singing of them gaveso great a fashion at one time in the great London world. It was in vainthat far better musicians, with far finer voices, attempted to copy herinimitable musical recitation; nobody ever sang like her, and still lessdid anybody ever look like her while she sang. Practical jokes of verydoubtful taste were the fashion of that day, and remembering whatwonderfully coarse and silly proceedings were then thought highlydiverting by "vastly genteel" people, it is not, perhaps, much to bewondered at that so poor a piece of wit as this should have furnisheddiversion to a couple of light-hearted girls, with no specialpretensions to elegance or education. Once they were driving together ina post-chaise on the road to Newcastle, and my aunt, having at hand in abox part of a military equipment intended for some farce, accoutred herupper woman in a soldier's cap, stock, and jacket, and, with heavilycorked mustaches, persisted in embracing her companion, whose franticresistance, screams of laughter, and besmirched cheeks, elicitedcomments of boundless amazement, in broad north-country dialect, fromthe market folk they passed on the road, to whom they must have appearedthe most violent runaway couple that ever traveled. 

Liston, the famous comedian, was at this time a member of the Durhamcompany, and though he began his career there by reciting Collins's "Odeto the Passions, " attired in a pea-green coat, buckskins, top-boots, andpowder, with a scroll in his hand, and followed up this essay of hispowers with the tragic actor's battle-horse, the part of Hamlet, he soonfound his peculiar gift to lie in the diametrically opposite directionof broad farce. Of this he was perpetually interpolating originalspecimens in the gravest performances of his fellow-actors; on oneoccasion suddenly presenting to Mrs. Stephen Kemble, as she stooddisheveled at the side scene, ready to go on the stage as Ophelia in hermadness, a basket with carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, and pot-herbs, instead of the conventional flowers and straws of the stage maniac, which sent the representative of the fair Ophelia on in a broad grin, with ill-suppressed fury and laughter, which must have given quite anoriginal character of verisimilitude to the insanity she counterfeited. 

On another occasion he sent all the little chorister boys on, in thelugubrious funeral procession in "Romeo and Juliet, " with pieces ofbrown paper in their hands to wipe their tears with. 

The suppression of that very dreadful piece of stage pageantry has atlast, I believe, been conceded to the better taste of modern audiences;but even in my time it was still performed, and an exact representationof a funeral procession, such as one meets every day in Rome, withtorch-bearing priests, and bier covered with its black-velvet pall, embroidered with skull and cross-bones, with a corpse-like figurestretched upon it, marched round the stage, chanting some portion of thefine Roman Catholic requiem music. I have twice been in the theatre whenpersons have been seized with epilepsy during that ghastly exhibition, and think the good judgment that has discarded such a mimicry of asolemn religious ceremony highly commendable. 

Another evening, Liston, having painted Fanny Kemble's face like aclown's, posted her at one of the stage side doors to confront hermother, poor Mrs. Stephen Kemble, entering at the opposite one toperform some dismally serious scene of dramatic pathos, who, on suddenlybeholding this grotesque apparition of her daughter, fell intoconvulsions of laughter and coughing, and half audible exclamations of"Go away, Fanny! I'll tell your father, miss!" which must have had theeffect of a sudden seizure of madness to the audience, accustomed to therigid decorum of the worthy woman in the discharge of her theatricalduties. 

Long after these provincial exploits, and when he had become thecomedian _par excellence_ of the English stage, for which eminencenature and art had alike qualified him by the imperturbable gravity ofhis extraordinarily ugly face, which was such an irresistibly comicalelement in his broadest and most grotesque performances, Mr. Liston usedto exert his ludicrous powers of tormenting his fellow-actors in themost cruel manner upon that sweet singer, Miss Stephens (afterwardCountess of Essex). She had a curious nervous trick of twitching herdress before she began to sing; this peculiarity was well known to allher friends, and Liston, who certainly was one of them, used to agonizethe poor woman by standing at the side scene, while the symphony of herpathetic ballads was being played, and indicating by his eyes andgestures that something was amiss with the trimming or bottom of herdress; when, as invariably as he chose to play the trick, poor MissStephens used to begin to twitch and catch at her petticoat, and halfhysterical, between laughing and crying, would enchant and entrance herlisteners with her exquisite voice and pathetic rendering of "SavourneenDeelish" or "The Banks of Allan Water. "

CHAPTER II. 

Two young men, officers of a militia regiment, became admirers of thetwo young country actresses: how long an acquaintance existed before thefact became evident that they were seriously paying their addresses tothe girls, I do not know; nor how long the struggle lasted between prideand conventional respectability on the part of the young men's familiesand the pertinacity of their attachment. 

Fanny Kemble's suitor, Robert Arkwright, had certainly no pretensions todignity of descent, and the old Derbyshire barber, Sir Richard, or hisson could hardly have stood out long upon that ground, though theimmense wealth realized by their ingenuity and industry was abundantworldly reason for objections to such a match, no doubt. 

However that may be, the opposition was eventually overcome by thedetermination of the lovers, and they were married; while to the othersa far different fate was allotted. The young man who addressed my aunt, whose name I do not know, was sent for by his father, a wealthyYorkshire squire, who, upon his refusing to give up his mistress, instantly assembled all the servants and tenants, and declared beforethem all that the young gentleman, his son (and supposed heir), wasillegitimate, and thenceforth disinherited and disowned. He enlisted andwent to India, and never saw my aunt again. Mrs. Arkwright went home toStoke, to the lovely house and gardens in the Peak of Derbyshire, toprosperity and wealth, to ease and luxury, and to the love of husbandand children. Later in life she enjoyed, in her fine mansion of Sutton, the cordial intimacy of the two great county magnates, her neighbors, the Dukes of Rutland and Devonshire, the latter of whom was her admiringand devoted friend till her death. In the society of the high-born andgay and gifted with whom she now mixed, and among whom her singulargifts made her remarkable, the enthusiasm she excited never impaired thetransparent and childlike simplicity and sincerity of her nature. Therewas something very peculiar about the single-minded, simple-heartedgenuineness of Mrs. Arkwright which gave an unusual charm ofunconventionality and fervid earnestness to her manner and conversation. I remember her telling me, with the most absolute conviction, that shethought wives were bound implicitly to obey their husbands, for shebelieved that at the day of judgment husbands would be answerable fortheir wives' souls. 

It was in the midst of a life full of all the most coveted elements ofworldly enjoyment, and when she was still beautiful and charming, thoughno longer young, that I first knew her. Her face and voice were heavenlysweet, and very sad; I do not know why she made so profoundly melancholyan impression upon me, but she was so unlike all that surrounded her, that she constantly suggested to me the one live drop of water in themiddle of a globe of ice. The loss of her favorite son affected her withirrecoverable sorrow, and she passed a great portion of the last yearsof her life at a place called Cullercoats, a little fishing village onthe north coast, to which when a young girl she used to accompany herfather and mother for rest and refreshment, when the hard life fromwhich her marriage released her allowed them a few days' respite by therocks and sands and breakers of the Northumberland shore. The Duke ofDevonshire, whose infirmity of deafness did not interfere with hisenjoyment of music, was an enthusiastic admirer of Mrs. Arkwright, andher constant and affectionate friend. Their proximity of residence inDerbyshire made their opportunities of meeting very frequent, and whenthe Arkwrights visited London, Devonshire House was, if they chose it, their hotel. His attachment to her induced him, towards the end of hislife, to take a residence in the poor little village of Cullercoats, whither she loved to resort, and where she died. I possess a copy of abeautiful drawing of a head of Mrs. Arkwright, given to me by the duke, for whom the original was executed. It is only a head, with the eyesraised to heaven, and the lips parted, as in the act of singing; and theangelic sweetness of the countenance may perhaps suggest, to those whonever heard her, the voice that seemed like that face turned to sound. 

So Fanny Kemble married, and Adelaide Decamp came and lived with us, andwas the good angel of our home. All intercourse between the two (tillthen inseparable companions) ceased for many years, and my aunt beganher new life with a bitter bankruptcy of love and friendship, happinessand hope, that would have dried the sap of every sweet affection, andmade even goodness barren, in many a woman's heart for ever. 

Without any home but my father's house, without means of subsistence butthe small pittance which he was able to give her, in most gratefulacknowledgment of her unremitting care of us, without any joys or hopesbut those of others, without pleasure in the present or expectation inthe future, apparently without memory of the past, she spent her wholelife in the service of my parents and their children, and lived andmoved and had her being in a serene, unclouded, unvarying atmosphere ofcheerful, self-forgetful content that was heroic in its absoluteunconsciousness. She is the only person I can think of who appeared tome to have fulfilled Wordsworth's conception of

 "Those blessed ones who do God's will and know it not. "

I have never seen either man or woman like her, in her humbleexcellence, and I am thankful that, knowing what the circumstances ofher whole life were, she yet seems to me the happiest human being I haveknown. She died, as she had lived, in the service of others. When I wentwith my father to America, my mother remained in England, and my auntcame with us, to take care of me. She died in consequence of theoverturning of a carriage (in which we were travelling), from which shereceived a concussion of the spine; and her last words to me, after anight of angelic endurance of restless fever and suffering, were, "Openthe window; let in the blessed light"--almost the same as Goethe's, witha characteristic difference. It was with the hope of giving her theproceeds of its publication, as a token of my affectionate gratitude, that I printed my American journal; that hope being defeated by herdeath, I gave them, for her sake, to her younger sister, my auntVictoire Decamp. This sister of my mother's was, when we were living inCovent Garden Chambers, a governess in a school at Lea, near Blackheath. 

The school was kept by ladies of the name of Guinani, sisters to thewife of Charles Young--the Julia so early lost, so long loved andlamented by him. I was a frequent and much-petted visitor to theirhouse, which never fulfilled the austere purpose implied in its name tome, for all my days there were holidays; and I remember hours of specialdelight passed in a large drawing-room where two fine cedars of Lebanonthrew grateful gloom into the windows, and great tall china jars ofpot-pourri filled the air with a mixed fragrance of roses and (as itseemed to me) plum-pudding, and where hung a picture, the contemplationof which more than once moved me to tears, after I had been given tounderstand that the princely personage and fair-headed baby in a boat inthe midst of a hideous black sea, overhung by a hideous black sky, wereProspero, the good Duke of Milan, and his poor little princess daughter, Miranda, cast forth by wicked relations to be drowned. 

It was while we were still living in Covent Garden Chambers that Talma, the great French actor, came to London. He knew both my uncle and myfather, and was highly esteemed and greatly admired by both of them. Hecalled one day upon my father, when nobody was at home, and the servantwho opened the door holding me by the hand, the famous French actor, whospoke very good English, though not without the "pure Parisian accent, "took some kind of notice of me, desiring me to be sure and remember hisname, and tell my father that Mr. Talma, the great French tragedian, hadcalled. I replied that I would do so, and then added, with nobleemulation, that my father was also a great tragedian, and my uncle wasalso a great tragedian, and that we had a baby in the nursery who Ithought must be a great tragedian too, for she did nothing but cry, andwhat was that if not tragedy?--which edifying discourse found its wayback to my mother, to whom Talma laughingly repeated it. I have heard myfather say that on the occasion of this visit of Talma's to London, heconsulted my uncle on the subject of acting in English. Hamlet was oneof his great parts, and he made as fine a thing of Ducis' cold, andstiff, and formal adaptation of Shakespeare's noble work as his meagrematerial allowed; but, as I have said before, he spoke English well, andthought it not impossible to undertake the part in the originallanguage. My uncle, however, strongly dissuaded him from it, thinkingthe decided French accent an insuperable obstacle to his success, andbeing very unwilling that he should risk by a failure in the attempt hisdeservedly high reputation. A friend of mine, at a dinner party, beingasked if she had seen Mr. Fechter in Hamlet, replied in the negative, adding that she did not think she should relish Shakespeare declaimedwith a foreign accent. The gentleman who had questioned her said, "Ah, very true indeed--perhaps not;" then, looking attentively at his plate, from which I suppose he drew the inspiration of what followed, he added, "And yet--after all, you know, Hamlet was a foreigner. " This view of thecase had probably not suggested itself to John Kemble, and so hedissuaded Talma from the experiment. While referring to Mr. Fechter'spersonification of Hamlet, and the great success which it obtained inthe fashionable world, I wish to preserve a charming instance of naïveignorance in a young guardsman, seduced by the enthusiasm of the gaysociety of London into going, for once, to see a play of Shakespeare's. After sitting dutifully through some scenes in silence, he turned to afellow-guardsman, who was painfully looking and listening by his side, with the grave remark, "I say, George, _dooced_ odd play this; its allfull of quotations. " The young military gentleman had occasionally, itseems, heard Shakespeare quoted, and remembered it. 

To return to my story. About this time it was determined that I shouldbe sent to school in France. My father was extremely anxious to give meevery advantage that he could, and Boulogne, which was not then theBritish Alsatia it afterwards became, and where there was a girl'sschool of some reputation, was chosen as not too far from home to send amite seven years old, to acquire the French language and begin hereducation. And so to Boulogne I went, to a school in the oddly named"Rue tant perd tant paie, " in the old town, kept by a rather sallow andgrim, but still vivacious old Madame Faudier, with the assistance of herdaughter, Mademoiselle Flore, a bouncing, blooming beauty of a discreetage, whose florid complexion, prominent black eyes, plaited andprofusely pomatumed black hair, and full, commanding figure, attired forfête days, in salmon-colored merino, have remained vividly impressedupon my memory. What I learned here except French (which I could nothelp learning), I know not. I was taught music, dancing, and Italian, the latter by a Signor Mazzochetti, an object of special detestation tome, whose union with Mademoiselle Flore caused a temporary fit ofrejoicing in the school. The small seven-year-old beginnings of suchparticular humanities I mastered with tolerable success, but if I mayjudge from the frequency of my _penitences_, humanity in general was notinstilled into me without considerable trouble. I was a sore torment, nodoubt, to poor Madame Faudier, who, on being once informed by somealarmed passers in the street that one of her "demoiselles" wasperambulating the house roof, is reported to have exclaimed, in aparoxysm of rage and terror, "Ah, ce ne peut etre que cette _diable_ deKemble!" and sure enough it was I. Having committed I know not whatcrime, I had been thrust for chastisement into a lonely garret, where, having nothing earthly to do but look about me, I discovered (like aprince in the Arabian Nights) a ladder leading to a trap-door, andpresently was out on a sort of stone coping, which ran round the steeproof of the high, old-fashioned house, surveying with serenesatisfaction the extensive prospect landward and seaward, unconsciousthat I was at the same time an object of terror to the beholders in thestreet below. Snatched from the perilous delight of this bad eminence, Iwas (again, I think, rather like the Arabian prince) forthwith plungedinto the cellar; where I curled myself up on the upper step, close tothe heavy door that had been locked upon me, partly for the comfort ofthe crack of light that squeezed itself through it, and partly, Isuppose, from some vague idea that there was no bottom to the steps, derived from my own terror rather than from any precise historicalknowledge of oubliettes and donjons, with the execrable treachery ofstairs suddenly ending in mid-darkness over an abyss. I suppose Isuffered a martyrdom of fear, for I remember upwards of thirty yearsafterwards having this very cellar, and my misery in it, brought beforemy mind suddenly, with intense vividness, while reading, in VictorHugo's Notre Dame, poor Esmeralda's piteous entreaties for deliverancefrom her underground prison: "Oh laissez moi sortir! j'ai froid! j'aipeur! et des bêtes me montent le long du corps. " The latter hideousdetail certainly completes the exquisite misery of the picture. Lessjustifiable than banishment to lonely garrets, whence egress was to befound only by the roof, or dark incarceration in cellars whence was noegress at all, was another device, adopted to impress me with the evilof my ways, and one which seems to me so foolish in its cruelty, thatthe only amazement is, how anybody entrusted with the care of childrencould dream of any good result from such a method of impressing a littlegirl not eight years old. There was to be an execution in the town ofsome wretched malefactor, who was condemned to be guillotined, and I wastold that I should be taken to see this supreme act of legalretribution, in order that I might know to what end evil coursesconducted people. We all remember the impressive fable of "Don't Care, "who came to be hanged, but I much doubt if any of the thousands of youngBritons whose bosoms have been made to thrill with salutary terror athis untimely end were ever taken by their parents and guardians to see ahanging, by way of enforcing the lesson. Whether it was ever intendedthat I should witness the ghastly spectacle of this execution, orwhether it was expressly contrived that I should come too late, I knownot; it is to be hoped that my doing so was not accidental, butmercifully intentional. Certain it is, that when I was taken to theGrande Place the slaughter was over; but I saw the guillotine, andcertain gutters running red with what I was told (whether truly or not)was blood, and a sad-looking man, busied about the terrible machine, who, it was said, was the executioner's son; all which lugubriousobjects, no doubt, had their due effect upon my poor childishimagination and nervous system, with a benefit to my moral nature whichI should think highly problematical. 

The experiments tried upon the minds and souls of children by those whoundertake to train them, are certainly among the most mysterious ofHeaven-permitted evils. The coarse and cruel handling of thesewonderfully complex and delicate machines by ignorant servants, ignorantteachers, and ignorant parents, fills one with pity and with amazementthat the results of such processes should not be even more disastrousthan they are. 

In the nature of many children exists a capacity of terror equalled inits intensity only by the reticence which conceals it. The fear ofridicule is strong in these sensitive small souls, but even that isinadequate to account for the silent agony with which they hug thesecret of their fear. Nursery and schoolroom authorities, fonder ofpower than of principle, find their account in both these tendencies, and it is marvellous to what a point tyranny may be exercised by meansof their double influence over children, the sufferers never havingrecourse to the higher parental authority by which they would bedelivered from the nightmare of silent terror imposed upon them. 

The objects that excite the fears of children are often as curious andunaccountable as their secret intensity. A child four years of age, whowas accustomed to be put to bed in a dressing-room opening into hermother's room, and near her nursery, and was left to go to sleep alone, from a desire that she should not be watched and lighted to sleep (or infact kept awake, after a very common nursery practice), endured thisdiscipline without remonstrance, and only years afterwards informed hermother that she never was so left in her little bed, alone in thedarkness, without a full conviction that a large black dog was lyingunder it, which terrible imagination she never so much as hinted at, orbesought for light or companionship to dispel. Miss Martineau told meonce, that a special object of horror to her, when she was a child, werethe colors of the prism, a thing in itself so beautiful, that it isdifficult to conceive how any imagination could be painfully impressedby it; but her terror of these magical colors was such, that she used torush past the room, even when the door was closed, where she had seenthem reflected from the chandelier, by the sunlight, on the wall. 

The most singular instance I ever knew, however, of unaccountable terrorproduced in a child's mind by the pure action of its imagination, wasthat of a little boy who overheard a conversation between his mother anda friend upon the subject of the purchase of some stuff, which she hadnot bought, "because, " said she, "it was ell wide. " The words "ellwide, " perfectly incomprehensible to the child, seized upon his fancy, and produced some image of terror by which for a long time his poorlittle mind was haunted. Certainly this is a powerful instance, amonginnumerable and striking ones, of the fact that the fears of childrenare by no means the result of the objects of alarm suggested to them bythe ghost-stories, bogeys, etc. , of foolish servants and companions;they quite as often select or create their terrors for themselves, fromsources so inconceivably strange, that all precaution proves ineffectualto protect them from this innate tendency of the imaginative faculty. This "ell wide" horror is like something in a German story. The strangeaversion, coupled with a sort of mysterious terror, for beautiful andagreeable or even quite commonplace objects, is one of the secrets ofthe profound impression which the German writers of fiction produce. Itbelongs peculiarly to their national genius, some of whose most strikingand thrilling conceptions are pervaded with this peculiar form of thesentiment of fear. Hoffman and Tieck are especially powerful in theiruse of it, and contrive to give a character of vague mystery to simpledetails of prosaic events and objects, to be found in no other works offiction. The terrible conception of the _Doppelgänger_, which exists ina modified form as the wraith of Scottish legendary superstition, isrendered infinitely more appalling by being taken out of its mistyhighland half-light of visionary indefiniteness, and produced infrock-coat and trousers, in all the shocking distinctness ofcommonplace, everyday, contemporary life. The Germans are the onlypeople whose imaginative faculty can cope with the homeliest forms ofreality, and infuse into them _vagueness_, that element of terror mostalien from familiar things. That they may be tragic enough we know, butthat they have in them a mysterious element of terror of quiteindefinite depth, German writers alone know how to make us feel. 

I do not think that in my own instance the natural cowardice with whichI was femininely endowed was unusually or unduly cultivated inchildhood; but with a highly susceptible and excitable nervoustemperament and ill-regulated imagination, I have suffered from everyconceivable form of terror; and though, for some inexplicable reason, Ihave always had the reputation of being fearless, have really, all mylife, been extremely deficient in courage. 

Very impetuous, and liable to be carried away by any strong emotion, myentire want of self-control and prudence, I suppose, conveyed theimpression that I was equally without fear; but the truth is that, as awise friend once said to me, I have always been "as rash and as cowardlyas a child;" and none of my sex ever had a better right to apply toherself Shakespeare's line--

 "A woman, naturally born to fears. "

The only agreeable impression I retain of my school-days at Boulogne isthat of the long half-holiday walks we were allowed to indulge in. Notthe two-and-two, dull, dreary, daily procession round the ramparts, butthe disbanded freedom of the sunny afternoon, spent in gatheringwild-flowers along the pretty, secluded valley of the Liane, throughwhich no iron road then bore its thundering freight. Or, better still, clambering, straying, playing hide-and-seek, or sitting telling andhearing fairy tales among the great carved blocks of stone, which lay, in ignominious purposelessness, around the site on the high, grassycliff where Napoleon the First--the Only--had decreed that his triumphalpillar should point its finger of scorn at our conquered, "pale-facedshores. " Best of all, however, was the distant wandering, far out alongthe sandy dunes, to what used to be called "La Gárenne;" I supposebecause of the wild rabbits that haunted it, who--hunted and rummagedfrom their burrows in the hillocks of coarse grass by a pitiless pack ofschool-girls--must surely have wondered after our departure, when theycame together stealthily, with twitching noses, ears, and tails, whatmanner of fiendish visitation had suddenly come and gone, scaring theirpeaceful settlement on the silent, solitary sea-shore. 

Before I left Boulogne, the yearly solemnity of the distribution ofprizes took place. This was, at Madame Faudier's, as at all Frenchschools of that day, a most exciting event. Special examinationspreceded it, for which the pupils prepared themselves with diligentemulation. The prefect, the sub-prefect, the mayor, the bishop, all theprincipal civil and religious authorities of the place, were invited tohonor the ceremony with their presence. The courtyard of the house waspartly inclosed, and covered over with scaffoldings, awnings, anddraperies, under which a stage was erected, and this, together with thesteps that led to it, was carpeted with crimson, and adorned with aprofusion of flowers. One of the dignified personages, seated around atable on which the books designed for prizes were exhibited, pronounceda discourse commendatory of past efforts and hortatory to future ones, and the pupils, all _en grande toilette_, and seated on benches facingthe stage, were summoned through the rows of admiring parents, friends, acquaintances, and other invited guests, to receive the prizes awardedfor excellence in the various branches of our small curriculum. I wasthe youngest girl in the school, but I was a quick, clever child, and alady, a friend of my family, who was present, told me many years after, how well she remembered the frequent summons to the dais received by asmall, black-eyed damsel, the _cadette_ of the establishment. I haveconsiderable doubt that any good purpose could be answered by thispublic appeal to the emulation of a parcel of school-girls; but I haveno doubt at all that abundant seeds of vanity, self-love, and love ofdisplay, were sown by it, which bore their bad harvest many a long yearafter. 

I left Boulogne when I was almost nine years old, and returned home, where I remained upwards of two years before being again sent to school. During this time we lived chiefly at a place called Craven Hill, Bayswater, where we occupied at different periods three differenthouses. 

My mother always had a detestation of London, which I have cordiallyinherited. The dense, heavy atmosphere, compounded of smoke and fog, painfully affected her breathing and oppressed her spirits; and thedeafening clangor of its ceaseless uproar irritated her nerves anddistressed her in a manner which I invariably experience whenever I amcompelled to pass any time in that huge Hubbub. She perpetually yearnedfor the fresh air and the quiet of the country. Occupied as my fatherwas, however, this was an impossible luxury; and my poor mother escapedas far as her circumstances would allow from London, and towards thecountry, by fixing her home at the place I have mentioned. In those daysTyburnia did not exist; nor all the vast region of Paddingtonian London. Tyburn turnpike, of nefarious memory, still stood at the junction ofOxford Road and the Edgeware Road, and between the latter and Bayswateropen fields traversed by the canal, with here and there an isolatedcottage dotted about them, stretched on one side of the high-road; andon the other, the untidy, shaggy, ravelled-looking selvage of Hyde Park;not trimmed with shady walks and flower borders and smooth grass andbright iron railing as now, but as forbidding in its neglected aspect asthe desolate stretch of uninclosed waste on the opposite side. 

About a mile from Tyburn Gate a lane turned off on the right, followingwhich one came to a meadow, with a path across its gentle rise which ledto the row of houses called Craven Hill. I do not think there weretwenty in all, and some of them, such as Lord Ferrar's and the HarleyHouse, were dwellings of some pretension. Even the most modest of themhad pretty gardens in front and behind, and verandas and balconies withflowering creepers and shrubberies, and a general air of semi-ruralitythat cheated my poor mother with a make-believe effect of being, if notin the country, at any rate out of town. And infinite were the devicesof her love of elegance and comfort produced from the most unpromisingmaterials, but making these dwellings of ours pretty and pleasant beyondwhat could have been thought possible. She had a peculiar taste andtalent for furnishing and fitting up; and her means being always verylimited, her zeal was great for frequenting sales, where she picked upat reasonable prices quaint pieces of old furniture, which she broughtwith great triumph to the assistance of the commonplace upholstery ofour ready-furnished dwellings. Nobody ever had such an eye for thedisposal of every article in a room, at once for greatest convenienceand best appearance; and I never yet saw the apartment into which by herexcellent arrangement she did not introduce an element of comfort andelegance--a liveable look, which the rooms of people unendowed with thatspecial faculty never acquire, and never retain, however handsome orfinely fitted up they may be. I am sorry to be obliged to add, however, that she had a rage for moving her furniture from one place to another, which never allowed her to let well alone; and not unfrequently her meredesire for change destroyed the very best results of her own good taste. We never knew when we might find the rooms a perfect chaos of disorder, with every chair, table, and sofa "dancing the hayes" in horridconfusion; while my mother, crimson and dishevelled with pulling andpushing them hither and thither, was breathlessly organizing newcombinations. Nor could anything be more ludicrous than my father'spiteous aspect, on arriving in the midst of this _remue-ménage_, or thepoor woman's profound mortification when, finding everything moved fromits last position (for the twentieth time), he would look around, and, instead of all the commendation she expected, exclaim in dismay, "Why, bless my soul! what has happened to the room, _again_!" Our furnitureplayed an everlasting game of puss in the corner; and I am thankful thatI have inherited some of my mother's faculty of arranging, without anyof her curious passion for changing the aspect of her rooms. 

A pretty, clever, and rather silly and affected woman, Mrs. CharlesM----, who had a great passion for dress, was saying one day to mymother, with a lackadaisical drawl she habitually made use of, "What doyou do when you have a headache, or are bilious, or cross, or nervous, or out of spirits? I always change my dress; it does me so much good!""Oh, " said my mother, briskly, "I change the furniture. " I think shemust have regarded it as a panacea for all the ills of life. Mrs. Charles M---- was the half-sister of that amiable woman and admirableactress, Miss Kelly. 

To return to Craven Hill. A row of very fine elm trees was separatedonly by the carriage-road from the houses, whose front windows lookedthrough their branches upon a large, quiet, green meadow, and beyondthat to an extensive nursery garden of enchanting memory, where ourweekly allowances were expended in pots of violets and flower-seeds androots of future fragrance, for our small gardens: this pleasantforeground divided us from the Bayswater Road and Kensington Gardens. Atthe back of the houses and their grounds stretched a complete open ofmeadow land, with hedgerows and elm trees, and hardly any building insight in any direction. Certainly this was better than the smoke and dinof London. To my father, however, the distance was a heavy increase ofhis almost nightly labor at the theatre. Omnibuses were no part ofLondon existence then; a hackney coach (there were no cabs, eitherfour-wheelers or hansoms) was a luxury to be thought of onlyoccasionally, and for part of the way; and so he generally wound up hishard evening's work with a five miles' walk from Covent Garden to CravenHill. 

It was perhaps the inconvenience of this process that led to our taking, in addition to our "rural" residence, a lodging in Gerard Street, Soho. The house immediately fronts Anne Street, and is now a largeestablishment for the sale of lamps. It was a handsome old house, and atone time belonged to the "wicked" Lord Lyttleton. At the time I speakof, we occupied only a part of it, the rest remaining in the possessionof the proprietor, who was a picture-dealer, and his collection of dusky_chefs-d'oeuvre_ covered the walls of the passages and staircases withdark canvas, over whose varnished surface ill-defined figures andill-discerned faces seemed to flit, as with some trepidation I ran pastthem. The house must have been a curious as well as a very large one;but I never saw more of it than our own apartments, which had somepeculiarities that I remember. Our dining-room was a very large, lofty, ground-floor room, fitted up partially as a library with my father'sbooks, and having at the farther end, opposite the windows, two heavy, fluted pillars, which gave it rather a dignified appearance. My mother'sdrawing-room, which was on the first floor and at the back of the house, was oval in shape and lighted only by a skylight; and one entrance to itwas through a small anteroom or boudoir, with looking-glass doors andceiling all incrusted with scrolls and foliage and _rococo_ Louis Quinzestyle of ornamentation, either in plaster or carved in wood and paintedwhite. There were back staircases and back doors without number, leadingin all directions to unknown regions; and the whole house, with itsremains of magnificence and curious lumber of objects of art and_vertu_, was a very appropriate frame for the traditional ill-repute ofits former noble owner. 

A ludicrous circumstance enough, I remember, occurred, which produced nolittle uproar and amusement in one of its dreariest chambers. My brotherJohn was at this time eagerly pursuing the study of chemistry for hisown amusement, and had had an out-of-the-way sort of spare bedroomabandoned to him for his various ill savored materials and scientificprocesses, from which my mother suffered a chronic terror of suddendeath by blowing up. There was a monkey in the house, belonging to ourlandlord, and generally kept confined in his part of it, whence theknowledge of his existence only reached us through anecdotes brought bythe servants. One day, however, an alarm was spread that the monkey hadescaped from his own legitimate quarters and was running wild over thehouse. Chase was given, and every hole and corner searched in vain forthe mischievous ape, who was at length discovered in what my brotherdignified by the title of his laboratory, where, in a frenzy of gleefulactivity, he was examining first one bottle and then another; finally hebetook himself, with indescribably grotesque grinnings and chatterings, to uncorking and sniffing at them, and then pouring their contentsdeliberately out on the (luckily carpetless) floor, --a joke which mighthave had serious results for himself, as well as the house, if he hadnot in the midst of it suffered ignoble capture and been led away to hisown quarters; my mother that time, certainly, escaping imminent "blowingup. "

While we were living in Gerard Street, my uncle Kemble came for a shorttime to London from Lausanne, where he had fixed his residence--compelledto live abroad, under penalty of seeing the private fortune he hadrealized by a long life of hard professional labor swept into the ruinwhich had fallen upon Covent Garden Theatre, of which he was partproprietor. And I always associate this my only recollection of hisvenerable white hair and beautiful face, full of an expression of mostbenign dignity, with the earliest mention I remember of that lucklessproperty, which weighed like an incubus upon my father all his life, andthe ruinous burden of which both I and my sister successively endeavoredin vain to prop. 

My mother at this time gave lessons in acting to a few young women whowere preparing themselves for the stage; and I recollect very well theadmiration my uncle expressed for the beauty of one of them, anextremely handsome Miss Dance, who, I think, came out successfully, butsoon married, and relinquished her profession. 

This young lady was the daughter of a violinist and musical composer, whose name has a place in my memory from seeing it on a pretty musicalsetting for the voice of some remarkably beautiful verses, the author ofwhich I have never been able to discover. I heard they had been takenout of that old-fashioned receptacle for stray poetical gems, the poet'scorner of a country newspaper. I write them here as accurately as I canfrom memory; it is more than fifty years since I learnt them, and I havenever met with any copy of them but that contained in the old musicsheet of Mr. Dance's duet. 

 SONG OF THE SPIRIT OF MORN. 

 Now on their couch of rest Mortals are sleeping, While in dark, dewy vest, Flowerets are weeping. Ere the last star of night Fades in the fountain, My finger of rosy light Touches the mountain. 

 Far on his filmy wing Twilight is wending, Shadows encompassing, Terrors attending: While my foot's fiery print, Up my path showing, Gleams with celestial tint. Brilliantly glowing, Now from my pinions fair Freshness is streaming, And from my yellow hair Glories are gleaming. Nature with pure delight Hails my returning, And Sol, from his chamber bright, Crowns the young morning. 

My uncle John returned to Switzerland, and I never saw him again; he hadmade over his share of Covent Garden to my father, and went back to liveand die in peace at his Beau Site on the Lake of Geneva. 

The first time that I visited Lausanne I went to his grave, and found itin the old burial-ground above the town, where I wonder the dead havepatience to lie still, for the glorious beauty of the view theirresting-place commands. It was one among a row of graves with broad, flat tombstones bearing English names, and surrounded with ironrailings, and flowers more or less running wild. 

My father received the property my uncle transferred to him withcheerful courage, and not without sanguine hopes of retrieving itsfortunes: instead of which, it destroyed his and those of his family;who, had he and they been untrammelled by the fatal obligation ofworking for a hopelessly ruined concern, might have turned their laborsto far better personal account. Of the eighty thousand pounds which myuncle sank in building Covent Garden, and all the years of toil myfather and myself and my sister sank in endeavoring to sustain it, nothing remained to us at my father's death; not even the ownership ofthe only thing I ever valued the property for, --the private box whichbelonged to us, the yearly rent of which was valued at three hundredpounds, and the possession of which procured us for several years manyevenings of much enjoyment. 

The only other recollection I have connected with Gerard Street is thatof certain passages from "Paradise Lost, " read to me by my father, thesonorous melody of which so enchanted me, that for many years of my lifeMilton was to me incomparably the first of English poets; though at thistime of my earliest acquaintance with him, Walter Scott had precedenceover him, and was undoubtedly in my opinion greatest of mortal andimmortal bards. His "Marmion" and "Lay of the Last Minstrel" werealready familiar to me. Of Shakespeare at this time, and for manysubsequent years, I knew not a single line. 

While our lodging in town was principally inhabited by my father andresorted to by my mother as a convenience, my aunt Dall, and wechildren, had our home at my mother's _rus in urbe_, Craven Hill, wherewe remained until I went again to school in France. 

Our next door neighbors were, on one side, a handsome, dashing Mrs. Blackshaw, sister of George the Fourth's favorite, Beau Brummel, whosedaughters were good friends of ours; and on the other Belzoni, theEgyptian traveller, and his wife, with whom we were well acquainted. Thewall that separated our gardens was upwards of six feet high, --itreached above my father's head, who was full six feet tall, --but ourcolossal friend, the Italian, looked down upon us over it quite easily, his large handsome face showing well above it, down to his magnificentauburn beard, which in those less hirsute days than these he seldomexhibited, except in the privacy of his own back garden, where he usedoccasionally to display it, to our immense delight and astonishment. Great, too, was our satisfaction in visiting Madame Belzoni, who used toreceive us in rooms full of strange spoils, brought back by herself andher husband from the East; she sometimes smoked a long Turkish pipe, andgenerally wore a dark blue sort of caftan, with a white turban on herhead. Another of our neighbors here was Latour, the musical composer, towhom, though he was personally good-natured and kind to me, I owe agrudge, for the sake of his "Music for Young Persons, " and only regretthat he was not our next-door neighbor, when he would have execrated hisown "O Dolce Concerto, " and "Sul Margine d'un Rio, " and all hisinnumerable progeny of variations for two hands and four hands, asheartily as I did. I do not know whether it was instigated by his adviceor not that my mother at this time made me take lessons of a certain Mr. Laugier, who received pupils at his own house, near Russell Square, andtaught them thorough-bass and counterpoint, and the science of musicalcomposition. I attended his classes for some time, and still possessbooks full of the grammar of music, as profound and difficult a study, almost, as the grammar of language. But I think I was too young toderive much benefit from so severe a science, and in spite of my booksfull of musical "parsing, " so to speak, declensions of chords, andconjugations of scales, I do not think I learned much from Mr. Laugier, and, never having followed up this beginning of the real study of music, my knowledge of it has been only of that empirical and contemptible sortwhich goes no further than the end of boarding-school young ladies'fingers, and sometimes, at any rate, amounts to tolerably skilful andaccurate execution; a result I never attained, in spite of Mr. Laugier'sthorough-bass and a wicked invention called a chiroplast, for which, Ithink, he took out a patent, and for which I suppose all luckless girlscompelled to practice with it thought he ought to have taken out ahalter. It was a brass rod made to screw across the keys, on which were_strung_, like beads, two brass frames for the hands, with separatelittle cells for the fingers, these being secured to the brass rodprecisely at the part of the instrument on which certain exercises wereto be executed. Another brass rod was made to pass under the wrist inorder to maintain it also in its proper position, and thus incarcerated, the miserable little hands performed their daily, dreary monotony ofmusical exercise, with, I imagine, really no benefit at all from theirksome constraint of this horrid machine, that could not have beenimparted quite as well, if not better, by a careful teacher. I had, however, no teacher at this time but my aunt Dall, and I suppose thechiroplast may have saved her some trouble, by insuring that mypractising, which she could not always superintend, should not be merelya process of acquiring innumerable bad habits for the exercise of thepatience of future teachers. 

My aunt at this time directed all my lessons, as well as the smallbeginnings of my sister's education. My brother John was at Clapham withMr. Richardson, who was then compiling his excellent dictionary, inwhich labor he employed the assistance of such of his pupils as showedthemselves intelligent enough for the occupation; and I have no doubtthat to this beginning of philological study my brother owed hissubsequent predilection for and addiction to the science of language. Myyoungest brother, Henry, went to a day-school in the neighborhood. 

All children's amusements are more or less dramatic, and a theatre is afavorite resource in most playrooms, and, naturally enough, held animportant place in ours. The printed sheets of small figures, representing all the characters of certain popular pieces, which wecolored, and pasted on card-board and cut out, and then, by dint of longslips of wood with a slit at one end, into which their feet wereinserted, moved on and off our small stage; the coloring of the scenery;and all the arrangement and conduct of the pieces we represented, gaveus endless employment and amusement. My brother John was always managerand spokesman in these performances, and when we had fitted up ourtheatre with a _real_ blue silk curtain that would roll up, and a _real_set of foot-lights that would burn, and when he contrived, with someresin and brimstone and salt put in a cup and set on fire, to produce adiabolical sputter and flare and bad smell, significant of the blowingup of the mill in "The Miller and his Men, " great was our exultation. This piece and "Blue Beard" were our "battle horses, " to which weafterwards added a lugubrious melodrama called "The Gypsy's Curse" (ithad nothing whatever to do with "Guy Mannering"), of which I remembernothing but some awful doggerel, beginning with--

 "May thy path be still in sorrow, May thy dark night know no morrow, "

which used to make my blood curdle with fright. 

About this time I was taken for the first time to a real play, and itwas to that paradise of juvenile spectators, Astley's, where we saw aHighland horror called "Meg Murdoch, or the Mountain Hag, " and amythological after-piece called "Hyppolita, Queen of the Amazons, " inwhich young ladies in very short and shining tunics, with burnishedbreastplates, helmets, spears, and shields, performed sundry warlikeevolutions round her Majesty Hyppolita, who was mounted on a snow-white_live_ charger: in the heat of action some of these fair warriors wentso far as to die, which martial heroism left an impression on myimagination so deep and delightful as to have proved hitherto indelible. 

At length we determined ourselves to enact something worthy of noticeand approbation, and "Amoroso, King of Little Britain, " was selected bymy brother John, our guide and leader in all matters of taste, for thepurpose. "Chrononhotonthologos" had been spoken of, but our youngestperformer, my sister, was barely seven years old, and I doubt if any ofus (but our manager) could have mastered the mere names of that famousburlesque. Moreover, I think, in the piece we chose there were only fourprincipal characters, and we contrived to speak the words, and even singthe songs, so much to our own satisfaction, that we thought we mightaspire to the honor of a hearing from our elders and betters. So weproduced our play before my father and mother and some of their friends, who had good right (whatever their inclination might have been) to becritical, for among them were Mr. And Mrs. Liston (the Amoroso andCoquetinda of the real stage), Mr. And Mrs. Mathews, and Charles Young, all intimate friends of my parents, whose children were our playmates, and coadjutors in our performance. 

For Charles Matthews I have always retained a kindly regard for auldlang syne's sake, though I hardly ever met him after he went on thestage. He was well educated, and extremely clever and accomplished, andI could not help regretting that his various acquirements and manyadvantages for the career of an architect, for which his father destinedhim, should be thrown away; though it was quite evident that he followednot only the strong bent of his inclination, but the instinct of thedramatic genius which he inherited from his eccentric and most originalfather, when he adopted the profession of the stage, where, in his ownday, he has been unrivaled in the sparkling vivacity of his performanceof a whole range of parts in which nobody has approached the finish, refinement, and spirit of his acting. Moreover, his whole demeanor, carriage, and manner were so essentially those of a gentleman, that thebroadest farce never betrayed him into either coarseness or vulgarity;and the comedy he acted, though often the lightest of the light, wasnever anything in its graceful propriety but high comedy. No member ofthe French theatre was ever at once a more finished and a moredelightfully amusing and _natural_ actor. 

Liston's son went into the army when he grew up, and I lost sight ofhim. 

With the Rev. Julian Young, son of my dear old friend Charles Young, Ialways remained upon the most friendly terms, meeting him with cordialpleasure whenever my repeated returns to England brought us together, and allowed us to renew the amicable relations that always subsistedbetween us. 

I remember another family friend of ours at this time, a worthy oldmerchant of the name of Mitchell, who was my brother John's godfather, and to whose sombre, handsome city house I was taken once or twice todinner. He was at one time very rich, but lost all his fortune in someuntoward speculation, and he used to come and pay us long, sad, silentvisits, the friendly taciturnity of which I always compassionatelyattributed to that circumstance, and wished that he had not lost the useof his tongue as well as his money. 

While we were living at Craven Hill, my father's sister, Mrs. Whitelock, came to live with us for some time. She was a very worthy butexceedingly ridiculous woman, in whom the strong peculiarities of herfamily were so exaggerated, that she really seemed like a living parodyor caricature of all the Kembles. 

She was a larger and taller woman than Mrs. Siddons, and had a fine, commanding figure at the time I am speaking of, when she was quite anelderly person. She was like her brother Stephen in face, with handsomefeatures, too large and strongly marked for a woman, light gray eyes, and a light auburn wig, which, I presume, represented the color of herprevious hair, and which, together with the tall cap that surmounted it, was always more or less on one side. She had the deep, sonorous voiceand extremely distinct utterance of her family, and an extraordinaryvehemence of gesture and expression quite unlike their quiet dignity andreserve of manner, and which made her conversation like that of peoplein old plays and novels; for she would slap her thigh in emphaticenforcement of her statements (which were apt to be upon an incrediblylarge scale), not unfrequently prefacing them with the exclamation, "Ideclare to God!" or "I wish I may die!" all which seemed to us veryextraordinary, and combined with her large size and loud voice usedoccasionally to cause us some dismay. My father used to call her QueenBess (her name was Elizabeth), declaring that her manners were likethose of that royal _un_-gentlewoman. But she was a simple-hearted, sweet-tempered woman, whose harmless peculiarities did not prevent usall being fond of her. 

She had a great taste and some talent for drawing, which she cultivatedwith a devotion and industry unusual in so old a person. I still possessa miniature copy she made of Clarke's life-size picture of my father asCromwell, which is not without merit. 

She was extremely fond of cards, and taught us to play the (even then)old-fashioned game of quadrille, which my mother, who also liked cards, and was a very good whist player, said had more variety in it than anymodern game. 

Mrs. Whitelock had been for a number of years in the United States, ofwhich (then comparatively little known) part of the world she used totell us stories that, from her characteristic exaggeration, we alwaysreceived with extreme incredulity; but my own experience, subsequent bymany years to hers, has corroborated her marvelous histories of flightsof birds that almost darkened the sun (_i. E. _ threw a passing shadow asof a cloud upon the ground), and roads with ruts and mud-holes intowhich one's carriage sank up to the axle-tree. 

She used to tell us anecdotes of General Washington, to whom she hadbeen presented and had often seen (his favorite bespeak was always "TheSchool for Scandal"); and of Talleyrand, whom she also had often met, and invariably called Prince _Tallierande_. She was once terrified bybeing followed at evening, in the streets of Philadelphia, by a redIndian savage, an adventure which has many times recurred to my mindwhile traversing at all hours and in all directions the streets of thatmost peaceful Quaker city, distant now by more than a thousand milesfrom the nearest red Indian savage. Congress was sitting in Philadelphiaat that time; it was virtually the capital of the newly made UnitedStates, and Mrs. Whitelock held an agreeable and respectable positionboth in private and in public. I have been assured by persons as wellqualified to be critics as Judge Story, Chief-Justice Kent, and JudgeHopkinson (Moore's friend), that she was an actress of considerableability. Perhaps she was; her Kemble name, face, figure, and voice nodoubt helped her to produce a certain effect on the stage; but she musthave been a very imperfectly educated woman. Nothing could be drollerthan to see her with Mrs. Siddons, of whom she looked like a clumsy, badly finished, fair imitation. Her vehement gestures and violentobjurgations contrasted comically with her sister's majestic stillnessof manner; and when occasionally Mrs. Siddons would interrupt her with, "Elizabeth, your wig is on one side, " and the other replied, "Oh, isit?" and giving the offending head-gear a shove put it quite as crookedin the other direction, and proceeded with her discourse, Melpomeneherself used to have recourse to her snuff-box to hide the dawning smileon her face. 

I imagine that my education must have been making but little progressduring the last year of my residence at Craven Hill. I had no masters, and my aunt Dall could ill supply the want of other teachers; moreover, I was extremely troublesome and unmanageable, and had become atragically desperate young person, as my determination to poison mysister, in revenge for some punishment which I conceived had beenunjustly inflicted upon me, will sufficiently prove. I had been warnednot to eat privet berries, as they were poisonous, and under the aboveprovocation it occurred to me that if I strewed some on the ground mysister might find and eat them, which would insure her going straight toheaven, and no doubt seriously annoy my father and mother. How much ofall this was a lingering desire for the distinction of a publicexecution of guillotine (the awful glory of which still survived in mymemory), how much dregs of "Gypsy Curses" and "Mountain Hags, " and howmuch the passionate love of exciting a sensation and producing aneffect, common to children, servants, and most uneducated people, I knownot. I never did poison my sister, and satisfied my desire of vengeanceby myself informing my aunt of my contemplated crime, the fulfillment ofwhich was not, I suppose, much apprehended by my family, as no measureswere taken to remove myself, my sister, or the privet bush from eachother's neighborhood. 

CHAPTER III. 

A quite unpremeditated inspiration which occurred to me upon being againoffended--to run away--probably alarmed my parents more than mysororicidal projects, and I think determined them upon carrying out aplan which had been talked of for some time, of my being sent again toschool; which plan ran a narrow risk of being defeated by my ownattempted escape from home. One day, when my father and mother were bothin London, I had started for a walk with my aunt and sister; when only afew yards from home, I made an impertinent reply to some reproof Ireceived, and my aunt bade me turn back and go home, declining mycompany for the rest of the walk. She proceeded at a brisk pace on herway with my sister, nothing doubting that, when left alone, I wouldretrace my steps to our house; but I stood still and watched her out ofsight, and then revolved in my own mind the proper course to pursue. 

At first it appeared to me that it would be judicious, under suchsmarting injuries as mine, to throw myself into a certain pond which wasin the meadow where I stood (my remedies had always rather an extremetendency); but it was thickly coated with green slime studded withfrogs' heads, and looked uninviting. After contemplating it for amoment, I changed my opinion as to the expediency of getting under thatsurface, and walked resolutely off towards London; not with any idea ofseeking my father and mother, but simply with that goal in view, as theend of my walk. 

Half-way thither, however, I became tired, and hot, and hungry, andperhaps a little daunted by my own undertaking. I have said that betweenCraven Hill and Tyburn turnpike there then was only a stretch of openfields, with a few cottages scattered over them. In one of these lived apoor woman who was sometimes employed to do needlework for us, and who, I was sure, would give me a bit of bread and butter, and let me rest; soI applied to her for this assistance. Great was the worthy woman'samazement when I told her that I was alone, on my way to London; greaterstill, probably, when I informed her that my intention was to apply foran engagement at one of the theatres, assuring her that nobody withtalent need ever want for bread. She very wisely refrained fromdiscussing my projects, but, seeing that I was tired, persuaded me tolie down in her little bedroom and rest before pursuing my way to town. The weather was oppressively hot, and having lain down on her bed, Ifell fast asleep. I know not for how long, but I was awakened by thesudden raising of the latch of the house door, and the voice of my auntDall inquiring of my friendly hostess if she had seen or heard anythingof me. 

I sat up breathless on the bed, listening, and looking round the roomperceived another door than the one by which I had entered it, whichwould probably have given me egress to the open fields again, andsecured my escape; but before I could slip down from the bed and resumemy shoes, and take advantage of this exit, my aunt and poor Mrs. Taylorentered the room, and I was ignominiously captured and taken home; Iexpiated my offence by a week of bread and water, and daily solitaryconfinement in a sort of tool-house in the garden, where my onlyoccupation was meditation, the "clear-obscure" that reigned in my prisonadmitting of no other. 

This was not cheerful, but I endeavored to make it appear as little thereverse as possible, by invariably singing at the top of my voicewhenever I heard footsteps on the gravel walk near my place ofconfinement. 

Finally I was released, and was guilty of no further outrage before mydeparture for Paris, whither I went with my mother and Mrs. CharlesMatthews at the end of the summer. 

We travelled in the _malle poste_, and I remember but one incidentconnected with our journey. Some great nobleman in Paris was about togive a grand banquet, and the _conducteur_ of our vehicle had beenprevailed upon to bring up the fish for the occasion in large hampers onour carriage, which was then the most rapid public conveyance on theroad between the coast and the capital. The heat was intense, and thesmell of our "luggage" intolerable. My mother complained andremonstrated in vain; the name of the important personage who was toentertain his guests with this delectable fish was considered anall-sufficient reply. At length the contents of the baskets beganliterally to ooze out of them and stream down the sides of the carriage;my mother threatening an appeal to the authorities at the _bureau deposte_, and finally we got rid of our pestiferous load. 

I was now placed in a school in the Rue d'Angoulême, Champs Élysées; ahandsome house, formerly somebody's private hotel, with _porte cochère_, _cour d'honneur_, a small garden beyond, and large, lofty ground-floorapartments opening with glass doors upon them. The name of the lady atthe head of this establishment was Rowden; she had kept a school forseveral years in Hans Place, London, and among her former pupils had hadthe charge of Miss Mary Russell Mitford, and that clever but mosteccentric personage, Lady Caroline Lamb. The former I knew slightly, years after, when she came to London and was often in friendlycommunication with my father, then manager of Covent Garden, upon thesubject of the introduction on the stage of her tragedy of the"Foscari. "

The play of "Rienzi, " in which Miss Mitford achieved the manly triumphof a really successful historical tragedy, is, of course, her principaland most important claim to fame, though the pretty collection of ruralsketches, redolent of country freshness and fragrance, called "OurVillage, " precursor, in some sort, of Mrs. Gaskell's incomparable"Cranford, " is, I think, the most popular of Miss Mitford's works. 

She herself has always a peculiar honor in my mind, from the exemplarydevotion of her whole life to her father, for whom her dutiful andtender affection always seemed to me to fulfil the almost religious ideaconveyed by the old-fashioned, half-heathen phrase of "filial piety. "

Lady Caroline Lamb I never saw, but from friends of mine who were wellacquainted with her I have heard manifold instances of her extraordinarycharacter and conduct. I remember my friend Mr. Harness telling me that, dancing with him one night at a great ball, she had suddenly amazed himby the challenge: "Gueth how many pairth of thtockingth I have on. " (Herladyship lisped, and her particular graciousness to Mr. Harness was theresult of Lord Byron's school intimacy with and regard for him. ) Findingher partner quite unequal to the piece of divination proposed to him, she put forth a very pretty little foot, from which she lifted thepetticoat ankle high, lisping out, "Thixth. "

I remember my mother telling me of my father and herself meeting Mr. AndLady Caroline Lamb at a dinner at Lord Holland's, in Paris, whenaccidentally the expected arrival of Lord Byron was mentioned. Mr. Lambhad just named the next day as the one fixed for their departure; butLady Caroline immediately announced her intention of prolonging herstay, which created what would be called in the French chambers"sensation. "

When the party broke up, my father and mother, who occupied apartmentsin the same hotel as the Lambs, --Meurice's, --were driven into thecourt-yard just as Lady Caroline's carriage had drawn up before thestaircase leading to her rooms, which were immediately opposite those ofmy father and mother. A _ruisseau_ or gutter ran round the court-yard, and intervened between the carriage step and the door of the vestibule, and Mr. Lamb, taking Lady Caroline, as she alighted, in his arms (shehad a very pretty, slight, graceful figure), gallantly lifted her overthe wet stones; which act of conjugal courtesy elicited admiringapproval from my mother, and from my father a growl to the effect, "Ifyou were _my_ wife I'd put your ladyship _in_ the gutter, " justifiedperhaps by their observation of what followed. My mother's sitting-roomfaced that of Lady Caroline, and before lights were brought into it sheand my father had the full benefit of a curious scene in the room oftheir opposite neighbors, who seemed quite unmindful that theirapartment being lighted and the curtains not drawn, they were, asregarded the opposite wing of the building, a spectacle for gods andmen. 

Mr. Lamb on entering the room sat down on the sofa, and his wife perchedherself on the elbow of it with her arm round his neck, which engagingattitude she presently exchanged for a still more persuasive one, bykneeling at his feet; but upon his getting up, the lively lady did soalso, and in a moment began flying round the room, seizing and flingingon the floor cups, saucers, plates, --the whole _cabaret_, --vases, candlesticks, her poor husband pursuing and attempting to restrain hismad moiety, in the midst of which extraordinary scene the curtains wereabruptly closed, and the domestic drama finished behind them, leaving nodoubt, however, in my father's and mother's minds that the question ofLady Caroline's prolonged stay till Lord Byron's arrival in Paris hadcaused the disturbance they had witnessed. 

I never read "Glenarvon, " in which, I believe, Lady Caroline is supposedto have intended to represent her idol, Lord Byron, and the onlycomposition of hers with which I am acquainted is the pretty song of"Waters of Elle, " of which I think she also wrote the air. She wasundoubtedly very clever, in spite of her silliness, and possessed thatsort of attraction, often as powerful as unaccountable, which belongssometimes to women so little distinguished by great personal beauty, that they have suggested the French observation that "ce sont les femmeslaides qui font les grandes passions. " The European women fascinating_par excellence_ are the Poles; and a celebrated enchantress of thatcharming and fantastic race of sirens, the Countess Delphine Potocka, always reminded me of Lady Caroline Lamb, in the descriptions given ofher by her adorers. 

With Mr. Lamb I never was acquainted till long after Lady Caroline'sdeath--after I came out on the stage, when he was Lord Melbourne, andPrime Minister of England. I was a very young person, and though I oftenmet him in society, and he took amiable and kindly notice of me, ourintercourse was, of course, a mere occasional condescension on his part. 

He was exceedingly handsome, with a fine person, verging towards theportly, and a sweet countenance, more expressive of refined, easy, careless good-humor, than almost any face I ever saw. His beauty was oftoo well born and well bred a type to be unpleasantly sensual; but hiswhole face, person, expression, and manner conveyed the idea of apleasure-loving nature, habitually self-indulgent, and indulgent toothers. He was my _beau ideal_ of an Epicurean philosopher (supposing itpossible that an Epicurean philosopher could have consented to be PrimeMinister of England), and I confess to having read with unboundedastonishment the statement in the "Greville Memoirs, " that this apparentprince of _poco curanti_ had taken the pains to make himself a profoundHebrew scholar. 

I retain one very vivid impression of that most charming of debonairnoblemen, Lord Melbourne. I had the honor of dining at his house once, with the beautiful, highly gifted, and unfortunate woman with whom hisrelations afterwards became subject of such cruel public scandal; andafter dinner I sat for some time opposite a large, crimson-coveredottoman, on which Lord Melbourne reclined, surrounded by those threeenchanting Sheridan sisters, Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Blackwood (afterwardsLady Dufferin), and Lady St. Maur (afterwards Duchess of Somerset, andalways Queen of Beauty). A more remarkable collection of comelycreatures, I think, could hardly be seen, and taking into considerationthe high rank, eminent position, and intellectual distinction of thefour persons who formed that beautiful group, it certainly was a pictureto remain impressed upon one's memory. 

To return to my school-mistress, Mrs. Rowden; she was herself anauthoress, and had published a poem dedicated to Lady Bessborough (LadyCaroline Lamb's mother), the title of which was "The pleasures offriendship" (hope, memory, and imagination were all bespoken), of whichI remember only the two opening lines--

 "Visions of early youth, ere yet ye fade, Let my light pen arrest your fleeting shade. "

Mrs. Rowden, during the period of her school-keeping in London, was anardent admirer of the stage in general and of my uncle John inparticular, of whom the mezzotint engraving as Coriolanus, fromLawrence's picture, adorned her drawing-room in the Rue d'Angoulême, where, however, the nature and objects of her enthusiasm had undergone aconsiderable change: for when I was placed under her charge, theatresand things theatrical had given place in her esteem to churches andthings clerical; her excitements and entertainments were Bible-meetings, prayer-meetings, and private preachings and teachings of religion. Shewas what was then termed Methodistical, what would now be designated asvery Low Church. We were taken every Sunday either to the chapel of theembassy or to the Église de l'Oratoire (French Protestant worship), totwo and sometimes to three services; and certainly Sunday was no day ofrest to us, as we were required to write down from memory the sermons wehad heard in the course of the day, and read them aloud at our eveningdevotional gathering. Some of us had a robust power of attention andretention, and managed these reproductions with tolerable fidelity. Others contrived to bring forth such a version of what they had heard asclosely resembled the last edition of the subject-matter of a prolongedgame of Russian scandal. Sometimes, upon an appeal to mercy and a solemnprotest that we had paid the utmost attention and _couldn't_ remember asingle sentence of the Christian exhortation we had heard, we wereallowed to choose a text and compose an original sermon of our own; andI think a good-sized volume might have been made of homilies of mycomposition, indited under these circumstances for myself and mycompanions. I have always had rather an inclination for preaching, ofwhich these exercises were perhaps the origin, and it is but a few yearsago that I received at Saint Leonard's a visit from a tottering, feebleold lady of near seventy, whose name, unheard since, carried me back tomy Paris school-days, and who, among other memories evoked to recallherself to my recollection, said, "Oh, don't you remember howgood-natured you were in writing such nice sermons for me when I nevercould write down what I had heard at church?" Her particular share inthese intellectual benefits conferred by me I did not remember, but Iremembered well and gratefully the sweet, silver-toned voice of hersister, refreshing the arid atmosphere of our dreary Sunday eveningswith Handel's holy music. "I know that my Redeemer liveth, " and "Heshall feed his Flock, " which I heard for the first time from that gentleschoolmate of mine, recall her meek, tranquil face and, liquid thread ofdelicate soprano voice, even through the glorious associations of JennyLind's inspired utterance of those divine songs. These ladies weredaughters of a high dignitary of the English Church, which made mysermon-writing for their succor rather comical. Besides these Sundayexercises, we were frequently taken to week-day services at the Oratoireto hear some special preacher of celebrity, on which occasions of devoutdissipation Mrs. Rowden always appeared in the highest state of elation, and generally received distinguished notice from the clerical hero ofthe evening. 

I remember accompanying her to hear Mr. Lewis Wade, a celebratedmissionary preacher, who had been to Syria and the Holy Land, andbrought thence observations on subjects sacred and profane that made hisdiscourses peculiarly interesting and edifying. 

I was also taken to hear a much more impressive preacher, Mr. CésarMalan, of Geneva, who addressed a small and select audience of verydistinguished persons, in a magnificent _salon_ in some great privatehouse, where every body sat on satin and gilded _fauteuils_ to receivehis admonitions, all which produced a great effect on my mind--not, however, I think, altogether religious; but the sermon I heard, and thestriking aspect of the eloquent person who delivered it, left a strongand long impression on my memory. It was the first fine preaching I everheard, and though I was undoubtedly too young to appreciate it duly, Iwas, nevertheless, deeply affected by it, and it gave me my earliestexperience of that dangerous thing, emotional religion, or, to speakmore properly, religious excitement. 

The Unitarians of the United States have in my time possessed a numberof preachers of most remarkable excellence; Dr. Channing, Dr. Dewey, Dr. Bellows, my own venerable and dear pastor, Dr. Furness, Dr. Follen, William and Henry Ware, being all men of extraordinary powers ofeloquence. At home I have heard Frederick Maurice and Dean Stanley, butthe most impressive preaching I ever heard in England was still from aUnitarian pulpit; James Martineau, I think, surpassed all the veryremarkable men I have named in the wonderful beauty and power, spirituality and solemnity, of his sacred teaching. Frederick Robertson, to my infinite loss and sorrow, I never heard, having been deterred fromgoing to hear him by his reputation of a "fashionable preacher;" he, better than any one, would have understood my repugnance to that speciesof religious instructor. 

Better, in my judgment, than these occasional appeals to our feelingsand imaginations under Mrs. Rowden's influence, was the constant _use_of the Bible among us. I cannot call the reading and committing tomemory of the Scriptures, as we performed those duties, by the seriousname of study. But the Bible was learnt by heart in certain portions andrecited before breakfast every morning, and read aloud before bedtimeevery evening by us; and though the practice may be open to someobjections, I think they hardly outweigh the benefit bestowed upon youngminds by early familiar acquaintance with the highest themes, theholiest thoughts, and the noblest words the world possesses or ever willpossess. To me my intimate knowledge of the Bible has always seemed thegreatest benefit I derived from my school training. 

Of the secular portion of the education we received, the French lady whowas Mrs. Rowden's partner directed the principal part. Our lessons ofgeography, grammar, history, arithmetic, and mythology (of which lattersubject I suspect we had a much more thorough knowledge than is at allusual with young English girls) were conducted by her. 

These studies were all pursued in French, already familiar to me as thevehicle of my elementary acquirements at Boulogne; and this soon becamethe language in which I habitually wrote, spoke, and thought, to thealmost entire neglect of my native tongue, of which I never thoroughlystudied the grammar till I was between fifteen and sixteen, when, on mypresenting, in a glow of vanity, some verses of mine to my father, hesaid, with his blandest smile, after reading them, "Very well, verypretty indeed! My dear, don't you think, before you write poetry, youhad better learn grammar?" a suggestion which sent me crestfallen to adiligent study of Lindley Murray. But grammar is perfectly uncongenialmatter to me, which my mind absolutely refuses to assimilate. I havelearned Latin, English, French, Italian, and German grammar, and do notknow a single rule of the construction of any language whatever. Moreover, to the present day, my early familiar use of French producesuncertainty in my mind as to the spelling of all words that take adouble consonant in French and only one in English, as apartment, enemy, etc. 

The men of my family--that is, my uncle John, my father, and my eldestbrother--were all philologists, and extremely fond of the study oflanguage. Grammar was favorite light reading, and the philosophy whichlies at the root of human speech a frequent subject of discussion andresearch with them; but they none of them spoke foreign languages withease or fluency. My uncle was a good Latin scholar, and read French, Italian, and Spanish, but spoke none of them; not even the first, inspite of his long residence in French Switzerland. The same was the casewith my father, whose delight in the dry bones of language was such thatat near seventy he took the greatest pleasure in assiduously studyingthe Greek grammar. My brother John, who was a learned linguist, andfamiliar with the modern European languages, spoke none of them well, not even German, though he resided for many years at Hanover, where hewas curator of the royal museum and had married a German wife, and hadamong his most intimate friends and correspondents both the Grimms, Gervinus, and many of the principal literary men of Germany. My sisterand myself, on the contrary, had remarkable facility in speaking foreignlanguages with the accent and tune (if I may use the expression)peculiar to each; a faculty which seems to me less the result of earlytraining and habit, than of some particular construction of ear andthroat favorable for receiving and repeating mere sounds; a musicalorganization and mimetic faculty; a sort of mocking-bird specialty, which I have known possessed in great perfection by persons with whom itwas in no way connected with the study, but only with the use of thelanguages they spoke with such idiomatic ease and grace. Moreover, in myown case, both in Italian and German, though I understand for the mostpart what I read and what is said in these languages, I have had butlittle exercise in speaking them, and have been amused to find myself, while travelling, taken for an Italian as well as for a German, simplyby dint of the facility with which I imitated the accent of the people Iwas among, while intrepidly confounding my moods, tenses, genders, andcases in the determination to speak and make myself understood in thelanguage of whatever country I was passing through. 

Mademoiselle Descuillès, Mrs. Rowden's partner, was a handsome woman ofabout thirty, with a full, graceful figure, a pleasant countenance, agreat deal of playful vivacity of manner, and very determined and strictnotions of discipline. Active, energetic, intelligent, andgood-tempered, she was of a capital composition for a governess, thesort of person to manage successfully all her pupils, and become anobject of enthusiastic devotion to the elder ones whom she admitted toher companionship. 

She almost always accompanied us when we walked, invariably presided inthe schoolroom, and very generally her eager figure and pleasant, brighteyes were to be discovered in some corner of the playground, where, froma semi-retirement, seated in her fauteuil with book or needlework inhand, she exercised a quiet but effectual surveillance over her youngsubjects. 

She was the active and efficient partner in the concern, Mrs. Rowden thedignified and representative one. The whole of our course of study andmode of life, with the exception of our religious training, of which Ihave spoken before, was followed under her direction, and according tothe routine of most French schools. 

The monastic rule of loud-reading during meals was observed, and l'AbbéMillot's "Universal History, " of blessed boring memory, was the drydaily sauce to our diet. On Saturday we always had a half-holiday in theafternoon, and the morning occupations were feminine rather thanacademic. 

Every girl brought into the schoolroom whatever useful needlework, mending or making, her clothes required; and while one read aloud, theothers repaired or replenished their wardrobes. 

Great was our satisfaction if we could prevail upon MademoiselleDescuillès herself to take the book in hand and become the "lectrice" ofthe morning; greater still when we could persuade her, while intent uponher own stitching, to sing to us, which she sometimes did, old-fashionedFrench songs and ballads, of which I learnt from her and still remembersome that I have never since heard, that must have long ago died out ofthe musical world and left no echo but in my memory. Of two of these Ithink the words pretty enough to be worth preserving, the one for itsnaïve simplicity, and the other for the covert irony of its reflectionupon female constancy, to which Mademoiselle Descuillès' delivery, withher final melancholy shrug of the shoulders, gave great effect. 

 LE TROUBADOUR

 Un gentil Troubadour Qui chante et fait la guerre, Revenait chez son père, Rêvant à son amour. 

 Gages de sa valeur, Suspendus à son écharpe, Son épée, et sa harpe, Se croisaient sur son coeur. 

 Il rencontre en chemin Pelerine jolie, Qui voyage, et qui prie, Un rosaire à la main. 

 Colerette, à long plis, Cachait sa fine taille, Un grand chapeau de paille, Ombrait son teint de lys. 

 "O gentil Troubadour, Si tu reviens fidèle, Chante un couplet pour celle Qui bénit ton retour. "

 "Pardonne à mon refus Pelerine jolie! Sans avoir vu ma mie, Je ne chanterai plus. "

 "Et ne la vois-tu pas? O Troubadour fidèle! Regarde moi--c'est elle! Ouvre lui donc tes bras!

 "Craignant pour notre amour, J'allais en pelerine, A la Vierge divine Prier pour ton retour!"

 Près des tendres amans S'élève une chapelle, L'Ermite qu'on appelle, Bénit leurs doux sermens

 Venez en ce saint lieu, Amans du voisinage, Faire un pelerinage A la Mère de Dieu!

The other ballad, though equally an illustration of the days ofchivalry, was written in a spirit of caustic contempt for the fair sex, which suggests the bitterness of the bard's personal experience:--

 LE CHEVALIER ERRANT. 

 Dans un vieux château de l'Andalousie, Au temps où l'amour se montrait constant, Où Beauté, Valeur, et Galanterie Guidait aux combats un fidèle amant, Un beau chevalier un soir se présente, Visière baissée, et la lance en main; Il vient demander si sa douce amante N'est pas (par hasard) chez le châtelain. 

 "Noble chevalier! quelle est votre amie?" Demande à son tour le vieux châtelain. "Ah! de fleurs d'amour c'est la plus jolie Elle a teint de rose, et peau de satin, Elle a de beaux yeux, dont le doux langage Porte en votre coeur vif enchantment, Elle a tout enfin--elle est belle, --et sage!" "Pauvre chevalier! chercherez longtemps!

 "Guidez de mes pas l'ardeur incertain, Où dois-je chercher ce que j'ai perdu?" "Mon fils, votre soit, hélas! s'en fait peine, Ce que vous cherchez ne se trouve plus. " "Poursuivez, pourtant, votre long voyage, Et si vouz trouvez un pareil trésor-- Ne le perdez plus! Adieu, bon voyage!" L'amant repartit--mais, il cherche encore. 

The air of the first of these songs was a very simple and charminglittle melody, which my sister, having learnt it from me, adapted tosome English words. The other was an extremely favorite _vaudeville_air, repeated constantly in the half-singing dialogue of some of thosepopular pieces. 

Our Saturday sewing class was a capital institution, which made most ofus expert needle-women, developed in some the peculiarly lady-likeaccomplishment of working exquisitely, and gave to all the usefulknowledge of how to make and mend our own clothes. When I left school Icould make my own dresses, and was a proficient in marking and darning. 

My school-fellows were almost all English, and, I suppose, with oneexception, were young girls of average character and capacity. ElizabethP----, a young person from the west of England, was the only remarkableone among them. She was strikingly handsome, both in face and figure, and endowed with very uncommon abilities. She was several years olderthan myself, and an object of my unbounded school-girl heroine worship. A daughter of Kiallmark, the musical composer, was also eminent among usfor her great beauty, and always seemed to my girlish fancy what MaryQueen of Scots must have looked like in her youth. 

Besides pupils, Mrs. Rowden received a small number of parlor boarders, who joined only in some of the lessons; indeed, some of them appeared tofulfil no purpose of education whatever by their residence with her. There were a Madame and Mademoiselle de ----, the latter of whom wassupposed, I believe, to imbibe English in our atmosphere. She bore awell-known noble French name, and was once visited, to the immenseexcitement of all "ces demoiselles, " by a brother, in the uniform of theRoyal Gardes du Corps, whose looks were reported (I think rathermythologically) to be as superb as his attire. In which case he musthave been strikingly unlike his sister, who was one of the ugliest womenI ever saw; with a disproportionately large and ill-shaped nose andmouth, and a terrible eruption all over her face. She had, however, anextremely beautiful figure, exquisite hands and feet, skin as white assnow, and magnificent hair and eyes; in spite of which numerousadvantages, she was almost repulsively plain: it really seemed as if shehad been the victim of a spell, to have so beautiful a body, and so allbut hideous a face. Besides these French ladies, there was a MissMcC----, a very delicate, elegant-looking Irishwoman, and a Miss ----, who, in spite of her noble name, was a coarse and inelegant, but veryhandsome Englishwoman. In general, these ladies had nothing to do withus; they had privileged places at table, formed Mrs. Rowden's eveningcircle in the drawing-room, and led (except at meals) a life ofdignified separation from the scholars. 

I remember but two French girls in our whole company: the one was aMademoiselle Adèle de ----, whose father, a fanatical Anglomane, wrote aridiculous book about England. 

The other French pupil I ought not to have called a companion, or saidthat I remembered, for in truth I remember nothing but her funeral. Shedied soon after I joined the school, and was buried in the cemetery ofPère la Chaise, near the tomb of Abelard and Eloïse, with rather atheatrical sort of ceremony. She was followed to her grave by the wholeschool, dressed in white, and wearing long white veils fastened roundour heads with white fillets. On each side of the bier walked threeyoung girls, pall-bearers, in the same maiden mourning, holding in onehand long streamers of broad white ribbon attached to the bier, and inthe other several white narcissus blossoms. 

The ghostly train and the picturesque mediæval monument, close to whichwe paused and clustered to deposit the dead girl in her earlyresting-place, formed a striking picture that haunted me for a longtime, and which the smell and sight of the chalk-white narcissus blossominvariably recalls to me. 

Meantime, the poetical studies, or rather indulgencies of home, hadceased. No sonorous sounds of Milton's mighty music ever delighted myears, and for my almost daily bread of Scott's romantic epics I hungeredand thirsted in vain, with such intense desire, that I at lengthundertook to write out "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion" frommemory, so as not absolutely to lose my possession of them. This task Iachieved to a very considerable extent, and found the stirring, chivalrous stories, and spirited, picturesque verse, a treasure ofrefreshment, when all my poetical diet consisted of "L'Anthologiefrançaise à l'Usage des Demoiselles, " and Voltaire's "Henriade, " which Iwas compelled to learn by heart, and with the opening lines of which Imore than once startled the whole dormitory at midnight, sittingsuddenly up in my bed, and from the midst of perpetual slumbers loudlyproclaiming--

 "Je chante ce héros qui regna sur la France, Et par droit de conquête, et par droit de naissance. "

More exciting reading was Madame Cottin's "Mathilde, " of which I now gothold for the first time, and devoured with delight, finishing it oneevening just before we were called to prayers, so that I wept bitterlyduring my devotions, partly for the Norman princess and her Saracenlover, and partly from remorse at my own sinfulness in not being able tobanish them from my thoughts while on my knees and saying my prayers. 

But, to be sure, that baptism in the desert, with the only drop of waterthey had to drink, seemed to me the very acme of religious fervor andsacred self-sacrifice. I wonder what I should think of the book were Ito read it now, which Heaven forefend! The really powerful impressionmade upon my imagination and feelings at this period, however, was by myfirst reading of Lord Byron's poetry. The day on which I received thatrevelation of the power of thought and language remained memorable to mefor many a day after. 

I had occasionally received invitations from Mrs. Rowden to take tea inthe drawing-room with the lady parlor boarders, when my week's reportfor "bonne conduite" had been tolerably satisfactory. One evening when Ihad received this honorable distinction, and was sitting in sleepysolemnity on the sofa, opposite my uncle John's black figure in"Coriolanus, " which seemed to grow alternately smaller and larger as myeyelids slowly drew themselves together and suddenly opened wide, with astartled consciousness of unworthy drowsiness, Miss H----, who wassitting beside me, reading, leaned back and put her book before my face, pointing with her finger to the lines--

 "It is the hour when from the boughs The nightingale's high note is heard. "

It would be impossible to describe the emotion I experienced. I wasinstantly wide awake, and, quivering with excitement, fastened a griplike steel upon the book, imploring to be allowed to read on. The fear, probably, of some altercation loud enough to excite attention to thesubject of her studies (which I rather think would not have beenapproved of, even for a "parlor boarder") prevented Miss H---- frommaking the resistance she should have made to my entreaties, and I wasallowed to leave the room, carrying with me the dangerous prize, which, however, I did not profit by. 

It was bedtime, and the dormitory light burned but while we performedour night toilet, under supervision. The under teacher and the lampdeparted together, and I confided to the companion whose bed was next tomine that I had a volume of Lord Byron under my pillow. The emphaticwhispered warnings of terror and dismay with which she received thisinformation, her horror at the wickedness of the book (of which ofcourse she knew nothing), her dread of the result of detection for me, and her entreaties, enforced with tears, that I would not keep theterrible volume where it was, at length, combined with my own nervousexcitement about it, affected me with such a sympathy of fear that Ijumped out of bed and thrust the fatal poems into the bowels of a straw_paillasse_ on an empty bed, and returned to my own to remain awakenearly all night. My study of Byron went no further then: the nextmorning I found it impossible to rescue the book unobserved from itshiding-place, and Miss H----, to whom I confided the secret of it, Isuppose took her own time for withdrawing it, and so I then read no moreof that wonderful poetry, which, in my after days of familiaracquaintance with it, always affected me like an evil potion taken intomy blood. The small, sweet draught which I sipped in that sleepyschool-salon atmosphere remained indelibly impressed upon my memory, insomuch that when, during the last year of my stay in Paris, the newsof my uncle John's death at Lausanne, and that of Lord Byron atMissolonghi, was communicated to me, my passionate regret was for thegreat poet, of whose writings I knew but twenty lines, and not for myown celebrated relation, of whom, indeed, I knew but little. 

It was undoubtedly well that this dangerous source of excitement shouldbe sealed to me as long as possible; but I do not think that the worksof imagination to which I was allowed free access were of a speciallywholesome or even harmless tendency. The false morality andattitudinizing sentiment of such books as "Les Contes à ma Fille, " andMadame de Genlis' "Veillées du Château, " and "Adèle et Théodore, " wererubbish, if not poison. The novels of Florian were genuine and simpleromances, less mischievous, I incline to think, upon the whole, than theeducational Countess's mock moral sentimentality; but Chateaubriand's"Atala et Chactas, " with its picturesque pathos, and his powerfulclassical novel of "Les Martyrs, " were certainly unfit reading for younggirls of excitable feelings and wild imaginations, in spite of thereligious element which I supposed was considered their recommendation. 

One great intellectual good fortune befell me at this time, and that wasreading "Guy Mannering;" the first of Walter Scott's novels that I everread--the _dearest_, therefore. I use the word advisedly, for I know noother than one of affection to apply to those enchanting and admirableworks, that deserve nothing less than love in return for the healthfuldelight they have bestowed. To all who ever read them, the first mustsurely be the best; the beginning of what a series of pure enjoyments, what a prolonged, various, exquisite succession of intellectualsurprises and pleasures, amounting for the time almost to happiness. 

Scott, like Shakespeare, has given us, for intimate acquaintance, companions, and friends, men and women of such peculiar individualnobleness, grace, wit, wisdom, and humor, that they people our minds andrecur to our thoughts with a vividness which makes them seem rather tobelong to the past realities of the memory, than to the shadowy visionsof the imagination. 

It was not long before all this imaginative stimulus bore its legitimatefruit in a premature harvest of crude compositions which I dignifiedwith the name of poetry. Rhymes I wrote without stint or stopping--aperfect deluge of doggerel; what became of it all I know not, but I havean idea that a manuscript volume was sent to my poor parents, as asample of the poetical promise supposed to be contained in these unripeproductions. 

Besides the studies pursued by the whole school under the tuition ofMademoiselle Descuillès, we had special masters from whom we tooklessons in special branches of knowledge. Of these, by far the mostinteresting to me, both in himself and in the subject of his teachings, was my Italian master, Biagioli. 

He was a political exile, of about the same date as his remarkablecontemporary, Ugo Foscolo; his high forehead, from which his hair fellback in a long grizzled curtain, his wild, melancholy eyes, and thesevere and sad expression of his face, impressed me with some awe andmuch pity. He was at that time one of the latest of the long tribe ofcommentators on Dante's "Divina Commedia. " I do not believe hiscommentary ranks high among the innumerable similar works on the greatItalian poem; but in violence of abuse, and scornful contempt of all buthis own glosses, he yields to none of his fellow-laborers in that vastand tangled poetical, historical, biographical, philosophical, theological, and metaphysical jungle. 

Dante was his spiritual consolation, his intellectual delight, andindeed his daily bread; for out of that tremendous horn-book he taughtme to stammer the divine Italian language, and illustrated every lesson, from the simplest rule of its syntax to its exceedingly complex andartificially constructed prosody, out of the pages of that sublime, grotesque, and altogether wonderful poem. My mother has told me that sheattributed her incapacity for relishing Milton to the fact of "ParadiseLost" having been used as a lesson-book out of which she was made tolearn English--a circumstance which had made it for ever "Paradise_Lost_" to her. I do not know why or how I escaped a similar misfortunein my school-girl study of Dante, but luckily I did so, probably beingcarried over the steep and stony way with comparative ease by the helpof my teacher's vivid enthusiasm. I have forgotten my Italian grammar, rules of syntax and rules of prosody alike, but I read and re-read the"Divina Commedia" with ever-increasing amazement and admiration. Settingaside all its weightier claims to the high place it holds among thefinest achievements of human genius, I know of no poem in any languagein which so many single lines and detached passages can be found ofequally descriptive force, picturesque beauty, and delightful melody ofsound; the latter virtue may lie, perhaps, as much in the instrumentitself as in the master hand that touched it--the Italian tongue, theresonance and vibrating power of which is quite as peculiar as itsliquid softness. 

While the stern face and forlorn figure of poor Biagioli seemed anappropriate accompaniment to my Dantesque studies, nothing could exceedthe contrast he presented to another Italian who visited us on alternatedays and gave us singing lessons. Blangini, whose extreme popularity asa composer and teacher led him to the dignity of _maestro di capella_ tosome royal personage, survives only in the recollection of certainelderly drawing-room nightingales who warbled fifty summers ago, and whowill still hum bits of his pretty Canzoni and Notturni, "Care pupille, ""Per valli per boschi, " etc. 

Blangini was a _petit maître_ as well as a singing master; alwaysattired in the height of the fashion, and in manner and appearance muchmore of a Frenchman than an Italian. He was mercilessly satirical on thefailures of his pupils, to whom (having reduced them, by the mostridiculous imitation of their unfortunate vocal attempts, to an almostinaudible utterance of _pianissimo_ pipings) he would exclaim, "Ma percarità! aprite la bocca! che cantate come uccelli che dormano!"

My music master, as distinguished from my singing master, was a worthyold Englishman of the name of Shaw, who played on the violin, and hadbeen at one time leader of the orchestra at Covent Garden Theatre. Indeed, it was to him that John Kemble addressed the joke (famous, because in his mouth unique) upon the subject of a song in the piece of"Richard Coeur de Lion"--I presume an English version of Gietry'spopular romance, "O Richard, O mon Roi!" This Mr. Shaw was painfullyendeavoring to teach my uncle, who was entirely without musical ear, andwhose all but insuperable difficulty consisted in repeating a few barsof the melody supposed to be sung under his prison window by hisfaithful minstrel, Blondel. "Mr. Kemble, Mr. Kemble, you are murderingthe time, sir!" cried the exasperated musician; to which my unclereplied, "Very well, sir, and you are forever beating it!" I do not knowwhether Mrs. Rowden knew this anecdote, and engaged Mr. Shaw because hehad elicited this solitary sally from her quondam idol, John Kemble. Thechoice, whatever its motive, was not a happy one. The old leader of thetheatrical orchestra was himself no piano-forte player, could no longersee very well nor hear very well, and his principal attention wasdirected to his own share of the double performance, which he led muchafter the careless, slap-bang style in which overtures that nobodylistened to were performed in his day. It is a very great mistake to letlearners play with violin accompaniment until they have thoroughlymastered the piano-forte without it. Fingering, the first of fundamentalacquirements, is almost sure to be overlooked by the master, whoseattention is not on the hands of his pupil but on his own bow; and thepupil, anxious to keep up with the violin, slurs over rapid passages, scrambles through difficult ones, and acquires a general habit of merelyfollowing the violin in time and tune, to the utter disregard of steady, accurate execution. As for me, I derived but one benefit from my oldviolin accompanier, that of becoming a good timist; in every otherrespect I received nothing but injury from our joint performances, getting into incorrigible habits of bad fingering, and of making up mybass with unscrupulous simplifications of the harmony, quite content ifI came in with my final chords well thumped in time and tune with theemphatic scrape of the violin that ended our lesson. The music my mastergave me, too, was more in accordance with his previous practice asleader of a theatrical orchestra, than calculated to make me a steadyand scrupulous executant. 

We had another master for French and Latin--a clever, ugly, impudent, snuffy, dirty little man, who wrote vaudevilles for the minor theaters, and made love to his pupils. Both these gentlemen were superseded intheir offices by other professors before I left school: poor old PshawPshaw, as we used to call him, by the French composer, Adam, unluckilytoo near the time of my departure for me to profit by his strict andexcellent method of instruction; and our vaudevillist was replaced by agentleman of irreproachable manners, and I should think morals, whoalways came to our lessons _en toilette_--black frock-coat andimmaculate white waistcoat, unexceptionable boots and gloves--by dint ofall which he ended by marrying our dear Mademoiselle Descuillès (who, poor thing, was but a woman after all, liable to charming by suchmethods), and turning her into Madame Champy, under which name shecontinued to preside over the school after I left it; and Mrs. Rowdenrelinquished her share in the concern--herself marrying, and becomingMrs. St. Quintin. 

I have spoken of my learning Latin: Elizabeth P----, the object in allthings of my emulous admiration, studied it, and I forthwith beggedpermission to do so likewise; and while this dead-language ambitionpossessed me, I went so far as to acquire the Greek alphabet; which, however, I used only as a cipher for "my secrets, " and abandoned myLatin lore, just as I had exchanged my Phædrus for Cornelius Nepos, noteven attaining to the "Arma virumque cano. "

Nobody but Miss P---- and myself dabbled in these classical depths, butnearly the whole school took dancing lessons, which were given us by twomasters, an old and young Mr. Guillet, father and son: the former, alittle dapper, dried-up, wizen-faced, beak-nosed old man, with a brownwig that fitted his head and face like a Welsh night-cap; who played theviolin and stamped in time, and scolded and made faces at us when wewere clumsy and awkward; the latter, a highly colored, beak-nosed younggentleman who squinted fearfully with magnificent black eyes, and hadone shining, oily wave of blue-black hair, which, departing from aboveone ear, traversed his forehead in a smooth sweep, and ended in afrizzly breaker above the other. This gentleman showed us our steps, andgave us the examples of graceful ability of which his father was nolonger capable. I remember a very comical scene at one of our dancinglessons, occasioned by the first appearance of a certain Miss ----, whoentered the room, to the general amazement, in full evening costume--apractice common, I believe, in some English schools where "dressing fordancing" prevails. We only put on light prunella slippers instead of ourheavier morning shoes or boots, and a pair of gloves, as adequatepreparation. Moreover, the French fashion for full dress, of that day, did not sanction the uncovering of the person usual in English eveningattire. 

CHAPTER IV. 

Great was the general surprise of the dancing class when this large, tall, handsome English girl, of about eighteen, entered the room in arose-colored silk dress, with very low neck and very short sleeves, white satin shoes, and white kid gloves; her long auburn ringlets andivory shoulders glancing in the ten o'clock morning sunlight with a sortof incongruous splendor, and her whole demeanor that of the mostinnocent and modest tranquillity. 

Mademoiselle Descuillès shut her book to with a snap, and sat boltupright and immovable, with eyes and mouth wide open. Young Mr. Guilletblushed purple, and old Mr. Guillet scraped a few interjections on hisfiddle, and then, putting it down, took a resonant pinch of snuff, byway of restoring his scattered senses. 

No observation was made, however, and the lesson proceeded, young Mr. Guillet turning scarlet each time either of his divergent orbs of visionencountered his serenely unconscious, full-dressed pupil; whichcertainly, considering that he was a member of the Grand Opera _corps deballet_, was a curious instance of the purely conventional ideas ofdecency which custom makes one accept. 

Whatever want of assiduity I may have betrayed in my other studies, there was no lack of zeal for my dancing lessons. I had a perfectpassion for dancing, which long survived my school-days, and I ampersuaded that my natural vocation was that of an opera dancer. Far intomiddle life I never saw beautiful dancing without a rapture ofenthusiasm, and used to repeat from memory whole dances after seeingDuvernay or Ellsler, as persons with a good musical ear can repeat theairs of the opera first heard the night before. And I remember, duringEllsler's visit to America, when I had long left off dancing in society, being so transported with her execution of a Spanish dance called "ElJaleo de Xerxes, " that I was detected by my cook, who came suddenly uponme in my store-room, in the midst of sugar, rice, tea, coffee, flour, etc. , standing on the tips of my toes, with my arms above my head, inone of the attitudes I had most admired in that striking and picturesqueperformance. The woman withdrew in speechless amazement, and I alightedon my heels, feeling wonderfully foolish. How I thought I never shouldbe able to leave off dancing! And so I thought of riding! and so Ithought of singing! and could not imagine what life would be like when Icould no more do these things. I was not wrong, perhaps, in thinking itwould be difficult to leave them off: I had no conception how easilythey would leave me off. 

Varying our processions in the Champs Élysées were less formalexcursions in the Jardin de Luxembourg; and as the picture-gallery inthe palace was opened gratuitously on certain days of the week, we wereallowed to wander through it, and form our taste for art among thesamples of the modern French school of painting there collected: thepictures of David, Gérard, Girodet, etc. , the Dido and Æneas, theRomulus and Tatius with the Sabine women interposing between them, Hippolytus before Theseus and Phædra, Atala being laid in her grave byher lover--compositions with which innumerable engravings have madeEngland familiar--the theatrical conception and hard coloring andexecution of which (compensated by masterly grouping and incomparabledrawing) did not prevent their striking our uncritical eyes withdelighted admiration, and making this expedition to the Luxembourg oneof my favorite afternoon recreations. These pictures are now all in thegallery of the Louvre, illustrating the school of art of the consulateand early empire of Bonaparte. 

Another favorite promenade of ours, and the one that I preferred even tothe hero-worship of the Luxembourg, was the Parc Monceaux. This estate, the private property of the Orleans family, confiscated by LouisNapoleon, and converted into a whole new _quartier_ of his new Paris, with splendid streets and houses, and an exquisite public flower-gardenin the midst of them, was then a solitary and rather neglected JardinAnglais (so called) or park, surrounded by high walls and entered by asmall wicket, the porter of which required a permit of admission beforeallowing ingress to the domain. I never remember seeing a singlecreature but ourselves in the complete seclusion of this desertedpleasaunce. It had grass and fine trees and winding walks, and littlebrooks fed by springs that glimmered in cradles of moss-grown, antiquated rock-work; no flowers or semblance of cultivation, but ageneral air of solitude and wildness that recommended it especially tome, and recalled as little as possible the great, gay city whichsurrounded it. 

My real holidays, however (for I did not go home during the three yearsI spent in Paris), were the rare and short visits my father paid mewhile I was at school. At all other seasons Paris might have beenPatagonia for any thing I saw or heard or knew of its brilliant gayetyand splendid variety. But during those holidays of his and mine, myenjoyment and his were equal, I verily believe, though probably not (asI then imagined) perfect. Pleasant days of joyous _camaraderie_ and_flanerie_!--in which every thing, from being new to me, was almost asgood as new to my indulgent companion: the Rue de Rivoli, the Tuileries, the Boulevard, the Palais Royal, the _déjeuner à la fourchette_ at theCafé Riche, the dinner in the small _cabinet_ at the Trois Frères, orthe Cadran Bleu, and the evening climax of the theater on the Boulevard, where Philippe, or Léontine Fay, or Poitier and Brunet, made a school ofdramatic art of the small stages of the Porte St. Martin, the Variétés, and the Vaudeville. 

My father's days in Paris, in which he escaped from the hard labor andheavy anxiety of his theatrical life of actor, manager, and proprietor, and I from the dull routine of school-room studies and school-groundrecreations, were pleasant days to him, and golden ones in my girlishcalendar. I remember seeing, with him, a piece called "Les deuxSergens, " a sort of modern Damon and Pythias, in which the heroicfriends are two French soldiers, and in which a celebrated actor of thename of Philippe performed the principal part. He was the predecessorand model of Frédéric Lemaître, who (himself infinitely superior to hispupil and copyist, Mr. Fechter, who, by a very feeble imitation ofLemaître's most remarkable parts, has achieved so much reputation) wasnot to be compared with Philippe in the sort of sentimental melodrama ofwhich "Les deux Sergens" was a specimen. 

This M. Philippe was a remarkable man, not only immensely popular forhis great professional merit, but so much respected for an order ofmerit not apt to be enthusiastically admired by Parisians--that of amoral character and decent life--that at his funeral a very serious riotoccurred, in consequence of the Archbishop of Paris, according to thereceived opinion and custom of the day, refusing to allow him to beburied in consecrated ground; the profane player's calling, in the yearof grace 1823, or thereabouts, being still one which disqualified itsfollowers for receiving the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, andtherefore, of course, for claiming Christian burial. The general feelingof the Parisian public, however, was in this case too strong for theancient anathema of the Church. The Archbishop of Paris was obliged togive way, and the dead body of the worthy actor was laid in the sacredsoil of Père la Chaise. I believe that since that time the question hasnever again been debated, nor am I aware that there is any one morepeculiarly theatrical cemetery than another in Paris. 

In a letter of Talma's to Charles Young upon my uncle John's death, hebegs to be numbered among the subscribers to the monument about to beerected to Mr. Kemble in Westminster Abbey; adding the touching remark:"Pour moi, je serai heureux si les prêtres me laissent enterrer dans uncoin de mon jardin. "

The excellent moral effect of this species of class prejudice isadmirably illustrated by an anecdote I have heard my mother tell. Oneevening, when she had gone to the Grand Opera with M. Jouy, the wise andwitty Hermite de la Chaussée d'Antin, talking with him of the career andcircumstances of the young ballet women (she had herself, when veryyoung, been a dancer on the English stage), she wound up her variousquestions with this: "Et y en a-t-il qui sont filles de bonne conduite?qui sont sages?" "Ma foi!" replied the Hermite, shrugging his shoulders, "elles auraient grand tort; personne n'y croirait. "

A charming vaudeville called "Michel et Christine, " with that charmingactress, Madame Alan Dorval, for its heroine, was another extremelypopular piece at that time, which I went to see with my father. The timeof year at which he was able to come to Paris was unluckily the seasonat which all the large theaters were closed. Nevertheless, by some happychance, I saw one performance at the Grand Opera of that great dancerand actress, Bigottini, in the ballet of the "Folle par Amour;" and Ishall never forget the wonderful pathos of her acting and the grace anddignity of her dancing. Several years after, I saw Madame Pasta inPaesiello's pretty opera of the "Nina Pazza, " on the same subject, andhardly know to which of the two great artists to assign the palm intheir different expression of the love-crazed girl's despair. 

I also saw several times, at this period of his celebrity, theinimitable comic actor, Poitier, in a farce called "Les Danaïdes" thatwas making a furor--a burlesque upon a magnificent mythological ballet, produced with extraordinary splendor of decoration, at the AcadémieRoyale de Musique, and of which this travesty drew all Paris in crowds;and certainly any thing more ludicrous than Poitier, as the wicked oldKing Danaus, with his fifty daughters, it is impossible to imagine. 

The piece was the broadest and most grotesque quiz of the "grand genreclassique et héroïque, " and was almost the first of an order ofentertainments which have gone on increasing in favor up to the presentday of universally triumphant parody and burlesque, by no means aslaughable and by no means as unobjectionable. Indeed, farcical to thebroadest point as was that mythological travesty of "The Danaïdes, " itwas the essence of decency and propriety compared with "La grandeDuchesse, " "La belle Hélène, " "Orphée aux Enfers, " "La Biche au Bois, ""Le petit Faust, " and all the vile succession of indecencies andimmoralities that the female good society of England in these latteryears has delighted in witnessing, without the help of the mask whichenabled their great-grandmothers to sit out the plays of Wycherley, Congreve, and Farquhar, chaste and decorous in their crude coarsenesscompared with the French operatic burlesques of the present day. 

But by far the most amusing piece in which I recollect seeing Poitier, was one in which he acted with the equally celebrated Brunet, and inwhich they both represented English _women_--"Les Anglaises pour Rire. "

The Continent was then just beginning to make acquaintance with thetraveling English, to whom the downfall of Bonaparte had opened thegates of Europe, and who then began, as they have since continued, inever-increasing numbers, to carry amazement and amusement from theshores of the Channel to those of the Mediterranean, by their wealth, insolence, ignorance, and cleanliness. 

"Les Anglaises pour Rire" was a caricature (if such a thing werepossible) of the English female traveler of that period. Coal-scuttlepoke bonnets, short and scanty skirts, huge splay feet arrayed inindescribable shoes and boots, short-waisted tight-fitting spencers, colors which not only swore at each other, but caused all beholders toswear at them--these were the outward and visible signs of the Britishfair of that day. To these were added, in this representation of them bythese French appreciators of their attractions, a mode of speech inwhich the most ludicrous French, in the most barbarous accent, wasuttered in alternate bursts of loud abruptness and languishing drawl. Sudden, grotesque playfulness was succeeded by equally sudden andgrotesque bashfulness; now an eager intrepidity of wild enthusiasm, defying all decorum, and then a sour, severe reserve, full of angry andterrified suspicion of imaginary improprieties. Tittering shyness, allgiggle-goggle and blush; stony and stolid stupidity, impenetrable to aray of perception; awkward, angular postures and gestures, and jerkingsaltatory motions; Brobdingnag strides and straddles, and kittenishfrolics and friskings; sharp, shrill little whinnying squeals andsqueaks, followed by lengthened, sepulchral "O-h's"--all formed togethersuch an irresistibly ludicrous picture as made "Les Anglaises pour Rire"of Poitier and Brunet one of the most comical pieces of acting I haveseen in all my life. 

Mrs. Rowden's establishment in Hans Place had been famous for occasionaldramatic representations by the pupils; and though she had become in herParis days what in the religious jargon of that day was called serious, or even methodistical, she winked at, if she did not absolutelyencourage, sundry attempts of a similar sort which her Paris pupils gotup. 

Once it was a vaudeville composed expressly in honor of her birthday bythe French master, in which I had to sing, with reference to her, thefollowing touching tribute, to a well-known vaudeville tune:

 "C'est une mère! Qui a les premiers droits sur nos coeurs? Qui partage, d'une ardeur sincère, Et nos plaisirs et nos douleurs? C'est une mère!"

I suppose this trumpery was stamped upon my brain by the infinitedifficulty I had in delivering it gracefully, with all the point and allthe pathos the author assured me it contained, at Mrs. Rowden, surrounded by her friends and guests, and not suggesting to me theremotest idea of _my_ mother or any body else's mother. 

After this we got up Madame de Genlis' little piece of "L' IsleHeureuse, " in which I acted the accomplished and conceited princess whois so judiciously rejected by the wise and ancient men of the island, inspite of the several foreign tongues she speaks fluently, in favor ofthe tender-hearted young lady who, in defiance of all sound systems ofpolitical and social economy, always walks about attended by the poor ofthe island in a body, to whom she distributes food and clothes in aperpetual stream of charity, and whose prayers and blessings lift hervery properly to the throne, while the other young woman is left talkingto all the ambassadors in all their different languages at once. 

Our next dramatic attempt came to a disastrous and premature end. I donot know who suggested to us the witty and clever little play of"Roxelane;" the versification of the piece is extremely easy andgraceful, and the preponderance of female characters and convenientTurkish costume, of turbans and caftans, and loose voluminous trousers, had appeared to us to combine various advantages for our purpose. Mademoiselle Descuillès had consented to fill the part of Solyman, themagnificent and charming Sultan, and I was to be the saucy Frenchheroine, "dont le nez en l'air semble narguer l'amour, " the _sémillante_Roxelane. We had already made good progress in the only difficulty oursimple appreciation of matters dramatic presented to our imagination, the committing the words of our parts to memory, when Mrs. Rowden, fromwhom all our preparations on such occasions were kept sacredly secret, lighted upon the copy of the play, with all the MS. Marks and directionsfor our better guidance in the performance; and great were ourconsternation, dismay, and disappointment when, with the offendingpamphlet in her hand, she appeared in our midst and indignantly forbadethe representation of any such piece, after the following ejaculatoryfashion, and with an accent difficult to express by written signs: "May, commang! may_de_mosels, je suis atonnay! May! commang! May_de_moselDescuillès, je suis surprise! Kesse ke say! vous per_ma_ttaymay_de_mosels être lay filles d'ung seraglio! je ne vou pau! je vousdefang! je suis biang atonnay!" And so she departed, with our prompter'scopy, leaving us rather surprised, ourselves, at the unsuspected horrorwe had been about to perpetrate, and Mademoiselle Descuillès shruggingher shoulders and smiling, and not probably quite convinced of thecriminality of a piece of which the heroine, a pretty Frenchwoman, revolutionizes the Ottoman Empire by inducing her Mohammedan lover todismiss his harem and confine his affections to her, whom he is supposedto marry after the most orthodox fashion possible in those parts. 

Our dramatic ardor was considerably damped by this event, and when nextit revived our choice could not be accused of levity. Our aim wasinfinitely more ambitious, and our task more arduous. Racine's"Andromaque" was selected for our next essay in acting, and was, Isuppose, pronounced unobjectionable by the higher authorities. Here, however, our mainstay and support, Mademoiselle Descuillès, interposed avery peculiar difficulty. She had very good-naturedly learned the partof Solyman, in the other piece, for us, and whether she resented theuseless trouble she had had on that occasion, or disliked that ofcommitting several hundred of Racine's majestic verses to memory, I knownot; but she declared that she would only act the part of Pyrrhus, whichwe wished her to fill, if we would read it aloud to her till she knewit, while she worked at her needle. Of course we had to accept anycondition she chose to impose upon us, and so we all took it by turns, whenever we saw her industrious fingers flying through theirnever-ending task, to seize up Racine and begin pouring her part intoher ears. She actually learned it so, and our principal difficulty afterso teaching her was to avoid mixing up the part of Pyrrhus, which we hadacquired by the same process, with every other part in the play. 

The dressing of this classical play was even more convenient than ourcontemplated Turkish costume could have been. A long white skirt drawnround the waist, a shorter one, with slits in it for armholes, drawnround the neck by way of tunic, with dark blue or scarlet Greek patternborder, and ribbon of the same color for girdle, and sandals, formed acostume that might have made Rachel or Ristori smile, but whichsatisfied all our conceptions of antique simplicity and grace; and so weplayed our play. 

Mademoiselle Descuillès was Pyrrhus; a tall blonde, with an insipid faceand good figure, Andromaque; Elizabeth P----, my admired and emulatedsuperior in all things, Oreste (not superior, however, in acting; shehad not the questionable advantage of dramatic blood in her veins); andmyself, Hermione (in the performance of which I very presently gavetoken of mine). We had an imposing audience, and were all dulyterrified, became hoarse with nervousness, swallowed raw eggs to clearour throats, and only made ourselves sick with them as well as withfright. But at length it was all over; the tragedy was ended, and I hadelectrified the audience, my companions, and, still more, myself; andso, to avert any ill effects from this general electrification, Mrs. Rowden thought it wise and well to say to me, as she bade me good-night, "Ah, my dear, I don't think your parents need ever anticipate your goingon the stage; you would make but a poor actress. " And she was rightenough. I did make but a poor actress, certainly, though that was notfor want of natural talent for the purpose, but for want of cultivatingit with due care and industry. At the time she made that comment upon myacting I felt very well convinced, and have since had good reason toknow, that my school-mistress thought my performance a threat, orpromise (I know not which to call it) of decided dramatic power, as Ibelieve it was. 

With this performance of "Andromaque, " however, all such taste, if itever existed, evaporated, and though a few years afterward the stagebecame my profession, it was the very reverse of my inclination. Iadopted the career of an actress with as strong a dislike to it as wascompatible with my exercising it at all. 

I now became acquainted with all Racine's and Corneille's plays, fromwhich we were made to commit to memory the most remarkable passages; andI have always congratulated myself upon having become familiar with allthese fine compositions before I had any knowledge whatever ofShakespeare. Acquaintance with his works might, and I suppose certainlywould, have impaired my relish for the great French dramatists, whosetragedies, noble and pathetic in spite of the stiff formality of theirconstruction, the bald rigidity of their adherence to the classicunities, and the artificial monotony of the French heroic rhymed verse, would have failed to receive their due appreciation from a taste andimagination already familiar with the glorious freedom of Shakespeare'sgenius. As it was, I learned to delight extremely in the dignifiedpathos and stately tragic power of Racine and Corneille, in thetenderness, refinement, and majestic vigorous simplicity of their finecreations, and possessed a treasure of intellectual enjoyment in theirplays before opening the first page of that wonderful volume whichcontains at once the history of human nature and human existence. 

After I had been about a year and a half at school, Mrs. Rowden left herhouse in the Rue d'Angoulême, and moved to a much finer one, at the verytop of the Champs Élysées, a large, substantial stone mansion, withinlofty iron gates and high walls of inclosure. It was the last house onthe left-hand side within the Barrière de l'Étoile, and stood on aslight eminence and back from the Avenue des Champs Élysées by somehundred yards. For many years after I had left school, on my repeatedvisits to Paris, the old stone house bore on its gray front the large"Institution de jeunes Demoiselles, " which betokened the unchanged tenorof its existence. But the rising tide of improvement has at length sweptit away, and modern Paris has rolled over it, and its place remembers itno more. It was a fine old house, roomy, airy, bright, sunny, cheerful, with large apartments and a capital play-ground, formed by thatold-fashioned device, a quincunx of linden trees, under whose shade wecarried on very Amazonian exercises, fighting having become one of ourfavorite recreations. 

This house was said to have belonged to Robespierre at one time, and avery large and deep well in one corner of the play-ground was investedwith a horrid interest in our imaginations by tales of _noyades_ on asmall scale supposed to have been perpetrated in its depths by hisorders. This charm of terror was, I think, rather a gratuitous additionto the attractions of this uncommonly fine well; but undoubtedly itadded much to the fascination of one of our favorite amusements, whichwas throwing into it the heaviest stones we could lift, and rushing tothe farthest end of the play-ground, which we sometimes reached beforethe resounding _bumps_ from side to side ended in a sullen splash intothe water at the bottom. With our removal to the Barrière de l'Étoile, the direction of our walks altered, and our visits to the LuxembourgGardens and the Parc Monceaux were exchanged for expeditions to the Boisde Boulogne, then how different from the charming pleasure-ground ofParis which it became under the reforming taste and judgment of LouisNapoleon!

Between the back of our play-ground and the village suburb of Chaillotscarcely a decent street or even house then existed; there was nosplendid Avenue de l'Impératrice, with bright villas standing on vividcarpets of flowers and turf. Our way to the "wood" was along thedreariest of dusty high-roads, bordered with mean houses anddisreputable-looking _estaminets_; and the Bois de Boulogne itself, thenundivided from Paris by the fortifications which subsequently encircledthe city, was a dismal network of sandy avenues and _carrefours_, traversed in every direction by straight, narrow, gloomy paths, a drearywilderness of low thickets and tangled copsewood. 

I have said that I never returned home during my three years' schoollife in Paris; but portions of my holidays were spent with a Frenchfamily, kind friends of my parents, who received me as an _enfant de lamaison_ among them. They belonged to the _petite bourgeoisie_ of Paris. Mr. A---- had been in some business, I believe, but when I visited himhe was living as a small _rentier_, in a pretty little house on the mainroad from Paris to Versailles. 

It was just such a residence as Balzac describes with such minute finishin his scenes of Parisian and provincial life: a sunny little_maisonnette_, with green _jalousies_, a row of fine linden treesclipped into arches in front of it, and behind, the trim garden with itswonderfully productive dwarf _espaliers_, full of delicious pears andReine Claudes (that queen of amber-tinted, crimson-freckled greengages), its apricots, as fragrant as flowers, and its glorious, spice-breathingcarnations. 

The mode of life and manners of these worthy people were not refined orelegant, but essentially hospitable and kind; and I enjoyed the sunnyfreedom of my holiday visits to them extremely. The marriage of theirdaughter opened to me a second Parisian home of the same class, but withgreater pretensions to social advantages, derived from the great city inthe center of which it stood. 

I was present at the celebration of Caroline A----'s marriage to one ofthe head-masters of a first-class boarding-school for boys, of which hesubsequently became the principal director. It was in the Rue de Clichy, and thither the bride departed, after a jolly, rollicking, noisywedding, beginning with the religious solemnization at church andprocession to the _mairie_ for due sanction of the civil authorities, and ending with a bountiful, merry, early afternoon dinner, and the notover-refined ancient custom of the distribution of the _jarretière de lamariée_. The jarretière was a white satin ribbon, tied at a discreetheight above the bride's ankle, and removed thence by the best man andcut into pieces, for which an animated scramble took place among themale guests, each one who obtained a piece of the white favorimmediately fastening it in his button-hole. Doubtless, in earlier andcoarser times, it was the bride's real garter that was thus distributed, and our elegant white and silver rosettes are the modern representativesof this primitive wedding "favor, " which is a relic of ages when both inEngland and in France usages obtained at the noblest marriages whichwould be tolerated by no class in either country now;

 "When bluff King Hal the stocking threw, And Katharine's hand the curtain drew. "

I have a distinct recollection of the merry uproar caused by thisceremony, and of the sad silence that fell upon the little sunnydwelling when the new-married pair and all the guests had returned toParis, and I helped poor Madame A---- and her old _cuisinière_ and_femme de charge_, both with tearful eyes, to replace the yellow_velours d'Utrecht_ furniture in its accustomed position on the shiny_parquet_ of the best _salon_, with the slippery little bits offoot-rugs before the empty _bergères_ and _canapés_. 

My holidays after this time were spent with M. And Madame R----, inwhose society I remember frequently seeing a literary man of the name ofPélissier, a clever writer, a most amusing talker, and an admirablesinger of Béranger's songs. 

Another visitor of their house was M. Rio, the eminent member of theFrench ultramontane party, the friend of Lammenais, Lacordaire, Montalembert, the La Ferronays, the hero of the Jeune Vendée, thelearned and devout historian of Christian art. I think my friend M. R---- was a Breton by birth, and that was probably the tie betweenhimself and his remarkable Vendéan friend, whose tall, commandingfigure, dark complexion, and powerful black eyes gave him more theappearance of a Neapolitan or Spaniard than of a native of the coast ofancient Armorica. M. Rio was then a young man, and probably in Paris forthe first time, at the beginning of the literary career of which he hasfurnished so interesting a sketch in the autobiographical volumes whichform the conclusion of his "Histoire de l'Art Chrétien. " Five and twentyyears later, while passing my second winter in Rome, I heard of M. Rio'sarrival there, and of the unbounded satisfaction he expressed at findinghimself in the one place where no restless wheels beat time to, and nopanting chimneys breathed forth the smoke of the vast, multiformindustry of the nineteenth century; where the sacred stillness ofunprogressive conservatism yet prevailed undisturbed. Gas had, indeed, been introduced in the English quarter; but M. Rio could shut his eyeswhen he drove through that, and there still remained darkness enoughelsewhere for those who loved it better than light. 

During one of my holiday visits to M. R----, a ball was given at hisyoung gentlemen's school, to which I was taken by him and his wife. Itwas my very first ball, and I have a vivid recollection of my whitemuslin frock and magnificent _ponceau_ sash. At this festival I wasintroduced to a lad, with whom I was destined to be much more intimatelyacquainted in after years as one of the best amateur actors I ever saw, and who married one of the most charming and distinguished women ofEuropean society, Pauline de la Ferronays, whose married name hasobtained wide celebrity as that of the authoress of "Le Récit d'uneSoeur. "

I remained in Paris till I was between fifteen and sixteen years old, and then it was determined that I should return home. The departure ofElizabeth P---- had left me without competitor in my studies among mycompanions, and I was at an age to be better at home than at any school. 

My father came to fetch me, and the only adventure I met with on the wayback was losing my bonnet, blown from my head into the sea, on board thepacket, which obliged me to purchase one as soon as I reached London;and having no discreeter guide of my proceedings, I so far imposed uponmy father's masculine ignorance in such matters as to make him buy forme a full-sized Leghorn flat, under the circumference of which enormous_sombrero_ I seated myself by him on the outside of the Weybridge coach, and amazed the gaping population of each successive village we passedthrough with the vast dimensions of the thatch I had put on my head. 

Weybridge was not then reached by train in half an hour from London; itwas two or three hours' coach distance: a rural, ratherdeserted-looking, and most picturesque village, with the desolate domainof Portmore Park, its mansion falling to ruin, on one side of it, and onthe other the empty house and fine park of Oatlands, the formerresidence of the Duke of York. 

The straggling little village lay on the edge of a wild heath and commoncountry that stretches to Guildford and Godalming and all through thatpart of Surrey to Tunbridge Wells, Brighton, and the Sussex coast--aregion of light, sandy soil, hiding its agricultural poverty under aroyal mantle of golden gorse and purple heather, and with large tractsof blue aromatic pine wood and one or two points of really fine scenery, where the wild moorland rolls itself up into ridges and rises to crestsof considerable height, which command extensive and beautiful views:such as the one from the summit of Saint George's Hill, near Weybridge, and the top of Blackdown, the noble site of Tennyson's fine house, whence, over miles of wild wood and common, the eye sweeps to the downsabove the Sussex cliffs and the glint of the narrow seas. 

We had left London in the afternoon, and did not reach Weybridge untilafter dark. I had been tormented the whole way down by a nervous fearthat I should not know my mother's face again; an absence of threeyears, of course, could not justify such an apprehension, but it hadcompletely taken possession of my imagination and was causing me muchdistress, when, as the coach stopped in the dark at the village inn, Iheard the words, "Is there any one here for Mrs. Kemble?" uttered in avoice which I knew so well, that I sprang, hat and all, into my mother'sarms, and effectually got rid of my fear that I should not know her. 

Her rural yearnings had now carried her beyond her suburban refuge atCraven Hill, and she was infinitely happy, in her small cottagehabitation, on the outskirts of Weybridge and the edge of itspicturesque common. Tiny, indeed, it was, and but for her admirablepower of contrivance could hardly have held us with any comfort; but shedelighted in it, and so did we all except my father, who, like most men, had no real taste for the country; the men who appear to themselves andothers to like it confounding their love for hunting and shooting withthat of the necessary field of their sports. Anglers seem to me to bethe only sportsmen who really have a taste for and love of nature aswell as for fishy water. At any rate, the silent, solitary, andcomparatively still character of their pursuit enables them to study andappreciate beauty of scenery more than the violent exercise andexcitement of fox-hunting, whatever may be said in favor of thepicturesque influences of beating preserves and wading throughturnip-fields with keepers and companions more or less congenial. 

Of deer-stalking and grouse-shooting I do not speak; a man who does notbecome enthusiastic in his admiration of wild scenery while followingthese sports must have but half the use of his eyes. 

Perhaps it was hardly fair to expect my father to relish extremely aresidence where he was as nearly as possible too high and too wide, toolong and too large, for every room in the house. He used to come down onSaturday and stay till Monday morning, but the rest of the week he spentat what was then our home in London, No. 5 Soho Square; it was ahandsome, comfortable, roomy house, and has now, I think, been convertedinto a hospital. 

The little cottage at Weybridge was covered at the back with a vine, which bore with the utmost luxuriance a small, black, sweet-water grape, from which, I remember, one year my mother determined to make wine; adireful experiment, which absorbed our whole harvest of good littlefruit, filled every room in the house with unutterable messes, producedmuch fermentation of temper as well as wine, and ended in a liquidproduct of such superlative nastiness, that to drink it defied ourutmost efforts of obedience and my mother's own resolute courage; so itwas with acclamations of execration made libations of--to the infernalgods, I should think--and no future vintage was ever tried, to our greatjoy. 

The little plot of lawn on which our cottage stood was backed by thewild purple swell of the common, and that was crested by a fine firwood, a beautiful rambling and scrambling ground, full of picturesqueand romantic associations with all the wild and fanciful mentalexistences which I was then beginning to enjoy. And even as I glidethrough it now, on the railroad that has laid its still depths open tothe sun's glare and scared its silence with the eldritch snort andshriek of the iron team, I have visions of Undine and Sintram, theElves, the little dog Stromian, the Wood-Witch, and all the world ofsupernatural beauty and terror which then peopled its recesses for me, under the influence of the German literature that I was becomingacquainted with through the medium of French and English translations, and that was carrying me on its tide of powerful enchantment far awayfrom the stately French classics of my school studies. 

Besides our unusual privilege of grape-growing in the open air, ourlittle estate boasted a magnificent beurré pear tree, a small arbor ofintertwined and peculiarly fine filbert and cobnut trees, and somecapital greengage and apple trees; among the latter, a remarkably largeand productive Ribstone pippin. So that in the spring the little plot ofland was flowerful, and in the autumn fruitful, and we cordiallyindorsed my mother's preference for it to the London house in SohoSquare. 

The sort of orchard which contained all these objects of our regard wasat the back of the house; in front of it, however, the chief peculiarity(which was by no means a beauty) of the place was displayed. 

This was an extraordinary mound or hillock of sand, about half an acrein circumference, which stood at a distance of some hundred yardsimmediately in front of the cottage, and in the middle of what ought tohave been a flower garden, if this uncouth protuberance had noteffectually prevented the formation of any such ornamental setting toour house. My mother's repeated applications to our landlord (thevillage baker) to remove or allow her to remove this unsightlyencumbrance were unavailing. He thought he might have future use for thesand, and he knew he had no other present place of deposit for it; andthere it remained, defying all my mother's ingenuity and love of beautyto convert it into any thing useful or ornamental, or other than a crueleye-sore and disfigurement to our small domain. 

At length she hit upon a device for abating her nuisance, and set aboutexecuting it as follows. She had the sand dug out of the interior of themound and added to its exterior, which she had graded and smoothed andleveled and turfed so as to resemble the glacis of a square bastion orcasemate, or other steep, smooth-sided earth-work in a fortification. Itwas, I suppose, about twenty feet high, and sloped at too steep an anglefor us to scale or descend it; a good footpath ran round the top, accessible from the entrance of the sand-heap, the interior walls ofwhich she turfed (to speak Irish) with heather, and the ground or floorof this curious inclosure she planted with small clumps of evergreenshrubs, leaving a broad walk through the middle of it to the house door. A more curious piece of domestic fortification never adorned a cottagegarden. It looked like a bit of Robinson Crusoe's castle--perhaps evenmore like a portion of some deserted fortress. It challenged theastonishment of all our visitors, whose invariable demand was, "What isthat curious place in the garden?" "The mound, " was the reply; and themound was a delightful play-ground for us, and did infinite credit to mymother's powers of contrivance. Forty years and more elapsed between myfirst acquaintance with Weybridge and my last visit there. The Duke ofYork's house at Oatlands, afterwards inhabited by my friends Lord andLady Ellesmere, had become a country hotel, pleasant to all its visitorsbut those who, like myself, saw ghosts in its rooms and on its gravelwalks; its lovely park, a nest of "villas, " made into a suburb of Londonby the railroads that intersect in all directions the wild moorlandtwenty miles from the city, which looked, when I first knew it, as if itmight be a hundred. 

I read and spent a night at the Oatlands Hotel, and walked, before I didso, to my mother's old cottage. The tiny house had had some smalladditions, and looked new and neat and well cared for. The mound, however, still stood its ground, and had relapsed into something of itsold savage condition; it would have warranted a theory of Mr. Oldbuck'sas to its possible former purposes and origin. I looked at its crumbledand irregular wall, from which the turf had peeled or been washed away;at the tangled growth of grasses and weeds round the top, crenellatedwith many a breach and gap; and the hollow, now choked up with luxuriantevergreens that overtopped the inclosure and forbade entrance to it, andthought of my mother's work and my girlish play there, and was glad tosee her old sand-heap was still standing, though her planting had, withthe blessing of time, made it impenetrable to me. 

Our cottage was the last decent dwelling on that side of the village;between ourselves and the heath and pine wood there was one miserableshanty, worthy of the poorest potato patch in Ireland. It was inhabitedby a ragged ruffian of the name of E----, whose small domain wesometimes saw undergoing arable processes by the joint labor of his sonand heir, a ragged ruffian some sizes smaller than himself, and of ahalf-starved jackass, harnessed together to the plow he was holding;occasionally the team was composed of the quadruped and a tattered andfierce-looking female biped, a more terrible object than even the manand boy and beast whose labors she shared. 

On the other side our nearest neighbors, separated from us by the commonand its boundary road, were a family of the name of ----, between whosecharming garden and pretty residence and our house a path was worn by aconstant interchange of friendly intercourse. 

I followed no regular studies whatever during our summer at Weybridge. We lived chiefly in the open air, on the heath, in the beautiful woodabove the meadows of Brooklands, and in the neglected, picturesqueinclosure of Portmore Park, whose tenantless, half-ruined mansion, andnoble cedars, with the lovely windings of the river Wey in front, madeit a place an artist would have delighted to spend his hours in. 

We haunted it constantly for another purpose. My mother had a perfectpassion for fishing, and would spend whole days by the river, pursuingher favorite sport. We generally all accompanied her, carrying basketsand tackle and bait, kettles and camp stools, and looking very much likea family of gypsies on the tramp. We were each of us armed with a rod, and were more or less interested in the sport. We often started after anearly breakfast, and, taking our luncheon with us, remained the wholeday long absorbed in our quiet occupation. 

My mother was perfectly unobservant of all rules of angling, in herindiscriminate enthusiasm, and "took to the water" whether the windblew, the sun shone, or the rain fell; fishing--under the mostpropitious or unpropitious circumstances--was not, indeed, necessarily, catching fish, but still, fishing; and she was almost equally happywhether she did or did not catch any thing. I have known her remain allday in patient expectation of the "glorious nibble, " stand throughsuccessive showers, with her clothes between whiles drying on her back, and only reluctantly leave the water's edge when it was literally toodark to see her float. 

Although we all fished, I was the only member of the family whoinherited my mother's passion for it, and it only developed much laterin me, for at this time I often preferred taking a book under the treesby the river-side, to throwing a line; but towards the middle of my lifeI became a fanatical fisherwoman, and was obliged to limit my waste oftime to one day in the week, spent on the Lenox lakes, or I shouldinfallibly have wandered thither and dreamed away my hours on theircharming shores or smooth expanse daily. 

I have often wondered that both my mother and myself (persons ofexceptional impatience of disposition and irritable excitability oftemperament) should have taken such delight in so still and monotonousan occupation, especially to the point of spending whole days in anunsuccessful pursuit of it. The fact is that the excitement of hope, keeping the attention constantly alive, is the secret of the charm ofthis strong fascination, infinitely more than even the exercise ofsuccessful skill. And this element of prolonged and at the same timeintense expectation, combined with the peculiarly soothing nature of theexternal objects which surround the angler, forms at once a powerfulstimulus and a sedative especially grateful in their double action uponexcitable organizations. 

CHAPTER V. 

I have said that we all more or less joined in my mother's fishing maniaat Weybridge; but my sister, then a girl of about eleven years, neverhad any liking for it, which she attributed to the fact that my motheroften employed her to bait the hook for her. My sister's "tender-hefted"nature was horribly disgusted and pained by this process, but my ownbelief is that had she inherited the propensity to catch fish, even thatwould not have destroyed it in her. I am not myself a cruel orhardhearted woman (though I have the hunter's passion very strongly), and invariably baited my own hook, in spite of the disgust and horror Iexperienced at the wretched twining of the miserable worms round myfingers, and springing of the poor little live bait with its backpierced with a hook. But I have never allowed any one to do this officefor me, because it seemed to me that to inflict such a task on any one, because it was revolting to me, was not fair or sportsmanlike; and so Iwent on torturing my own bait and myself, too eagerly devoted to thesport to refrain from it, in spite of the price I condemned myself topay for it. Moreover, if I have ever had female companions on my fishingexcursions, I have invariably done this service for them, thinking theprocess too horrid for them to endure; and have often thought that if Iwere a man, nothing could induce me to marry a woman whom I had seenbait her own hook with any thing more sensitive than paste. 

I have said that I followed no systematic studies after I left school;but from that time began for me an epoch of indiscriminate, omnivorousreading, which lasted until I went upon the stage, when all my ownoccupations were necessarily given up for the exercise of my profession. 

At this time my chief delight was in such German literature astranslations enabled me to become acquainted with. La Motte Fouqué, Tieck, Wieland's "Oberon, " Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister, " were my principalstudies; soon to be followed by the sort of foretaste of Jean PaulRichter that Mr. Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" gave his readers; bothmatter and manner in that remarkable work bearing far more resemblanceto the great German Incomprehensible than to any thing in the Englishlanguage, certainly not excepting Mr. Carlyle's own masterly articles inthe _Edinburgh Review_ on Burns, Elliot the Corn-Law Rhymer, etc. Besides reading every book that came within my reach, I now commencedthe still more objectionable practice of scribbling verses without stintor stay; some, I suppose, in very bad Italian, and some, I am sure, inmost indifferent English; but the necessity was on me, and perhaps aneruption of such rubbish was a safer process than keeping it in themental system might have proved; and in the meantime this intellectualeffervescence added immensely to the pleasure of my country life, and mylong, rambling walks in that wild, beautiful neighborhood. 

I remember at this moment, by the by, a curious companionship we had inthose walks. A fine, big Newfoundland dog and small terrier weregenerally of the party; and, nothing daunted by their presence, anextremely tame and affectionate cat, who was a member of the family, invariably joined the procession, and would accompany us in our longestwalks, trotting demurely along by herself, a little apart from the rest, though evidently considering herself a member of the party. 

The dogs, fully occupied with each other, and with discursive raidsright and left of the road, and parenthetical rushes in variousdirections for their own special delectation, would sometimes, returningto us at full gallop, tumble over poor puss and roll her unceremoniouslydown in their headlong career. She never, however, turned back for this, but, recovering her feet, with her back arched all but in two, and everyhair of her tail standing on end with insulted dignity, vented in aseries of spittings and swearings her opinion of dogs in general andthose dogs in particular, and then resumed her own decently demure gaitand deportment; thanking Heaven, I have no doubt, in her cat's soul, that she was not that disgustingly violent and ill-mannered beast--adog. 

My brothers shared with us our fishing excursions and these walks, whenat home from school; besides, I was promoted to their noblercompanionship by occasionally acting as long-stop or short-stop (stop ofsome sort was undoubtedly my title) in insufficiently manned or boyedgames of cricket: once, while nervously discharging this onerous duty, Ireceived a blow on my instep from a cricket ball which I did not stop, that seemed to me a severe price for the honor of sharing my brothers'manly pastimes. A sport of theirs in which I joined with moresatisfaction was pistol-shooting at a mark: I had not a quick eye, but avery steady hand, so that with a deliberate aim I contrived to hit themark pretty frequently. I liked this quiet exercise of skill better thanthat dreadful watching and catching of cannon-balls at cricket; thoughthe noise of the discharge of fire-arms was always rather trying to me, and I especially resented my pistol missing fire when I had braced mycourage for the report. My brother John at this time possessed a rifleand a fowling-piece, with the use of both of which he endeavored tofamiliarize me; but the rifle I found insupportably heavy, and as forthe other gun, it kicked so unmercifully, in consequence, I suppose, ofmy not holding it hard enough against my shoulder the first time I firedit, that I declined all further experiments with it, and reverted to thepretty little lady-like pocket pistols, which were the only fire-arms Iever used until one fine day, some years later, when I was promoted tothe honor of firing an American cannon on the practicing ground of theyoung gentlemen cadets of West Point. 

While we retained our little cottage at Weybridge, the house ofOatlands, the former residence of the Duke of York, and burial-place ofthe duchess's favorite dogs, whose cemetery was one of the "lions" ofthe garden, was purchased by a Mr. ----, a young gentleman of very largefortune, who came down there and enlivened the neighborhood occasionallywith his sporting prowesses, which consisted in walking out, attired inthe very height of Bond Street dandyism, with two attendant gamekeepers, one of whom carried and handed him his gun when he wished to fire it, the other receiving it from him after it had been discharged. This veryluxurious mode of following his sport caused some sarcastic comment inthe village. 

This gentleman did not long retain possession of Oatlands, and it waslet to the Earl of Ellesmere, then Lord Francis Egerton, with whom andLady Francis we became acquainted soon after their taking it; anacquaintance which on my part grew into a strong and affectionate regardfor both of them. They were excellent and highly accomplished, and, whenfirst I knew them, two of the handsomest and most distinguished-lookingpersons I have ever seen. 

Our happy Weybridge summers, which succeeded each other for three years, had but one incident of any importance for me--my catching thesmall-pox, which I had very severely. A slight eruption from which mysister suffered was at first pronounced by our village Æsculapius to bechicken-pox, but presently assumed the more serious aspect of varioloid. My sister, like the rest of us, had been carefully vaccinated; but thefact was then by no means so generally understood as it now is, that thepower of the vaccine dies out of the system by degrees, and requiresrenewing to insure safety. My mother, having lost her faith invaccination, thought that a natural attack of varioloid was the bestpreservative from small-pox, and my sister having had her seasoning somildly and without any bad result but a small scar on her long nose, Iwas sent for from London, where I was, with the hope that I should takethe same light form of the malady from her; but the difference of ourage and constitution was not taken into consideration, and I caught thedisease, indeed, but as nearly as possible died of it, and have remaineddisfigured by it all my life. 

I was but little over sixteen, and had returned from school a verypretty-looking girl, with fine eyes, teeth, and hair, a clear, vividcomplexion, and rather good features. The small-pox did not affect mythree advantages first named, but, besides marking my face veryperceptibly, it rendered my complexion thick and muddy and my featuresheavy and coarse, leaving me so moderate a share of good looks as quiteto warrant my mother's satisfaction in saying, when I went on the stage, "Well, my dear, they can't say we have brought you out to exhibit yourbeauty. " Plain I certainly was, but I by no means always looked so; andso great was the variation in my appearance at different times, that mycomical old friend, Mrs. Fitzhugh, once exclaimed, "Fanny Kemble, youare the ugliest and the handsomest woman in London!" And I am sure, if acollection were made of the numerous portraits that have been taken ofme, nobody would ever guess any two of them to be likenesses of the sameperson. 

The effect of natural small-pox on the skin and features variesextremely in different individuals, I suppose according to theirconstitution. My mother and her brother had the disease at the sametime, and with extreme violence; he retained his beautiful brightcomplexion and smooth skin and handsome features; my mother was deeplypitted all over her face, though the fine outline of her nose and mouthwas not injured in the slightest degree; while with me, the processappeared to be one of general thickening or blurring, both of form andcolor. Terrified by this result of her unfortunate experiment, my poormother had my brothers immediately vaccinated, and thus saved them fromthe infection which they could hardly have escaped, and preserved thebeauty of my youngest brother, which then and for several years afterwas very remarkable. 

Mrs. F---- is among the most vivid memories of my girlish days. She andher husband were kind and intimate friends of my father and mother. Hewas a most amiable and genial Irish gentleman, with considerableproperty in Ireland and Suffolk, and a fine house in Portland Place, andhad married his cousin, a very handsome, clever, and eccentric woman. Iremember she always wore a bracelet of his hair, on the massive clasp ofwhich were engraved the words, "Stesso sangue, stessa sorte. " I alsoremember, as a feature of sundry dinners at their house, the first golddessert service and table ornaments that I ever saw, the magnificence ofwhich made a great impression upon me; though I also remember theirbeing replaced, upon Mrs. F---- wearying of them, by a set of groundglass and dead and burnished silver, so exquisite, that the splendidgold service was pronounced infinitely less tasteful and beautiful. 

Mrs. F----'s sons were school-fellows of my eldest brother, under Dr. Malkin, the master of the grammar school of Bury St. Edmunds; and atthis time we always saw Dr. And Mrs. Malkin when they visited London, and I was indebted to the doctor for a great deal of extremely kindinterest which he took in my mental development and cultivation. 

He suggested books for my reading, and set me, as a useful exercise, totranslate Sismondi's fine historical work, "Les Républiques Italiennes, "which he wished me to abridge for publication. I was not a little proudof Dr. Malkin's notice and advice; he was my brother's school-master, anobject of respectful admiration, and a kind and condescending friend tome. 

He was a hearty, genial man, of portly person, and fine, intelligent, handsome face; active and energetic in his habits and movements, inspite of a slight lameness, which I remember he accounted for to me inthe following manner. He was very intimate with Miss O'Neil before sheleft the stage and became Lady Becher. While dancing with her in acountry-dance one evening at her house, she exclaimed, on hearing asudden sonorous twang, "Dear me! there is one of the chords of my harpsnapped. " "Indeed it is not, " replied Dr. Malkin; "it is mytendo-Achillis which has snapped. " And so it was; and from that time healways remained lame. 

Mrs. Malkin was a more uncommon person than her husband; the strength ofher character and sweetness of her disposition were alike admirable, andthe bright vivacity of her countenance and singular grace and dignity ofher person must be a pleasant memory in the minds of all who, likemyself, knew her while she was yet in the middle bloom of life. 

Dr. And Mrs. Malkin's sons were my brother's school and college mates. They were all men of ability, and good scholars, as became theirfather's sons. Sir Benjamin, the eldest, achieved eminence as a lawyer, and became an Indian judge; and the others would undoubtedly have risento distinction but for the early death that carried off Frederick andCharles, and the hesitation of speech which closed almost all publiccareers to their brother Arthur. 

He was a prominent and able contributor to the "Library of UsefulKnowledge, " and furnished a great part of the first of a wholegeneration of delightful publications, Murray's "Hand-Book" forSwitzerland. 

One of the earliest of Alpine explorers, Arthur Malkin mounted to thoseicy battlements which have since been scaled by a whole army ofbesiegers, and planted the banner of English courage and enterprise on"peaks, passes, and glaciers" which, when he first climbed the shiningsummits of the Alps, were all but _terra incognita_ to his countrymen. 

There is nothing more familiar to the traveling and reading Britishpublic nowadays than Alpine adventures and their records; but when myfriend first conquered the passes between Evolena and Zermatt (still oneof the least overrun mountain regions of Switzerland), their sublimesolitudes were awful with the mystery of unexplored loneliness. Nowprofessors climb up them, and artists slide down them, and they arephotographed with "members" straddling over their dire crevasses, orcutting capers on their scornful summits, or turning somersaults downtheir infinite precipices. The air of the high Alps was inhaled by fewEnglishmen before Arthur Malkin; one can not help thinking that now, even on the top of the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, it must have lost someof its freshness. 

I have said that all Dr. Malkin's sons were men of more than averageability; but one, who never lived to be a man, "died a most rare boy" ofabout six years, fully justifying by his extraordinary precocity andsingular endowments the tribute which his bereaved father paid hismemory in a modest and touching record of his brief and remarkableexistence. 

My Parisian education appeared, at this time, to have failed signally inthe one especial result that might have been expected from it: all myFrench dancing lessons had not given me a good deportment, nor taught meto hold myself upright. I stooped, slouched, and poked, stood with onehip up and one shoulder down, and exhibited an altogether disgracefullyungraceful carriage, which greatly afflicted my parents. In order that Imight "bear my body more seemly, " various were the methods resorted to;among others, a hideous engine of torture of the backboard species, madeof steel covered with red morocco, which consisted of a flat pieceplaced on my back, and strapped down to my waist with a belt and securedat the top by two epaulets strapped over my shoulders. From the middleof this there rose a steel rod or spine, with a steel collar whichencircled my throat and fastened behind. This, it was hoped, wouldeventually put my shoulders down and my head up, and in the meantime Ihad the appearance of a young woman walking about in a portable pillory. The ease and grace which this horrible machine was expected to impart tomy figure and movements were, however, hardly perceptible afterconsiderable endurance of torture on my part, and to my ineffable joy itwas taken off (my harness, as I used to call it; and no knight of oldever threw off his iron shell with greater satisfaction), and I wasplaced under the tuition of a sergeant of the Royal Foot Guards, whoundertook to make young ladies carry themselves and walk well, and notexactly like grenadiers either. This warrior having duly put me througha number of elementary exercises, such as we see the awkward squads onparade grounds daily drilled in, took leave of me with the verdict, thatI "was fit to march before the Duke of York, " then commander of theforces; and, thanks to his instructions, I remained endowed with a flatback, well-placed shoulders, an erect head, upright carriage, andresolute step. 

I think my education had come nearly to a standstill at this period, for, with the exception of these physical exercises, and certain hoursof piano-forte practicing and singing lessons, I was left very much tothe irregular and unsystematic reading which I selected for myself. Ihad a good contralto voice, which my mother was very desirous ofcultivating, but I think my progress was really retarded by theexcessive impatience with which her excellent ear endured myunsuccessful musical attempts. I used to practice in her sitting-room, and I think I sang out of tune and played false chords oftener, fromsheer apprehension of her agonized exclamations, than I should have doneunder the supervision of a less sensitively organized person. I remembermy sister's voice and musical acquirements first becoming remarkable atthis time, and giving promise of her future artistic excellence. Irecollect a ballad from the Mexican opera by Bishop, called Cortex, "Oh, there's a Mountain Palm, " which she sang with a clear, high, sweet, truelittle voice and touching expression, full of pathos, in which I used totake great delight. 

The nervous terror which I experienced when singing or playing before mymother was carried to a climax when I was occasionally called upon toaccompany the vocal performances of our friendly acquaintance, JamesSmith (one of the authors of the "Rejected Addresses"). He was famousfor his humorous songs and his own capital rendering of them, but theanguish I endured in accompanying him made those comical performances ofhis absolutely tragical to me; the more so that he had a lion-like castof countenance, with square jaws and rather staring eyes. But perhaps heappeared so stern-visaged only to me; while he sang everybody laughed, but I perspired coldly and felt ready to cry, and so have but alugubrious impression of some of the most amusing productions of thatdescription, heard to the very best advantage (if I could have listenedto them at all) as executed by their author. 

Among our most intimate friends at this time were my cousin Horace Twissand his wife. I have been reminded of him in speaking of James Smith, because he had a good deal of the same kind of humor, not unmixed with avein of sentiment, and I remember his songs, which he sang with greatspirit and expression, with the more pleasure that he never required meto accompany them. One New-Year's Eve that he spent with us, just beforegoing away he sang charmingly some lines he had composed in the courseof the evening, the graceful turn of which, as well as the feeling withwhich he sang them, were worthy of Moore. I remember only the burden:

 "Oh, come! one genial hour improve, And fill one measure duly; A health to those we truly love, And those who love us truly!"

And this stanza:

 "To-day has waved its parting wings, To join the days before it; And as for what the morning brings, The morning's mist hangs o'er it. "

It was delightful to hear him and my mother talk together, and theirdisputes, though frequent, seemed generally extremely amicable, and asdiverting to themselves as to us. On one occasion he ended theirdiscussion (as to whether some lady of their acquaintance had or had notgone somewhere) by a vehement declaration which passed into a proverb inour house: "Yes, yes, she did; for a woman will go anywhere, at anytime, with anybody, to see any thing--especially in a gig. " Those weredays in which a gig was a vehicle the existence of which was not onlyrecognized in civilized society, but supposed to confer a diploma of"gentility" upon its possessor. 

Horace Twiss was one of the readiest and most amusing talkers in theworld, and when he began to make his way in London society, which heeventually did very successfully, ill-natured persons considered hisfirst step in the right direction to have been a repartee made in thecrush-room of the opera, while standing close to Lady L----, who waswaiting for her carriage. A man he was with saying, "Look at that fatLady L----; isn't she like a great white cabbage?" "Yes, " answeredHorace, in a discreetly loud tone, "she _is_ like one--all heart, Ibelieve. " The white-heart cabbage turned affably to the risingbarrister, begged him to see her to her carriage, and gave him the_entrée_ of H---- House. Lord Clarendon subsequently put him inParliament for his borough of Wootton-Basset, and for a short time heformed part of the ministry, holding one of the under-secretaryships. Hewas clever, amiable, and good-tempered, and had every qualification forsuccess in society. 

He had married a Miss Searle, one of his mother's pupils at thefashionable Bath boarding-school, the living image of Scott's Fenella, the smallest woman that I have ever seen, with fairy feet and tinyhands, the extraordinary power of which was like that of a steel talon. On one occasion, when Horace Twiss happened to mention that his brightlittle spark of a wife sat working in his library by him, while he wasengaged with his law or business papers, my mother suggested that herconversation must disturb him. "Oh, she doesn't talk, " said he, "but Ilike to hear the scissors fall, " a pretty conjugal reply, that left apleasant image in my mind. His only child by her, a daughter, marriedfirst Mr. Bacon, then editor of the _Times_, and, after his death, JohnDelane, who succeeded him in that office and still holds it; so that herfather said "she took the _Times_ and Supplement. "

About this time I began to be aware of the ominous distresses anddisturbances connected with the affairs of the theater, that were tocontinue and increase until the miserable subject became literally thesauce to our daily bread; embittering my father's life with incessantcare and harassing vexation; and of the haunting apprehension of thatruin which threatened us for years, and which his most strenuous effortsonly delayed, without averting it. 

The proprietors were engaged in a lawsuit with each other, and finallyone of them threw the whole concern into chancery; and for years thatdreary chancery suit seemed to envelop us in an atmosphere ofpalpitating suspense or stagnant uncertainty, and to enter as aninevitable element into every hope, fear, expectation, resolution, event, or action of our lives. 

How unutterably heart-sick I became of the very sound of its name, andhow well I remember the expression on my father's careworn face one day, as he turned back from the door, out of which he was going to his dailydrudgery at the theater, to say to my aunt, who had reproached him withthe loss of a button from his rather shabby coat, "Ah, Dall, my dear, you see it is my chancery suit!"

Lord Eldon, Sir John Leach, Lord Lyndhurst, and Lord Brougham were thesuccessive chancellors before whom the case was heard; the latter was afriend of my family, and on one occasion my father took me to the Houseof Lords to hear the proceedings. We were shown into the chancellor'sroom, where he indeed was not, but where his huge official wig wasperched upon a block; the temptation was irresistible, and for half aminute I had the awful and ponderous periwig on my pate. 

While we were still living in Soho Square our house was robbed; orrather, my father's writing-desk was broken open, and sixty sovereignstaken from it--a sum that he could very hardly spare. He had been at thetheater, acting, and my mother had spent the evening at some friend'shouse, and the next morning great was the consternation of the family onfinding what had happened. The dining-room sideboard and _cellarette_had been opened, and wine and glasses put on the table, as if ourrobbers had drank our good health for the success of their attempt. 

A Bow Street officer was sent for; I remember his portly and imposingaspect very well; his name was Salmon, and he was a famous member of hisfraternity. He questioned my mother as to the honesty of our servants;we had but three, a cook, housemaid, and footman, and for all of thesemy mother answered unhesitatingly; and yet the expert assured her thatvery few houses were robbed without connivance from within. 

The servants were had up and questioned, and the cook related how, coming down first thing in the morning, she had found a certain backscullery window open, and, alarmed by that, had examined the lowerrooms, and found the dining-room table set out with the decanters andglasses. Having heard her story, the officer, as soon as she left theroom, asked my mother if any thing else besides the money had beentaken, and if any quantity of the wine had been drank. She said, "No, "and with regard to the last inquiry, she supposed, as the cook hadsuggested when the decanters were examined, that the thieves hadprobably been disturbed by some alarm, and had not had time to drinkmuch. 

Mr. Salmon then requested to look at the kitchen premises; the cookofficiously led the way to the scullery window, which was still open, "just as she found it, " she said, and proceeded to explain how therobbers must have got over the wall of a court which ran at the back ofthe house. When she had ended her demonstrations and returned to thekitchen, Salmon, who had listened silently to her story of the case, detained my mother for an instant, and rapidly passed his hand over theoutside window-sill, bringing away a thick layer of undisturbed dust, which the passage of anybody through the window must infallibly haveswept off. Satisfied at once of the total falsity of the cook'shypothesis, he told my mother that he had no doubt at all that she was aparty to the robbery, that the scullery window and dining-room drinkingscene were alike mere blinds, and that in all probability she had letinto the house whoever had broken open the desk, or else forced itherself, having acquired by some means a knowledge of the money itcontained; adding, that in the very few words of interrogatory which hadpassed between him and the servants, in my mother's presence, he hadfelt quite sure that the housemaid and man were innocent; but hadimmediately detected something in the cook's manner that seemed to himsuspicious. What a fine tact of guilt these detectives acquire in theirimmense experience of it! The cook was not prosecuted, but dismissed, the money, of course, not being recoverable; it was fortunate thatneither she nor her honest friends had any suspicion of the contents ofthree boxes lying in the drawing-room at this very time. They werelarge, black leather cases, containing a silver helmet, shield, andsword, of antique Roman pattern and beautiful workmanship--a publictribute bestowed upon my uncle, and left by him to my father; they havesince become an ornamental trophy in my sister's house. They were thenabout to be sent for safe keeping to Coutts's bank, and in the meantimelay close to the desk that had been rifled of a more portable but farless valuable booty. 

Upon my uncle John's death his widow had returned to England, and fixedher residence at a charming place called Heath Farm, in Hertfordshire. Lord Essex had been an attached friend of my uncle's, and offered thishome on his property to Mrs. Kemble when she came to England, after herlong sojourn abroad with my uncle, who, as I have mentioned, spent thelast years of his life, and died, at Lausanne. Mrs. Kemble invited mymother to come and see her soon after she settled in Hertfordshire, andI accompanied her thither. Cashiobury Park thus became familiar groundto me, and remains endeared to my recollection for its own beauty, forthe delightful days I passed rambling about it, and for the beginning ofthat love bestowed upon my whole life by H---- S----. Heath Farm was apretty house, at once rural, comfortable, and elegant, with a finefarm-yard adjoining it, a sort of cross between a farm and a manorhouse; it was on the edge of the Cashiobury estate, within which itstood, looking on one side over its lawn and flower-garden to the grassyslopes and fine trees of the park, and on the other, across a road whichdivided the two properties, to Lord Clarendon's place, the Grove. It hadbeen the residence of Lady Monson before her (second) marriage to LordWarwick. Close to it was a pretty cottage, also in the park, where livedan old Miss M----, often visited by a young kinswoman of hers, whobecame another of my life-long friends. T---- B----, Miss M----'s niece, was then a beautiful young woman, whose singularly fine face and sweetand spirited expression bore a strong resemblance to two eminentlyhandsome people, my father and Mademoiselle Mars. She and I soon becameintimate companions, though she was several years my senior. We used totake long rambles together, and vaguely among my indistinctrecollections of her aunt's cottage and the pretty woodland round it, mix sundry flying visions of a light, youthful figure, that of LordM----, then hardly more than a lad, who seemed to haunt the path of hiscousin, my handsome friend, and one evening caused us both a suddenpanic by springing out of a thicket on us, in the costume of aHarlequin. Some years after this, when I was about to leave England forAmerica, I went to take leave of T---- B----. She was to be married thenext day to Lord M----, and was sitting with his mother, Lady W----, andon a table near her lay a set of jewels, as peculiar as they weremagnificent, consisting of splendid large opals set in diamonds, blackenamel, and gold. .. . 

To return to our Cashiobury walks: T---- B---- and I used often to gotogether to visit ladies, the garden round whose cottage overflowed inevery direction with a particular kind of white and maroon pink, thepowerful, spicy odor of which comes to me, like a warm whiff of summersweetness, across all these intervening fifty years. Another favoritehaunt of ours was a cottage (not of gentility) inhabited by an old manof the name of Foster, who, hale and hearty and cheerful in extreme oldage, was always delighted to see us, used to give us choice flowers andfruit out of his tiny garden, and make me sit and sing to him by thehalf-hour together in his honeysuckle-covered porch. After my firstvisit to Heath Farm some time elapsed before we went thither again. Onthe occasion of our second visit Mrs. Siddons and my cousin Cecilia werealso Mrs. Kemble's guests, and a lady of the name of H---- S----. Shehad been intimate from her childhood in my uncle Kemble's house, andretained an enthusiastic love for his memory and an affectionatekindness for his widow, whom she was now visiting on her return toEngland. And so I here first knew the dearest friend I have ever known. The device of her family is "Haut et Bon:" it was her description. Shewas about thirty years old when I first met her at Heath Farm; tall andthin, her figure wanted roundness and grace, but it was straight as adart, and the vigorous, elastic, active movements of her limbs, andfirm, fleet, springing step of her beautifully made feet and ankles, gave to her whole person and deportment a character like that of thefabled Atalanta, or the huntress Diana herself. Her forehead and eyeswere beautiful. The broad, white, pure expanse surrounded with thick, short, clustering curls of chestnut hair, and the clear, limpid, bright, tender gray eyes that always looked radiant with light, and seemed toreflect radiance wherever they turned, were the eyes and forehead ofAurora. The rest of her features were not handsome, though her mouth wasfull of sensibility and sweetness, and her teeth were the most perfect Iever saw. She was eccentric in many things, but in nothing more so thanthe fashion of her dress, especially the coverings she provided for herextremities, her hat and boots. The latter were not positively masculinearticles, but were nevertheless made by a man's boot-maker, and therewas only one place in London where they could be made sufficiently uglyto suit her; and infinite were the pains she took to procure the heavy, thick, cumbrous, misshapen things that as much as possible concealed anddisfigured her finely turned ankles and high, arched, Norman instep. Indeed, her whole attire, peculiar (and very ugly, I thought it) as itwas, was so by malice prepense on her part. And whereas the generalresult would have suggested a total disregard of the vanities of dress, no Quaker coquette was ever more jealous of the peculiar texture of thefabrics she wore, or of the fashion in which they were made. She wore nocolors, black and gray being the only shades I ever saw her in; and herdress, bare and bald of every ornament, was literally only a coveringfor her body; but it was difficult to find cashmere fine enough for herscanty skirts, or cloth perfect enough for her short spencers, or lawnclear and exquisite enough for her curious collars and cuffs ofimmaculate freshness. 

I remember a similar peculiarity of dress in a person in all otherrespects the very antipodes of my friend H----. My mother took me onceto visit a certain Miss W----, daughter of a Stafford banker, her verydear friend, and the godmother from whom I took my second name of Anne. 

This lady inhabited a quaint, picturesque house in the oldest part ofthe town of Stafford. Well do I remember its oak-wainscoted andoak-paneled chambers, and the fine old oak staircase that led from thehall to the upper rooms; also the extraordinary abundance and delicacyof our meals, particularly the old-fashioned nine o'clock supper, aboutevery item of which, it seemed to me, more was said and thought thanabout any food of which I ever before or since partook. It was in thishomely palace of good cheer that a saying originated, which passed intoa proverb with us, expressive of a rather _un_nice indulgence ofappetite. 

One of the ladies, going out one day, called back to the servant who wasclosing the door behind her: "Tell the cook not to forget thesally-lunns" (a species of muffin) "for tea, well greased on both sides, and we'll put on our cotton gowns to eat them. "

The appearance of the mistress of this mansion of rather obsoleteluxurious comfort was strikingly singular. She was a woman about sixtyyears old, tall and large and fat, of what Balzac describes as "unembonpoint flottant, " and was habitually dressed in a white linencambric gown, long and tending to train, but as plain and tight as a bagover her portly middle person and prominent bust; it was finished at thethroat with a school-boy's plaited frill, which stood up round her heavyfalling cheeks by the help of a white muslin or black silk cravat. Herhead was very nearly bald, and the thin, short gray hair lay in distantstreaks upon her skull, white and shiny as an ostrich egg, which on therare occasions of her going out, or into her garden, she covered with aman's straw or beaver hat. 

It is curious how much minor eccentricity the stringent general spiritof formal conformity allows individuals in England: nowhere else, scarcely, in civilized Europe, could such a costume be worn in profound, peaceful defiance of public usage and opinion, with perfect securityfrom insult or even offensive comment, as that of my mother's oldfriend, Miss W----, or my dear H---- S----. In this same Staffordshirefamily and its allies eccentricity seemed to prevail alike in life anddeath; for I remember hearing frequent mention, while among them, ofconnections of theirs who, when they died, one and all desired to beburied in full dress and with their coffins _standing upright_. 

To return to Heath Farm and my dear H----. Nobility, intelligence, andtenderness were her predominating qualities, and her person, manner, andcountenance habitually expressed them. 

This lady's intellect was of a very uncommon order; her habits ofthought and reading were profoundly speculative; she delighted inmetaphysical subjects of the greatest difficulty, and abstract questionsof the most laborious solution. On such subjects she incessantlyexercised her remarkably keen powers of analysis and investigation, andno doubt cultivated and strengthened her peculiar mental faculties andtendencies by the perpetual processes of metaphysical reasoning whichshe pursued. 

Between H---- S---- and myself, in spite of nearly twelve years'difference in our age, there sprang up a lively friendship, and our timeat Heath Farm was spent in almost constant companionship. We walked andtalked together the livelong day and a good part of the night, in spiteof Mrs. Kemble's judicious precaution of sending us to bed with verymoderate wax candle ends; a prudent provision which we contrived todefeat by getting from my cousin, Cecilia Siddons, clandestine alms offine, long, _life-sized_ candles, placed as mere supernumeraries on thetoilet table of a dressing-room adjoining her mother's bedroom, whichshe never used. At this time I also made the acquaintance of my friend'sbrother, who came down to Heath Farm to visit Mrs. Kemble and hissister. He possessed a brilliant intellect, had studied for the bar, andat the same time made himself favorably known by a good deal of cleverperiodical writing; but he died too early to have fully developed hisgenius, and left as proofs of his undoubtedly superior talents only afew powerfully written works of fiction, indicating considerableabilities, to which time would have given maturity, and more experiencea higher direction. 

Among the principal interests of my London life at this time was theproduction at our theater of Weber's opera, "Der Freyschütz. " Fewoperas, I believe, have had a wider or more prolonged popularity; nonecertainly within my recollection ever had any thing approaching it. Several causes conduced to this effect. The simple pathos of the lovestory, and the supernatural element so well blended with it, which gavesuch unusual scope to the stage effects of scenery, etc. , were twoobvious reasons for its success. 

From the inimitably gay and dramatic laughing chorus and waltz of thefirst scene to the divine melody in which the heroine expresses herunshaken faith in Heaven, immediately before her lover's triumph closesthe piece, the whole opera is a series of exquisite conceptions, hardlyone of which does not contain some theme or passage calculated to catchthe dullest and slowest ear and fix itself on the least retentivememory; and though the huntsman's and bridesmaid's choruses, of course, first attained and longest retained a street-organ popularity, there isnot a single air, duet, concerted piece, or chorus, from which extractswere not seized on and carried away by the least musical memories. Sothat the advertisement of a German gentleman for a valet, who to othernecessary qualifications was to add the indispensable one of not beingable to whistle a note of "Der Freyschütz, " appeared a not unnaturalresult of the universal furor for this music. 

We went to hear it until we literally knew it by heart, and such was myenthusiasm for it that I contrived to get up a romantic passion for thegreat composer, of whom I procured a hideous little engraving (very uglyhe was, and very ugly was his "counterfeit presentment, " with highcheek-bones, long hooked nose, and spectacles), which, folded up in asmall square and sewed into a black silk case, I carried like an amuletround my neck until I completely wore it out, which was soon after poorWeber's death. 

CHAPTER VI. 

The immense success of "Der Freyschütz, " and the important assistance itbrought to the funds of the theater, induced my father to propose toWeber to compose an opera expressly for Covent Garden. The proposal metwith ready acceptance, and the chivalric fairy tale of Wieland's"Oberon" was selected for the subject, and was very gracefully andpoetically treated by Mr. Planché, to whom the literary part of thework--the libretto--was confided, and who certainly bestowed as muchpains on the versification of his lyrical drama as if it was notdestined to be a completely secondary object to the music in the publicestimation. Weber himself, however, was by no means a man to disregardthe tenor of the words and characters he was to associate with hismusic, and was greatly charmed with his English coadjutor's operaticversion of Wieland's fairy epic. He was invited to come over to Londonand himself superintend the production of his new work. 

Representations of "Der Freyschütz" were given on his arrival, and nightafter night the theater was crowded to see him preside in the orchestraand conduct his own fine opera; and the enthusiasm of the London publicrose to fever height. Weber took up his abode at the house of Sir GeorgeSmart, the leader of the Covent Garden orchestra, and our excellent oldfriend--a capital musician and very worthy man. He was appointedorganist to King William IV. , and for many years directed thoseadmirable performances of classical music called the Ancient Concerts. 

He was a man of very considerable musical knowledge, and had a peculiartalent for teaching and accompanying the vocal compositions of Handel. During the whole of my father's management of Covent Garden, he had thesupervision of the musical representations and conducted the orchestra, and he was principally instrumental in bringing out Weber's fine operasof "Der Freyschütz" and "Oberon. " Weber continued to reside in SirGeorge Smart's house during the whole of his stay in London, and diedthere soon after the production of his "Oberon. " Sir George Smart wasthe first person who presented Mendelssohn to me. I had been actingJuliet one night, and at the end of the play was raised from the stageby my kind old friend, who had been in the orchestra during theperformance, with the great composer, then a young man of nineteen, onhis first visit to England. He brought letters of introduction to myfather, and made his first acquaintance with me in my grave-clothes. Besides my esteem and regard for Sir George's more valuable qualities, Ihad a particular liking for some excellent snuff he always had, and usedconstantly to borrow his snuff-box to sniff at it like a perfume, nothaving attained a sufficiently mature age to venture upon "pinches;" anda snuff-taking Juliet being inadmissible, I used to wish myself at theelderly lady age when the indulgence might be becoming: but before Iattained it, snuff was no longer taken by ladies of any age, and now, Ithink, it is used by very few men. 

In a letter written to me by my mother, during my temporary absence fromLondon, just after the accession of King William IV. , I find thefollowing passage with reference to Sir George Smart:

"London is all alive; the new king seems idolized by the people, and heappears no less pleased with them; perhaps Sir George is amongst thehappiest of his subjects. His Majesty swears that nothing shall beencouraged but _native talent_, and our friend is to get up a concert atthe Duke of Sussex's, where the royal family are all to dine, at whichnone but English singers are to perform. Sir George dined with me onMonday, and I perceive he has already arranged in his thoughts all heproposes _to tell the queen about you_ on this occasion. It is evidenthe flatters himself that he is to be deep in her Majesty's confidence. "

Sir George Smart and his distinguished guest, Weber, were constantly atour house while the rehearsals of "Oberon" went forward. The first daythey dined together at my father's was an event for me, especially asSir George, on my entering the room, took me by the hand, and drawing metoward Weber, assured him that I and all the young girls in England wereover head and ears in love with him. With my guilty satchel round myneck, I felt ready to sink with confusion, and stammered out somethingabout Herr von Weber's beautiful music, to which, with a comical, melancholy smile, he replied, "Ah, my music! it is always my music, butnever myself!"

Baron Carl Maria von Weber was a noble-born Saxon German, whose veryirregular youth could hardly, one would suppose, have left him leisureto cultivate or exercise his extraordinary musical genius; but though hespent much of his early life in wild dissipation, and died in middleage, he left to the world a mass of compositions of the greatest varietyand beauty, and a name which ranks among the most eminent in hispre-eminently musical country. He was a little thin man, lame of onefoot, and with a slight tendency to a deformed shoulder. His hollow, sallow, sickly face bore an expression of habitual suffering and illhealth, and the long, hooked nose, salient cheek-bones, light, prominenteyes, and spectacles were certainly done no more than justice to in theunattractive representation of my cherished portrait of him. 

He had the air and manner of a well-born and well-bred man of the world, a gentle voice, and a slow utterance in English, which he spoke butindifferently and with a strong accent; he generally conversed with myfather and mother in French. One of the first visits he paid to CoventGarden was in my mother's box, to hear Miss Paton and Braham (his primadonna and tenor) in an oratorio. He was enthusiastic in his admirationof Braham's fine performance of one of Handel's magnificent songs("Deeper and deeper still, " I think), but when, in the second part ofthe concert, which consisted of a selection of secular music, the greatsinger threw the house into ecstasies, and was tumultuously encored inthe pseudo-Scotch ballad of "Blue Bonnets over the Border, " he wasextremely disgusted, and exclaimed two or three times, "Ah, that is_beast_!" (Ah, cela est bête!) to our infinite diversion. Much moreaggravating proof was poor Weber destined to have of the famous tenor'slove of mere popularity in his art, and strange enough, no doubt, to thegreat German composer was the thirst for ignorant applause which inducedBraham to reject the beautiful, tender, and majestic opening air Weberhad written for him in the character of Huon, and insist upon thewriting of a battle-piece which might split the ears of the groundlingsand the gods, and furnish him an opportunity for making some of thestartling effects of lyrical declamation which never failed to carry hisaudience by storm. 

No singer ever delivered with greater purity or nobler breadth Handel'smajestic music; the masterly simplicity of his execution of all reallyfine compositions was worthy of his first-rate powers; but the desire ofobtaining by easier and less elevated means the acclamations of hisadmirers seemed irresistible to him, and "Scots wha hae, " with theflourish of his stick in the last verse, was a sure triumph which henever disdained. Weber expressed unbounded astonishment and contempt atthis unartistic view of things, and with great reluctance at lengthconsented to suppress, or rather transfer to the overture, the noble andpathetic melody designed for Huon's opening song, for which he submittedthe fine warlike cantata beginning--

 "Oh, 'tis a glorious sight to see The charge of the Christian chivalry!"

in which, to be sure, Braham charged with the Christians, and routed thePaynims, and mourned for the wounded, and wept for the dead, andreturned in triumph to France in the joyous cabaletta, with wonderfuldramatic effect, such as, no doubt, the other song would never haveenabled him to produce. But the success of the song did not reconcileWeber to what he considered the vulgarity and inappropriateness of itssubject, and the circumstance lowered his opinion both of the Englishsinger and of the English public very grievously. 

How well I remember all the discussions of those prolonged, repeated, anxious, careful rehearsals, and the comical despair of which MissPaton, the heroine of the opera, was the occasion to all concerned, bythe curious absence of dramatic congruity of gesture and action whichshe contrived to combine with the most brilliant and expressiverendering of the music. In the great shipwreck scene, which she sangmagnificently, she caught up the short end of a sash tied around herwaist, and twirled it about without unfastening it, by way of signalingfrom the top of a rock for help from a distant vessel, the words shesang being, "Quick, quick, for a signal this scarf shall be _waved_!"This performance of hers drew from my father the desperate exclamation, "That woman's an inspired idiot!" while Weber limped up and down theroom silently wringing his hands, and Sir George Smart went off intoecstatic reminiscences of a certain performance of my mother's, when--insome musical arrangement of "Blue Beard" (by Kelly or Storace, I think), in the part of Sister Anne--she waved and signaled and sang from thecastle wall, "I see them galloping! I see them galloping!" after a verydifferent fashion, that drew shouts of sympathetic applause from herhearers. 

Miss Paton married Lord William Lennox, was divorced from her husbandand married Mr. Wood, and pursued her career as a public singer for manyyears successfully after this event; nor was her name in any way againmade a subject of public animadversion, though she separated herselffrom Mr. Wood, and at one time was said to have entertained thoughts ofgoing into a Roman Catholic nunnery. Her singing was very admirable, andher voice one of the finest in quality and compass that I ever heard. The effects she produced on the stage were very remarkable, consideringthe little intellectual power or cultivation she appeared to possess. Myfather's expression of "an inspired idiot, " though wrung from him by theirritation of momentary annoyance, was really not inapplicable to her. She sang with wonderful power and pathos her native Scotch ballads, shedelivered with great purity and grandeur the finest soprano music ofHandel, and though she very nearly drove poor Weber mad with herapparent want of intelligence during the rehearsals of his great opera, I have seldom heard any thing finer than her rendering of the difficultmusic of the part of Reiza, from beginning to end, and especially thescene of the shipwreck, with its magnificent opening recitative, "Ocean, thou mighty monster!"

"Oberon" was brought out and succeeded; but in a degree so far below thesanguine expectations of all concerned, that failure itself, though moresurprising, would hardly have been a greater disappointment than theresult achieved at such a vast expenditure of money, time, and labor. The expectations of the public could not have been realized by any workwhich was to be judged by comparison with their already permanentfavorite, "Der Freyschütz. " No second effort could have seemed any thingbut second-best, tried by the standard of that popular production; andwhatever judgment musicians and connoisseurs might pronounce as to therespective merits of the two operas, the homely test of the "proof ofthe pudding" being "in the eating" was decidedly favorable to themaster's earlier work; and my own opinion is, that either his"Euryanthe" or his "Preciosa" would have been more popular with thegeneral English public than the finer and more carefully elaboratedmusic of "Oberon. " The story of the piece (always a main considerationin matters of art, with average English men and women) wanted interest, certainly, as compared with that of its predecessor; the chivalric lovesand adventures of Huon of Bordeaux and the caliph's daughter wereindifferent to the audience, compared with the simple but deep interestof the fortunes of the young German forester and his village bride; andthe gay and brilliant fairy element of the "Oberon" was no sort ofequivalent for the startling _diablerie_ of Zamiel, and the incantationscene. The music, undoubtedly of a higher order than that of "DerFreyschütz, " was incomparably more difficult and less popular. The wholeof the part of Reiza was trying in the extreme, even to the powers ofthe great singer for whom it was written, and quite sure not to be afavorite with prime donne from its excessive strain upon the voice, particularly in what is the weaker part of almost all soprano registers;and Reiza's first great aria, the first song of the fairy king, andHuon's last song in the third act, are all compositions of which thefinest possible execution must always be without proportionate effect onany audience, from the extreme difficulty of rendering them and theircomparative want of melody. By amateurs, out of Germany, the performanceof any part of the music was not likely ever to be successfullyattempted; and I do not think that a single piece in the opera foundfavor with the street organists, though the beautiful opening chorus wasmade into a church hymn by discarding the exquisite aerial fairysymphonies and accompaniments; and the involuntary dance of the caliph'scourt and servants at the last blast of the magical horn was for a shorttime a favorite waltz in Germany. 

Poor Weber's health, which had been wretched before he came to England, and was most unfavorably affected by the climate, sank entirely underthe mortification of the comparatively small success of his great work. He had labored and fretted extremely with the rehearsals, and very soonafter its production he became dangerously ill, and died--not, as peoplesaid, of a broken heart, but of disease of the lungs, already faradvanced when he came to London, and doubtless accelerated by theseinfluences. He died in Sir George Smart's house, who gave me, as amemorial of the great composer whom I had so enthusiastically admired, alock of his hair, and the opening paragraph of his will, which wasextremely touching and impressive in its wording. 

The plaintive melody known as "Weber's Waltz" (said to have been hislast composition, found after his death under his pillow) was a tributeto his memory by some younger German composer (Reichardt or Ries); butthough not his own, it owed much of its popularity to his name, withwhich it will always be associated. Bellini transferred the air, verbatim, into his opera of "Beatrice di Tenda, " where it appears in hersong beginning, "Orombello, ah Sciagurato!" A circumstance which tendedto embitter a good deal the close of Weber's life was the arrival inLondon of Rossini, to whom and to whose works the public immediatelytransferred its demonstrations of passionate admiration with even more, than its accustomed fickleness. Disparaging comparisons and contrasts toWeber's disadvantage were drawn between the two great composers in thepublic prints; the enthusiastic adulation of society and the great worldnot unnaturally followed the brilliant, joyous, sparkling, wittyItalian, who was a far better subject for London _lionizing_ than hissickly, sensitive, shrinking, and rather soured German competitor forfame and public favor. 

The proud, morbid sensitiveness of the Northern genius was certainly inevery respect the very antipodes of the healthy, robust, rejoicing, artistic nature of the Southern. 

No better instance, though a small one, perhaps, could be given of thetone and temper in which Rossini was likely to encounter both adversecriticism and the adulation of amateur idolatry, than his reply to theDuchess of Canizzaro, one of his most fanatical worshipers, who askedhim which he considered his best comic opera; when, with a burst ofjoyous laughter, he named "Il Matrimonio Secreto, " Cimarosa's enchanting_chef-d'oeuvre_, from which, doubtless, Rossini, after the fashion ofgreat geniuses, had accepted more than one most felicitous suggestion, especially that of the admirable finale to the second act of the"Barbiere. " It was during this visit of his to London, while Weber laydisappointed and dying in the dingy house in Great Portland Street, thatthis same Duchess of Canizzaro, better known by her earlier title ofCountess St. Antonio, as a prominent leader of fashionable taste inmusical matters, invited all the great and gay and distinguished worldof London to meet the famous Italian composer; and, seated in herdrawing-room with the Duke of Wellington and Rossini on either side ofher, exclaimed, "Now I am between the two greatest men in Europe. " TheIron Duke not unnaturally rose and left his chair vacant; the greatgenius retained his, but most assuredly not without humorousappreciation of the absurdity of the whole scene, for he was almost"plus fin que tous les autres, " and certainly "bien plus fin que tous_ces_ autres. "

About this time I returned again to visit Mrs. Kemble at Heath Farm, andrenew my days of delightful companionship with H---- S----. Endless wereour walks and talks, and those were very happy hours in which, loiteringabout Cashiobury Park, I made its echoes ring with the music of"Oberon, " singing it from beginning to end--overture, accompaniment, choruses, and all; during which performances my friend, who was nomusician, used to keep me company in sympathetic silence, reconciled byher affectionate indulgence for my enthusiasm to this utter postponementof sense to sound. What with her peculiar costume and my bonnetless head(I always carried my bonnet in my hand when it was possible to do so)and frenzied singing, any one who met us might have been justified insupposing we had escaped from the nearest lunatic asylum. 

Occasionally we varied our rambles, and one day we extended them so farthat the regular luncheon hour found us at such a distance from home, that I--hungry as one is at sixteen after a long tramp--peremptorilyinsisted upon having food; whereupon my companion took me to a smallroadside ale-house, where we devoured bread and cheese and drank beer, and while thus vulgarly employed beheld my aunt's carriage drive pastthe window. If that worthy lady could have seen us, that bread andcheese which was giving us life would inevitably have been her death;she certainly would have had a stroke of apoplexy (what the French call_foudroyante_), for gentility and propriety were the breath of life toher, and of the highest law of both, which can defy conventions, shenever dreamed. 

Another favorite indecorum of mine (the bread and cheese was mere mortalinfirmity, not moral turpitude) was wading in the pretty river that ranthrough Lord Clarendon's place, the Grove; the brown, clear, shallow, rapid water was as tempting as a highland brook, and I remember itsbright, flashing stream and the fine old hawthorn trees of the avenue, alternate white and rose-colored, like clouds of fragrant bloom, as oneof the sunniest pictures of those sweet summer days. 

The charm and seduction of bright water has always been irresistible tome, a snare and a temptation I have hardly ever been able to withstand;and various are the chances of drowning it has afforded me in the wildmountain brooks of Massachusetts. I think a very attached maid of mineonce saved my life by the tearful expostulations with which she opposedthe bewitching invitations of the topaz-colored flashing rapids ofTrenton Falls, that looked to me in some parts so shallow, as well as sobright, that I was just on the point of stepping into them, charmed bythe exquisite confusion of musical voices with which they werepersuading me, when suddenly a large tree-trunk of considerable weightshot down their flashing surface and was tossed over the fall below, leaving me to the natural conclusion, "Just such a log should I havebeen if I had gone in there. " Indeed, my worthy Marie, overcome by myimportunity, having selected what seemed to her a safe, and to me a verytame, bathing-place, in another and quieter part of the stream, I hadevery reason, from my experience of the difficulty of withstanding itspowerful current there, to congratulate myself upon not having tried theexperiment nearer to one of the "springs" of the lovely torrent, whoseIndian name is the "Leaping Water. " Certainly the pixies--whose cousinmy friends accused me of being, on account of my propensity for theirelement--if they did not omit any opportunity of alluring me, allowed meto escape scathless on more than one occasion, when I might have paiddearly for being so much or so little related to them. 

This fascination of living waters for me was so well known among myLenox friends of all classes, that on one occasion a Yankee Jehu of ourvillage, driving some of them by the side of a beautiful mountain brook, said, "I guess we should hardly have got Mrs. Kemble on at all, alongside of this stream, " as if I had been a member of his _team_, maderestive by the proximity of water. A pool in a rocky basin, with foamingwater dashing in and out of it, was a sort of trap for me, and I havemore than once availed myself of such a shower-bath, without any furtherpreparation than taking my hat and shoes and stockings off. Once, on avisit to the Catskills, during a charming summer walk with my dearfriend, Catherine Sedgwick, I walked into the brook we were coasting, and sat down in the water, without at all interrupting the thread of ourconversation; a proceeding which, of course, obliged me to return to thehotel dripping wet, my companion laughing so immoderately at myappearance, that, as I represented to her, it was quite impossible forme to make anybody believe that I had met with an accident and _fallen_into the water, which was the impression I wished (in the interest of myreputation for sanity) to convey to such spectators as we mightencounter. 

On another occasion, coming over the Wengern Alp from Grindelwald onesultry summer day, my knees were shaking under me with the steep andprolonged descent into Lauterbrunnen. Just at the end of the wearisomedownward way an exquisite brook springs into the Lutschine, as it fliesthrough the valley of waterfalls, and into this I walked straight, tothe consternation of my guides and dear companion, a singularlydignified little American lady, of Quaker descent and decorum, who wasquite at a loss to conceive how, after such an exploit, I was to presentmyself to the inhabitants, tourists, and others of the little street andits swarming hotels, in my drenched and dripping condition; but, as Irepresented to her, nothing would be easier: "I shall get on my mule andride sprinkling along, and people will only say, 'Ah, cette pauvre dame!qui est tombée à l'eau!'"

My visit to my aunt Kemble was prolonged beyond the stay of my friendH----, and I was left alone at Heath Farm. My walks were, of course, circumscribed, and the whole complexion of my life much changed by mybeing given over to lonely freedom limited only by the bounds of ourpleasure-grounds, and my living converse with my friend exchanged forunrestricted selection from my aunt's book-shelves; from which I made achoice of extreme variety, since Lord Byron and Jeremy Taylor were amongthe authors with whom I then first made acquaintance, my schoolintroduction to the former having been followed up by no subsequentintimacy. 

I read them on alternate days, sitting on the mossy-cushioned lawn, under a beautiful oak tree, with a cabbage-leaf full of fresh-gatheredstrawberries and a handful of fresh-blown roses beside me, whichEpicurean accompaniments to my studies appeared to me equally adapted tothe wicked poet and the wise divine. Mrs. Kemble in no way interferedwith me, and was quite unconscious of the subjects of my studies; shethought me generally "a very odd girl, " but though I occasionally took amischievous pleasure in perplexing her by fantastical propositions, towhich her usual reply was a rather acrimonious "Don't be absurd, Fanny, "she did not at all care to investigate my oddity, and left me to my owndevices. 

Among her books I came upon Wraxall's "Memoirs of the House of Valois, "and, reading it with great avidity, determined to write an historicalnovel, of which the heroine should be Françoise de Foix, the beautifulCountess de Châteaubriand. At this enterprise I now set eagerly to work, the abundant production of doggerel suffering no diminution from thisnewer and rather soberer literary undertaking, to which I added a briskcorrespondence with my absent friend, and a task she had set me (perhapswith some vague desire of giving me a little solid intellectualoccupation) of copying for her sundry portions of "Harris's Hermes;" amost difficult and abstruse grammatical work, much of which was inLatin, not a little in Greek. All these I faithfully copied, Chinesefashion, understanding the English little better than the two deadlanguages which I transcribed--the Greek without much difficulty, owingto my school-day proficiency in the alphabet of that tongue. Theseliterary exercises, walks within bounds, drives with my aunt, and theoccasional solemnity of a dinner at Lord Essex's, were the events of mylife till my aunt, Mrs. Whitelock, came to Heath Farm and brought anelement of change into the procession of our days. 

I think these two widowed ladies had entertained some notion that theymight put their solitude together and make society; but the experimentdid not succeed, and was soon judiciously abandoned, for certainly twomore hopelessly dissimilar characters never made the difficultexperiment of a life in common. 

Mrs. Kemble, before she went to Switzerland, had lived in the bestLondon society, with which she kept up her intercourse by zealouscorrespondence; the names of lords and ladies were familiar in her mouthas household words, and she had undoubtedly an undue respect forrespectability and reverence for titled folk; yet she was not at allsuperficially a vulgar woman. She was quick, keen, clever, and shrewd, with the air, manner, dress, and address of a finished woman of theworld. Mrs. Whitelock was simple-hearted and single-minded, had neverlived in any English society whatever, and retorted but feebly thefashionable gossip of the day which reached Mrs. Kemble through theLondon post, with her transatlantic reminiscences of Prince Talleyrandand General Washington. She was grotesque in her manner and appearance, and a severe thorn in the side of her conventionally irreproachablecompanion, who has been known, on the approach of some coronetedcarriage, to observe pointedly, "Mrs. Whitelock, there is an_ekkipage_. " "I see it, ma'am, " replied the undaunted Mrs. Whitelock, screwing up her mouth and twirling her thumbs in a peculiarly emphaticway, to which she was addicted in moments of crisis. Mrs. Kemble, whowas as quick as Pincher in her movements, rang the bell and snapped out, "Not at home!" denying herself her stimulating dose of high-life gossip, and her companion what she would have called a little "genteelsociability, " rather than bring face to face her fine friends and Mrs. Whitelock's flounced white muslin apron and towering Pamela cap, for shestill wore such things. I have said that Mrs. Kemble was not(superficially) a vulgar woman, but it would have taken the soul ofgentility to have presented, without quailing, her amazingly oddcompanion to her particular set of visitors. A humorist would have foundhis account in the absurdity of the scene all round; and Jane Austenwould have made a delicious chapter of it; but Mrs. Kemble had not therequisite humor to perceive the fun of her companion, her acquaintances, and herself in juxtaposition. I have mentioned her mode of pronouncingthe word equipage, which, together with several similar peculiaritiesthat struck me as very odd, were borrowed from the usage of London goodsociety in the days when she frequented it. My friend, Lord Lansdowne, never called London any thing but _Lunnon_, and always said _obleege_for oblige, like the Miss Berrys and Mrs. F---- and other of theircontemporaries, who also said _ekkipage_, _pettikits_, _divle_. Sincetheir time the pronunciation of English in good society, whose usage isthe only acknowledged law in that matter, and the grammaticalconstruction of the language habitual in that same good society, hasbecome such as would have challenged the severest criticism, if we hadventured upon it in my father's house. 

The unsuccessful partnership of my aunts was dissolved. Mrs. Kemblefound the country intolerably dull, declared that the grass and treesmade her sick, and fixed her abode in Leamington, then a small, unpretending, pretty country town, which (principally on account of theability, reputation, and influence of its celebrated and popularresident physician, Dr. Jephson) was a sort of aristocratic-invalid KurResidenz, and has since expanded into a thriving, populous, showy, semi-fashionable, Anglo-American watering-place in summer, andhunting-place in winter. Mrs. Kemble found the Leamington of her day asatisfactory abode; the Æsculapius, whose especial shrine it was, becameher intimate friend; the society was comparatively restricted andselect; and the neighborhood, with Warwick Castle, Stoneleigh Abbey, andGuy's Cliff, full of state and ancientry, within a morning's drive, was(which she cared less for) lovely in every direction. Mrs. Whitelockbetook herself to a really rural life in a cottage in the beautifulneighborhood of Addlestone, in Surrey, where she lived in much simplecontent, bequeathing her small mansion and estate, at her death, to mymother, who passed there the last two years of her life and died there. I never returned to Heath Farm again; sometimes, as I steam by Watford, the image of the time I spent there rises again before me, but I passfrom it at forty miles an hour, and it passed from me upwards of fortyyears ago. 

We were now occupying the last of the various houses which for a seriesof years we inhabited at Bayswater; it belonged to a French Jew diamondseller, and was arranged and fitted up with the peculiar tastefulnesswhich seems innate across the Channel, and inimitable even on theEnglish side of it. There was one peculiarity in the drawing-room ofthis house which I have always particularly liked: a low chimney with awindow over it, the shutter to which was a sliding panel oflooking-glass, so that both by day and candle light the effect wasequally pretty. 

At this time I was promoted to the dignity of a bedroom "to myself, "which I was able to make into a small study, the privacy of which Ienjoyed immensely, as well as the window opening above our suburban bitof garden, and the sloping meadows beyond it. The following letters, written at this time to my friend Miss S----, describe the interests andoccupations of my life. It was in the May of 1827. I was between sixteenand seventeen, which will naturally account for the characteristics ofthese epistles. 

 BAYSWATER, May, 1827. DEAR H----:

 I fear you will think me forgetful and unkind in not having answered your last letter; but if you do, you are mistaken--nor ungrateful, which my silence, after the kind interest you have taken in me and mine, seems to be. But when I tell you that besides the many things that have occupied my mind connected with the present situation of our affairs, my hands have been full of work nearly as dismal as my thoughts--mourning--you will easily understand and excuse the delay. 

 Do not be alarmed; the person for whom we are in black has been so little known to me since my childhood, was so old and infirm, and so entirely cheerful, resigned, and even desirous of leaving this world, that few, even of those who knew and loved him better than I did, could, without selfishness, lament his release. Mr. Twiss, the father of my cousin Horace, is dead lately; and it is of him that I speak. He has unfortunately left three daughters, who, though doing well for themselves in the world, will now feel a sad void in the circle of their home affections and interests. 

 And now, dear H----, for myself, or ourselves, rather; for, as you may well suppose, my whole thoughts are taken up with our circumstances. 

 I believe in my last I told you pretty nearly all I knew, or indeed any of us knew, of our affairs; the matter is now much clearer, and not a whit pleasanter. 

 It seems that my father, as proprietor of Covent Garden Theater, in consequence of this lawsuit and the debts which encumber the concern, is liable at any time to be called upon for twenty-seven thousand pounds; which, for a man who can not raise five thousand, is not a pleasant predicament. On the other hand, Mr. Harris, our adversary, and joint proprietor with my father, is also liable to enormous demands, if the debts should be insisted upon at present. 

 The creditors have declared that they are entirely satisfied that my father, and Messrs. Forbes and Willett, the other partners, have done every thing with respect to them which honorable men could do, and offer to wait till some compromise can be made with Mr. Harris, who, it is thought, will be willing to enter into any arrangement rather than be irretrievably ruined, as we all must be unless some agreement takes place between the proprietors. In the meantime, the lawyers have advised our party to appeal from the decision of the Vice-Chancellor. Amid all this perplexity and trouble, we have had the satisfaction of hearing that John and Henry are both doing well; we received a letter from the latter a short time ago, full of affection and kindness to us all. I wish you could have seen my father's countenance as he read it, and with what fondness and almost gratitude he kissed dear Henry's name, while the tears were standing in his eyes. I can not help thinking sometimes that my father deserved a less hard and toilsome existence. 

 He has resolved that, come what may, he will keep those boys at their respective schools, if he can by any means compass it; and if (which I fear is the case) he finds Bury St. Edmunds too expensive, we shall remove to Westminster, in order that Henry's education may not suffer from our circumstances. Last Thursday was my father's benefit, and a very indifferent one, which I think is rather hard, considering that he really slaves night and day, and every night and every day, in that theater. Cecilia Siddons and I have opened a poetical correspondence; she writes very prettily indeed. Perhaps, had she not had such a bad subject as myself to treat of, I might have said more of her verses. You will be sorry to hear that not only my poor mother's health, but what is almost as precious, her good spirits, have been dreadfully affected by all her anxiety; indeed, her nerves have been so utterly deranged that she has been alternately deaf and blind, and sometimes both, for the last fortnight. Thank Heaven she is now recovering!

 CRAVEN HILL, BAYSWATER, May, 1827. MY DEAREST H----:

 I received your letter the day before yesterday, and felt very much obliged to you for it, and was particularly interested by your description of Kenilworth, round which Walter Scott's admirable novel has cast a halo of romance forever; for many who would have cared little about it as the residence of Leicester, honored for some days by the presence of Elizabeth, will remember with a thrill of interest and pity the night poor Amy Robsart passed there, and the scene between her, Leicester, and the queen, when that prince of villains, Varney, claims her as his wife. But in spite of the romantic and historical associations belonging to the place, I do not think it would have "inspired my muse. "

 Of our affairs I know nothing, except that we are going to remove to Westminster, on account of Henry's schooling, as soon as we can part with this house. 

 You will be glad to hear that my mother is a great deal better, though still suffering from nervousness. She desires to be most kindly remembered to you and to my aunt Kemble, and would feel very much obliged to you if you can get from Mrs. Kemble the name and address of the man who built her pony carriage. Do this, and send it in the next letter you write to me, which must be long, but not "long a-coming. "

 I am glad you like Miss W----, but take care not to like her better than me; and I am very glad you think of Heath Farm sometimes, for there, I know, I must be in some corner or other of the picture, be the foreground what it may. At this time, when the hawthorn is all out and the nightingales are singing, even here, I think of the quantities of May we gathered for my wreaths, and the little scrap of the nightingale's song we used to catch on the lawn between tea and bedtime. I have been writing a great deal of poetry--at least I mean it for such, and I hope it is not all very bad, as my father has expressed himself surprised and pleased at some things I read him lately. I wish I could send you some of my perpetrations, but they are for the most part so fearfully long that it is impossible. You ask about my uncle's monument: I can tell you nothing about it at present; it is where the memory of the public, the perseverance of the projectors, Flaxman's genius, and John Kemble's fame are. Do you know where that is? No more do I. 

 CRAVEN HILL, BAYSWATER, June 8, 1827. MY DEAR H----:

 I am sure you will rejoice with us all when I inform you that John has at length exerted himself successfully, and has obtained one of the highest literary honors conferred by Cambridge on its students: these are his tutor's very words, therefore I leave you to imagine how delighted and grateful we all are; indeed, the day we received the intelligence, we all, with my father at our head, looked more like hopeful candidates for Bedlam than any thing else. My poor father jumped, and clapped his hands, and kissed the letter, like a child; as my mother says, "I am glad he has one gleam of sunshine, at least;" he sadly wanted it, and I know nothing that could have given him so much pleasure. Pray tell my aunt Kemble of it. I dare say she will be glad to hear it. [My brother's tutor was Mr. Peacock, the celebrated mathematician, well known at Cambridge as one of the most eminent members of the university, and a private tutor of whom all his pupils were deservedly proud; even those who, like my brother John, cultivated the classical studies in preference to the severe scientific subjects of which Mr. Peacock was so illustrious a master. His praise of my brother was regretful, though most ungrudging, for his own sympathy was entirely with the intellectual pursuits for which Cambridge was peculiarly famous, as the mathematical university, in contradistinction to the classical tendency supposed to prevail at this time among the teachers and students of Oxford. ]

 And now let me thank you for your last long letter, and the detailed criticism it contained of my lines; if they oftener passed through such a wholesome ordeal, I should probably scribble less than I do. You ask after my novel of "Françoise de Foix, " and my translation of Sismondi's History; the former may, perhaps, be finished some time these next six years; the latter is, and has been, in Dr. Malkin's hands ever since I left Heath Farm. What you say of scriptural subjects I do not always think true; for instance, "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, " does not appear to me to have lost much beauty by Byron's poetical paraphrase. We are really going to leave this pleasant place, and take up our abode in Westminster; how I shall regret my dear little room, full of flowers and books, and with its cheerful view. Enfin il n'y faut plus penser. I have, luckily, the faculty of easily accommodating myself to circumstances, and though sorry to leave my little hermitage, I shall soon take root in the next place. With all my dislike to moving, my great wish is to travel; but perhaps that is not an absolute inconsistency, for what I wish is never to remain long enough in a place to take root, or, having done so, never to be transplanted. I am writing a journal, and its pages, like our many pleasant hours of conversation, are a whimsical medley of the sad, the sober, the gay, the good, the bad, and the ridiculous; not at all the sort of serious, solemn journal you would write. 

 CRAVEN HILL, BAYSWATER, ----, 1827. MY DEAREST H----:

 I am afraid you are wondering once more whether I have the gout in my hands; but so many circumstances have latterly arisen to occupy my time and attention that I have had but little leisure for letter-writing. You are now once more comfortably re-established in your little turret chamber [Miss S----'s room in her home, Ardgillan Castle], which I intend to come and storm some day, looking over your pleasant lawn to the beautiful sea and hills. I ought to envy you, and yet, when I look round my own little snuggery, which is filled with roses and the books I love, and where not a ray of sun penetrates, though it is high noon and burning hot, I only envy you your own company, which I think would be a most agreeable addition to the pleasantness of my little room. I am sadly afraid, however, that I shall soon be called upon to leave it, for though our plans are still so unsettled as to make it quite impossible to say what will be our destination, it is, I think, almost certain that we shall leave this place. 

 We have had Mrs. Henry Siddons, with her youngest daughter, staying with us for a short time; she is now going on through Paris to Switzerland, on account of my cousin's delicate health, which renders Scotland an unsafe residence for her. John is also at home just now, which, as you may easily believe, is an invaluable gain to me; I rather think, however, that my mother is not of that opinion, for he talks and thinks of nothing but politics, and she has a great dread of my becoming imbued with his mania; a needless fear, I think, however, for though I am willing and glad to listen to his opinions and the arguments of his favorite authors, I am never likely to study them myself, and my interest in the whole subject will cease with his departure for Cambridge. 

 Henry returned from Bury St. Edmunds, and my father left us for Lancaster last night, and we are now in daily expectation of departing for Weybridge, so that the last fortnight has been one continual bustle. 

 I have had another reason for not writing to you, which I have only just made up my mind to tell you. Dick ---- has been taking my likeness, or rather has begun to do so. I thought, dear H----, that you would like to have this sketch, and I was in hopes that the first letter you received in Ireland from me would contain it; but, alas! Dick is as inconstant and capricious as a genius need be, and there lies my fac-simile in a state of non-conclusion; they all tell me it is very like, but it does appear to me so pretty that I am divided between satisfaction and incredulity. My father, I lament to say, left us last night in very bad spirits. I never saw him so depressed, and feared that my poor mother would suffer to-day from her anxiety about him; however, she is happily pretty well to-day, and I trust will soon, what with Weybridge and pike-fishing, recover her health and spirits entirely. 

 I suspect this will be the last summer we shall spend at Weybridge, as we are going to give our cottage up, I believe. I shall regret it extremely for my mother; it is agreeable to and very good for her. I do not care much about it for myself; indeed, I care very little where I go; I do not like leaving any place, but the tie of habit, which is quickly formed and strong in me, once broken, I can easily accommodate myself to the next change, which, however, I always pray may be the last. My mother and myself had yesterday a serious, and to me painful, conversation on the necessity of not only not hating society, but tolerating and mixing in it. She and my father have always been disinclined to it, but their disinclination has descended to me in the shape of active dislike, and I feel sometimes inclined to hide myself, to escape sitting down and communing with my fellow-creatures after the fashion that calls itself social intercourse. I can't help fancying (which, however, _may_ be a great mistake) that the hours spent in my own room reading and writing are better employed than if devoted to people and things in which I feel no interest whatever, and do not know how to pretend the contrary. 

 I must do justice to my mother, however, for any one more reasonable, amiable, and kind, in this as in most respects, can not exist than herself; but nevertheless, when I went to bed last night I sat by my open window, looking at the moon and thinking of my social duties, and then scribbled endless doggerel in a highly Byronic mood to deliver my mind upon the subject, after which, feeling amazingly better, I went to bed and slept profoundly, satisfied that I had given "society" a death-blow. But really, jesting apart, the companionship of my own family--those I live with, I mean--satisfies me entirely, and I have not the least desire for any other. 

 Good-by, my dearest H----; do not punish me for not writing sooner by not answering this for two months; but be a nice woman and write very soon to yours ever, FANNY. 

 P. S. --I am reading the memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, la Grande Mademoiselle, written by herself: if you never read them, do; they are very interesting and amusing. 

The "Dick" mentioned in this letter was the nephew of my godmother, MissA---- W----, of Stafford, and son of Colonel ----, a Staffordshiregentleman of moderate means, who went to Germany and settled atDarmstadt, for the sake of giving a complete education in foreignlanguages and accomplishments to his daughters. His eldest son was inthe Church. They resided at the little German court till the young girlsbecame young women, remarkable for their talents and accomplishments. Inthe course of their long residence at Darmstadt they had become intimatewith the reigning duke and his family, whose small royalty admitted ofsuch friendly familiarity with well-born and well-bred foreigners. Butwhen Colonel ---- brought his wife and daughters back to England, likemost other English people who try a similar experiment, the change frombeing decided _somebodies_ in the court circle of a German principality(whose sovereign was chiefly occupied, it is true, with the governmentof his opera-house) to being decided _nobodies_ in the huge mass ofobscure, middle-class English gentility, was all but intolerable tothem. 

The peculiar gift of their second son, my eccentric friend Richard, wasa genius for painting, which might have won him an honored place amongEnglish artists, had he ever chosen to join their ranks as a competitorfor fame and fortune. 

 EASTLANDS COTTAGE, WEYBRIDGE, ----, 1827. MY DEAR H----:

 I wrote to you immediately upon our arriving here, which is now nearly a month ago, but having received no answer, and not having heard from you for some time, I conjecture that our charming post-office has done as it did last year, and kept my letters to itself. I therefore take the opportunity, which my brother's departure for town to-morrow gives me, of writing to you and having my letter posted in London. John's going to town is an extreme loss to me, for here we are more thrown together and companionable than we can be in London. His intellectual occupations and interests engross him very much, and though always very interesting to me, are seldom discussed with or communicated to me as freely there as they are here--I suppose for want of better fellowship. I have latterly, also, summoned up courage enough to request him to walk with me; and to my some surprise and great satisfaction, instead of the "I can't, I am really so busy, " he has acquiesced, and we have had one or two very pleasant long strolls together. He is certainly a very uncommon person, and I admire, perhaps too enthusiastically, his great abilities. 

 My father is in Paris, where he was to arrive yesterday, and where to-morrow he will act in the first regularly and decently organized English theater that the French ever saw. He is very nervous, and we, as you may easily conceive, very anxious about it; when next I write to you I will let you know all that we hear of the result. I must repeat some part of my last letter, in case you did not receive it. We have taken a house in James Street, Buckingham Gate, Westminster, which appears to be in every way a desirable and convenient abode; in itself it is comfortable and cheerful, and its nearness to Henry's school and comparative nearness to the theatre, together with its view over the park, and (though last, not least) its moderate rent, make up a mass of combined advantages which few other situations that we could afford can present. 

 I am extremely busy, dearest H----, and extremely elated about my play; I know I mentioned it before to you, but you may have reckoned it as one of the soap-bubbles which I am so fond of blowing, admiring, and forgetting; however, when I tell you that I have finished three acts of it, and that the proprietors of Covent Garden have offered me, if it succeeds, two hundred pounds (the price Miss Mitford's "Foscari" brought her), you will agree that I have some reason to be proud as well as pleased. 

 As nobody but myself can give you any opinion of it, you must be content to take my own, making all allowances for etc. , etc. , etc. I think, irrespective of age or sex, it is not a bad play--perhaps, considering both, a tolerably fair one; there is some good writing in it, and good situations; the latter I owe to suggestions of my mother's, who is endowed with what seems to me really a science by itself, i. E. The knowledge of producing dramatic effect; more important to a playwright than even true delineation of character or beautiful poetry, in spite of what Alfieri says: "Un attore che dirà bene, delle cose belle si farà ascoltare per forza. " But the "ben dire cose belle" will not make a play without striking situations and effects succeed, for all that; at any rate with an English audience of the present day. Moreover (but this, as well as everything about my play, must be _entre nous_ for the present), my father has offered me either to let me sell my play to a bookseller, or to buy it for the theatre at fifty pounds. 

 Fifty pounds is the very utmost that any bookseller would give for a successful play, _mais en revanche_, by selling my play to the theater it cannot be read or known as a literary work, and as to make a name for myself as a writer is the aim of my ambition, I think I shall decline his offer. My dearest H----, this quantity about myself and my pursuits will, I am afraid, appear very egotistical to you, but I rely on your unchangeable affection for me to find some interest in what is interesting me so much. 

 Always you most affectionate FANNY. 

CHAPTER VII. 

The success of the English theater in Paris was quite satisfactory; andall the most eminent members of the profession--Kean, Young, Macready, and my father--went over in turn to exhibit to the Parisian publicShakespeare the Barbarian, illustrated by his barbarianfellow-countrymen. I do not remember hearing of any very eminent actressjoining in that worthy enterprise; but Miss Smithson, a young lady witha figure and face of Hibernian beauty, whose superfluous native accentwas no drawback to her merits in the esteem of her French audience, represented to them the heroines of the English tragic drama; theincidents of which, infinitely more startling than any they were usedto, invested their fair victim with an amazing power over her foreigncritics, and she received from them, in consequence, a ratherdisproportionate share of admiration--due, perhaps, more to theastonishing circumstances in which she appeared before them than to theexcellence of her acting under them. 

One of the most enthusiastic admirers of the English representationssaid to my father, "Ah! parlez moi d'Othello! voilà, voilà la passion, la tragédie. Dieu! que j'aime cette pièce! il y a tant de_remue-ménage_. "

A few rash and superficial criticisms were hardly to be avoided; but ingeneral, my father has often said, in spite of the difficulty of theforeign language, and the strangeness of the foreign form of thought andfeeling and combination of incident, his Parisian audience neverappeared to him to miss the finer touches or more delicate and refinedshades of his acting; and in this respect he thought them superior tohis own countrymen. Lamartine and Victor Hugo had already proclaimed theenfranchisement of French poetical thought from the rigid rule ofclassical authority; and all the enthusiastic believers in the futureglories of the "Muse Romantique" went to the English theater, to beamazed, if not daunted, by the breadth of horizon and height of empyreanwhich her wings might sweep, and into which she might soar, "puisqueShakespeare l'a bien osé. "

 ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, October 11, 1827, MY DEAREST H----, I do not think you would have been surprised at my delay in answering your last, when I told you that on arriving here I found that all my goods and chattels had been (according to my own desire) only removed hither, and that their arrangement and bestowal still remained to be effected by myself; and when I tell you that I have settled all these matters, and moreover _finished my play_, I think you will excuse my not having answered you sooner. Last Monday, having in the morning achieved the termination of the fourth act, and finding that my father did not act on Tuesday, I resolved, if possible, to get it finished in order to read it to him on Tuesday evening. So on Monday evening at six o'clock I sat down to begin my fifth act, and by half-past eleven had completed my task; I am thus minute because I know you will not think these details tiresome, and also because, even if it succeeds and is praised and admired, I shall never feel so happy as when my father greeted my entrance into the drawing-room with, "Is it done, my love? I shall be the happiest man alive if it succeeds!"

 On Tuesday evening I read it to them, and I was so encouraged by the delighted looks my father and mother were continually exchanging, that I believe I read it with more effect than they either of them had thought me capable of. When it was done I was most richly rewarded, for they all seemed so pleased with me and so proud of me, that the most inordinate author's vanity would have been satisfied. And my dear mother, oh, how she looked at me!--forgive me, dear, and grant some little indulgence to my exultation. I thought I deserved some praise, but thrice my deserts were showered upon me by those I love above everything in the world. 

 When commendation and congratulation had a little given way to reflection, my mother and John entreated my father not to let the play be acted, or, if he did, to have it published first; for they said (and their opinion has been sanctioned by several literary men) that the work as a literary production (I repeat what they say, mind) has merit enough to make it desirable that the public should judge of it as a poetical composition before it is submitted to the mangling necessary for the stage. 

 Of course, my task being finished, I have nothing more to do with it; nor do I care whether it is published first or after, provided only it may be acted: though I dare say that process may not prove entirely satisfactory to me either; for though Mr. Young and my father would thoroughly embody my conception of the parts intended for them, yet there is a woman's part which, considering the materials history has furnished, ought to be a very fine one--Louisa of Savoy; and it must be cut down to the capacity of a second-rate actress. The character would have been the sort of one for Mrs. Siddons; how I wish she was yet in a situation to afford it the high preferment of her acceptance!

 My father has obtained a most unequivocal success in Paris, the more flattering as it was rather doubtful, and the excellent Parisians not only received him very well, but forthwith threw themselves into a headlong _furor_ for Shakespeare and Charles Kemble, which, although they might not improbably do the same to-morrow for two dancing dogs, _we_ are quite willing to attribute to the merits of the poet and his interpreter. The French papers have been profuse in their praises of both, and some of our own have quoted their commendations. My mother is, I think, recovering, though slowly, from her long illness. She is less deaf, and rather less blind; but for the general state of her health, time, and time alone, will, I am sure, restore it entirely. I have just seen the dress that my father had made abroad for his part in my play: a bright amber-colored _velours épinglé_, with a border of rich silver embroidery; this, together with a cloak of violet velvet trimmed with imitation sable. The fashion is what you see in all the pictures and prints of Francis I. My father is very anxious, I think, to act the play; my mother, to have it published before it is acted; and I sit and hear it discussed and praised and criticised, only longing (like a "silly wench, " as my mother calls me when I confess as much to her) to see my father in his lovely dress and hear the _alarums of my fifth act_. 

 I am a little mad, I suppose, and my letter a little tipsy, I dare say, but I am ever your most affectionate

 FANNY. 

 16 ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, WESTMINSTER, October 21, 1827. MY DEAR H----, Your letter was short and sweet, but none the sweeter for being short. I should have thought no one could have been worse provided than myself with news or letter chit-chit, and yet I think my letters are generally longer than yours; brevity, in you, is a fault; do not be guilty of it again: "car du reste, " as Madame de Sévigné says, "votre style est parfait. " John returned to Cambridge on Thursday night. He is a great loss to me, for though I have seen but little of him since our return to town, that little is too much to lose of one we love. He is an excellent fellow in every way, and in the way of abilities he is particularly to my mind. We all miss him very much; however, his absence will be broken now by visits to London, in order to keep his term [about this time my brother was entered at the Inner Temple, I think], so that we shall occasionally enjoy his company for a day or two. I should like to tell you something about my play, but unluckily have nothing to tell; everything about it is as undecided as when last I wrote to you. It is in the hands of the copyist of Covent Garden, but what its ultimate fate is to be I know not. If it is decided that it is to be brought out on the stage before publication, that will not take place at present, because this is a very unfavorable time of year. If I can send it to Ireland, tell me how I can get it conveyed to you, and I will endeavor to do so. I should like you to read it, but oh, _how_ I should like to go and see it acted with you! I am now full of thoughts of writing a comedy, and have drawn out the plan of one--plot, acts, and scenes in due order--already; and I mean to make it Italian and mediæval, for the sake of having one of those bewitching creatures, a jester, in it; I have an historical one in my play, Triboulet, whom I have tried to make an interesting as well as an amusing personage. 

 My mother, by the aid of a blister and _my play_, is, I think, recovering, though slowly, from her illness; she is still, though, in a state of great suffering, which is by no means alleviated by being unable to write, read, work, or occupy herself in any manner. 

 We have been to the play pretty regularly twice a week for the last three weeks, and shall continue to do so during the whole winter; which is a plan I much approve of. I am very fond of going to the play, and Kean, Young, and my father make one of Shakespeare's plays something well worth seeing. I saw the "Merchant of Venice" the other evening, for the first time, and returned home a violent _Keanite_. That man is an extraordinary creature! Some of the things he did, appeared, on reflection, questionable to my judgment and open to criticism; but while under the influence of his amazing power of passion it is impossible to reason, analyze, or do anything but surrender one's self to his forcible appeals to one's emotions. He entirely divested Shylock of all poetry or elevation, but invested it with a concentrated ferocity that made one's blood curdle. He seemed to me to combine the supernatural malice of a fiend with the base reality of the meanest humanity. His passion is prosaic, but all the more intensely terrible for that very reason. I am to see him to-morrow in "Richard III. , " and, though I never saw the play before, am afraid I shall be disappointed, because Richard III. Is a Plantagenet Prince, and should be a royal villain, and I am afraid Mr. Kean will not have the innate _majesty_ which I think belongs to the part; however, we shall see, and when next I write I will tell you how it impressed me. 

 You deserve that I should bestow all my tediousness upon you, for loving me as well as you do. Mrs. Harry Siddons and her daughter are here for two or three days, on their return from their tour through Switzerland. Mrs. Harry is all that is excellent, though she does not strike me as particularly clever; and Lizzy is a very pretty, very good, very sweet, very amiable girl. Her brother, my cousin, the midshipman, is here too, having come up from Portsmouth to meet his mother and sister, so that the house is full. Think of that happy girl having travelled all through Switzerland, seen the Jungfrau--Manfred's mountain--been in two violent storms at night on the lakes, and telling me placidly that "she liked it all very well. " Oh dear, oh dear! how queerly Heaven does distribute privileges! Good-by, dear. 

 Yours ever, FANNY. 

 16 ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, December, 1827. MY DEAREST H----, My heart is full of joy, and I write that you may rejoice with me; our dear John has distinguished himself greatly, but lest my words should seem sisterly and exaggerated, I will repeat what Mr. Peacock, his tutor, wrote to my father: "He has covered himself with glory. Such an oration as his has not been heard for many years in Cambridge, and it was as tastefully and modestly delivered as it was well written. " This has made us all _very, very_ happy, and though the first news of it overcame my poor mother, whose nerves are far from firm, she soon recovered, and we are impatiently expecting his return from college. My play is at present being pruned by my father, and will therefore not occupy my thoughts again till it comes out, which I hope will be at Easter. I did not write sooner, because I had nothing to say; but now that this joy about my brother has come to me, _je te l'envoie_. Since last you heard from me I have seen the great West India Dock and the Thames Tunnel. Oh, H----, "que c'est une jolie chose que l'homme!" Annihilated by any one of the elements if singly opposed to its power, he by his genius yet brings their united forces into bondage, and compels obedience from all their manifold combined strength. We penetrate the earth, we turn the course of rivers, we exalt the valleys and bow down the mountains; and we die and return to our dust, and they remain and remember us no more. Often enough, indeed, the names of great inventors and projectors have been overshadowed or effaced by mere finishers of their work or adapters of their idea, who have reaped the honor and emolument due to an obscure originator, who passes away from the world, his rightful claim to its admiration and gratitude unknown or unacknowledged. But these obey the law of their being; they cannot but do the work God's inspiration calls them to. 

 But I must tell you what this tunnel is like, or at least try to do so. You enter, by flights of stairs, the first door, and find yourself on a circular platform which surrounds the top of a well or shaft, of about two hundred feet in circumference and five hundred in depth. This well is an immense iron frame of cylindrical form, filled in with bricks; it was constructed on level ground, and then, by some wonderful mechanical process, sunk into the earth. In the midst of this is a steam engine, and above, or below, as far as your eye can see, huge arms are working up and down, while the creaking, crashing, whirring noises, and the swift whirling of innumerable wheels all round you, make you feel for the first few minutes as if you were going distracted. I should have liked to look much longer at all these beautiful, wise, working creatures, but was obliged to follow the last of the party through all the machinery, down little wooden stairs and along tottering planks, to the bottom of the well. On turning round at the foot of the last flight of steps through an immense dark arch, as far as sight could reach stretched a vaulted passage, smooth earth underfoot, the white arches of the roof beyond one another lengthening on and on in prolonged vista, the whole lighted by a line of gas lamps, and as bright, almost, as if it were broad day. It was more like one of the long avenues of light that lead to the abodes of the genii in fairy tales, than anything I had ever beheld. The profound stillness of the place, which was first broken by my father's voice, to which the vaulted roof gave extraordinary and startling volume of tone, the indescribable feeling of subterranean vastness, the amazement and delight I experienced, quite overcame me, and I was obliged to turn from the friend who was explaining everything to me, to cry and ponder in silence. How I wish you had been with us, dear H----! Our name is always worth something to us: Mr. Brunel, who was superintending some of the works, came to my father and offered to conduct us to where the workmen were employed--an unusual favor, which of course delighted us all. So we left our broad, smooth path of light, and got into dark passages, where we stumbled among coils of ropes and heaps of pipes and piles of planks, and where ground springs were welling up and flowing about in every direction, all which was very strange. As you may have heard, the tunnel caved in once, and let the Thames in through the roof; and in order that, should such an accident occur again, no lives may be lost, an iron frame has been constructed--a sort of cage, divided into many compartments, in each of which a man with his lantern and his tools is placed--and as they clear the earth away this iron frame is moved onward and advances into new ground. All this was wonderful and curious beyond measure, but the appearance of the workmen themselves, all begrimed, with their brawny arms and legs bare, some standing in black water up to their knees, others laboriously shovelling the black earth in their cages (while they sturdily sung at their task), with the red, murky light of links and lanterns flashing and flickering about them, made up the most striking picture you can conceive. As we returned I remained at the bottom of the stairs last of all, to look back at the beautiful road to Hades, wishing I might be left behind, and then we reascended, through wheels, pulleys, and engines, to the upper day. After this we rowed down the river to the docks, lunched on board a splendid East Indiaman, and came home again. I think it is better for me, however, to look at the trees, and the sun, moon, and stars, than at tunnels and docks; they make me too _humanity proud_. 

 I am reading "Vivian Grey. " Have you read it? It is very clever. 

 Ever your most affectionate

 FANNY. 

 16 ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, January, 1828. DEAREST H----, I jumped, in despite of a horrid headache, when I saw your letter. Indeed, if you knew how the sight of your handwriting delights me, you would not talk of lack of matter; for what have I to tell you of more interest for you, than the health and proceedings of those you love must be to me?

 Dear John is come home with his trophy. He is really a highly gifted creature; but I sometimes fear that the passionate eagerness with which he _pursues his pursuit_, the sort of frenzy he has about politics, and his constant excitement about political questions, may actually injure his health, and the vehemence with which he speaks and writes in support of his peculiar views will perhaps endanger his future prospects. 

 He is neither tory nor whig, but a radical, a utilitarian, an adorer of Bentham, a worshiper of Mill, an advocate for vote by ballot, an opponent of hereditary aristocracy, the church establishment, the army and navy, which he deems sources of unnecessary national expense; though who is to take care of our souls and bodies, if the three last-named institutions are done away with, I do not quite see. Morning, noon, and night he is writing whole volumes of arguments against them, full of a good deal of careful study and reading, and in a close, concise, forcible style, which is excellent in itself, and the essays are creditable to his laborious industry; but they will not teach him mathematics, or give him a scholarship or his degree. That he will distinguish himself hereafter I have no doubt; but at present he is engrossed by a passion (for it seems to me nothing less) which occupies his mind and time, to the detriment, if not the exclusion, of all other studies. 

 I feel almost ashamed of saying anything about myself, after the two or three scoldings you have sent me of late. Perhaps while my blue devils found vent in ridiculous verses, they did not much matter; but their having prompted me lately to throw between seven and eight hundred pages (about a year's work) into the fire, seems to me now rather deplorable. You perhaps will say that the fire is no bad place for seven or eight hundred pages of my manuscript; but I had spent time and pains on them, and I think they should not have been thrown away in a foolish fit of despondency. I am at present not very well. I do not mean that I have any specific illness, but headaches and side-aches, so that I am one moment in a state of feverish excitement and the next nervous and low-spirited; this is not a good account, but a true one. 

 I have no "new friends, " dearest H----; perhaps because my dislike to society makes me stupid and disagreeable when I am in it. I have made one acquaintance, which might perhaps grow to a friendship were it not that distance and its attendant inconveniences have hitherto prevented my becoming more intimate with the lady I refer to. She is a married woman; her name is Jameson. She is an Irishwoman, and the authoress of the "Diary of an Ennuyée. " I like her very much; she is extremely clever; I wish I knew her better. I have been to one dance and one or two dinners lately, but to tell you the truth, dear H----, the old people naturally treat me after my years, as a young person, and the young people (perhaps from my self-conceit) seem to me stupid and uninteresting, and so, you see, I do not like society. Cecilia Siddons is out of town at present, and I have not seen her for some time. You may have heard that the theatre has gained a lawsuit against Sinclair, the celebrated singer, by a reversal of the former verdict in the case. We were not even aware that such a process was going on, and when my father came home and said, "We have won our cause, " my mother and myself started up, supposing he meant _the_ chancery suit. That, unfortunately, is still pending, pending, like the sword of Damocles, over our heads, banishing all security for the present or hope for the future. The theatre is, I believe, doing very well just now, and we go pretty often to the play, which I like. I have lately been seeing my father playing Falstaff several times, and I think it is an excellent piece of acting; he gives all the humor without too much coarseness, or _charging_, and through the whole, according to the fat knight's own expression, he is "Sir John to all the world, " with a certain courtly deportment which prevents him from degenerating into the mere gross buffoon. They are in sad want of a woman at both the theatres. I've half a mind to give Covent Garden one. Don't be surprised. I have something to say to you on this subject, but have not room for it in this letter. My father is just now acting in the north of England. We expect him back in a fortnight. God bless you, dear H----. 

 Yours ever, FANNY. 

The vehement passion of political interest which absorbed my brother atthis time was in truth affecting the whole of English society almost aspassionately. In a letter written in 1827, the Duke of Wellington, afterspeaking of the strong partisan sentiment which was agitating thecountry, added, "The ladies and all the youth are with us;" that is, with the Tory party, which, under his leadership, was still an activepower of obstruction to the imminent changes to which both he and hisparty were presently to succumb. His ministry was a period of thestormiest excitement in the political world, and the importance of thequestions at issue--Catholic emancipation and parliamentaryreform--powerfully affected men's minds in the ranks of life leastallied to the governing class. Even in a home so obscure and so devotedto other pursuits and interests as ours, the spirit of the times madeits way, and our own peculiar occupations became less interesting to usthan the intense national importance of the public questions which werebeginning to convulse the country from end to end. About this time I metwith a book which produced a great and not altogether favorable effectupon my mind (the blame resting entirely with me, I think, and not withwhat I read). I had become moody and fantastical for want of solidwholesome mental occupation, and the excess of imaginative stimulus inmy life, and was possessed with a wild desire for an existence of lonelyindependence, which seemed to my exaggerated notions the only one fittedto the intellectual development in which alone I conceived happiness toconsist. Mrs. Jameson's "Diary of an Ennuyée, " which I now read for thefirst time, added to this desire for isolation and independence such apassionate longing to go to Italy, that my brain was literally filledwith chimerical projects of settling in the south of Europe, and thereleading a solitary life of literary labor, which, together with the fameI hoped to achieve by it, seemed to me the only worthy purpose ofexistence. While under the immediate spell of her fascinating book, itwas of course very delightful to me to make Mrs. Jameson's acquaintance, which I did at the house of our friends, Mr. And Mrs. Basil Montagu. They were the friends of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Proctor(Barry Cornwall, who married Mrs. Montagu's daughter), and werethemselves individually as remarkable, if not as celebrated, as many oftheir more famous friends. Basil Montagu was the son of the Earl ofSandwich and the beautiful Miss Wray, whose German lover murdered her atthe theatre by shooting her in her private box, and then blew his ownbrains out. Mr. Montagu inherited ability, eccentricity, and personalbeauty, from his parents. His only literary productions that I amacquainted with were a notice of Bacon and his works, which he publishedin a small pamphlet volume, and another volume of extracts from some ofthe fine prose writers of the seventeenth century. I have a generalimpression that his personal intercourse gave a far better idea of hisintellectual ability than anything that he achieved either in hisprofession or in letters. 

His conversation was extremely vivid and sparkling, and the quainteccentricity of his manner added to the impression of originality whichhe produced upon one. Very unlike the common run of people as he was, however, he was far less so than his wife, who certainly was one of themost striking and remarkable persons I have known. Her appearance wasextraordinary: she was much above middle height, with a beautiful figureand face, the outline of which was of classical purity and severity, while her whole carriage and appearance was dignified and majestic tothe highest degree. I knew her for upwards of thirty years, and neversaw her depart from a peculiar style of dress, which she had adoptedwith the finest instinct of what was personally becoming as well asgraceful and beautiful in itself. She was so superior in this point toher sex generally, that, having found that which was undoubtedly her ownproper individual costume, she never changed the fashion of it. Herdress deserved to be called (what all dress should be) a lesser fineart, and seemed the proper expression in clothes of her personality, andreally a part of herself. It was a long, open robe, over an underskirtof the same material and color (always moonlight silver gray, amethystpurple, or black silk or satin of the richest quality), trimmed withbroad velvet facings of the same color, the sleeves plain and tightfitting from shoulder to wrist, and the bosom covered with a fine lacehalf-body, which came, like the wimple of old mediæval portraits, upround her throat, and seemed to belong in material and fashion to theclear chin-stay which followed the noble contour of her face, and thepicturesque cap which covered, without concealing, her auburn hair andthe beautiful proportions of her exquisite head. 

This lady knew no language but her own, and to that ignorance (which oneis tempted in these days occasionally to think desirable) she probablyowed the remarkable power and purity with which she used her mothertongue. Her conversation and her letters were perfect models of spokenand written English. Her marriage with Mr. Montagu was attended withsome singular circumstances, the knowledge of which I owe to herself. She was a Yorkshire widow lady, and came with her only child (a littlegirl) to visit some friends in London, with whom Basil Montagu wasintimate. Mrs. S---- had probably occasionally been the subject ofconversation between him and her hosts, when they were expecting her;for one evening soon after her arrival, as she was sitting partlyconcealed by one of the curtains in the drawing-room, Basil Montagu camerapidly into the room, exclaiming (evidently not perceiving her), "Come, where is your wonderful Mrs. S----? I want to see her. " During the wholeevening he engrossed her attention and talked to her, and the nextmorning at breakfast she laughingly complained to her hosts that he hadnot been content with that, but had tormented her in dreams all night. "For, " said she, "I dreamt I was going to be married to him, and the daybefore the wedding he came to me with a couple of boxes, and saidsolemnly, 'My dear Anne, I want to confide these relics to your keeping;in this casket are contained the bones of my dear first wife, and inthis those of my dear second wife; do me the favor to take charge ofthem for me. '" The odd circumstance was that Basil Montagu had beenmarried twice, and that when he made his third matrimonial venture, andwas accepted by Mrs. S----, he appeared before her one day, and withmuch solemnity begged her to take charge of two caskets, in which wererespectively treasured, not the bones, but the letters of her twopredecessors. It is quite possible that he might have heard of her dreamon the first night of their acquaintance, and amused himself withcarrying it out when he was about to marry her; but when Mrs. Montagutold me the story I do not think she suggested any such rationalisticsolution of the mystery. Her daughter, Anne S---- (afterwards Mrs. Procter), who has been all my life a kind and excellent friend to me, inherited her remarkable mother's mental gifts and special mastery overher own language; but she added to these, as part of her ownindividuality, a power of sarcasm that made the tongue she spoke in andthe tongue she spoke with two of the most formidable weapons any womanwas ever armed with. She was an exceedingly kind-hearted person, perpetually occupied in good offices to the poor, the afflicted, herfriends, and all whom she could in any way serve; nevertheless, such washer severity of speech, not unfrequently exercised on those she appearedto like best, that Thackeray, Browning, and Kinglake, who were all herfriendly intimates, sometimes designated her as "Our Lady ofBitterness, " and she is alluded to by that title in the opening chapterof "Eothen. " A daily volume of wit and wisdom might have been gatheredfrom her familiar talk, which was _crisp_, with suggestions of thoughtin the liveliest and highest form. Somebody asking her how she and acertain acrid critic of her acquaintance got on together, she replied, "Oh, very well; we sharpen each other like two knives. " Beingcongratulated on the restoration of cordiality between herself and afriend with whom she had had some difference, "Oh yes, " said she, "thecracked cup is mended, but it will never hold water again. " Both theseladies, mother and daughter, had a most extraordinary habit of creditingtheir friends with their own wise and witty sayings; thus Mrs. Montaguand Mrs. Procter would say, "Ah yes, you know, as you once said, " andthen would follow something so sparkling, profound, concise, incisive, and brilliant, that you remained, eyes and mouth open, gasping inspeechless astonishment at the merit of the saying you never said (andcouldn't have said if your life had depended on it), and themagnificence of the gift its author was making you. The princes in theArabian Nights, who only gave you a ring worth thousands of sequins, were shabby fellows compared with these ladies, who declared that thediamonds and rubies of their own uttering had fallen from your lips. Persons who lay claim to the good things of others are not rare; thosewho do not only disclaim their own, but even credit others with them, are among the very rarest. In all my intercourse with the inhabitants of_two_ worlds, I have known no similar instance of self-denial; andreflecting upon it, I have finally concluded that it was too superhumanto be a real virtue, and could proceed only from an exorbitantsuperabundance of natural gift, which made its possessors reckless, extravagant, and even unprincipled in the use of their wealth; they hadwit enough for themselves, and to spare for all their friends, and thesewere many. 

At an evening party at Mrs. Montagu's, in Bedford Square, in 1828, Ifirst saw Mrs. Jameson. The Ennuyée, one is given to understand, dies;and it was a little vexatious to behold her sitting on a sofa, in a verybecoming state of blooming _plumptitude_; but it was some compensationto be introduced to her. And so began a close and friendly intimacy, which lasted for many years, between myself and this very accomplishedwoman. She was the daughter of an Irish miniature-painter of the name ofMurphy, and began life as a governess, in which capacity she educatedthe daughters of Lord H----, and went to Italy with the family of Mrs. R----. When I first knew her she had not long been married to Mr. RobertJameson, a union so ill-assorted that it restored Mrs. Jameson to thebosom of her own family, to whom her conjugal ill-fortune proved ablessing, for never did daughter and sister discharge with more lovingfidelity the duties of those relationships. Her life was devoted to herparents while they lived, and after their death to her sisters and ayoung niece whom she adopted. Her various and numerous gifts andacquirements were exercised, developed, and constantly increased by alife of the most indefatigable literary study, research, and labor. Herreading was very extensive; her information, without being profound, wasgeneral; she was an excellent modern linguist, and perfectly well versedin the literature of her own country and of France, Germany, and Italy. She had an uncommon taste and talent for art, and as she added to herknowledge of the theory and history of painting familiar acquaintancewith most of the fine public and private galleries in Europe, a keensensibility to beauty, and considerable critical judgment, her worksupon painting, and especially the exceedingly interesting volumes shepublished on the "Sacred and Legendary Art of the Romish Church, " are atonce delightful and interesting sources of information, and useful andaccurate works of reference, to which considerable value is added by herown spirited and graceful etchings. 

The literary works of hers in which I have a direct personal interest, are a charming book of essays on Shakespeare's female characters, entitled "Characteristics of Women, " which she did me the honor todedicate to me; some pages of letterpress written to accompany a seriesof sketches John Hayter made of me in the character of Juliet; and anotice of my sister's principal operatic performances after she came outon the stage. Mrs. Jameson at one time contemplated writing a life of myaunt Siddons, not thinking Boaden's biography of her satisfactory; inthis purpose, however, she was effectually opposed by Campbell, who hadundertaken the work, and, though he exhibited neither interest nor zealin the fulfillment of his task, doggedly (in the manger) refused torelinquish it to her. Certainly, had Mrs. Jameson carried out herintention, Mrs. Siddons would have had a monument dedicated to hermemory better calculated to preserve it than those which the above-namedgentlemen bestowed on her. It would have been written in a spirit of farhigher artistic discrimination, and with infinitely more sympathy bothwith the woman and with the actress. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Late in middle life Mrs. Jameson formed an intimate acquaintance, whichat one time assumed the character of a close friendship, with LadyByron, under the influence of whose remarkable mind and character thesubjects of artistic and literary interest, which had till then absorbedMrs. Jameson's attention and occupied her pen, gave place to others of avery different kind--those which engrossed for a time, to the exclusionof almost all others, the minds of men and women in England at thebeginning of the Crimean War; when the fashion of certain forms ofphilanthropy set by that wonderful woman, Florence Nightingale, wasmaking hospital nurses of idle, frivolous fine ladies, and turning intoinnumerable channels of newly awakened benevolence and activity--farmore zealous than discreet--the love of adventure, the desire forexcitement, and the desperate need of occupation, of many women who hadno other qualifications for the hard and holy labors into which theyflung themselves. 

Mrs. Jameson felt the impulse of the time, as it reached her throughLady Byron and Miss Nightingale, and warmly embraced the wider and moreenlightened aspect of women's duties beginning to be advocated withextreme enthusiasm in English society. One of the last books shepublished was a popular account of foreign Sisters of Mercy, theirspecial duties, the organization of their societies, and the sphere oftheir operations; suggesting the formation of similar bodies ofreligiously charitable sisterhoods in England. She had this subject somuch at heart, she told me, that she had determined to give a series ofpublic lectures upon it, provided she found her physical power equal tothe effort of making herself heard by an audience in any public room ofmoderate size. She tested the strength of her chest and voice bydelivering one lecture to an audience assembled in the drawing-rooms ofa friend; but, as she never repeated the experiment, I suppose she foundthe exertion too great for her. 

When first I met Mrs. Jameson she was an attractive-looking young woman, with a skin of that dazzling whiteness which generally accompaniesreddish hair, such as hers was; her face, which was habitually refinedand _spirituelle_ in its expression, was capable of a marvelous power ofconcentrated feeling, such as is seldom seen on any woman's face, and ispeculiarly rare on the countenance of a fair, small, delicately featuredwoman, all whose personal characteristics were essentially feminine. Herfigure was extremely pretty; her hands and arms might have been those ofMadame de Warens. 

Mrs. Jameson told me that the idea of giving public lectures hadsuggested itself to her in the course of her conversations with LadyByron upon the possible careers that might be opened to women. I knowLady Byron thought a very valuable public service might be rendered bywomen who so undertook to advocate important truths of which they hadmade special study, and for the dissemination of which in this mannerthey might be especially gifted. She accepted in the most liberal mannerthe claim put forward by women to more extended spheres of usefulness, and to the adoption of careers hitherto closed to them; she was deeplyinterested, personally, in some who made the arduous attempt of studyingand practicing medicine, and seemed generally to think that there weremany directions in which women might follow paths yet unopened, of highand noble exertion, and hereafter do society and the cause of progressgood service. 

Lady Byron was a peculiarly reserved and quiet person, with a mannerhabitually deliberate and measured, a low, subdued voice, and ratherdiffident hesitation in expressing herself: and she certainly conveyedthe impression of natural reticence and caution. But so far from everappearing to me to justify the description often given of her, of aperson of exceptionally cold, hard, measured intellect and character, she always struck me as a woman capable of profound and fervidenthusiasm, with a mind of rather a romantic and visionary order. 

She surprised me extremely one evening as she was accompanying me to oneof my public readings, by exclaiming, "Oh, how I envy you! What would Inot give to be in your place!" As my vocation, I am sorry to say, oftener appeared to me to justify my own regret than the envy of others, I answered, "What! to read Shakespeare before some hundreds of people?""Oh no, " she said; "not to read Shakespeare to them, but to have allthat mass of people under your control, subject to your influence, andreceiving your impressions. " She then went on to say she would giveanything to lecture upon subjects which interested her deeply, and thatshe should like to advocate with every power she possessed. Lady Byron, like most enthusiasts, was fond of influencing others and makingdisciples to her own views. I made her laugh by telling her that morethan once, when looking from my reading-desk over the sea of facesuplifted towards me, a sudden feeling had seized me that I must saysomething _from myself_ to all those human beings whose attention I feltat that moment entirely at my command, and between whom and myself asense of sympathy thrilled powerfully and strangely through my heart, asI looked steadfastly at them before opening my lips; but that, onwondering afterwards _what_ I might, could, would, or should have saidto them from myself, I never could think of anything but two words: "Begood!" which as a preface to the reading of one of Shakespeare's plays("The Merry Wives of Windsor, " for instance) might have startled them. Often and strongly as the temptation recurred to me, I never could thinkof anything better worth saying to my audience. I have some hope thatsometimes in the course of the reading I said it effectually, withoutshocking them by a departure from my proper calling, or deserving therebuke of "Ne sutor ultra crepidam. "

In February, 1828, I fell ill of the measles, of which the followingnote to Miss S---- is a record. 

 MY DEAREST H----, I am in a great hurry, because my parcel is not made up yet, and I expect your brother's emissary to call at every moment. I send you my play, also an album of mine, also an unfinished sketch of me, also a copy of my will. The play you must not keep, because it is my only copy; neither must you keep my album, because I want to finish one of the pieces of verse begun in it; my picture--such as it is--begun, but never finished, by Dick ----, I thought you would like better than nothing. He has finished one that is a very good likeness of me, but it was done for my mother, or I should have wished you to have it. My will I made last week, while I was in bed with the measles, and want you to keep that. 

 I have been very ill for the last fortnight, but am well again now. I am pressed for time to-day, but will soon write to you in earnest. 

 I'm afraid you'll find my play very long; when my poor father began cutting it, he looked ruefully at it, and said, "There's plenty of it, Fan, " to which my reply is Madame de Sévigné's, "Si j'eusse eu plus de temps, je ne t'aurais pas écrit si longuement. " Dear H----, if you knew how I thought of you, and the fresh, sweet mayflowers with which we filled our baskets at Heath Farm, while I lay parched and full of pain and fever in my illness!

 Yours ever, FANNY. 

My beloved aunt Dall nursed and tended me in my sickness with unwearieddevotion; and one day when I was convalescent, finding me depressed inspirits and crying, she said laughingly to me, "Why, child, there isnothing the matter with you; but you are weak in body and mind. " Thisseemed to me the most degraded of all conceivable conditions, and I fellinto a redoublement of weeping over my own abasement and imbecility. 

My attention was suddenly attracted to a large looking-glass opposite mybed, and it occurred to me that in my then condition of nerves nothingwas more likely than that I should turn visionary and fancy I beheldapparitions. And under this conviction I got up and covered the glass, in which I felt sure I should presently "see sic sights as I daured natell. " I speak of this because, though I was in a physical condition notunlikely to produce such phenomena, I retained the power of perceivingthat they would be the result of my physical condition, and that Ishould in some measure be accessory to my own terror, whatever form itmight assume. 

I have so often in my life been on the very edge of ghost-seeing, andfelt so perfectly certain that the least encouragement on my part wouldset them before me, and that nothing but a resolute effort of will wouldsave me from such a visitation, that I have become convinced that of thepeople who have seen apparitions, one half have--as I should termit--chosen to do so. I have all my life suffered from a tendency toimaginary terrors, and have always felt sure that a determined exerciseof self-control would effectually keep them from having the dominionover me. The most distressing form of nervous excitement that I haveever experienced was one that for many years I was very liable to, andwhich always recurred when I was in a state of unusual exaltation ordepression of spirits; both which states in me were either directlycaused or greatly aggravated by certain electrical conditions of theatmosphere, which seemed to affect my whole nervous system as if I hadbeen some machine expressly constructed for showing and testing thepower of such influences on the human economy. 

I habitually read while combing and brushing my hair at night, andthough I made no use of my looking-glass while thus employed, having myeyes fixed on my book, I sat (for purposes of general convenience) at mytoilet table in front of the mirror. While engrossed in my book it hasfrequently happened to me accidentally to raise my eyes and suddenly tofix them on my own image in the glass, when a feeling of startledsurprise, as if I had not known I was there and did not immediatelyrecognize my own reflection, would cause me to remain looking at myself, the intentness with which I did so increasing as the face appeared to menot my own; and under this curious fascination my countenance hasaltered, becoming gradually so dreadful, so much more dreadful inexpression than any human face I ever saw or could describe, while itwas next to impossible for me to turn my eyes away from the hideousvision confronting me, that I have felt more than once that unless bythe strongest effort of will I immediately averted my head, I shouldcertainly become insane. Of course I was myself a party to this strangefascination of terror, and must, no doubt, have exercised some power ofvolition in the assumption of the expression that my face graduallypresented, and which was in no sense a distortion or grimace, but aterrible look suggestive of despair and desperate wickedness, the memoryof which even now affects me painfully. But though in some measurevoluntary, I do not think I was conscious at the time that the processwas so; and I have never been able to determine the precise nature ofthis nervous affection, which, beginning thus in a startled feeling ofsudden surprise, went on to such a climax of fascinated terror. 

I was already at this time familiar enough with the theory of ghosts, ofwhich one need not be afraid, through Nicolai of Berlin's interestingwork upon the curious phantasmagoria of apparitions, on which he madeand recorded so many singular observations. Moreover, my mother, from acombination of general derangement of the system and special affectionof the visual nerves, was at one time constantly tormented by wholeprocessions and crowds of visionary figures, of the origin and nature ofwhich she was perfectly aware, but which she often described asexceedingly annoying by their grotesque and distorted appearance, andwearisome from their continual recurrence and thronging succession. Withthe recovery of her general health she obtained a release from thisdisagreeable haunting. 

One of the most remarkable and painful instances of affection of thevisual organs in consequence of a violent nervous shock was thatexperienced by my friend Miss T----, who, after seeing her cousin, LadyL----, drowned while bathing off the rocks at her home at Ardgillan, wasrequested by Lord L---- to procure for him, before his wife's burial, the wedding ring from her finger. The poor lady's body was terriblyswollen and discolored, and Miss T---- had to use considerable effort towithdraw the ring from the dead finger. The effect of the wholedisastrous event upon her was to leave her for several months afflictedwith an affection of the eyes, which represented half of the face ofevery person she saw with the swollen, livid, and distorted features ofher drowned cousin; a horrible and ghastly result of the nervous shockshe had undergone, which she feared she should never be delivered from, but which gradually wore itself out. 

The only time I ever saw an apparition was under singularly unfavorablecircumstances for such an experience. I was sitting at midday in anAmerican railroad car, which every occupant but my maid and myself hadleft to go and get some refreshment at the station, where the trainstopped some time for that purpose. I was sitting with my maid in asmall private compartment, sometimes occupied by ladies travellingalone, the door of which (wide open at the time) communicated with themain carriage, and commanded its entire length. Suddenly a personentered the carriage by a door close to where I sat, and passed down thewhole length of the car. I sprang from my seat, exclaiming aloud, "Thereis C----!" and rushed to the door before, by any human possibility, anyone could have reached the other end of the car; but nobody was to beseen. My maid had seen nothing. The person I imagined I had seen wasupwards of two hundred miles distant; but what was to me the mostcurious part of this experience was that had I really met the person Isaw anywhere, my most careful endeavor would have been to avoid her, and, if possible, to escape being seen by her; whereas this apparition, or imagination, so affected my nerves that I rushed after it as ifdesirous of pursuing and overtaking it, while my deliberate desire withregard to the image I thus sprang towards would have been never to haveseen it again as long as I lived. The state of the atmosphere at thetime of this occurrence was extraordinarily oppressive, and charged witha tremendous thunder-storm, a condition of the air which, as I havesaid, always acts with extremely distressing and disturbing influenceupon my whole physical system. 

 ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, February, 1828. MY DEAREST H----, I have this instant received your letter, and, contrary to John's wise rule of never answering an epistle till three days after he receives it, I sit down to write, to talk, to be with you. Pray, when your potatoes flourish, your fires are put out by the sun, and your hills are half hid in warm mist, wish one hearty wish for me, such as I spend by the dozen on you. I confess I am disappointed, as far as I can be with a letter of yours, at finding you had not yet received my parcel, for my vanity has been in considerable anxiety respecting your judgment on my production. Now that the effervescence of my poetical _furor_ has subsided, and that repeated perusals have taken a little of the charm of novelty from my play, my own opinion of it is that it is a clever performance _for so young a person_, but nothing more. The next will, I hope, be better, and I think you will agree with me in regard to this. Dearest H----, in my last letter want of time and room prevented my enlarging on my hint about the stage, but as far as my own determination goes at present, I think it is the course that I shall most likely pursue. You know that independence of mind and body seems to me the great desideratum of life; I am not patient of restraint or submissive to authority, and my head and heart are engrossed with the idea of exercising and developing the literary talent which I think I possess. This is meat, drink, and sleep to me; my world, in which I live, and have my happiness; and, moreover, I hope, by means of fame (the prize for which I pray). To a certain degree it may be my means of procuring benefits of a more substantial nature, which I am by no means inclined to estimate at less than their worth. I do not think I am fit to marry, to make an obedient wife or affectionate mother; my imagination is paramount with me, and would disqualify me, I think, for the every-day, matter-of-fact cares and duties of the mistress of a household and the head of a family. I think I should be unhappy and the cause of unhappiness to others if I were to marry. I cannot swear I shall never fall in love, but if I do I will fall out of it again, for I do not think I shall ever so far lose sight of my best interest and happiness as to enter into a relation for which I feel so unfit. Now, if I do not marry, what is to become of me in the event of anything happening to my father? His property is almost all gone; I doubt if we shall ever receive one pound from it. Is it likely that, supposing I were willing to undergo the drudgery of writing for my bread, I could live by my wits and the produce of my brain; or is such an existence desirable?

 Perhaps I might attain to the literary dignity of being the lioness of a season, asked to dinner parties "because I am so clever;" perhaps my writing faculty might become a useful auxiliary to some other less precarious dependence; but to write to eat--to live, in short--that seems to me to earn hard money after a very hard fashion. The stage is a profession that people who have a talent for it make lucrative, and which honorable conduct may make respectable; one which would place me at once beyond the fear of want, and that is closely allied in its nature to my beloved literary pursuits. 

 If I should (as my father and mother seem to think not unlikely) change my mind with respect to marrying, the stage need be no bar to that, and if I continue to write, the stage might both help me in and derive assistance from my exercise of the pursuit of dramatic authorship. And the mere mechanical labor of writing costs me so little, that the union of the two occupations does not seem to me a difficulty. My father said the other day, "There is a fine fortune to be made by any young woman, of even decent talent, on the stage now. " A fine fortune is a fine thing; to be sure, there remains a rather material question to settle, that of "even decent talent. " A passion for all beautiful poetry I am sure you will grant me; and you would perhaps be inclined to take my father and mother's word for my dramatic capacity. I spoke to them earnestly on this subject lately, and they both, with some reluctance, I think, answered me, to my questions, that they thought, as far as they could judge (and, unless partiality blinds them entirely, none can be better judges), I might succeed. In some respects, no girl intending herself for this profession can have had better opportunities of acquiring just notions on the subject of acting. I have constantly heard refined and thoughtful criticism on our greatest dramatic works, and on every various way of rendering them effective on the stage. I have been lately very frequently to the theater, and seen and heard observingly, and exercised my own judgment and critical faculty to the best of my ability, according to these same canons of taste by which it has been formed. Nature has certainly not been as favorable to me as might have been wished, if I am to embrace a calling where personal beauty, if not indispensable, is so great an advantage. But if the informing spirit be mine, it shall go hard if, with a face and voice as obedient to my emotions as mine are, I do not in some measure make up for the want of good looks. My father is now proprietor and manager of the theatre, and those certainly are favorable circumstances for my entering on a career which is one of great labor and some exposure, at the best, to a woman, and where a young girl cannot be too prudent herself, nor her protectors too careful of her. I hope I have not taken up this notion hastily, and I have no fear of looking only on the bright side of the picture, for ours is a house where that is very seldom seen. 

 Good-by; God bless you! I shall be very anxious to hear from you; I sent you a note with my play, telling you I had just got up from the measles; but as my note has not reached you, I tell you so again. I am quite well, however, now, and shall not give them to you by signing myself

 Yours most affectionately, FANNY. 

 P. S. --I forgot to answer your questions in telling you all this, but I will do so methodically now. My side-ache is some disturbance in my liver, evidently, and does not give way entirely either to physic or exercise, as the slightest emotion, either pleasurable or painful, immediately brings it on; my blue devils I pass over in silence; such a liver and my kind of head are sure to breed them. 

 Certainly I reverence Jeremy Bentham for his philanthropy, plain powerful sense, and lucid forcible writing; but as for John's politics, they are, as Beatrice tells the prince he is, "too costly for every-day wear. " His theories are so perfect that I think imperfect men could never be brought to live under a scheme of government of his devising. 

 I think Mrs. Jameson would like you, and you her, if you met, but my mind is running on something else than this. My father's income is barely eight hundred a year. John's expenses, since he has been at college, have been nearly three. Five hundred a year for such a family as ours is very close and careful work, dear H----, and if my going on the stage would nearly double that income, lessen my dear father's anxieties for us all, and the quantity of work which he latterly has often felt too much for him, and remove the many privations which my dear mother cheerfully endures, as well as the weight of her uncertainty about our future provision, would not this be a "consummation devoutly to be wished"?

 ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, March, 1828. MY DEAREST H----, I have been thinking what you have been thinking of my long silence, about which, however, perhaps you have not been thinking at all. What, you say in one of your last about my destroying your letters troubles me a good deal, dearest H----. I really cannot bear to think of it; why, those letters are one of my very few precious possessions. When I am unhappy (as I sometimes am), I read them over, and I feel strengthened and comforted; if it is your _positive desire_ that I should burn them, of course I must do it; but if it is only a sort of "I think you had better" that you have about it, I shall keep them, and you must be satisfied with one of my old "I can't help it's. " As for my own scrawls, I do _not_ desire that you should keep them. I write, as I speak, on the impulse of the moment, and I should be sorry that the incoherent and often contradictory thoughts that I pour forth daily should be preserved against me by anybody. 

 My father is now in Edinburgh. He has been absent from London about a week. I had a conversation with him about the stage some time before he went, in which he allowed that, should our miserably uncertain circumstances finally settle unfavorably, the theatre might be an honorable and advantageous resource for me; but that at present he should be sorry to see me adopt that career. As he is the best and kindest father and friend to us all, such a decision on his part was conclusive, as you will easily believe; and I have forborne all further allusion to the subject, although on some accounts I regret being obliged to do so. 

 I was delighted with your long letter of criticisms; I am grateful to you for taking the trouble of telling me so minutely all you thought about my play. For myself, although at the time I wrote it I was rather puffed up and elated in spirit, and looked at it naturally in far too favorable a light, I assure you I have long since come to a much soberer frame of mind respecting it. I think it is quite unfit for the stage, where the little poetical merit it possesses would necessarily be lost; besides, its construction is wholly undramatic. The only satisfaction I now take in it is entirely one of hope; I am very young, and I cannot help feeling that it offers some promise for the future, which I trust may be fulfilled. Now even, already, I am sure I could do infinitely better; nor will it be long, I think, before I try my strength again. If you could see the multiplicity of subjects drawn up in my book under the head of "projected works, " how you would shake your wise head, and perhaps your lean sides. I wish I could write a good prose work, but that, I take it, is really difficult, as good, concise, powerful, clear prose must be much less easy to write than even tolerable poetry. I have been reading a quantity of German plays (translations, of course, but literal ones), and I have been reveling in that divine devildom, "Faust. " Suppose it does send one to bed with a side-ache, a headache, and a heartache, isn't it worth while? Did you ever read Goethe's "Tasso"? Certainly he makes the mad poet a mighty disagreeable person; but in describing him it seemed to me as if Goethe was literally transcribing my thoughts and feelings, my mind and being. 

 Now, dearest H----, don't bear malice, and, because I have not written for so long, wait still longer before you answer. My mother has been in the country for a few days, and has returned with a terrible cough and cold, with which pleasant maladies she finds the house full here to welcome her, so that we all croak in unison most harmoniously. I was at the Siddonses' the other evening. My aunt was suffering, I am sorry to say, with one of her terrible headaches; Cecilia was pretty well, but as it was a _soirée chantante_, I had little opportunity of talking to either of them. Did you mention my notion about going on the stage in any of your letters to Cecy?

 The skies are brightening and the trees are budding; it will soon be the time of year when we first met. Pray remember me when the hawthorn blossoms; hail, snow, or sunshine, I remember you, and am ever your affectionate

 FANNY. 

The want of a settled place of residence compelled me, many years afterwriting this letter, to destroy the letters of my friend, which I hadpreserved until they amounted to many hundreds; my friend kept, in thehouse that was her home from her fourteenth to her sixtieth year, allmine to her--several thousands, the history of a whole human life--andgave them back to me when she was upwards of seventy and I of sixtyyears old; they are the principal aid to my memory in my present task ofretrospection. 

My life at home at this time became difficult and troublesome, andunsatisfactory to myself and others; my mind and character were in achaotic state of fermentation that required the wisest, firmest, andgentlest guidance. I was vehement and excitable, violently impulsive, and with a wild, ill-regulated imagination. 

The sort of smattering acquirements from my schooling, and the desultoryreading which had been its only supplement, had done little or nothing(perhaps even worse than nothing) towards my effectual moral or mentaltraining. A good fortune, for which I can never be sufficientlythankful, occurred to me at this time, in the very intimate intercoursewhich grew up just then between our family and that of my cousin, Mrs. Henry Siddons. 

She had passed through London on her way to the Continent, whither shewas going for the sake of the health of her youngest daughter, aninteresting and attractive young girl some years older than myself, whoat this time seemed threatened with imminent consumption. She had asylph-like, slender figure, tall, and bending and wavering like a youngwillow sapling, and a superabundant profusion of glossy chestnutringlets, which in another might have suggested vigor of health andconstitution, but always seemed to me as if their redundant masses hadexhausted hers, and were almost too great a weight for her slim throatand drooping figure. Her complexion was transparently delicate, and shehad dark blue eyes that looked almost preternaturally large. It seemsstrange to remember this ethereal vision of girlish fragile beauty asbelonging to my dear cousin, who, having fortunately escaped the doom bywhich she then seemed threatened, lived to become a most happy andexcellent wife and mother, and one of the largest women of our family, all of whose female members have been unusually slender in girlhood andunusually stout in middle and old age. When Mrs. Henry Siddons wasobliged to return to Edinburgh, which was her home, she was persuaded bymy mother to leave her daughter with us for some time; and for more thana year she and her elder sister and their brother, a lad studying at theIndian Military College of Addiscombe, were frequent inmates of ourhouse. The latter was an extremely handsome youth, with a strikingresemblance to his grandmother, Mrs. Siddons; he and my brother Henrywere certainly the only two of the younger generation who honorablymaintained the reputation for beauty of their elders; in spite of which, and the general admiration they excited (especially when seen together), perhaps indeed from some uncomfortable consciousness of their personaladvantages, they were both of them shamefaced and bashful to an unusualdegree. 

I remember a comical instance of the shy _mauvaise honte_, peculiar toEnglishmen, which these two beautiful boys exhibited on the occasion ofa fancy ball, to which we were all invited, at the house of our friend, Mrs. E. G----. To me, of course, my first fancy ball was an event ofunmixed delight, especially as my mother had provided for me a lovelyAnne Boleyn costume of white satin, point-lace, and white Roman pearls, which raised my satisfaction to rapture. The two Harrys, however, farfrom partaking of my ecstasy, protested, pouted, begged off, all butbroke into open rebellion at the idea of making what they called "guys"and "chimney-sweeps" of themselves; and though the painful sense of anysingularity might have been mitigated by the very numerous company oftheir fellow-fools assembled in the ball-room, to keep them incountenance, and the very unpretending costume of simple and, elegantblack velvet in which my mother had attired them, as Hamlet and Laertes(it must have been in their very earliest college days), they hidthemselves behind the ball-room door and never showed as much as theirnoses or their toes, while I danced beatifically till daylight, andwould have danced on till noon. 

Mrs. Henry Siddons, in her last stay with us, obtained my mother'sconsent that I should go to Edinburgh to pay her a visit, which began bybeing of indeterminate length, and prolonged itself for a year--thehappiest of my life, as I often, while it lasted, thought it wouldprove; and now that my years are over I know to have been so. To theanxious, nervous, exciting, irritating tenor of my London life succeededthe calm, equable, and all but imperceptible control of my dear friend, whose influence over her children, the result of her wisdom in dealingwith them, no less than of their own amiable dispositions, was absolute. In considering Mrs. Henry Siddons's character, when years had modifiedits first impression upon my own, my estimate of it underwent, ofcourse, some inevitable alteration; but when I stayed with her inEdinburgh I was at the idolatrous period of life, and never, certainly, had an enthusiastic young girl worshiper a worthier or better idol. 

She was not regularly handsome, but of a sweet and most engagingcountenance; her figure was very pretty, her voice exquisite, and herwhole manner, air, and deportment graceful, attractive, and charming. Men, women, and children not only loved her, but inevitably _fell inlove_ with her, and the fascination which she exercised over every onethat came in contact with her invariably deepened into profound esteemand confidence in those who had the good fortune to share her intimacy. Her manner, which was the most gentle and winning imaginable, had in ita touch of demure playfulness that was very charming, at the same timethat it habitually conveyed the idea of extreme self-control, and agreat reserve of moral force and determination underneath this quietsurface. 

Mrs. Harry's manner was artificial, and my mother told me she thought itthe result of an early determination to curb the demonstrations of animpetuous temper and passionate feelings. It had become her secondnature when I knew her, however, and contributed not a little to theimmense ascendency she soon acquired over my vehement and stormycharacter. She charmed me into absolute submission to her will andwishes, and I all but worshiped her. 

She was a Miss Murray, and came of good Scottish blood, hergreat-grandfather having at one time been private secretary to the YoungPretender. She married Mrs. Siddons's youngest son, Harry, the only oneof my aunt's children who adopted her own profession, and who, himselfan indifferent actor, undertook the management of the Edinburgh theater, fell into ill-health, and died, leaving his lovely young widow with fourchildren to the care of her brother, William Murray, who succeeded himin the government of the theater, of which his sister and himself becamejoint proprietors. 

Edinburgh at that time was still the small but important capital ofScotland, instead of what railroads and modern progress have reduced itto, merely the largest town. Those were the days of the giants, Scott, Wilson, Hogg, Jeffrey, Brougham, Sidney Smith, the Horners, Lord Murray, Allison, and all the formidable intellectual phalanx that held mentaldominion over the English-speaking world, under the blue and yellowstandard of the _Edinburgh Review_. 

The ancient city had still its regular winter season of fashionablegayety, during which sedan chairs were to be seen carrying through itsstreets, to its evening assemblies, the more elderly members of the_beau monde_. The nobility and gentry of Scotland came up from theirdistant country residences to their town-houses in "Auld Reekie, " asthey now come up to London. 

Edinburgh was a brilliant and peculiarly intellectual center of societywith a strongly marked national character, and the theater held adistinguished place among its recreations; the many eminent literary andprofessional men who then made the Scotch capital illustrious beingzealous patrons of the drama and frequenters of the play-house, andproud, with reason, of their excellent theatrical company, at the headof which was William Murray, one of the most perfect actors I have everknown on any stage, and among whom Terry and Mackay, admirable actorsand cultivated, highly intelligent men, were conspicuous for theirability. 

Mrs. Henry Siddons held a peculiar position in Edinburgh, her widowedcondition and personal attractions combining to win the sympathy andadmiration of its best society, while her high character and blamelessconduct secured the respect and esteem of her theatrical subjects andthe general public, with whom she was an object of almost affectionatepersonal regard, and in whose favor, as long as she exercised herprofession, she continued to hold the first place, in spite of theirtemporary enthusiasm for the great London stars who visited them atstated seasons. "_Our_ Mrs. Siddons, " I have repeatedly heard her calledin Edinburgh, not at all with the slightest idea of comparing her withher celebrated mother-in-law, but rather as expressing the kindlypersonal good-will and the admiring approbation with which she wasregarded by her own townsfolk, who were equally proud and fond of her. She was not a great actress, nor even what in my opinion could be calleda good actress, for she had no natural versatility or power ofassumption whatever, and what was opposed to her own nature andcharacter was altogether out of the range of her powers. 

On the other hand, when (as frequently happened) she had to embodyheroines whose characteristics coincided with her own, her grace andbeauty and innate sympathy with every thing good, true, pure, andupright made her an admirable representative of all such characters. Shewanted physical power and weight for the great tragic drama ofShakespeare, and passion for the heroine of his love tragedy; but Viola, Rosalind, Isabel, Imogen, could have no better representative. In thefirst part Sir Walter Scott has celebrated (in the novel of "Waverley")the striking effect produced by her resemblance to her brother, WilliamMurray, in the last scene of "Twelfth Night;" and in many pieces foundedupon the fate and fortune of Mary Stuart she gave an unrivaledimpersonation of the "enchanting queen" of modern history. 

My admiration and affection for her were, as I have said, unbounded; andsome of the various methods I took to exhibit them were, I dare say, intolerably absurd, though she was graciously good-natured in toleratingthem. 

Every day, summer and winter, I made it my business to provide her witha sprig of myrtle for her sash at dinner-time; this, when she had wornit all the evening, I received again on bidding her good night, andstored in a _treasure_ drawer, which, becoming in time choked withfragrant myrtle leaves, was emptied with due solemnity into the fire, that destruction in the most classic form might avert from them alldesecration. I ought by rights to have eaten their ashes, or drunk adecoction of them, or at least treasured them in a golden urn, butcontented myself with watching them shrivel and crackle with muchsentimental satisfaction. I remember a most beautiful myrtle tree, which, by favor of a peculiarly sunny and sheltered exposure, hadreached a very unusual size in the open air in Edinburgh, and in theflowering season might have borne comparison with the finest shrubs ofthe warm terraces of the under cliff of the Isle of Wight. From this Iprocured my daily offering to my divinity. 

The myrtle is the least voluptuous of flowers; the legend of Juno'smyrtle-sheltered bath seems not unnaturally suggested by the vigorous, fresh, and healthy beauty of the plant, and the purity of its snowyblossoms. The exquisite quality, too, which myrtle possesses, ofpreserving uncorrupted the water in which it is placed, with otherflowers, is a sort of moral attribute, which, combined with the peculiarcharacter of its fragrance, seems to me to distinguish this lovely shrubfrom every other flower of the field or garden. 

To return to my worship of Mrs. Harry Siddons. On one occasion the sashof her dress came unfastened and fell to the ground, and, having securedpossession of it, I retained my prize and persisted in wearing it, baldric fashion, over every dress I put on. It was a silk scarf, of asober dark-gray color, and occasionally produced a most fantastical andabsurd contrast with what I was wearing. 

These were childish expressions of a feeling the soberer portion ofwhich remains with me even now, and makes the memory of that excellentwoman, and kind, judicious friend, still very dear to my gratefulaffection. Not only was the change of discipline under which I now livedadvantageous, but the great freedom I enjoyed, and which would have beenquite impossible in London, was delightful to me; while the wonderful, picturesque beauty of Edinburgh, contrasted with the repulsive dinginessand ugliness of my native city, was a constant source of the liveliestpleasure to me. 

The indescribable mixture of historic and romantic interest with allthis present, visible beauty, the powerful charm of the Scotch balladpoetry, which now began to seize upon my imagination, and theinexhaustible enchantment of the associations thrown by the great modernmagician over every spot made memorable by his mention, combined toaffect my mind and feelings at this most susceptible period of my life, and made Edinburgh dear and delightful to me above all other places Iever saw, as it still remains--with the one exception of Rome, whosecombined claim to veneration and admiration no earthly city can indeeddispute. 

Beautiful Edinburgh! dear to me for all its beauty and all the happinessthat I have never failed to find there, for the keen delight of my yearof youthful life spent among its enchanting influences, and for the kindfriends and kindred whose affectionate hospitality has made each returnthither as happy as sadder and older years allowed--my blessing on everystone of its streets!

I had the utmost liberty allowed me in my walks about the city, and atearly morning have often run up and round and round the Calton Hill, delighting, from every point where I stopped to breathe, in the noblepanorama on every side. Not unfrequently I walked down to the sands atPorto Bello and got a sea bath, and returned before breakfast; while onthe other side of the town my rambles extended to Newhaven and the rocksand sands of Cramond Beach. 

While Edinburgh had then more the social importance of a capital, it hada much smaller extent; great portions of the present new town did notthen exist. Warriston and the Bridge of Dean were still out of town;there was no Scott's monument in Princess Street, no railroad terminuswith its smoke and scream and steam scaring the echoes of the NorthBridge; no splendid Queen's Drive encircled Arthur's Seat. WindsorStreet, in which Mrs. Harry Siddons lived, was one of the most recentlyfinished, and broke off abruptly above gardens and bits of meadow land, and small, irregular inclosures, and mean scattered houses, stretchingdown toward Warriston Crescent; while from the balcony of thedrawing-room the eye, passing over all this untidy suburban district, reached, without any intervening buildings, the blue waters of the Forthand Inchkeith with its revolving light. 

Standing on that balcony late one cold, clear night, watching the risingand setting of that sea star that kept me fascinated out in the chillair, I saw for the first time the sky illuminated with the auroraborealis. It was a magnificent display of the phenomenon, and I feelcertain that my attention was first attracted to it by the cracklingsound which appeared to accompany the motion of the pale flames as theystreamed across the sky; indeed, _crackling_, is not the word thatproperly describes the sound I heard, which was precisely that made bythe _flickering_ of blazing fire; and as I have often since read andheard discussions upon the question whether the motion of the aurora isor is not accompanied by an audible sound, I can only say that on thisoccasion it was the sound that first induced me to observe the sheets ofwhite light that were leaping up the sky. At this time I knew nothing ofthese phenomena, or the debates among scientific men to which they hadgiven rise, and can therefore trust the impression made on my senses. 

I have since then witnessed repeated appearances of these beautifulmeteoric lights, but have never again detected any sound accompanyingtheir motion. The finest aurora I ever saw was at Lenox, Massachusetts;a splendid rose-colored pavilion appeared to be spread all over the sky, through which, in several parts, the shining of the stars was distinctlyvisible, while at the zenith the luminous drapery seemed gathered intofolds, the color of which deepened almost to crimson. It was wonderfullybeautiful. At Lenox, too, one night during the season of the appearanceof the great comet of 1858, the splendid flaming plume hovered over oneside of the sky, while all round the other horizon streams of white fireappeared to rise from altars of white light. It was awfully glorious, and beyond all description beautiful. The sky of that part of the UnitedStates, particularly in the late autumn and winter, was more frequentlyvisited by magnificent meteors than any other with which I have beenacquainted. 

The extraordinary purity, dryness, and elasticity of the atmosphere inthat region was, I suppose, one cause of these heavenly shows; the cleartransparency of the sky by day often giving one the feeling that one waslooking straight into heaven without any intermediate window ofatmospheric air, while at night (especially in winter) the world ofstars, larger, brighter, more numerous than they ever seemed to meelsewhere, and yet apparently infinitely higher and farther off, wereset in a depth of dark whose blackness appeared transparent rather thanopaque. 

Midnight after midnight I have stood, when the thermometer was twentyand more degrees below freezing, looking over the silent, snow-smotheredhills round the small mountain village of Lenox, fast asleep in theirembrace, and from thence to the solemn sky rising above them like a hugeiron vault hung with thousands of glittering steel weapons, from which, every now and then, a shining scimitar fell flashing earthward; it was acruel looking sky, in its relentless radiance. 

My solitary walks round Edinburgh have left two especial recollectionsin my mind; the one pleasant, the other very sad. I will speak of thelatter first; it was like a leaf out of the middle of a tragedy, ofwhich I never knew either the beginning or the end. 

CHAPTER IX. 

I was coming home one day from a tramp toward Cramond Beach, and wasjust on the brow of a wooded height looking towards Edinburgh and nottwo miles from it, when a heavy thunder-cloud darkened the sky above myhead and pelted me with large drops of ominous warning. On one side ofthe road the iron gate and lodge of some gentleman's park suggestedshelter; and the half-open door of the latter showing a tidy, pleasant-looking woman busy at an ironing table, I ventured to ask herto let me come in till the sponge overhead should have emptied itself. She very good-humoredly consented, and I sat down while the rain rangmerrily on the gravel walk before the door, and smoked in its vehementdescent on the carriage-road beyond. 

The woman pursued her work silently, and I presently became aware of alittle child, as silent as herself, sitting beyond her, in a smallwicker chair; on the baby's table which fastened her into it were someremnants of shabby, broken toys, among which her tiny, wax-like fingersplayed with listless unconsciousness, while her eyes were fixed on me. The child looked wan and wasted, and had in its eyes, which it neverturned from me, the weary, wistful, unutterable look of "far away andlong ago" longing that comes into the miserably melancholy eyes ofmonkeys. 

"Is the baby ill?" said I. 

"Ou na, mem; it's no to say that ill, only just always peaking andpining like"--and she stopped ironing a moment to look at the littlecreature. 

"Is it your own baby?" said I, struck with the absence of motherlytenderness in spite of the woman's compassionate tone and expression. 

"Ou na, mem, it's no my ain; I hae nane o' my ain. "

"How old is it?" I went on. 

"Nigh upon five year old, " was the answer, with which the ironing wassteadily resumed, with apparently no desire to encourage more questions. 

"Five years old!" I exclaimed, in horrified amazement: its size was thatof a rickety baby under three, while its wizened face was that of aspell-struck creature of no assignable age, or the wax image of somedwindling life wasting away before the witch-kindled fire of adiabolical hatred. The tiny hands and arms were pitiably thin, andshowed under the yellow skin sharp little bones no larger than achicken's; and at her wrists and temples the blue tracery of her veinslooked like a delicate map of the blood, that seemed as if it couldhardly be pulsing through her feeble frame; while below the eyes a lividshadow darkened the faded face that had no other color in it. 

The tears welled up into my eyes, and the woman, seeing them, suddenlystopped ironing and exclaimed eagerly: "Ou, mem, ye ken the family; ormaybe ye'll hae been a friend of the puir thing's mither!" I was obligedto say that I neither knew them nor any thing about them, but that thechild's piteous aspect had made me cry. 

In answer to the questions with which I then plied her, the woman, whoseemed herself affected by the impression I had received from the poorlittle creature's appearance, told me that the child was that of theonly daughter of the people who owned the place; that there was"something wrong" about it all, she did not know what--a marriageill-pleasing to the grandparents perhaps, perhaps even worse than that;but the mother was dead, the family had been abroad for upward of threeyears, and the child had been left under her charge. This was all shetold me, and probably all she knew; and as she ended she wiped the tearsfrom her own eyes, adding, "I'm thinking the puir bairn will no livelong itsel'. "

The rain was over and the sun shone, and I got up to go; as I went, thechild's dreary eyes followed me out at the door, and I cried all the wayhome. Was it possible that my appearance suggested to that tiny soul theimage of its young lost mother?

The other incident in my rambles that I wish to record was of a farpleasanter sort. I had gone down to the pier at Newhaven, one blowy, blustering day (the fine Granton Pier Hotel and landing-place did notyet exist), and stood watching the waves taking their mad run and leapover the end of the pier, in a glorious, foaming frenzy that kept mefascinated with the fine uproar, till it suddenly occurred to me that itwould be delightful to be out among them (I certainly could have had norecollections of sea-sickness), and I determined to try and get a boatand go out on the frith. 

I stopped at a cottage on the outskirts of the fishing town (it was notmuch more than a village then) of Newhaven, and knocked. Invited to comein, I did so, and there sat a woman, one of the very handsomest I eversaw, in solitary state, leisurely combing a magnificent curtain of fairhair that fell over her ample shoulders and bosom and almost swept theground. She was seated on a low stool, but looked tall as well as large, and her foam-fresh complexion and gray-green eyes might have becomeVenus Anadyomene herself, turned into a Scotch fish-wife of five andthirty, or "thereawa. " "Can you tell me of any one who will take me outin a boat for a little while?" quoth I. She looked steadily at me for aminute, and then answered laconically, "Ay, my man and boy shall gangwi' ye. " A few lusty screams brought her husband and son forth, and ather bidding they got a boat ready, and, with me well covered withsail-cloths, tarpaulins, and rough dreadnaughts of one sort and another, rowed out from the shore into the turmoil of the sea. A very little ofthe dancing I got now was delight enough for me, and, deadly sick, Ibesought to be taken home again, when the matronly Brinhilda at thecottage received me with open-throated peals of laughter, and then mademe sit down till I had conquered my qualms and was able to walk back toEdinburgh. Before I went, she showed me a heap of her children, too many, it seemed to me, to be counted; but as they lay in an inextricable masson the floor in an inner room, there may have seemed more arms and legsforming the radii, of which a clump of curly heads was the center, thanthere really were. 

The husband was a comparatively small man, with dark eyes, hair, andcomplexion; but her "boy, " the eldest, who had come with him to takecare of me, was a fair-haired, fresh-faced young giant, of his mother'sstrain, and, like her, looked as if he had come of the Northern Vikings, or some of the Niebelungen Lied heroes. 

When I went away, my fish-wife bade me come again in smooth weather, andif her husband and son were at home they should take me out; and I gaveher my address, and begged her, when she came up to town with her fish, to call at the house. 

She was a splendid specimen of her tribe, climbing the steep Edinburghstreets with bare white feet, the heavy fish-basket at her back hardlystooping her broad shoulders, her florid face sheltered and softened inspite of its massiveness into something like delicacy by the transparentshadow of the white handkerchief tied hoodwise over her fair hair, andher shrill sweet voice calling "Caller haddie!" all the way she went, inthe melancholy monotone that resounds through the thoroughfares ofEdinburgh--the only melodious street-cry (except the warning of theVenetian gondoliers) that I ever heard. 

I often went back to visit my middle-aged Christie Johnstone, and morethan once saw her and her fellow fish-women haul up the boats on theirreturn after being out at sea. They all stood on the beach clamoringlike a flock of sea-gulls, and, as a boat's keel rasped the shingles, rushed forward and seized it; and while the men in their sea clothes, all dripping like huge Newfoundland dogs, jumped out in their heavyboots and took each the way to their several houses, their stalwartpartners, hauling all together at the rope fastened to the boat, drew itup beyond water-mark, and seized and sorted its freight of fish, andstalked off each with her own basketful, with which she trudged up totrade and chaffer with the "gude wives" of the town, and bring back tothe men the value of their work. It always seemed to me that these womenhad about as equal a share of the labor of life as the most zealouschampion of the rights of their sex could desire. 

I did not indulge in any more boating expeditions, but admired the seafrom the pier, and became familiar with all the spokes of thefish-wife's family wheel; at any rate, enough to distinguish Jamie fromSandy, and Willie from Johnnie, and Maggie from Jeanie, and Ailsie fromLizzie, and was great friends with them all. 

When I returned to Edinburgh, a theatrical star of the first magnitude, I took a morning's holiday to drive down to Newhaven, in search of myold ally, Mistress Sandie Flockhart. She no longer inhabited the littledetached cottage, and divers and sundry were the Flockhart "wives" thatI "speired at" through the unsavory street of Newhaven, before I foundthe right one at last, on the third flat of a filthy house, where noiseand stench combined almost to knock me down, and where I could hardlyknock loud enough to make myself heard above the din within and without. She opened the door of a room that looked as if it was running over withlive children, and confronted me with the unaltered aspect of hercomely, smiling face. But I had driven down from Edinburgh in all thestarlike splendor of a lilac silk dress and French crape bonnet, and mydear fish-wife stared at me silently, with her mouth and gray eyes wideopen; only for a moment, however, for in the next she joyfullyexclaimed, "Ech, sirs! but it's yer ain sel come back again at last!"Then seizing my hand, she added breathlessly, "I'se gotten anither ane, and ye maun come in and see him;" so she dragged me bodily through andover her surging progeny to a cradle, where, soothed by the stridentlullabies of its vociferating predecessors, her last-born and eleventhbaby lay peaceably slumbering, an infant Hercules. 

Among Mrs. Harry Siddons's intimate friends and associates were theremarkable brothers George and Andrew Combe; the former a lawyer byprofession, but known to the literary and scientific world of Europe andAmerica as the Apostle of Phrenology, and the author of a work entitled"The Constitution of Man, " and other writings, whose considerable meritand value appear to me more or less impaired by the craniological theorywhich he made the foundation of all his works, and which to my minddiminished the general utility of his publications for those readers whoare not prepared to accept it as the solution of all the mysteries ofhuman existence. 

His writings are all upon subjects of the greatest importance anduniversal interest, and full of the soundest moral philosophy and themost enlightened humanity; and their only drawback, to me, is thephrenological element which enters so largely into his treatment ofevery question. Indeed, his life was devoted to the dissemination ofthis new philosophy of human nature (new, at any rate, in the precisedetails which Gall, Spurzheim, and he elaborated from it), which, Combebelieved, if once generally accepted, would prove the clew to everydifficulty, and the panacea for every evil existing in moderncivilization. Political and social, religious and civil, mental andmoral government, according to him, hinged upon the study and knowledgeof the different organs of the human brain, and he labored incessantlyto elucidate and illustrate this subject, upon which he thought thesalvation of the world depended. For a number of years I enjoyed theprivilege of his friendship, and I have had innumerable opportunities ofhearing his system explained by himself; but as I was never able to getbeyond a certain point of belief in it, it was agreed on all hands thatmy brain was deficient in the organ of causality, _i. E. _, in thecapacity of logical reasoning, and that therefore it was not in my powerto perceive the force of his arguments or the truth of his system, evenwhen illustrated by his repeated demonstrations. 

I am bound to say that my cousin Cecilia Combe had quite as much troublewith her household, her lady's-maids were quite as inefficient, herhousemaids quite as careless, and her cooks quite as fiery-tempered andunsober as those of "ordinary Christians, " in spite of Mr. Combe'sobservation and manipulation of their bumps previous to engaging them. 

I remember once, when I was sitting to Lawrence Macdonald for my bust, which was one of the first he ever executed, before he left Edinburgh toachieve fame and fortune as the most successful marble portrait-maker inRome, an absurd instance of Mr. Combe's insight into character occurredat my expense. 

Macdonald was an intimate friend of the Combes, and I used to see him attheir house very frequently, and Mr. Combe often came to the studio whenI was sitting. One day while he was standing by, grimly observingMacdonald's absorbed manipulation of his clay, while I, the original_clay_, occupied the "bad eminence" of an artist's studio throne, myaunt came in with a small paper bag containing raspberry tarts in herhand. This was a dainty so peculiarly agreeable to me that, even at thatadvanced stage of my existence, those who loved me, or wished to beloved by me, were apt to approach me with those charming three-corneredpuff paste propitiations. 

As soon as I espied the confectioner's light paper bag I guessed itscontents, and, springing from my dignified station, seized on the tartsas if I had been the notorious knave of the nursery rhyme. "There now, Macdonald, I told you so!" quoth Mr. Combe, and they both began tolaugh; and so did I, with my mouth full of raspberry puff, for it wasquite evident to me that my phrenological friend had impressed upon myartistic friend the special development of my organ of alimentiveness, as he politely called it, which I translated into the vulgate as "bumpof greediness. " In spite of my reluctance to sit to him, from theconviction that the thick outline of my features would turn the edge ofthe finest chisel that "ever yet cut breath, " and perhaps by dint ofphrenology, Macdonald succeeded in making a very good bust of me; andsome time after, to my great amusement, having seen me act in the"Grecian Daughter, " he said to me, "Oh, but what I want to do now is astatue of you. "

"Yes, " said I, "and I will tell you exactly where--in the last scene, where I cover my face. "

"Precisely so!" cried my enthusiastic friend, and then burst outlaughing, on seeing the trap I had laid for him; but he was a veryhonest man, and stood by his word. 

The attitude he wished to represent in a statue was that when, havingstabbed Dionysius, I raised the dagger toward heaven with one hand, anddrew my drapery over my face with the other. For my notion of heroicwomen has always been, I am afraid, rather base--a sort of "They do notmind death, but they can not bear pinching;" and though Euphrasia might, could, would, and should stab the man who was about to murder herfather, I have no idea that she would like to look at the man she hadstabbed. "O Jupiter, no blood!" is apt to be the instinct, I suspect, even in very villainous feminine natures, and those who are and thosewho are not cowards alike shrink from sights of horror. 

When I made Macdonald's acquaintance I was a girl of about seventeen, and he at the very beginning of his artistic career; but he had anexpression of power and vivid intelligence which foretold his futureachievements in the exquisite art to which he devoted himself. 

When next I met Macdonald it was after a long lapse of time, in 1846, inRome. Thither he had gone to study his divine art, and there he hadremained for a number of years in the exercise of it. He was now theSignor Lorenzo of the Palazzo Barberini, the most successful andcelebrated maker of busts, probably, in Rome, having achieved fame, fortune, the favor of the great, and the smiles of the fair, of the mostfastidious portion of the English society that makes its winter seasonin Italy. He dined several times at our house (I was living with mysister and her husband); under his guidance we went to see the statutesof the Vatican by torchlight; and he came out once or twice in thesummer of that year to visit us at our villa at Frascati. 

I returned to Rome in 1852, and saw Macdonald frequently, in his studio, in our own house, and in general society; and shortly before leavingRome I met him at dinner at Mrs. Archer Clive's (the authoress of "PaulFerrol"). I had a nosegay of snowdrops in the bosom of my dress, andMacdonald, who sat next me, observed that they reminded him of Scotland, that he had never seen one in all the years he had passed in Italy, anddid not even know that they grew there. 

The next day I went to the gardener of the Villa Medici, an old friendof mine, and begged him to procure a pot of snowdrops for me, which Icarried to Macdonald's studio, thinking an occasional reminiscence ofhis own northern land, which he had not visited for years, not a badelement to infuse into his Roman life and surroundings. Macdonald'sportraits are generally good likenesses, sufficiently idealized to bealso good works of art. In statuary he never accomplished any thing ofextraordinary excellence. I think the "Ulysses Recognized by his Dog"his best performance in sculpture. His studio was an extremelyinteresting place of resort, from the portraits of his many remarkablesitters with which it was filled. 

I met dear old Macdonald, in the winter of 1873, creeping in the sunslowly up the Pincio as I waddled heavily down it (_Eheu!_), hissnow-white hair and moustache making his little-altered and stronglymarked features only more striking. I visited his studio and foundthere, ardently and successfully creating immortal gods, a handsome, pleasing youth, his son, inheriting his father's genius, and, strange tosay, his broadest of Scotch accents, though he had himself never beenout of Rome, where he was born. 

On one occasion Mr. Combe was consulted by Prince Albert with regard tothe royal children, and was desired to examine their heads. He did not, of course, repeat any of the opinions he had given upon the youngprinces' "developments, " but said they were very nice children, andlikely to be capitally educated, for, he added (though shaking his headover cousinly intermarriages among royal personages), Prince Albert waswell acquainted with the writings of Gall and Spurzheim, and his ownwork on "The Constitution of Man. " Prince Albert seems to have knownsomething of every thing that was worthy of a Wiseman's knowledge. 

In spite of my inability to accept his science of human nature, Mr. Combe was always a most kind and condescending friend to me. He was aman of singular integrity, uprightness, and purity of mind andcharacter, and of great justice and impartiality of judgment; he wasextremely benevolent and humane, and one of the most reasonable humanbeings I have ever known. From first to last my intercourse with him wasalways delightful and profitable to me. Of the brothers, however, theyounger, Dr. Andrew Combe, was by far the most generally popular, anddeservedly so. He was one of the most excellent and amiable of men; hiscountenance, voice, and manner were expressive of the kindliestbenevolence; he had none of the angular rigidity of person and harshnessof feature of his brother: both were worthy and distinguished men, butAndrew Combe was charming, which George Combe was not--at least to thosewho did not know him. Although Dr. Combe completely indorsed hisbrother's system, he was far lass fanatical and importunate in hisadvocacy of it. Indeed, his works upon physiology, hygiene, and thephysical education of children are of such universal value andimportance that no parent or trainer of youth should be unfamiliar withthem. Moreover, to them and their excellent author society is indebtedfor an amount of knowledge on these subjects which has now passed intogeneral use and experience, and become so completely incorporated in thepractice of the present day, that it is hardly remembered to whom thefirst and most powerful impression of the importance of the "naturallaws, " and their observance in our own lives and the training of ourchildren, is due. I knew a school of young girls in Massachusetts, wheretaking regular exercise, the use of cold baths, the influence of freshair, and all the process of careful physical education to which theywere submitted, went by the general name of _Combeing_, in honor of Dr. Combe. 

Dr. Combe was Mrs. Harry Siddons's medical adviser, most trusted friend, and general counselor. The young people of her family, myself included, all loved and honored him; and the gleam of genial pleasant humor (aquality of which his worthy brother had hardly a spark) which frequentlybrightened the gentle gravity of his countenance and demeanor made hisintercourse delightful to us; and great was the joy when he proposed totake one or other of us in his gig for a drive to some patient's house, in the lovely neighborhood of Edinburgh. I remember my poor dearmother's dismay when, on my return home, I told her of these samedrives. She was always in a fever of apprehension about people's fallingin love with each other, and begged to know how old a man thisdelightful doctor, with whom Mrs. Harry allowed her own daughters and mymother's daughters to go _gigging_, might be. "Ah, " replied I, inexpressibly amused at the idea of Dr. Combe in the character of a gaygallant, "ever so old!" I had the real school-girl's estimate of age, and honestly thought that dear Dr. Combe was quite an old man. I believehe was considerably under forty. But if he had been much younger, thefatal disease which had set its seal upon him, and of which hedied--after defending his life for an almost incredible space of timefrom its ultimate victory (which all his wisdom and virtue could butpostpone)--was so clearly written upon his thin, sallow face, deep-sunkeyes, and emaciated figure, and gave so serious and almost sad anexpression to his countenance and manner, that one would as soon havethought of one's grandfather as an unsafe companion for young girls. Istill possess a document, duly drawn up and engrossed in the form of adeed by his brother, embodying a promise which he made to me jestinglyone day, that when he was dead he would not fail to let me know, if everghosts were permitted to revisit the earth, by appearing to me, bindinghimself by this contract that the vision should be unaccompanied by thesmallest smell of sulphur or flash of blue flame, and that instead ofthe indecorous undress of a slovenly winding-sheet, he would wear hisusual garments, and the familiar brown great-coat with which, to use hisown expression, he "buttoned his bones together" in his life. Iremembered that laughing promise when, years after it was given, thenews of his death reached me, and I thought how little dismay I shouldfeel if it could indeed have been possible for me to see again, "in hisimage as he lived, " that kind and excellent friend. On one of theoccasions when Dr. Combe took me to visit one of his patients, we wentto a quaint old house in the near neighborhood of Edinburgh. If theLaird of Dumbiedike's mansion had been still standing, it might havebeen that very house. The person we went to visit was an old Mr. M----, to whom he introduced me, and with whom he withdrew, I suppose for aprofessional consultation, leaving me in a strange, curious, old-fashioned apartment, full of old furniture, old books, and faded, tattered, old nondescript articles, whose purpose it was not easy toguess, but which must have been of some value, as they were allprotected from the air and dust by glass covers. When the gentlemenreturned, Mr. M---- gratified my curiosity by showing every one of themto me in detail, and informing me that they had all belonged to, or werein some way relics of, Charles Edward Stuart. "And this, " said the oldgentleman, "was his sword. " It was a light dress rapier, with a veryhighly cut and ornamented steel hilt. I half drew the blade, thinkinghow it had flashed from its scabbard, startling England and dazzlingScotland at its first unsheathing, and in what inglorious gloom ofprostrate fortunes it had rusted away at last, the scorn of those whohad opposed, and the despair of those who had embraced, its cause. "Andso that was the Pretender's sword!" said I, hardly aware that I hadspoken until the little, withered, snuff-colored gentleman snatchedrather than took it from me, exclaiming, "Wha' did ye say, madam? it wasthe _prince's_ sword!" and laid it tenderly back in the receptacle fromwhich he had taken it. 

As we drove away, Dr. Combe told me, what indeed I had perceived, thatthis old man, who looked like a shriveled, russet-colored leaf for ageand feebleness, was a passionate partisan of Charles Edward, by whom mymention of him as the Pretender, if coming from a man, would have beenheld a personal insult. It was evident that I, though a mere chit of theirresponsible sex, had both hurt and offended him by it. His soleremaining interest in life was hunting out and collecting the smallestrecords or memorials of this shadow of a hero; surely the merest "royalapparition" that ever assumed kingship. "What a set those Stuarts musthave been!" exclaimed an American friend of mine once, after listeningto "Bonnie Prince Charlie, " "to have had all those glorious Jacobitesongs made and sung for them, and not to have been more of men than theywere!" And so I think, and thought even then, for though I had a passionfor the Jacobite ballads, I had very little enthusiasm for theirthoroughly inefficient hero, who, for the claimant of a throne, wasundoubtedly _un très pauvre sire_. Talking over this with me, as wedrove from Mr. M----'s, Dr. Combe said he was persuaded that at thattime there were men to be found in Scotland ready to fight a duel aboutthe good fame of Mary Stuart. 

Sir Walter Scott told me that when the Scottish regalia was discovered, in its obscure place of security, in Edinburgh Castle, pending thedecision of government as to its ultimate destination, a committee ofgentlemen were appointed its guardians, among whom he was one; and thathe received a most urgent entreaty from an old lady of the Maxwellfamily to be permitted to see it. She was nearly ninety years old, andfeared she might not live till the crown jewels of Scotland werepermitted to become objects of public exhibition, and pressed Sir Walterwith importunate prayers to allow her to see them before she died. SirWalter's good sense and good nature alike induced him to take uponhimself to grant the poor old lady's petition, and he himself conductedher into the presence of these relics of her country's independentsovereignty; when, he said, tottering hastily forward from his support, she fell on her knees before the crown, and, clasping and wringing herwrinkled hands, wailed over it as a mother over her dead child. Hisdescription of the scene was infinitely pathetic, and it must haveappealed to all his own poetical and imaginative sympathy with theformer glories of his native land. 

My mother's anxiety about Dr. Combe's age reminds me that my intimacywith my cousin, Harry Siddons, who was now visiting his mother previousto his departure for India to begin his military career, had been asubject of considerable perplexity to her while I was still at home andhe used to come from Addiscombe to see us. Nothing could be morediametrically opposite than his mother's and my mother's system (ifeither could be called so) of dealing with the difficulty, though I havemy doubts whether Mrs. Harry perceived any in the case; and whereas Ithink my mother's apprehensions and precautions would have very probablybeen finally justified by some childish engagement between Harry andmyself, resulting in all sorts of difficulties and complications as timewent on and absence and distance produced their salutary effect on a boyof twenty and a girl of seventeen, Mrs. Harry remained passive, andapparently unconscious of any danger; and we walked and talked anddanced and were sentimental together after the most approved cousinlyfashion, and Harry went off to India with my name engraved upon hissword--a circumstance which was only made known to me years after by hiswidow (his and my cousin, Harriet Siddons), whom he met and loved andmarried in India, and who made me laugh, telling me how hard he and shehad worked, scratched, and scrubbed together to try and efface my namefrom the good sword; which, however, being true steel, and notinconstant heart of man, refused to give up its dedication. I shouldhave much objected to any such inscription had I been consulted. 

My cousin Harry's wife was the second daughter of George Siddons, Mrs. Siddons's eldest son, who through her interest was appointed, whilestill quite a young man, to the influential and lucrative post ofcollector of the port at Calcutta, which position he retained for nearlyforty years. He married a lady in whose veins ran the blood of the kingsof Delhi, and in whose descendants, in one or two instances, even in thefourth generation, this ancestry reveals itself by a type of beauty ofstrikingly Oriental character. Among these is the beautiful Mrs. Scott-Siddons, whose exquisite features present the most perfect livingminiature of her great-grandmother's majestic beauty. In two curiouslyminute, highly finished miniatures of the royal Hindoo personages, herancestors, which Mrs. George Siddons gave Miss Twiss (and the lattergave me), it is wonderful how strong a likeness may be traced to severalof their remote descendants born in England of English parents. 

To return to Edinburgh: another intimate acquaintance, or rather friend, of Mr. Combe's whom I frequently met at his house was Duncan McLaren, father of the present member of Parliament, the able editor of the_Scotsman_. Between him and the Combes all matters of public interestand importance were discussed from the most liberal and enlightenedpoint of view, and it was undoubtedly a great advantage to anintelligent girl of my age to hear such vigorous, manly, clearexpositions of the broadest aspects of all the great political andgovernmental questions of the day. Admirable sound sense was thecharacteristic that predominated in that intellectual circle, and wasbrought to bear upon every subject; and I remember with the greatestpleasure the evenings I passed at Mr. Combe's residence inNorthumberland Street, with these three grave men. Among the youngerassociates to whom these elders and betters extended their kindlyhospitality was William Gregory, son of the eminent professor ofchemistry, who himself has since pursued the same scientific course withequal success and distinction, adding a new luster to the honorable namehe inherited. 

Mr. William Murray, my dear Mrs. Harry's brother, was another member ofour society, to whom I have alluded, in speaking of the EdinburghTheater, as an accomplished actor; and sometimes I used to think thatwas all he was, for it was impossible to determine whether the romance, the sentiment, the pathos, the quaint humor, or any of the curiouslycapricious varying moods in which these were all blended, displayed realelements of his character or only shifting exhibitions of the peculiarversatility of a nature at once so complex and so superficial that itreally was impossible for others, and I think would have been difficultfor himself, to determine what was genuine thought and feeling in him, and what the mere appearance or demonstration or imitation of thoughtand feeling. Perhaps this peculiarity was what made him such a perfectactor. He was a very melancholy man, with a tendency to moody morbidnessof mind which made him a subject of constant anxiety to his sister. Hiscountenance, which was very expressive without being at all handsome, habitually wore an air of depression, and yet it was capable ofbrilliant vivacity and humorous play of feature. His conversation, whenhe was in good spirits, was a delightful mixture of sentiment, wit, poetry, fun, fancy and imagination. He had married the sister of Mrs. Thomas Moore (the Bessie so tenderly invited to "fly from the world"with the poet), and I used to think that he was like an embodiment ofMoore's lyrical genius: there was so much pathos and wit and humor andgrace and spirit and tenderness, and such a quantity of factitiousflummery besides in him, that he always reminded me of those pretty andprovoking songs in which some affected attitudinizing conceit mingleswith almost every expression of genuine feeling, like an artificial rosein a handful of wild flowers. 

I do not think William Murray's diamonds were of the finest water, buthis _paste_ was; and it was difficult enough to tell the one from theother. He had a charming voice, and sang exquisitely, after a fashionwhich I have no doubt he copied (as, however, only original genius cancopy) from Moore; but his natural musical facility was such that, although no musician, and singing everything only by ear, he executedthe music of the Figaro in Mozart's "Nozze" admirably. He had a gooddeal of his sister's winning charm of manner, and was (but not, I think, of malice prepense) that pleasantly pernicious creature, a male flirt. It was quite out of his power to address any woman (sister or niece orcookmaid) without an air and expression of sentimental courtesy andtender chivalrous devotion, that must have been puzzling and perplexingin the extreme to the uninitiated; and I am persuaded that until somefamiliarity bred--if not contempt, at least comprehension--every womanof his acquaintance (his cook included) must have felt convinced that hewas struggling against a respectful and hopeless passion for her. 

Of another acquaintance of ours in Edinburgh, a Mrs. A----, I wish tosay a word. She was a very singular woman; not perhaps in beingtolerably ignorant and silly, with an unmeaning face and a foolish, commonplace manner, an average specimen of vacuity of mind and vapidityof conversation, but undoubtedly singular in that she combined withthese not un-frequent human conditions a most rare gift of musical andpoetical interpretation--a gift so peculiar that when she sang sheliterally seemed inspired, taken possession of, by some other soul, thatentered into her as she opened her mouth and departed from her as sheshut it. She had a dull, brick-colored, long, thin face, and dull, pale-green eyes, like boiled gooseberries; but when in a clear, high, sweet, passionless soprano, like the voice of a spirit, and without anyaccompaniment, she sang the old Scotch ballads which she had learned inearly girlhood from her nurse, she produced one of the most powerfulimpressions that music and poetry combined can produce. From her I heardand learned by ear "The Douglas Tragedy, " "Fine Flowers in the Valley, ""Edinbro', " and many others, and became completely enamored of the wildbeauty of the Scotch ballads, the terror and pity of their stories, andthe strange, sweet, mournful music to which they were told. I knew everycollection of them, that I could get hold of, by heart, from Scott's"Border Minstrelsy" to Smith's six volumes of "National Scottish Songswith their Musical Settings, " and I said and sang them over in my lonelywalks perpetually; and they still are to me among the deepest andfreshest sources of poetical thought and feeling that I know. It isimpossible, I think, to find a truer expression of passion, anguish, tenderness, and supernatural terror, than those poems contain. The dewof heaven on the mountain fern is not more limpid than the simplicity oftheir diction, nor the heart's blood of a lover more fervid than thethrobbing intensity of their passion. Misery, love, longing, and despairhave found no finer poetical utterance out of Shakespeare; and thedeepest chords of woe and tenderness have been touched by these oftenunknown archaic song-writers, with a power and a pathos inferior only tohis. The older ballads, with the exquisite monotony of their burdenssoothing and relieving the tragic tenor of their stories, like thesighing of wind or the murmuring of water; the clarion-hearted Jacobitesongs, with the fragrance of purple heather and white roses breathingthrough their strains of loyal love and death-defying devotion; and thelovely, pathetic, and bewitchingly humorous songs of Burns, with theirenchanting melodies, were all familiar to me, and, during the year thatI spent in Edinburgh, were my constant study and delight. 

On one occasion I sat by Robert Chambers, and heard him relate someportion of the difficulties and distresses of his own and his brother'searly boyhood (the interesting story has lately become generally knownby the publication of their memoirs); and I then found it very difficultto swallow my dinner, and my tears, while listening to him, so deeplywas I affected by his simple and touching account of the cruel strugglethe two brave lads--destined to become such admirable and eminentmen--had to make against the hardships of their position. I remember hisdescribing the terrible longing occasioned by the smell of newly bakedbread in a baker's shop near which they lived, to their poor, half-starved, craving appetites, while they were saving every farthingthey could scrape together for books and that intellectual sustenance ofwhich, in after years, they became such bountiful dispensers to allEnglish-reading folk. Theirs is a very noble story of virtue conqueringfortune and dedicating it to the highest purposes. I used to meet theMessrs. Chambers at Mr. Combe's house; they were intimate and valuedfriends of the phrenologist, and I remember when the book entitled"Vestiges of Creation" came out, and excited so great a sensation in thepublic mind, that Mr. Combe attributed the authorship of it, which wasthen a secret, to Robert Chambers. 

Another Edinburgh friend of ours was Baron Hume, a Scottish lawdignitary, a charming old gentleman of the very old school, who alwayswore powder and a pigtail, knee-breeches, gold-buckles, and black silkstockings; and who sent a thrill of delight through my girlish breastwhen he addressed me, as he invariably did, by the dignified title of"madam;" though I must sorrowfully add that my triumph on this score wasconsiderably abated when, on the occasion of my second visit toEdinburgh, after I had come out on the stage, I went to see my kind oldfriend, who was too aged and infirm to go to the theater, and who saidto me as I sat on a low stool by his sofa, "Why, madam, they tell me youare become a great tragic actress! But, " added he, putting his handunder my chin, and raising my face toward him, "how am I to believe thatof this laughing face, madam?" No doubt he saw in his memory's eye themajestic nose of my aunt, and my "visnomy" under the effect of such acontrast must have looked comical enough, by way of a tragic mask. Bythe bye, it is on record that while Gainsborough was painting thatexquisite portrait of Mrs. Siddons which is now in the South KensingtonGallery, and which for many fortunate years adorned my father's house, after working in absorbed silence for some time he suddenly exclaimed, "Damn it, madam, there is no end to your nose!" The _restoration_ ofthat beautiful painting has destroyed the delicate charm of itscoloring, which was perfectly harmonious, and has as far as possiblemade it coarse and vulgar: before it had been spoiled, not even SirJoshua's "Tragic Muse" seemed to me so noble and beautiful arepresentation of my aunt's beauty as that divine picture ofGainsborough's. 

Two circumstances occurred during my stay in Edinburgh which made agreat impression upon me: the one was the bringing of the famous oldgun, Mons Meg, up to the castle; and the other was the last publicappearance of Madame Catalani. I do not know where the famous old cannonhad been kept till it was resolved to place it in Edinburgh Castle, butthe event was made quite a public festival, and by favor of some of themilitary authorities who presided over the ceremony we were admirablyplaced in a small angle or turret that commanded the beautiful land andsea and town, and immediately overlooked the hollow road up which, withits gallant military escort of Highland troops, and the resoundingaccompaniment of their warlike music, the great old lumbering piece ofordnance came slowly, dragged by a magnificent team of horses, into thefortress. Nothing could be more striking than the contrast presented bythis huge, clumsy, misshapen, obsolete engine of war, and the spruce, trim, shining, comparatively little cannon (mere pocket-pistols forBellona) which furnished the battery just below our stand, and which, assoon as the unwieldy old warrioress had occupied the post of honorreserved for her in their midst, sent forth a martial acclaim of welcomethat made the earth tremble under our feet, and resounded through theair, shivering, with the strong concussion, more than one pane of glassin the windows of Princess Street far below. 

Of Madame Catalani, all I can say is that I think she sang only "Godsave the King" and "Rule Britannia" on the occasion on which I heardher, which was that of her last public appearance in Edinburgh. Iremember only these, and think had she sung any thing else I could nothave forgotten it. She was quite an old woman, but still splendidlyhandsome. Her magnificent dark hair and eyes, and beautiful arms, andher blue velvet dress with a girdle flashing with diamonds, impressed mealmost as much as her singing; which, indeed, was rather a declamatoryand dramatic than a musical performance. The tones of her voice werestill fine and full, and the majestic action of her arms as she utteredthe words, "When Britain first arose from the waves, " wonderfullygraceful and descriptive; still, I remember better that I _saw_, thanthat I _heard_, Madame Catalani. She is the first of the queens of songthat I have seen ascend the throne of popular favor, in the course ofsixty years, and pretty little Adelina Patti the last; I have heard allthat have reigned between the two, and above them all Pasta appears tome pre-eminent for musical and dramatic genius--alone and unapproached, the muse of tragic song. 

CHAPTER X. 

I can not remember any event, or series of events, the influence ofwhich could, during my first stay in Edinburgh, have made a distinctlyserious or religious impression on my mind, or have directed my thoughtsespecially toward the more solemn concerns and aspects of life. But fromsome cause or other my mind became much affected at this time byreligious considerations, and a strong devotional element began topredominate among my emotions and cogitations. In my childhood in myfather's house we had no special religious training; our habits werethose of average English Protestants of decent respectability. My motherread the Bible to us in the morning before breakfast; Mrs. Trimmer's andMrs. Barbauld's Scripture histories and paraphrases were taught to us;we learnt our catechism and collects, and went to church on Sunday, dulyand decorously, as a matter of course. Grace was always said before andafter meals by the youngest member of the family present; and I remembera quaint, old-fashioned benediction which, when my father happened to beat home at our bedtime, we used to kneel down by his chair to receive, and with which he used to dismiss us for the night: "God bless you! makeyou good, happy, healthy, and wise!" These, with our own daily morningand evening prayers, were our devotional habits and pious practices. InMrs. Harry Siddons's house religion was never, I think, directly made asubject of inculcation or discussion; the usual observances of Church ofEngland people were regularly fulfilled by all her family, the spirit oftrue religion governed her life and all her home relations, but special, direct reference to religious subjects was infrequent among us. God'sservice in that house took the daily and hourly form of theconscientious discharge of duty, unselfish, tender affection toward eachother, and kindly Christian charity toward all. At various times in mylife, when hearing discussions on the peculiar (technical, I should bedisposed to call it) profession and character supposed by some very goodpeople of a certain way of thinking to be the only indication of whatthey considered real religion, I have remembered the serene, courageousself-devotion of my dear friend, when, during a dangerous (as it was atone time apprehended, fatal) illness of her youngest daughter, she wouldleave her child's bedside to go to the theater, and discharge dutiesnever very attractive to her, and rendered distasteful then by cruelanxiety, but her neglect of which would have injured the interests ofher brother, her fellow-actors, and all the poor people employed in thetheater, and been a direct infringement of her obligations to them. Ihave wondered what amount of religion a certain class of "professingChristians" would have allowed entered into that great effort. 

We attended habitually a small chapel served by the Rev. WilliamShannon, an excellent but not exciting preacher, who was a devotedfriend of Mrs. Harry Siddons; and occasionally we went to Dr. Allison'schurch and heard him--then an old man--preach, and sometimes his youngassistant, Mr. Sinclair, whose eloquent and striking sermons, whichimpressed me much, were the only powerful direct appeals made to myreligious sentiments at that time. I rather incline to think that I had, what a most unclerical young clergyman of my acquaintance once assuredme I had, a natural turn for religion. I think it not unlikely that agreat deal of the direct religious teaching and influences of my Parisschool-days was, as it were, coming up again to the surface of my mind, and occupying my thoughts with serious reflections upon the mostimportant subjects. The freedom I enjoyed gave scope and leisure to mycharacter to develop and strengthen itself; and to the combinedhealthful repose and activity of all my faculties, the absence of allexcitement and irritation from external influences, the pure moralatmosphere and kindly affection by which I lived surrounded during thishappy year, I attribute whatever perception of, desire for, or endeavorafter goodness I was first consciously actuated by. In the rest andliberty of my life at this time, I think, whatever was best in me hadthe most favorable chance of growth, and I have remained ever gratefulto the wise forbearance of the gentle authority under which I lived, forthe benefit as well as the enjoyment I derived from the time I passed inEdinburgh. 

I think that more harm is frequently done by over than by under culturein the moral training of youth. Judicious _letting alone_ is a preciouselement in real education, and there are certain chords which, oftentouched and made to vibrate too early, are apt to lose instead ofgaining power; to grow first weakly and morbidly sensitive, and thenhard and dull; and finally, when the full harmony of the characterdepends upon their truth and depth of tone, to have lost some measure ofboth under repeated premature handling. 

I sometimes think that instead of beginning, as we do, with a wholeheaven-and-earth-embracing theory of duty to God and man, it might bebetter to adopt with our children the method of dealing only with eachparticular instance of moral obligation empirically as it occurs; witheach particular incident of life, detached, as it were, from the notionof a formal system, code, or theory of religious belief, until therecurrence of the same rules of morality under the same governingprinciple, invoked only in immediate application to some instance ofconduct or incident of personal experience, built up by degrees a bodyof precedent which would have the force and efficacy of law before itwas theoretically inculcated as such. Whoever said that principles were_moral habits_ spoke, it seems to me, a valuable truth, not generallysufficiently recognized or acted upon in the task of education. 

The only immediate result, that I can remember, of my graver turn ofthought at this time upon my conduct was a determination to give upreading Byron's poetry. It was a great effort and a very greatsacrifice, for the delight I found in it was intense; but I was quiteconvinced of its injurious effect upon me, and I came to the conclusionthat I would forego it. 

"Cain" and "Manfred" were more especially the poems that stirred mywhole being with a tempest of excitement that left me in a state ofmental perturbation impossible to describe for a long time after readingthem. I suppose the great genius touched in me the spirit of our time, which, chit as I was, was common to us both; and the mere fact of mybeing _un enfant du siècle_ rendered me liable to the infection of thepotent, proud, desponding bitterness of his writing. 

The spirit of an age creates the spirit that utters it, and thoughByron's genius stamped its impress powerfully upon the thought andfeeling of his contemporaries, he was himself, after all, but a sort ofquintessence of _them_, and gave them back only an intensified, individual extract of themselves. The selfish vanity and profligate vicewhich he combined with his extraordinary intellectual gifts were aspeculiar to himself as his great mental endowments; and though fools mayhave followed the fashion of his follies, the heart of all Europe wasnot stirred by a fashion of which he set the example, but by a passionfor which he found the voice, indeed, but of which the key-note lay inthe very temper of the time and the souls of the men of his day. Goethe, Alfieri, Châteaubriand, each in his own language and with his peculiarnational and individual accent, uttered the same mind; they stampedtheir own image and superscription upon the coin to which, by so doing, they gave currency, but the mine from whence they drew their metal wasthe civilized humanity of the nineteenth century. It is true that someof Solomon's coining rings not unlike Goethe's and Byron's; but Solomonforestalled his day by being _blasé_ before the nineteenth century. Doubtless the recipe for that result has been the same for individualsever since the world rolled, but only here and there a great king, whowas also a great genius, possessed it in the earlier times; it took allthe ages that preceded it to make the _blasé_ age, and Byron, pre-eminently, to speak its mind in English--which he had no sooner donethan every nineteenth-century shop-boy in England quoted Byron, wore hisshirt-collar open, and execrated his destiny. Doubtless by grace of hisfree-will a man may wring every drop of sap out of his own soul and helphis fellows like-minded with himself to do the same; but the everlastingspirit of truth renews the vitality of the world, and while Byron wasgrowling and howling, and Shelley was denying and defying, Scott wastelling and Wordsworth singing things beautiful and good, and new andtrue. 

Certain it is, however, that the noble poet's glorious chanting of muchinglorious matter did me no good, and so I resolved to read that grandpoetry no more. It was a severe struggle, but I persevered in it formore than two years, and had my reward; I broke through the thraldom ofthat powerful spell, and all the noble beauty of those poems remained tome thenceforth divested of the power of wild excitement they hadexercised over me. A great many years after this girlish effort andsacrifice, Lady Byron, who was a highly esteemed friend of mine, spoketo me upon the subject of a new and cheap edition of her husband's worksabout to be published, and likely to be widely disseminated among theyoung clerk and shopkeeper class of readers, for whom she deprecatedextremely the pernicious influence it was calculated to produce. Sheconsulted me on the expediency of appending to it some notice of LordByron written by herself, which she thought might modify or lessen theinjurious effect of his poetry upon young minds. "Nobody, " she said, "knew him as I did" (this certainly was not the general impression uponthe subject); "nobody knew as well as I the causes that had made himwhat he was; nobody, I think, is so capable of doing justice to him, andtherefore of counteracting the injustice he does to himself, and theinjury he might do to others, in some of his writings. " I was stronglyimpressed by the earnestness of her expression, which seemed to me oneof affectionate compassion for Byron and profound solicitude lest, evenin his grave, he should incur the responsibility of yet further evilinfluence, especially on the minds of the young. I could not helpwondering, also, whether she did not shrink from being again, to a newgeneration and a wider class of readers, held up to cruel ridicule andcondemnation as the cold-hearted, hard, pedantic prude, without sympathyfor suffering or relenting toward repentance. I had always admired thereticent dignity of her silence with reference to her short anddisastrous union with Lord Byron, and I felt sorry, therefore, that shecontemplated departing from the course she had thus far steadfastlypursued, though I appreciated the motive by which she was actuated. Icould not but think, however, that she overestimated the mischiefByron's poetry was likely to do the young men of 1850, highlyprejudicial as it undoubtedly was to those of his day, illustrated, soto speak, by the bad notoriety of his own character and career. But thegeneration of English youth who had grown up with Thackeray, Dickens, and Tennyson as their intellectual nourishment, seemed to me littlelikely to be infected with Byronism, and might read his poetry with adegree of impunity which the young people of his own time did not enjoy. I urged this my conviction upon her, as rendering less necessary thanshe imagined the antidote she was anxious to append to the poison of thenew edition of her husband's works. But to this she replied that she hadderived her impression of the probable mischief to a class peculiarlyinteresting to him, from Frederick Robertson, and of course his opinionwas more than an overweight for mine. 

Lady Byron did not, however, fulfill her purpose of prefacing thecontemplated edition of Byron's poems with a notice of him by herself, which I think very likely to have been a suggestion of Mr. Robertson'sto her. 

My happy year in Edinburgh ended, I returned to London, to our house inJames Street, Buckingham Gate, where I found my parents much burdenedwith care and anxiety about the affairs of the theater, which wererapidly falling into irretrievable embarrassment. My father toiledincessantly, but the tide of ill-success and losing fortune had setsteadily against him, and the attempt to stem it became daily harder andmore hopeless. I used sometimes to hear some of the sorrowful details ofthis dreary struggle, and I well remember the indignation and terror Iexperienced when one day my father said at dinner, "I have had a newexperience to-day: I have been arrested for the first time in my life. "I believe my father was never personally in debt during all his life; hesaid he never had been up to that day, and I am very sure he never wasafterward. Through all the severe labor of his professional life, andhis strenuous exertions to maintain his family and educate my brotherslike gentlemen, and my sister and myself with every advantage, he neverincurred the misery of falling into debt, but paid his way as he wentalong, with difficulty, no doubt, but still steadily and successfully, "owing no man any thing. " But the suit in question was brought againsthim as one of the proprietors of the theater, for a debt which thetheater owed; and, moreover, was that of a person whom he had befriendedand helped forward, and who had always professed the most sinceregratitude and attachment to him. The constantly darkening prospects ofthat unlucky theater threw a gloom over us all; sometimes my father usedto speak of selling his share in it for any thing he could get for it(and Heaven knows it was not likely to be much!), and going to liveabroad; or sending my mother, with us, to live cheaply in the south ofFrance, while he continued to work in London. Neither alternative wascheerful for him or my poor mother, and I felt very sorrowful for them, though I thought I should like living in the south of France better thanin London. I was working with a good deal of enthusiasm at a tragedy onthe subject of Fiesco, the Genoese noble's conspiracy against theDorias--a subject which had made a great impression upon me when I firstread Schiller's noble play upon it. My own former fancy about going onthe stage, and passionate desire for a lonely, independent life in whichit had originated, had died away with the sort of moral and mentaleffervescence which had subsided during my year's residence inEdinburgh. Although all my sympathy with the anxieties of my parentstended to make the theater an object of painful interest to me, andthough my own attempts at poetical composition were constantly cast in adramatic form, in spite of my enthusiastic admiration of Goethe's andSchiller's plays (which, however, I could only read in French or Englishtranslations, for I then knew no German) and my earnest desire to writea good play myself, the idea of making the stage my profession hadentirely passed from my mind, which was absorbed with the wish andendeavor to produce a good dramatic composition. The turn I hadexhibited for acting at school appeared to have evaporated, and CoventGarden itself never occurred to me as a great institution for purposesof art or enlightened public recreation, but only as my father'sdisastrous property, to which his life was being sacrificed; and everythought connected with it gradually became more and more distasteful tome. It appears to me curious, that up to this time, I literally knewnothing of Shakespeare, beyond having seen one or two of his playsacted; I had certainly never read one of them through, nor did I do sountil some time later, when I began to have to learn parts in them byheart. 

I think the rather serious bias which my mind had developed while I wasstill in Scotland tended probably to my greater contentment in my home, and to the total disinclination which I should certainly now have feltfor a life of public exhibition. My dramatic reading and writing wascuriously blended with a very considerable interest in literature of avery different sort, and with the perusal of such works as Mason on"Self-Knowledge, " Newton's "Cardiphonia, " and a great variety of sermonsand religious essays. My mother, observing my tendency to reading onreligious subjects, proposed to me to take my first communion. She was amember of the Swiss Protestant Church, the excellent pastor of which, the Rev. Mr. S----, was our near neighbor, and we were upon terms of thefriendliest intimacy with him and his family. In his church I receivedthe sacrament for the first time, but I do not think with the mostdesirable effect. The only immediate result that I can remember of thisincrease of my Christian profession and privileges was, I am sorry tosay, a rigid pharisaical formalism, which I carried so far as to declineaccompanying my father and mother to our worthy clergyman's house, oneSunday, when we were invited to spend the evening with him and hisfamily. This sort of acrid fruit is no uncommon first harvest ofyouthful religious zeal; and I suppose my parents and my worthy pastorthought it a piece of unripe, childish, impertinent conscientiousness, hardly deserving a serious rebuke. 

Another of my recollections which belong to this time is seeing severaltimes at our house that exceedingly coarse, disagreeable, clever, andwitty man, Theodore Hook. I always had a dread of his loud voice, andblazing red face, and staring black eyes; especially as on more than oneoccasion his after-dinner wit seemed to me fitter for the table he hadleft than the more refined atmosphere of the drawing-room. One day hedined with us to meet my cousin Horace Twiss and his handsome new wife. Horace had in a lesser degree some of Hook's wonderful sense of humorand quickness of repartee, and the two men brought each other out withgreat effect. Of course I had heard of Mr. Hook's famous reply when, after having returned from the colonies, where he was in an officialposition, under suspicion of peculation, a friend meeting him said, "Why, hallo, Hook! I did not know you were in England! What has broughtyou back again?" "Something wrong about the _chest_, " replied theimperturbable wit. He was at this time the editor of the John Bull, apaper of considerable ability, and only less scurrility than the _Age_;and in spite of his _chest difficulty_ he was much sought in society forhis extraordinary quickness and happiness in conversation. Hisoutrageous hoax of the poor London citizen, from whom he extorted anagonized invitation to dinner by making him believe that he and CharlesMathews were public surveyors, sent to make observations for a new road, which was to go straight through the poor shopkeeper's lawn, flower-garden, and bedroom, he has, I believe, introduced into his novelof "Gilbert Gurney. " But not, of course, with the audaciousextemporaneous song with which he wound up the joke, when, having eatenand drank the poor citizen's dinner, prepared for a small party ofcitizen friends (all the time assuring him that he and his friend woulduse their very best endeavors to avert the threatened invasion of hisproperty by the new line of road), he proposed singing a song, to thegreat delight of the unsophisticated society, the concluding verse ofwhich was--

 "And now I am bound to declare That your wine is as good as your cook, And that this is Charles Mathews, the player, And I, sir, am Theodore Hook. "

He always demanded, when asked for a specimen of his extemporizingpower, that a subject should be given to him. I do not remember, on oneoccasion, what was suggested in the first instance, but after somediscussion Horace Twiss cried out, "The Jews. " It was the time of thefirst mooting of the question of the Jews being admitted to stand forParliament and having seats in the House, and party spirit ran extremelyhigh upon the subject. Theodore Hook shrugged his shoulders and made adiscontented grimace, as if baffled by his theme, the Jews. However, hewent to the piano, threw back his head, and began strumming a gallopingcountry-dance tune, to which he presently poured forth the mostinconceivable string of witty, comical, humorous, absurd allusions toeverybody present as well as to the subject imposed upon him. HoraceTwiss was at that time under-secretary either for foreign affairs or thecolonies, and Hook took occasion to say, or rather sing, that theforeign department could have little charms for a man who had so manymore in the home, with an indication to Annie Twiss; the final verse ofthis real firework of wit was this--

 "I dare say you think there's little wit In this, but you've all forgot That, instead of being a jeu d'esprit, 'Tis only a jeu de mot, "

pronouncing the French words as broadly as possible, "a _Jew d'esprit_, and 'tis only a _Jew de motte_, " for the sake of the rhyme, and hissubject, the Jews. It certainly was all through a capital specimen ofready humor. I remember on another occasion hearing him exercise hissingular gift in a manner that seemed to me as unjustifiable as it wasdisagreeable. I met him at dinner at Sir John McDonald's, thenadjutant-general, a very kind and excellent friend of mine. Mrs. Nortonand Lord C----, who were among the guests, both came late, and after wehad gone into the dining-room, where they were received with a discreetquantity of mild chaff, Mrs. Norton being much too formidable anadversary to be challenged lightly. After dinner, however, when the mencame up into the drawing-room, Theodore Hook was requested toextemporize, and having sung one song, was about to leave the piano inthe midst of the general entreaty that he would not do so, when Mrs. Norton, seating herself close to the instrument so that he could notleave it, said, in her most peculiar, deep, soft, contralto voice, whichwas like her beautiful dark face set to music, "I am going to sit downhere, and you shall not come away, for I will keep you in like an ironcrow. " There was nothing about her manner or look that could suggest anything but a flattering desire to enjoy Hook's remarkable talent in somefurther specimen of his power of extemporizing, and therefore I supposethere must have been some previous ill-will or heart-burning on his parttoward her--she was reckless enough in her use of her wonderful wit andpower of saying the most intolerable stinging things, to have left asmart on some occasion in Hook's memory, for which he certainly did hisbest to pay her then. Every verse of the song he now sang ended with histurning with a bow to her, and the words, "my charming iron crow;" butit was from beginning to end a covert satire of her and her socialtriumphs; even the late arrival at dinner and its supposed causes wereduly brought in, still with the same mock-respectful inclination to his"charming iron crow. " Everybody was glad when the song was over, andapplauded it quite as much from a sense of relief as from admiration ofits extraordinary cleverness; and Mrs. Norton smilingly thanked Hook, and this time made way for him to leave the piano. 

We lived near each other at this time, we in James Street, BuckinghamGate, and the Nortons at Storey's Gate, at the opposite end of theBirdcage Walk. We both of us frequented the same place of worship--atiny chapel wedged in among the buildings at the back of Downing Street, the entrance to which was from the park; it has been improved away bythe new government offices. Our dinner at the McDonalds' was on aSaturday, and the next day, as we were walking part of the way hometogether from church, Mrs. Norton broke out about Theodore Hook and hisodious ill-nature and abominable coarseness, saying that it was adisgrace and a shame that for the sake of his paper, the _John Bull_, and its influence, the Tories should receive such a man in society. I, who but for her outburst upon the subject should have carefully avoidedmentioning Hook's name, presuming that after his previous evening'sperformance it could not be very agreeable to Mrs. Norton, now, notknowing very well what to say, but thinking the Sheridan blood(especially in her veins) might have some sympathy with and find someexcuse for him, suggested the temptation that the possession of such witmust always be, more or less, to the abuse of it. "Witty!" exclaimed theindignant beauty, with her lip and nostril quivering, "witty! One maywell be witty when one fears neither God nor devil!" I was heartily gladHook was not there; he was not particular about the truth, and wouldinfallibly, in some shape or other, have translated for her benefit, "Jecrains Dieu, cher Abner, et n'ai point d'autre crainte. "

The Nortons' house was close to the issue from St. James's Park intoGreat George Street. I remember passing an evening with them there, whena host of distinguished public and literary men were crowded into theirsmall drawing-room, which was literally resplendent with the light ofSheridan beauty, male and female: Mrs. Sheridan (Miss Callender, ofwhom, when she published a novel, the hero of which commits forgery, that wicked wit, Sidney Smith, said he knew she was a Callender, but didnot know till then that she was a Newgate calendar), the mother of theGraces, more beautiful than anybody but her daughters; Lady Grahame, their beautiful aunt; Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Blackwood (Lady Dufferin), Georgiana Sheridan (Duchess of Somerset and queen of beauty by universalconsent), and Charles Sheridan, their younger brother, a sort of youngerbrother of the Apollo Belvedere. Certainly I never saw such a bunch ofbeautiful creatures all growing on one stem. I remarked it to Mrs. Norton, who looked complacently round her tiny drawing-room and said, "Yes, we are rather good-looking people. " I remember this eveningbecause of the impression made on me by the sight of these wonderfully"good-looking people" all together, and also because of my having had tosing with Moore--an honor and glory hardly compensating the distress ofsemi-strangulation, in order to avoid drowning his feeble thread of avoice with the heavy, robust contralto which I found it very difficultto swallow half of, while singing second to him, in his own melodies, with the other half. My acquaintance with Mrs. Norton lasted through aperiod of many years, and, though never very intimate, was renewed withcordiality each time I returned to England. It began just after I cameout on the stage, when I was about twenty, and she a few years older. Myfather and mother had known her parents and grandparents, RichardBrinsley Sheridan and Miss Lindley, from whom their descendants derivedthe remarkable beauty and brilliant wit which distinguished them. 

My mother was at Drury Lane when Mr. Sheridan was at the head of itsadministration, and has often described to me the extraordinaryproceedings of that famous first night of "Pizarro, " when, at lastkeeping the faith he had so often broken with the public, Mr. Sheridanproduced that most effective of melodramas, with my aunt and uncle'sparts still unfinished, and, depending upon their extraordinary rapidityof study, kept them learning the last scenes of the last act, which hewas still writing, while the beginning of the piece was being performed. By the by, I do not know what became of the theories about the dramaticart, and the careful and elaborate study necessary for its perfection. In this particular instance John Kemble's Rolla and Mrs. Siddons'sElvira must have been what may be called extemporaneous acting. Notimpossibly, however, these performances may have gained in vivid powerand effect what they lost in smoothness and finish, from the verynervous strain and excitement of such a mental effort as the actors werethus called upon to make. My mother remembered well, too, the dismalSaturdays when, after prolonged periods of non-payment of theirsalaries, the poorer members of the company, and all the unfortunatework-people, carpenters, painters, scene-shifters, understrappers of allsorts, and plebs in general of the great dramatic concern, thronging thepassages and staircases, would assail Sheridan on his way to thetreasury with pitiful invocations: "For God's sake, Mr. Sheridan, pay usour salaries!" "For Heaven's sake, Mr. Sheridan, let us have somethingthis week!" and his plausible reply of, "Certainly, certainly, my goodpeople, you shall be attended to directly. " Then he would go into thetreasury, sweep it clean of the whole week's receipts (the salaries ofthe principal actors, whom he dared not offend and could not dispensewith, being, if not wholly, partially paid), and, going out of thebuilding another way, leave the poor people who had cried to him fortheir arrears of wages baffled and cheated of the price of their laborfor another week. The picture was not a pleasant one. 

When I first knew Caroline Sheridan, she had not long been married tothe Hon. George Norton. She was splendidly handsome, of an un-Englishcharacter of beauty, her rather large and heavy head and featuresrecalling the grandest Grecian and Italian models, to the latter of whomher rich coloring and blue-black braids of hair gave her an additionalresemblance. Though neither as perfectly lovely as the Duchess ofSomerset, nor as perfectly charming as Lady Dufferin, she produced a farmore striking impression than either of them, by the combination of thepoetical genius with which she alone, of the three, was gifted, with thebrilliant wit and power of repartee which they (especially LadyDufferin) possessed in common with her, united to the exceptional beautywith which they were all three endowed. Mrs. Norton was extremelyepigrammatic in her talk, and comically dramatic in her manner ofnarrating things. I do not know whether she had any theatrical talent, though she sang pathetic and humorous songs admirably, and I remembershaking in my shoes when, soon after I came out, she told me she enviedme, and would give anything to try the stage herself. I thought, as Ilooked at her wonderful, beautiful face, "Oh, if you should, what wouldbecome of me!" She was no musician, but had a deep, sweet contraltovoice, precisely the same in which she always spoke, and which, combinedwith her always lowered eyelids ("downy eyelids" with sweeping silkenfringes), gave such incomparably comic effect to her sharp retorts andludicrous stories; and she sang with great effect her own and LadyDufferin's social satires, "Fanny Grey, " and "Miss Myrtle, " etc. , andsentimental songs like "Would I were with Thee, " "I dreamt 'twas but aDream, " etc. , of which the words were her own, and the music, which onlyamounted to a few chords with the simplest modulations, her own also. Iremember she used occasionally to convulse her friends _en petit comité_with a certain absurd song called "The Widow, " to all intents andpurposes a piece of broad comedy, the whole story of which (the wooingof a disconsolate widow by a rich lover, whom she first rejects and thenaccepts) was comprised in a few words, rather spoken than sung, eked outby a ludicrous burden of "rum-ti-iddy-iddy-iddy-ido, " which, by dint ofher countenance and voice, conveyed all the alternations of the widow'sfirst despair, her lover's fiery declaration, her virtuous indignationand wrathful rejection of him, his cool acquiescence and intimation thathis full purse assured him an easy acceptance in various other quarters, her rage and disappointment at his departure, and final relenting andconsent on his return; all of which with her "iddy-iddy-ido" she sang, or rather acted, with incomparable humor and effect. I admired herextremely. 

In 1841 I began a visit of two years and a half in England. During thistime I constantly met Mrs. Norton in society. She was living with heruncle, Charles Sheridan, and still maintained her glorious supremacy ofbeauty and wit in the great London world. She came often to parties atour house, and I remember her asking us to dine at her uncle's, whenamong the people we met were Lord Lansdowne and Lord Normanby, both thenin the ministry, whose good-will and influence she was exerting herselfto _captivate_ in behalf of a certain shy, silent, rather rusticgentleman from the far-away province of New Brunswick, Mr. Samuel Cunard, afterwards Sir Samuel Cunard of the great mail-packet line of steamersbetween England and America. He had come to London an obscure and humbleindividual, endeavoring to procure from the government the sole privilegeof carrying the transatlantic mails for his line of steamers. Fortunatelyfor him he had some acquaintance with Mrs. Norton, and the powerfulbeauty, who was kind-hearted and good-natured to all but her naturalenemies (i. E. The members of her own London society), exerted all herinterest with her admirers in high place in favor of Cunard, and had madethis very dinner for the express purpose of bringing her provincial_protégé_ into pleasant personal relations with Lord Lansdowne and LordNormanby, who were likely to be of great service to him in the specialobject which had brought him to England. The only other individual Iremember at the dinner was that most beautiful person, Lady Harrietd'Orsay. Years after, when the Halifax projector had become Sir SamuelCunard, a man of fame in the worlds of commerce and business of New Yorkand London, a baronet of large fortune, and a sort of proprietor of theAtlantic Ocean between England and the United States, he reminded me ofthis charming dinner in which Mrs. Norton had so successfully found themeans of forwarding his interests, and spoke with enthusiasm of herkind-heartedness as well as her beauty and talents; he, of course, passedunder the Caudine Forks, beneath which all men encountering her had tobow and throw down their arms. She was very fond of inventing devices forseals, and other such ingenious exercises of her brains, and she gave---- a star with the motto, "Procul sed non extincta, " which she civillysaid bore reference to me in my transatlantic home. She also told me, when we were talking of mottoes for seals and rings, that she had hadengraved on a ring she always wore the name of that miserable bayou ofthe Mississippi--Atchafalaya--where Gabriel passes near one side of anisland, while Evangeline, in her woe-begone search, is lying asleep onthe other; and that, to her surprise, she found that the King of theBelgians wore a ring on which he had had the same word engraved, as anexpression of the bitterest and most hopeless disappointment. 

In 1845 I passed through London, and spent a few days there with myfather, on my way to Italy. Mrs. Norton, hearing of my being in town, came to see me, and urged me extremely to go and dine with her before Ileft London, which I did. The event of the day in her society was thedeath of Lady Holland, about which there were a good many lamentations, of which Lady T---- gave the real significance, with considerable_naïveté_: "Ah, poore deare Ladi Ollande! It is a grate pittie; it wassuche a _pleasant 'ouse!_" As I had always avoided Lady Holland'sacquaintance, I could merely say that the regrets I heard expressedabout her seemed to me only to prove a well-known fact--how soon thedead were forgotten. The _real_ sorrow was indeed for the loss of herhouse, that pleasantest of all London rendezvouses, and not for itsmistress, though those whom I then heard speak were probably among thefew who did regret her. Lady Holland had one good quality (perhaps morethan one, which I might have found out if I had known her): she was aconstant and exceedingly warm friend, and extended her regard andremembrance to all whom Lord Holland or herself had ever received withkindness or on a cordial footing. My brother John had always beentreated with great friendliness by Lord Holland, and in her will LadyHolland, who had not seen him for years, left him as a memento a copy, in thirty-two volumes, of the English essayists, which had belonged toher husband. 

Almost immediately after this transient renewal of my intercourse withMrs. Norton, I left England for Italy, and did not see her again forseveral years. The next time I did so was at an evening party at mysister's house, where her appearance struck me more than it had everdone. Her dress had something to do with this effect, no doubt. She hada rich gold-colored silk on, shaded and softened all over with blacklace draperies, and her splendid head, neck, and arms were adorned withmagnificently simple Etruscan gold ornaments, which she had brought fromRome, whence she had just returned, and where the fashion of that famousantique jewelry had lately been revived. She was still "une beautétriomphante à faire voir aux ambassadeurs. "

During one of my last sojourns in London I met Mrs. Norton at LansdowneHouse. There was a great assembly there, and she was wandering throughthe rooms leaning on the arm of her youngest son, her glorious headstill crowned with its splendid braids of hair, and wreathed with grapesand ivy leaves, and this was my last vision of her; but, in the autumnof 1870, Lady C---- told me of meeting her in London society, now indeedquite old, but indomitably handsome and witty. 

I think it only humane to state, for the benefit of all mothers anxiousfor their daughters', and all daughters anxious for their own, futurewelfare in this world, that in the matter of what the lady's-maid in theplay calls "the first of earthly blessings--personal appearance, "Caroline Sheridan as a girl was so little distinguished by theexceptional beauty she subsequently developed, that her lovely mother, who had a right to be exacting in the matter, entertained occasionallydesponding misgivings as to the future comeliness of one of the mostcelebrated beauties of her day. 

At the time of my earliest acquaintance with the Nortons, our friendsthe Basil Montagus had left their house in Bedford Square, and were alsoliving at Storey's Gate. Among the remarkable people I met at theirhouse was the Indian rajah, Ramohun Roy, philosopher, scholar, reformer, Quaker, theist, I know not what and what not, who was introduced to me, and was kind enough to take some notice of me. He talked to me of theliterature of his own country, especially its drama, and, finding that Iwas already acquainted with the Hindoo theatre through the medium of myfriend Mr. Horace Wilson's translations of its finest compositions, butthat I had never read "Sakuntalà, " the most remarkable of them all, which Mr. Wilson had not included in his collection (I suppose becauseof its translation by Sir William Jones), Ramohun Roy sent me a copy ofit, which I value extremely as a memento of so remarkable a man, but inwhich I confess I am utterly unable to find the extraordinary beauty andsublimity which he attributed to it, and of which I remember Goethe alsospeaks enthusiastically (if I am not mistaken, in his conversations withEckermann), calling it the most wonderful production of human genius. Goethe had not, any more than myself, the advantage of reading"Sakuntalà" in Sanskrit, and I am quite at a loss to account for theextreme and almost exaggerated admiration he expresses for it. 

 JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, August 23, ----. MY DEAREST H----, I received your last on my return from the country, where I had been staying a fortnight, and I assure you that after an uncomfortable and rainy drive into town I found it of more service in warming me than even the blazing fire with which we are obliged to shame the month of August. 

 I have a great deal to tell you about our affairs, and the effect that their unhappy posture seems likely to produce upon my future plans and prospects. Do you remember a letter I wrote to you a long time ago about going on the stage? and another, some time before that, about my becoming a governess? The urgent necessity which I think now exists for exertion, in all those who are capable of it among us, has again turned my thoughts to these two considerations. My father's property, and all that we might ever have hoped to derive from it, being utterly destroyed in the unfortunate issue of our affairs, his personal exertions are all that remain to him and us to look to. There are circumstances in which reflections that our minds would not admit at other times of necessity force themselves upon our consideration. Those talents and qualifications, both mental and physical, which have been so mercifully preserved to my dear father hitherto, cannot, in the natural course of things, all remain unimpaired for many more years. It is right, then, that those of us who have the power to do so should at once lighten his arms of all unnecessary burden, and acquire the habit of independent exertion before the moment comes when utter inexperience would add to the difficulty of adopting any settled mode of proceeding; it is right and wise to prepare for the evil day before it is upon us. These reflections have led me to the resolution of entering upon some occupation or profession which may enable me to turn the advantages my father has so liberally bestowed upon me to some account, so as not to be a useless incumbrance to him at present, or a helpless one in future time. My brother John, you know, has now determined, to go into the Church. Henry we have good although remote hopes of providing well for, and, were I to make use of my own capabilities, dear little A---- would be the only one about whom there need be any anxiety. I propose writing to my father before he returns home (he is at present acting in the provinces) on this subject. Some step I am determined to take; the nature of it will, of course, remain with him and my mother. I trust that whatever course they resolve upon I shall be enabled to pursue steadily, and I am sure that, be it what it may, I shall find it comparatively easy, as the motive is neither my own profit nor reputation, but the desire of bringing into their right use whatever talents I may possess, which have not been given for useless purposes. I hope and trust that I am better fitted for either of the occupations I have mentioned than I was when I before entertained an idea of them. You asked me what inclined John's thoughts to the Church. It would be hard to say; or rather, I ought to say, that Providence which in its own good time makes choice of its instruments, and which I ever firmly trusted would not suffer my brother's fine powers to be wasted on unworthy aims. I am not able to say how the change which has taken place in his opinions and sentiments was effected; but you know one has not done _all_ one's thinking at two and twenty. I have been by circumstances much separated from my brother, and when with him have had but little communication upon such subjects. It was at a time when, I think, his religious principles were somewhat unsettled, that his mind was so passionately absorbed by politics. The nobler instincts of his nature, diverted for a while from due direct intercourse with their divine source, turned themselves with enthusiastic, earnest hope to the desire of benefiting his fellow-creatures; and to these aims--the reformation of abuses, the establishment of a better system of government, the gradual elevation and improvement of the people, and the general progress of the country towards enlightened liberty and consequent prosperity--he devoted all his thoughts. This was the period of his fanatical admiration for Jeremy Bentham and Mill, who, you know, are our near neighbors here, and whose houses we never pass without John being inclined to salute them, I think, as the shrines of some beneficent powers of renovation. And here comes the break in our intercourse and in my knowledge of his mental and moral progress. I went to Scotland, and was amazed, after I had been there some time, to hear from my mother that John had not got his scholarship, and had renounced his intention of going to the bar and determined to study for the Church. I returned home, and found him much changed. His high sense of the duties attending it makes me rejoice most sincerely that he has chosen that career, which may not be the surest path to worldly advancement, but if conscientiously followed must lead, I should think, to the purest happiness this life can offer. I think much of this change may be attributed to the example and influence of some deservedly dear friends of his; probably something to the sobering effect of the disappointment and mortification of his failure at college, where such sanguine hopes and expectations of his success had been entertained. Above all, I refer his present purpose to that higher influence which has followed him through all his mental wanderings, suggesting the eager inquiries of his restless and dissatisfied spirit, and finally leading it to this, its appointed goal. He writes to us in high spirits from Germany, and his letters are very delightful. 

 Mrs. Siddons and Cecy are with Mrs. Kemble at Leamington. Mrs. Harry Siddons is, I fear, but little better; she has had another attack of erysipelas, and I am very anxious to get to her, but the distance, and the dependence of all interesting young females in London on the legs and leisure of chaperons, prevents me from seeing her as often as I wish. 

 German is an arduous undertaking, and I have once more abandoned it, not only on account of its difficulty, but because I do not at present wish to enter upon the study of a foreign language, when I am but just awakened to my radical ignorance of my own. God bless you, dear H----. 

 Yours ever, FANNY. 

As long as I retained a home of my own, I resisted my friend'shalf-expressed wish that I should destroy her letters; but when I ceasedto have any settled place of habitation, it became impossible to providefor the safe-keeping of a mass of papers the accumulation of whichreceived additions every few days, and by degrees (for my courage failedme very often in the task) my friend's letters were destroyed. Fewthings that I have had to relinquish have cost me a greater pang orsense of loss, and few of the conditions of my wandering life haveseemed to me more grievous than the necessity it imposed upon me ofdestroying these letters. My friend did not act upon her own theory withregard to my correspondence, and indeed it seems to me that no generalrule can be given with regard to the preservation or destruction ofcorrespondence. What revelations of misery and guilt may lie in theforgotten folds of hoarded letters, that have been preserved only toblast the memory of the dead! What precious words, again, have beendestroyed, that might have lightened for a whole heavy lifetime thedoubt and anguish of the living! In this, as in all we do, we gropeabout in darkness, and the one and the other course must often enoughhave been bitterly lamented by those who "did for the best" in keepingor destroying these chronicles of human existence. 

Madame Pasta's daughter once said to Charles Young, who enthusiasticallyadmired her great genius, "Vous trouvez qu'elle chante et joue bien, n'est-ce pas?" "Je crois bien, " replied he, puzzled to understand herdrift. "Well, " replied the daughter of the great lyrical artist, "to us, to whom she belongs, and who know and love her, her great talent is theleast admirable thing about her; but no one but us knows that. "

Doubtless if letters of Shakespeare's could be found, letters developingthe mystery of those sorrowful sonnets, or even letters describing hisdaily dealings with his children, and Mistress Anne Hathaway, his wife;nay, even the fashion, color, and texture of the hangings of "thesecond-best bed, " her special inheritance, a frenzy of curiosity wouldbe aroused by them. All his glorious plays would not be worth(bookseller's value) some scraps of thought and feeling, or merepersonal detail, or even commonplace (he must have been sovereignlycommonplace) impartment of theatrical business news and gossip to hisfellow-players, or Scotch Drummond, or my Lord Southampton, or the DarkWoman of the sonnets. But we know little about him, thank Heaven! and Iam glad that little is not more. 

I know he must have sinned and suffered, mortal man since he was, but Ido not wish to know how. From his plays, in spite of the necessarilyimpersonal character of dramatic composition, we gather a vivid anddistinct impression of serene sweetness, wisdom, and power. In thefragment of personal history which he gives us in his sonnets, thereverse is the case; we have a painful impression of mournful strugglingwith adverse circumstances and moral evil elements, and of the labor andthe love of his life alike bestowed on objects deemed by himselfunworthy; and in spite of his triumphant promise of immortality to thefalse mistress or friend, or both, to whom (as far as he has revealedthem to us) he has kept his promise, we fall to pitying Shakespeare, thebestower of immortality. In the great temple raised by his genius to hisown undying glory, one narrow door opens into a secret, silent crypt, where his image, blurred and indistinct, is hardly discernible throughthe gloomy atmosphere, heavy and dim as if with sighs and tears. Here isno clew, no issue, and we return to the shrine filled with light andlife and warmth and melody; with knowledge and love of man, and worshipof God and nature. There is our benefactor and friend, simplest and mostlovable, though most wonderful of his kind; other image of him than thatbright one may the world never know!

The extraordinary development of the taste for petty details of personalgossip which our present literature bears witness to makes it almost aduty to destroy all letters not written for publication; and yet thereis no denying that life is essentially interesting--every life, anylife, all lives, if their detailed history could be given with truth andsimplicity. For my own part, I confess that the family correspondence, even of people utterly unknown to me, always seems to me full ofinterest. The vivid interest the writers took in themselves makes theirletters better worth reading than many books we read; they are life, ascompared with imitations of it--life, that mystery and beauty surpassingevery other; they are morsels of that profoundest of all secrets, whichbaffles alike the man of science, the metaphysician, artist, and poet. And yet it would be hard if A, B, and C's letters should therefore bepublished, especially as, had they contemplated my reading them, theywould doubtless never have written them, or written them quite otherthan they did. 

To resume my chronicle. My brother John was at this time traveling inGermany; the close of his career at Cambridge had proved a bitterdisappointment to my father, and had certainly not fulfilled theexpectations of any of his friends or the promise of his own veryconsiderable abilities. He left the university without taking hisdegree, and went to Heidelberg, where he laid the foundation of hissubsequent thorough knowledge of German, and developed the taste for theespecial philological studies to which he eventually devoted himself, but his eminence in which brought him little emolument and but tardyfame, and never in the least consoled my father for the failure of allthe brilliant hopes he had formed of the future distinction and fortuneof his eldest son. When a man has made up his mind that his son is to beLord Chancellor of England, he finds it hardly an equivalent that heshould be one of the first Anglo-Saxon scholars in Europe. 

In my last letter to Miss S---- I have referred to some of my brother'sfriends and their possible influence in determining his choice of theclerical profession in preference to that of the law, which my fatherhad wished him to adopt, and for which, indeed, he had so far shown hisown inclination as to have himself entered at the Inner Temple. 

Among my brother's contemporaries, his school and college mates whofrequented my father's house at this time, were Arthur Hallam, AlfredTennyson and his brothers, Frederick Maurice, John Sterling, RichardTrench, William Donne, the Romillys, the Malkins, Edward Fitzgerald, James Spedding, William Thackeray, and Richard Monckton Milnes. 

These names were those of "promising young men, " our friends andcompanions, whose various remarkable abilities we learned to estimatethrough my brother's enthusiastic appreciation of them. How bright hasbeen, in many instances, the full performance of that early promise, England has gratefully acknowledged; they have been among the jewels oftheir time, and some of their names will be famous and blessed forgenerations to come. It is not for me to praise those whom allEnglish-speaking folk delight to honor; but in thinking of that brightband of very noble young spirits, of my brother's love and admirationfor them, of their affection for him, of our pleasant intercourse inthose far-off early days, --in spite of the faithful, life-long regardwhich still subsists between myself and the few survivors of that goodlycompany, my heart sinks with a heavy sense of loss, and the world fromwhich so much light has departed seems dark and dismal enough. 

CHAPTER XI. 

Alfred Tennyson had only just gathered his earliest laurels. My brotherJohn gave me the first copy of his poems I ever possessed, with aprophecy of his future fame and excellence written on the fly-leaf ofit. I have never ceased to exult in my possession of that copy of thefirst edition of those poems, which became the songs of our every dayand every hour, almost; we delighted in them and knew them by heart, andread and said them over and over again incessantly; they were ourpictures, our music, and infinite was the scorn and indignation withwhich we received the slightest word of adverse criticism upon them. Iremember Mrs. Milman, one evening at my father's house, challenging melaughingly about my enthusiasm for Tennyson, and asking me if I had reada certain severely caustic and condemnatory article in the _Quarterly_upon his poems. "Have you read it?" said she; "it is so amusing! Shall Isend it to you?" "No, thank you, " said I; "have you read the poems, mayI ask?" "I cannot say that I have, " said she, laughing. "Oh, then, " saidI (not laughing), "perhaps it would be better that I should send youthose?"

It has always been incomprehensible to me how the author of those poemsever brought himself to alter them, as he did, in so many instances--all(as it seemed to me) for the worse rather than the better. I certainlycould hardly love his verses better than he did himself, but the variouschanges he made in them have always appeared to me cruel disfigurementsof the original thoughts and expressions, which were to me treasures notto be touched even by his hand; and his changing lines which I thoughtperfect, omitting beautiful stanzas that I loved, and interpolatingothers that I hated, and disfiguring and maiming his own exquisitecreations with second thoughts (none of which were best to me), hascaused me to rejoice, while I mourn, over my copy of the first versionof "The May Queen, " "OEnone, " "The Miller's Daughter, " and all thesubsequent _improved_ poems, of which the improvements were to medesecrations. In justice to Tennyson, I must add that the presentgeneration of his readers swear by _their_ version of his poems as wedid by ours, for the same reason, --they knew it first. 

The early death of Arthur Hallam, and the imperishable monument of loveraised by Tennyson's genius to his memory, have tended to give him apre-eminence among the companions of his youth which I do not think hisabilities would have won for him had he lived; though they wereundoubtedly of a high order. There was a gentleness and purity almostvirginal in his voice, manner, and countenance; and the upper part ofhis face, his forehead and eyes (perhaps in readiness for his earlytranslation), wore the angelic radiance that they still must wear inheaven. Some time or other, at some rare moments of the divine spirit'ssupremacy in our souls, we all put on the heavenly face that will beours hereafter, and for a brief lightning space our friends behold us aswe shall look when this mortal has put on immortality. On ArthurHallam's brow and eyes this heavenly light, so fugitive on other humanfaces, rested habitually, as if he was thinking and seeing in heaven. 

Of all those very remarkable young men, John Sterling was by far themost brilliant and striking in his conversation, and the one of whosefuture eminence we should all of us have augured most confidently. Butthough his life was cut off prematurely, it was sufficiently prolongedto disprove this estimate of his powers. The extreme vividness of hislook, manner, and speech gave a wonderful impression of latent vitalityand power; perhaps some of this lambent, flashing brightness may havebeen but the result of the morbid physical conditions of his existence, like the flush on his cheek and the fire in his eye; the over stimulatedand excited intellectual activity, the offspring of disease, mistaken byus for morning instead of sunset splendor, promise of future light andheat instead of prognostication of approaching darkness and decay. Itcertainly has always struck me as singular that Sterling, who in hislife accomplished so little and left so little of the work by which menare generally pronounced to be gifted with exceptional ability, shouldhave been the subject of two such interesting biographies as thosewritten of him by Julius Hare and Carlyle. I think he must have been oneof those persons in whom genius makes itself felt and acknowledgedchiefly through the medium of personal intercourse; a not infrequentthing, I think, with women, and perhaps men, wanting the full vigor ofnormal health. I suppose it is some failure not so much in the powerpossessed as in the power of producing it in a less evanescent form thanthat of spoken words, and the looks that with such organizations aremore than the words themselves. Sterling's genius was his _Wesen_, himself, and he could detach no portion of it that retained anythinglike the power and beauty one would have expected. After all, the worldhas twice been moved (once intellectually and once morally), as neverbefore or since, by those whose spoken words, gathered up by others, areall that remain of them. Personal influence is the strongest and themost subtle of powers, and Sterling impressed all who knew him as a manof undoubted genius; those who never knew him will perhaps always wonderwhy. 

My life was rather sad at this time: my brother's failure at college wasa source of disappointment and distress to my parents; and I, whoadmired him extremely, and believed in him implicitly, was grieved athis miscarriage and his absence from England; while the darkeningprospects of the theater threw a gloom over us all. My hitherto frequentinterchange of letters with my dear friend H---- S---- had becomeinterrupted and almost suspended by the prolonged and dangerous illnessof her brother; and I was thrown almost entirely upon myself, and wasfinding my life monotonously dreary, when events occurred that changedits whole tenor almost suddenly, and determined my future career withless of deliberation than would probably have satisfied either myparents or myself under less stringent circumstances. 

It was in the autumn of 1829, my father being then absent on aprofessional tour in Ireland, that my mother, coming in from walking oneday, threw herself into a chair and burst into tears. She had beenevidently much depressed for some time past, and I was alarmed at herdistress, of which I begged her to tell me the cause. "Oh, it has comeat last, " she answered; "our property is to be sold. I have seen thatfine building all covered with placards and bills of sale; the theatermust be closed, and I know not how many hundred poor people will beturned adrift without employment!" I believed the theater employedregularly seven hundred persons in all its different departments, without reckoning the great number of what were called supernumeraries, who were hired by the night at Christmas, Easter, and on all occasionsof any specially showy spectacle. Seized with a sort of terror, like theLady of Shallott, that "the curse had come upon me, " I comforted mymother with expressions of pity and affection, and, as soon as I lefther, wrote a most urgent entreaty to my father that he would allow me toact for myself, and seek employment as a governess, so as to relieve himat once at least of the burden of my maintenance. I brought this letterto my mother, and begged her permission to send it, to which sheconsented; but, as I afterward learned, she wrote by the same post to myfather, requesting him not to give a positive answer to my letter untilhis return to town. The next day she asked me whether I seriouslythought I had any real talent for the stage. My school-day triumphs inRacine's "Andromaque" were far enough behind me, and I could onlyanswer, with as much perplexity as good faith, that I had not theslightest idea whether I had or not. She begged me to learn some partand say it to her, that she might form some opinion of my power, and Ichose Shakespeare's Portia, then, as now, my ideal of a perfectwoman--the wise, witty woman, loving with all her soul and submittingwith all her heart to a man whom everybody but herself (who was the bestjudge) would have judged her inferior; the laughter-loving, light-hearted, true-hearted, deep-hearted woman, full of keenperception, of active efficiency, of wisdom prompted by love, oftenderest unselfishness, of generous magnanimity; noble, simple, humble, pure; true, dutiful, religious, and full of fun; delightful above allothers, the woman of women. Having learned it by heart, I recited Portiato my mother, whose only comment was, "There is hardly passion enough inthis part to test any tragic power. I wish you would study Juliet forme. " Study to me then, as unfortunately long afterward, simply meant tolearn by heart, which I did again, and repeated my lesson to my mother, who again heard me without any observation whatever. Meantime my fatherreturned to town and my letter remained unanswered, and I was wonderingin my mind what reply I should receive to my urgent entreaty, when onemorning my mother told me she wished me to recite Juliet to my father;and so in the evening I stood up before them both, and withindescribable trepidation repeated my first lesson in tragedy. 

They neither of them said anything beyond "Very well, --very nice, mydear, " with many kisses and caresses, from which I escaped to sit downon the stairs half-way between the drawing-room and my bedroom, and getrid of the repressed nervous fear I had struggled with while reciting, in floods of tears. A few days after this my father told me he wished totake me to the theater with him to try whether my voice was ofsufficient strength to fill the building; so thither I went. Thatstrange-looking place, the stage, with its racks of pasteboard andcanvas--streets, forests, banqueting-halls, and dungeons--drawn apart oneither side, was empty and silent; not a soul was stirring in theindistinct recesses of its mysterious depths, which seemed to stretchindefinitely behind me. In front, the great amphitheater, equally emptyand silent, wrapped in its gray holland covers, would have beenabsolutely dark but for a long, sharp, thin shaft of light that dartedhere and there from some height and distance far above me, and alightedin a sudden, vivid spot of brightness on the stage. Set down in themidst of twilight space, as it were, with only my father's voice comingto me from where he stood hardly distinguishable in the gloom, in thosepoetical utterances of pathetic passion I was seized with the spirit ofthe thing; my voice resounded through the great vault above and beforeme, and, completely carried away by the inspiration of the wonderfulplay, I acted Juliet as I do not believe I ever acted it again, for Ihad no visible Romeo, and no audience to thwart my imagination; atleast, I had no consciousness of any, though in truth I had one. In theback of one of the private boxes, commanding the stage but perfectlyinvisible to me, sat an old and warmly attached friend of my father's, Major D----, a man of the world--of London society, --a passionate loverof the stage, an amateur actor of no mean merit, one of the members ofthe famous Cheltenham dramatic company, a first-rate critic in allthings connected with art and literature, a refined and courtly, courteous gentleman; the best judge, in many respects, that my fathercould have selected, of my capacity for my profession and my chance ofsuccess in it. Not till after the event had justified my kind oldfriend's prophecy did I know that he had witnessed that morning'sperformance, and joining my father at the end of it had said, "Bring herout at once; it will be a great success. " And so three weeks from thattime I was brought out, and it was a "great success. " Three weeks wasnot much time for preparation of any sort for such an experiment, but Ihad no more, to become acquainted with my fellow actors and actresses, not one of whom I had ever spoken with or seen--off the stage--before;to learn all the technical _business_, as it is called, of the stage;how to carry myself toward the audience, which was not--but was tobe--before me; how to concert my movements with the movements of those Iwas acting with, so as not to impede or intercept their efforts, whilegiving the greatest effect of which I was capable to my own. 

I do not wonder, when I remember this brief apprenticeship to myprofession, that Mr. Macready once said that I did not know the elementsof it. Three weeks of morning rehearsals of the play at the theater, andevening consultations at home as to colors and forms of costume, what Ishould wear, how my hair should be dressed, etc. , etc. , --in all which Iremained absolutely passive in the hands of others, taking no part andnot much interest in the matter, --ended in my mother's putting aside allsuggestions of innovation like the adoption of the real picturesquecostume of mediæval Verona (which was, of course, Juliet's properdress), and determining in favor of the traditional stage costume forthe part, which was simply a dress of plain white satin with a longtrain, with short sleeves and a low body; my hair was dressed in thefashion in which I usually wore it; a girdle of fine paste brilliants, and a small comb of the same, which held up my hair, were the onlytheatrical parts of the dress, which was as perfectly simple and asabsolutely unlike anything Juliet ever wore as possible. 

Poor Mrs. Jameson made infinite protests against this decision of mymother's, her fine artistic taste and sense of fitness being intolerablyshocked by the violation of every propriety in a Juliet attired in amodern white satin ball dress amid scenery representing the streets andpalaces of Verona in the fourteenth century, and all the othercharacters dressed with some reference to the supposed place and periodof the tragedy. Visions too, no doubt, of sundry portraits of Raphael, Titian, Giorgione, Bronzino, --beautiful alike in color andfashion, --vexed her with suggestions, with which she plied my mother;who, however, determined as I have said, thinking the body more thanraiment, and arguing that the unincumbered use of the person, and thenatural grace of young arms, neck, and head, and unimpeded movement ofthe limbs (all which she thought more compatible with the simple whitesatin dress than the picturesque mediæval costume) were points ofparamount importance. My mother, though undoubtedly very anxious that Ishould look well, was of course far more desirous that I should actwell, and judged that whatever rendered my dress most entirelysubservient to my acting, and least an object of preoccupation andstrange embarrassment to myself, was, under the circumstances of mytotal inexperience and brief period of preparation, the thing to bechosen, and I am sure that in the main she judged wisely. The mereappendage of a train--three yards of white satin--following me whereverI went, was to me a new, and would have been a difficult experience tomost girls. As it was, I never knew, after the first scene of the play, what became of my train, and was greatly amused when Lady Dacre told me, the next morning, that as soon as my troubles began I had snatched it upand carried it on my arm, which I did quite unconsciously, because Ifound something in the way of _Juliet's feet_. 

I have often admired the consummate good sense with which, confronting awhole array of authorities, historical, artistical, æsthetical, mymother stoutly maintained in their despite that nothing was to beadopted on the stage that was in itself ugly, ungraceful, or evencuriously antiquated and singular, however correct it might be withreference to the particular period, or even to authoritative portraitsof individual characters of the play. The passions, sentiments, actions, and sufferings of human beings, she argued, were the main concern of afine drama, not the clothes they wore. I think she even preferred anunobtrusive indifference to a pedantic accuracy, which, she said, fewpeople appreciated, and which, if anything, rather took the attentionfrom the acting than added to its effect, when it was really fine. 

She always said, when pictures and engravings were consulted, "Remember, this presents but one view of the person, and does not change itsposition: how will this dress look when it walks, runs, rushes, kneels, sits down, falls, and turns its back?" I think an edge was added to mymother's keen, rational, and highly artistic sense of this matter ofcostume because it was the special hobby of her "favorite aversion, " Mr. E----, who had studied with great zeal and industry antiquarianquestions connected with the subject of stage representations, and wasperpetually suggesting to my father improvements on the old ignorantcareless system which prevailed under former managements. 

It is very true that, as she said, Garrick acted Macbeth in a full courtsuit of scarlet, --knee-breeches, powdered wig, pigtail, and all; andMrs. Siddons acted the Grecian Daughter in piles of powdered curls, witha forest of feathers on the top of them, high-heeled shoes, and aportentous hoop; and both made the audience believe that they lookedjust as they should do. But for all that, actors and actresses who wereneither Garrick nor Mrs. Siddons were not less like the parts theyrepresented by being at least dressed as they should be; and the fineaccuracy of the Shakespearean revivals of Mr. Macready and Charles Keanwas in itself a great enjoyment; nobody was ever told to _omit_ thetithing of mint and cummin, though other matters were more important;and Kean's Othello would have been the grand performance it was, evenwith the advantage of Mr. Fechter's clever and picturesque "getting up"of the play, as a frame to it; as Mademoiselle Rachel's wonderfulfainting exclamation of "Oh, mon cher Curiace!" lost none of itspoignant pathos, though she knew how every fold of her drapery fell andrested on the chair on which she sank in apparent unconsciousness. Criticising a portrait of herself in that scene, she said to thepainter, "Ma robe ne fait pas ce pli la; elle fait, au contraire, celui-ci. " The artist, inclined to defend his picture, asked her how, while she was lying with her eyes shut and feigning utter insensibility, she could possibly tell anything about the plaits of her dress. "Allez-y-voir, " replied Rachel; and the next time she played Camille, the artist was able to convince himself by more careful observation thatshe was right, and that there was probably no moment of the piece atwhich this consummate artist was not aware of the effect produced byevery line and fold of the exquisite costume, of which she had studiedand prepared every detail as carefully as the wonderful movements of hergraceful limbs, the intonations of her awful voice, and the changingexpressions of her terribly beautiful countenance. 

In later years, after I became the directress of my own stage costumes, I adopted one for Juliet, made after a beautiful design of my friend, Mrs. Jameson, which combined my mother's _sine qua non_ of simplicitywith a form and fashion in keeping with the supposed period of the play. 

My frame of mind under the preparations that were going forward for my_début_ appears to me now curious enough. Though I had found out that Icould act, and had acted with a sort of frenzy of passion and entireself-forgetfulness the first time I ever uttered the wonderfulconception I had undertaken to represent, my going on the stage wasabsolutely an act of duty and conformity to the will of my parents, strengthened by my own conviction that I was bound to help them by everymeans in my power. The theatrical profession was, however, utterlydistasteful to me, though _acting_ itself, that is to say, dramaticpersonation, was not; and every detail of my future vocation, from thepreparations behind the scenes to the representations before thecurtain, was more or less repugnant to me. Nor did custom ever renderthis aversion less; and liking my work so little, and being so devoid ofenthusiasm, respect, or love for it, it is wonderful to me that I everachieved _any_ success in it at all. The dramatic element inherent in myorganization must have been very powerful, to have enabled me withouteither study of or love for my profession to do anything worth anythingin it. 

But this is the reason why, with an unusual gift and many unusualadvantages for it, I did really so little; why my performances werealways uneven in themselves and perfectly unequal with each other, nevercomplete as a whole, however striking in occasional parts, and never atthe same level two nights together; depending for their effect upon thestate of my nerves and spirits, instead of being the result ofdeliberate thought and consideration, --study, in short, carefully andconscientiously applied to my work; the permanent element whichpreserves the artist, however inevitably he must feel the influence ofmoods of mind and body, from ever being at their mercy. 

I brought but one half the necessary material to the exercise of myprofession, that which nature gave me; and never added the cultivationand labor requisite to produce any fine performance in the right senseof the word; and, coming of a family of _real_ artists, have never feltthat I deserved that honorable name. 

A letter written at this time to Miss S---- shows how comparativelysmall a part my approaching ordeal engrossed my thoughts. 

 JAMES STREET, September 24, 1829, MY DEAREST H----, Your letter grieved me very much, but it did not surprise me; of your brother's serious illness I had heard from my cousin, Horace Twiss. But is there indeed cause for the terrible anxiety you express? I know how impossible it is to argue with the apprehensions of affection, and should have forborne this letter altogether, but that I felt very deeply your kindness in writing to me at such a time, and that I would fain assure you of my heart-felt sympathy, however unavailing it may be. To you who have a steadfast anchor for your hopes, I ought not, perhaps, to say, "Do not despond. " Yet, dearest H----, do not despond: is there _any_ occasion when despair is justified? I know how lightly all soothing counsel must be held, in a case of such sorrow as yours, but among fellow-Christians such words still have some significance; for the most unworthy of that holy profession may point unfalteringly to the only consolations adequate to the need of those far above them in every endowment of mind and heart and religious attainment. Dear H----, I hardly know how to tell you how much I feel for you, how sincerely I hope your fears may prove groundless, and how earnestly I pray that, should they prove prophetic, you may be enabled to bear the affliction, to meet which I doubt not strength will be given you. This is all I dare say; those who love you best will hardly venture to say more. To put away entirely the idea of an evil which one may be called upon at any moment to encounter would hardly be wise, even if it were possible, in this world where every happiness one enjoys is but a loan, the repayment of which may be exacted at the very moment, perhaps, when we are forgetting in its possession the precarious tenure by which alone it is ours. 

 My dear father and mother have both been very unwell; the former is a little recovered, but the latter is still in a sad state of bodily suffering and mental anxiety. Our two boys are well and happy, and I am very well and not otherwise than happy. I regret to say Mrs. Henry Siddons will leave London in a very short time; this is a great loss to me. I owe more to her than I can ever repay; for though abundant pains had been bestowed upon me previously to my going to her, it was she who caused to spring whatever scattered seeds of good were in me, which almost seemed as if they had been cast into the soil in vain. 

 My dear H----, I am going on the stage: the nearest period talked of for my _début_ is the first of October, at the opening of the theater; the furthest, November; but I almost think I should prefer the nearest, for it is a very serious trial to look forward to, and I wish it were over. Juliet is to be my opening part, but not to my father's Romeo; there would be many objections to that; he will do Mercutio for me. I do not enter more fully upon this, because I know how few things can be of interest to you in your present state of feeling, but I wished you not to find the first notice of my entrance on the stage of life in a newspaper. God bless you, dearest H----, and grant you better hopes. 

 Your most affectionate FANNY. 

My father not acting Romeo with me deprived me of the most poetical andgraceful stage lover of his day; but the public, who had long beenfamiliar with his rendering of the part of Romeo, gained as much as Ilost, by his taking that of Mercutio, which has never since been soadmirably represented, and I dare affirm will never be given moreperfectly. The graceful ease, and airy sparkling brilliancy of hisdelivery of the witty fancies of that merry gentleman, the gallantdefiance of his bearing toward the enemies of his house, and hisheroically pathetic and humorous death-scene, were beyond descriptioncharming. He was one of the best Romeos, and incomparably _the_ bestMercutio, that ever trod the English stage. 

My father was Miss O'Neill's Romeo throughout her whole theatricalcareer, during which no other Juliet was tolerated by the Englishpublic. This amiable and excellent woman was always an attached friendof our family, and one day, when she was about to take leave of me, atthe end of a morning visit, I begged her to let my father have thepleasure of seeing her, and ran to his study to tell him whom I had withme. He followed me hastily to the drawing-room, and stopping at thedoor, extended his arms towards her, exclaiming, "Ah, Juliet!" LadyBecher ran to him and embraced him with a pretty, affectionate grace, and the scene was pathetical as well as comical, for they were bothwhite-haired, she being considerably upward of sixty and he of seventyyears old; but she still retained the slender elegance of her exquisitefigure, and he some traces of his pre-eminent personal beauty. 

My mother had a great admiration and personal regard for Lady Becher, and told me an anecdote of her early life which transmitted thosefeelings of hers to me. Lord F----, eldest son of the Earl of E----, apersonally and mentally attractive young man, fell desperately in lovewith Miss O'Neill, who was (what the popular theatrical heroine of theday always is) the realization of their ideal to the youth, male andfemale, of her time, the stage star of her contemporaries. Lord F----'sfamily had nothing to say against the character, conduct, or personalendowments of the beautiful, actress who had enchanted, to such seriouspurpose as marriage, the heir of their house; but much, reasonably andrightly enough, against marriages disproportionate to such a degree asthat, and the objectionable nature of the young woman's peculiarcircumstances and public calling. Both Miss O'Neill, however, and LordF---- were enough in earnest in their mutual regard to accept the testof a year's separation and suspension of all intercourse. She remainedto utter herself in Juliet to the English public, and her lover went andtravelled abroad, both believing in themselves and each other. Noletters or communication passed between them; but toward the end oftheir year of probation vague rumors came flying to England of the lifeof dissipation led by the young man, and of the unworthy companions withwhom he entertained the most intimate relations. After this came moreexplicit tales of positive entanglement with one particular person, andreports of an entire devotion to one object quite incompatible with theconstancy professed and promised to his English mistress. 

Probably aware that every effort would, till the last, be made by LordF----'s family to detach them from each other, bound by her promise tohold no intercourse with him, but determined to take the verdict of herfate from no one but himself, Miss O'Neill obtained a brief leave ofabsence from her theatrical duties, went with her brother and sister toCalais, whence she travelled alone to Paris (poor, fair Juliet! when Ithink of her, not as I ever knew her, but such as I know she must thenhave been, no more pathetic image presents itself to my mind), and tookeffectual measures to ascertain beyond all shadow of doubt the bittertruth of the evil reports of her fickle lover's mode of life. Hisdevotion to one lady, the more respectable form of infidelity which mustinevitably have canceled their contract of love, was not indeed true, and probably the story had been fabricated because the mere generalaccusation of profligacy might easily have been turned into an appeal toher mercy, as the result of reckless despondency and of his utterseparation from her; and a woman in her circumstances might not havebeen hard to find who would have persuaded herself that she mightoverlook "all that, " reclaim her lover, and be an Earl's wife. MissO'Neill rejoined her family at Calais, wrote to Lord F----'s father, theEarl of E----, her final and irrevocable rejection of his son's suit, fell ill of love and sorrow, and lay for some space between life anddeath for the sake of her unworthy lover; rallied bravely, recovered, resumed her work, --her sway over thousands of human hearts, --and, afterlapse of healing and forgiving and forgetting time, married Sir WilliamWrixon Becher. 

The peculiar excellence of her acting lay in the expression of pathos, sorrow, anguish, --the sentimental and suffering element of tragedy. Shewas expressly devised for a representative victim; she had, too, a rareendowment for her special range of characters, in an easily excited, superficial sensibility, which caused her to cry, as she once said tome, "buckets full, " and enabled her to exercise the (to most men)irresistible influence of a beautiful woman in tears. The power (orweakness) of abundant weeping without disfigurement is an attribute ofdeficient rather than excessive feeling. In such persons the tears arepoured from their crystal cups without muscular distortion of the restof the face. In proportion to the violence or depth of emotion, and theacute or profound sensibility of the temperament, is the disturbance ofthe countenance. In sensitive organizations, the muscles round thenostrils and lips quiver and are distorted, the throat and templesswell, and a grimace, which but for its miserable significance would begrotesque, convulses the whole face. Men's tears always seem to me as ifthey were pumped up from their heels, and strained through every drop ofblood in their veins; women's, to start as under a knife stroke, directwith a gush from their heart, abundant and beneficent; but again, womenof the temperament I have alluded to above have fountains of lovelytears behind their lovely eyes, and their weeping, which isindescribably beautiful, is comparatively painless, and yet patheticenough to challenge tender compassion. I have twice seen such tearsshed, and never forgotten them: once from heaven-blue eyes, and the facelooked like a flower with pearly dewdrops sliding over it; and again, once from magnificent, dark, uplifted orbs, from which the falling tearslooked like diamond rain-drops by moonlight. 

Miss O'Neill was a supremely touching, but neither a powerful nor apassionate actress. Personally, she was the very beau ideal of feminineweakness in its most attractive form--delicacy. She was tall, slender, elegantly formed, and extremely graceful; her features were regular andfinely chiseled, and her hair beautiful; her eyes were too light, andher eyebrows and eyelashes too pale for expression; her voice wantedvariety and brilliancy for comic intonation, but was deep and sonorous, and of a fine pathetic and tragic quality. 

It was not an easy matter to find a Romeo for me, and in the emergencymy father and mother even thought of my brother Henry's trying the part. He was in the first bloom of youth, and really might be calledbeautiful; and certainly, a few years later, might have been the veryideal of a Romeo. But he looked too young for the part, as indeed hewas, being three years my junior. The overwhelming objection, however, was his own insuperable dislike to the idea of acting, and his ludicrousincapacity for assuming the faintest appearance of any sentiment. However, he learned the words, and never shall I forget the explosion oflaughter which shook my father, my mother, and myself, when, afterhearing him recite the balcony scene with the most indescribable mixtureof shy terror and nervous convulsions of suppressed giggling, my fatherthrew down the book, and Henry gave vent to his feelings by clapping hiselbows against his sides and bursting into a series of triumphantcock-crows--an expression of mental relief so ludicrously in contrastwith his sweet, sentimental face, and the part he had just beenpretending to assume, that I thought we never should have recovered fromthe fits it sent us into. We were literally all crying with laughter, and a more farcical scene cannot be imagined. This, of course, ended allidea of that young chanticleer being my Romeo; and yet the young rascalwas, or fancied he was, over head and ears in love at this very time, and an exquisite sketch Hayter had just made of him might with theutmost propriety have been sent to the exhibition with no other titlethan "Portrait of a Lover. "

The part of Romeo was given to Mr. Abbot, an old-established favoritewith the public, a very amiable and worthy man, old enough to have beenmy father, whose performance, not certainly of the highest order, wasnevertheless not below inoffensive mediocrity. But the public, who werebent upon doing more than justice to me, were less than just to him; andthe abuse showered upon his Romeo, especially by my more enthusiasticadmirers of the male sex, might, I should think, have embittered hisstage relations with me to the point of making me an object ofdetestation to him, all through our theatrical lives. A tragicomicincident was related to me by one of the parties concerned in it, whichcertainly proved that poor Mr. Abbot was quite aware of the little favorhis Romeo found with my particular friends. One of them, the son of ourkind and valued friends the G----s, an excellent, good-hearted, but notvery wise young fellow, invariably occupied a certain favorite andfavorable position in the midst of the third row of the pit every nightthat I acted. There were no stalls or reserved seats then, though notlong after I came out the majority of the seats in the orchestra werelet to spectators, and generally occupied by a set of young gentlemenwhom Sir Thomas Lawrence always designated as my "body guard. " This, however, had not yet been instituted, and my friend G---- had often towait long hours, and even to fight for the privilege of his peculiarseat, where he rendered himself, I am sorry to say, not a littleludicrous, and not seldom rather obnoxious to everybody in his vicinity, by the vehement demonstrations of his enthusiasm--his frantic cries of"bravo, " his furious applause, and his irrepressible exclamations ofecstasy and agony during the whole play. He became as familiar to thepublic as the stage lamps themselves, and some of his immediateneighbors complained rather bitterly of the incessant din and clatter ofhis approbation, and the bruises, thumps, contusions, and constant fearswhich his lively sentiments inflicted upon them. This _fanatico_ ofmine, walking home from the theater one night with two other like-mindedindividuals, indulged himself in obstreperous abuse of poor Mr. Abbot, in which he was heartily joined by his companions. Toward CavendishSquare the broad, quiet streets rang with the uproarious mirth withwhich they recapitulated his "damnable faces, " "strange postures, "uncouth gestures, and ungainly deportment; imitation followed imitationof the poor actor's peculiar declamation, and the night became noisywith the shouts of mingled derision and execration of his critics; whensuddenly, as they came to a gas-light at the corner of a crossing, asolitary figure which had been preceding them, without possibility ofescape, down the long avenue of Harley Street, where G---- lived, turnedabruptly round, and confronted them with Mr. Abbot's unimpressivecountenance. "Gentlemen, " he said, "no one can be more aware than myselfof the defects of my performance of Romeo, no one more conscious of itsentire unworthiness of Miss Kemble's Juliet; but all I can say is, thatI do not act the part by my own choice, and shall be delighted to resignit to either of you who may feel more capable than I am of doing itjustice. " The young gentlemen, though admiring me "not wisely, but toowell, " were good-hearted fellows, and were struck with the manly andmoderate tone of Mr. Abbot's rebuke, and shocked at havingunintentionally wounded the feelings of a person who (except as Romeo), was every way deserving of their respect. Of course they could notswallow all their foolish words, and Abbot bowed and was gone beforethey could stutter an apology. I have no doubt that his next appearanceas Romeo was hailed with some very cordial, remorseful applause, addressed to him personally as some relief to their feelings, by myindiscreet partisans. My friend G----, not very long after thistheatrical passion of his, became what is sometimes called "religious, "and had thoughts of going into the Church, and giving up the play-house. He confided to my mother, who was his mother's intimate friend, and ofwhom he was very fond, his conscientious scruples, which she in no wisecombated; though she probably thought more moderation in going to thetheater, and a little more self-control when there, might not, in anyevent, be undesirable changes in his practice, whether his taking holyorders cut him off entirely from what was then his principal pleasure, or not. One night, when the venerable Prebend of St. Paul's, her oldfriend, Dr. Hughes, was in her box with her, witnessing my performance(which my mother never failed to attend), she pointed out G----, _scrimmaging_ about, as usual, in his wonted place in the pit, and said, "There is a poor lad who is terribly disturbed in his own mind about thevery thing he is doing at this moment. He is thinking of going into theChurch, and more than half believes that he ought to give up coming tothe play. " "That depends, I should say, " replied dear old Dr. Hughes, "upon his own conviction in the matter, and nothing else; meantime, praygive him my compliments, and tell him _I_ have enjoyed the performanceto-night extremely. "

Mr. Abbot was in truth not a bad actor, though a perfectly uninterestingone in tragedy; he had a good figure, face, and voice, the carriage andappearance of a well-bred person, and, in what is called genteel comedy, precisely the air and manner which it is most difficult to assume, thatof a gentleman. He had been in the army, and had left it for the stage, where his performances were always respectable, though seldom anythingmore. Wanting passion and expression in tragedy, he naturally resortedto vehemence to supply their place, and was exaggerated and violent fromthe absence of all dramatic feeling and imagination. Moreover, inmoments of powerful emotion he was apt to become unsteady on his legs, and always filled me with terror lest in some of his headlong runs andrushes about the stage he should lose his balance and fall; as indeed heonce did, to my unspeakable distress, in the play of "The GrecianDaughter, " in which he enacted my husband, Phocion, and flying toembrace me, after a period of painful and eventful separation, hecompletely overbalanced himself, and swinging round with me in his arms, we both came to the ground together. "Oh, Mr. Abbot!" was all I couldejaculate; he, poor man, literally pale green with dismay, picked me upin profound silence, and the audience kindly covered our confusion, andcomforted us by vehement applause, not, indeed, unmixed with laughter. But my friends and admirers were none the more his after that exploit;and I remained in mortal dread of his stage embraces for ever after, steadying myself carefully on my feet, and bracing my whole figure to"stand fast, " whenever he made the smallest affectionate approach towardme. It is not often that such a piece of awkwardness as this isperpetrated on the stage, but dramatic heroines are nevertheless liableto sundry disagreeable difficulties of a very unromantic nature. If agentleman in a ball-room places his hand round a lady's waist to waltzwith her, she can, without any shock to the "situation, " beg him torelease the end spray of her flowery garland, or the floating ribbons ofher head-dress, which he may have imprisoned; but in the middle of ascene of tragedy grief or horror, of the unreality of which, by dint ofthe effort of your imagination, you are no longer conscious, to beobliged to say, in your distraction, to your distracted partner in woe, "Please lift your arm from my waist, you are pulling my head downbackwards, " is a distraction, too, of its kind. 

The only occasion on which I ever acted Juliet to a Romeo who looked thepart was one when Miss Ellen Tree sustained it. The acting of Romeo, orany other man's part by a woman (in spite of Mrs. Siddons's Hamlet), is, in my judgment, contrary to every artistic and perhaps naturalpropriety, but I cannot deny that the stature "more than common tall, "and the beautiful face, of which the fine features were too marked intheir classical regularity to look feeble or even effeminate, of my fairfemale lover made her physically an appropriate representative of Romeo. Miss Ellen Tree looked beautiful and not unmanly in the part; she wasbroad-shouldered as well as tall, and her long limbs had the fineproportions of the huntress Diana; altogether, she made a very "prettyfellow, " as the saying was formerly, as all who saw her in her gracefulperformance of Talfourd's "Ion" will testify; but assumption of thatcharacter, which in its ideal classical purity is almost without sex, was less open to objection than that of the fighting young Veronesenoble of the fourteenth century. She fenced very well, however, andacquitted herself quite manfully in her duel with Tybalt; the only hitchin the usual "business" of the part was between herself and me, and I donot imagine the public, for one night, were much aggrieved by theomission of the usual clap-trap performance (part of Garrick'sinterpolation, which indeed belongs to the original story, but whichShakespeare's true poet's sense had discarded) of Romeo's pluckingJuliet up from her bier and rushing with her, still stiff and motionlessin her death-trance, down to the foot-lights. This feat Miss Treeinsisted upon attempting with me, and I as stoutly resisted all herentreaties to let her do so. I was a very slender-looking girl, but veryheavy for all that. (A friend of mine, on my first voyage to America, lifting me from a small height, set me down upon the deck, exclaiming, "Oh, you solid little lady!" and my cousin, John Mason, the first timehe acted Romeo with me, though a very powerful, muscular young man, whispered to me as he carried my corpse down the stage with a finesemblance of frenzy, "Jove, Fanny, you are a lift!") Finding that allargument and remonstrance was unavailing, and that Miss Tree, though byno means other than a good friend and fellow-worker of mine, was bentupon performing this gymnastic feat, I said at last, "If you attempt tolift or carry me down the stage, I will kick and scream till you set medown, " which ended the controversy. I do not know whether she believedme, but she did not venture upon the experiment. 

I am reminded by this recollection of my pleasant professionalfellowship with Miss Ellen Tree of a curious instance of theunprincipled, flagrant recklessness with which scandalous gossip isreceived and circulated in what calls itself the best English society. 

In Mr. Charles Greville's "Memoirs, " he makes a statement that Miss Treewas never engaged at Covent Garden. The play-bills and the newspapers ofthe day abundantly contradicted this assertion (at the time he enteredit in his diary), and, of course, the discreditable motive assigned forthe _fact_. 

I cannot help thinking that, had Mr. Greville lived, much of thevoluminous record he kept of persons and events would have been withheldfrom publication. He told me, not long before his death, that he had norecollection whatever of the contents of the earlier volumes of his MS. Journal which he had lent me to read; and it is infinitely to beregretted, if he did not look over them before they were published, thatthe discretion he exercised (or delegated) in the omission of certainpassages was not allowed to prevail to the exclusion of others. Suchpartial omissions would not indeed alter the whole tone and character ofthe book, but might have mitigated the shock of painful surprise withwhich it was received by the society he described, and by no one morethan some of those who had been on terms of the friendliest intimacywith him and who had repeatedly heard him assert that his journal wouldnever be published in the lifetime of any one mentioned in it. 

I consider that I was quite justified in using even this naughty child'sthreat to prevent Miss Tree from doing what might very well have endedin some dangerous and ludicrous accident; nor did I feel at all guiltytoward her of the species of malice prepense which Malibran exhibitedtoward Sontag, when they sang in the opera of "Romeo and Juliet, " on thefirst occasion of their appearing together during their brilliant publiccareer in England. Malibran's mischievousness partook of the force andversatility of her extraordinary genius, and having tormented poorMademoiselle Sontag with every inconceivable freak and caprice duringthe whole rehearsal of the opera, at length, when requested by her tosay in what part of the stage she intended to fall in the last scene, she, Malibran, replied that she "really didn't know, " that she "reallycouldn't tell;" sometimes she "died in one place, sometimes in another, just as it happened, or the humor took her at the moment. " As Sontag wasbound to expire in loving proximity to her, and was, I take it, muchless liable to spontaneous inspiration than her fiery rival, this was byno means satisfactory. She had nothing like the original genius of theother woman, but was nevertheless a more perfect artist. Wanting weightand power and passion for such parts as Norma, Medea, Semiramide, etc. , she was perfect in the tenderer and more pathetic parts of Amina, Luciadi Lammermoor, Linda di Chamouni; exquisite in the Rosina and Carolinaof the "Barbiere" and "Matrimonio Segreto;" and, in my opinion, quiteunrivaled in her Countess, in the "Nozze, " and, indeed, in all renderingof Mozart's music, to whose peculiar and pre-eminent genius hers seemedto me in some degree allied, and of whose works she was the onlyinterpreter I ever heard, gifted alike with the profound Germanunderstanding of music and the enchanting Italian power of rendering it. Her mode of uttering sound, of putting forth her voice (the test whichall but Italians, or most carefully Italian-trained singers, fail in), was as purely unteutonic as possible. She was one of the most perfectsingers I ever heard, and suggests to my memory the quaint praise of thegypsy vocal performance in the ballad of "Johnny Faa"--

 "They sang so sweet, So very _complete_, "

She was the first Rosina I ever heard who introduced into the scene ofthe music-lesson "Rhodes Air, " with the famous violin variations, whichshe performed by way of a _vocalise_, to the utter amazement of hernoble music-master, I should think, as well as her audience. Mademoiselle Nilsson is the only prima donna since her day who has atall reminded me of Sontag, who was lovely to look at, delightful tolisten to, good, amiable, and charming, and, compared with Malibran, like the evening star to a comet. 

Defeated by Malibran's viciousness in rehearsing her death-scene, sheresigned herself to the impromptu imposed upon her, and prepared tofollow her Romeo, wherever _she_ might choose to die; but when theevening came, Malibran contrived to die close to the foot-lights and infront of the curtain; Sontag of necessity followed, and fell beside herthere; the drop came down, and there lay the two fair corpses in fullview of the audience, of course unable to rise or move, till a couple ofstage footmen, in red plush breeches, ran in to the rescue, took thedead Capulet and Montague each by the shoulders, and dragged them off atthe side scenes; the Spanish woman in the heroism of her maliciousnesssubmitting to this ignominy for the pleasure of subjecting her gentleGerman rival to it. 

Madame Malibran was always an object of the greatest interest to me, notonly on account of her extraordinary genius, and great and variousgifts, but because of the many details I heard of her youth from M. Dela Forest, the French consul in New York, who knew her as Marie Garcia, a wild and wayward but most wonderful girl, under her father'styrannical and harsh rule during the time they spent in the UnitedStates. He said that there was not a piece of furniture in theirapartment that had not been thrown by the father at the daughter's head, in the course of the moral and artistic training he bestowed upon her:it is perhaps wonderful that success in either direction should havebeen the result of such a system; but, upon the whole, the singer seemsto have profited more than the woman from it, as might have beenexpected. Garcia was an incomparable artist, actor, and singer (no suchDon Giovanni has ever been heard or seen since), and bestowed upon allhis children the finest musical education that ever made great naturalgifts available to the utmost to their possessors. I suppose it was fromhim, too, that Marie derived with her Spanish blood the vehement, uncontrollable nature of which M. De la Forest told me he had witnessedsuch extraordinary exhibitions in her girlhood. He said she would flyinto passions of rage, in which she would set her teeth in the sleeve ofher silk gown, and tear and rend great pieces out of the thick textureas if it were muslin; a test of the strength of those beautiful teeth, as well as of the fury of her passion. She then would fall rigid on thefloor, without motion, breath, pulse, or color, though not fainting, ina sort of catalepsy of rage. 

Her marriage with the old French merchant Malibran was speedily followedby their separation; he went to France, leaving his divine devil of awife in New York, and during his absence she used to write letters tohim, which she frequently showed to M. De la Forest, who was herintimate friend and adviser, and took a paternal interest in all heraffairs. These epistles often expressed so much cordial kindness andwarmth of feeling toward her husband, that M. De la Forest, who knew herseparation from him to have been entirely her own act and choice, andany decent agreement and harmonious life between them absolutelyimpossible, was completely puzzled by such professions toward a man withwhom she was determined never to live, and occasionally said to her, "What do you mean? Do you wish your husband to come here to you? or doyou contemplate going to him? In short, what is your intention inwriting with all this affection to a man from whom you have separatedyourself?" Upon this view of her epistle, which did not appear to havestruck her, M. De la Forest said, she would (instead of rewriting it)tack on to it, with the most ludicrous inconsistency, a sort ofrevocatory codicil, in the shape of a postscript, expressing her decideddesire that her husband should remain where he was, and her own explicitdetermination never again to enter into any more intimate relations withhim than were compatible with a correspondence from opposite sides ofthe Atlantic, whatever personal regard or affection for him her lettermight appear to express to the contrary notwithstanding. 

To my great regret I only saw her act once, though I heard her sing atconcerts and in private repeatedly. My only personal encounter with hertook place in a curious fashion. My father and myself were acting atManchester, and had just finished performing the parts of Mr. And Mrs. Beverley, one night, in "The Gamester. " On our return from the theater, as I was slowly and in considerable exhaustion following my father upthe hotel stairs, as we reached the landing by our sitting-room, a doorimmediately opposite to it flew open, and a lady dressed likeTilburina's Confidante, all in white muslin, rushed out of it, and fellupon my father's breast, sobbing out hysterically, "Oh, Mr. Kembel, mydeare, deare Mr. Kembel!" This was Madame Malibran, under the effect ofmy father's performance of the Gamester, which she had just witnessed. "Come, come, " quoth my father (who was old enough to have been hers, andknew her very well), patting her consolingly on the back, "Come now, mydear Madame Malibran, compose yourself; don't now, Marie, don't, my dearchild!" all which was taking place on the public staircase, while Ilooked on in wide-eyed amazement behind. Madame Malibran, havingsuffered herself to be led into our room, gradually composed herself, ate her supper with us, expressed herself with much kind enthusiasmabout my performance, and gave me a word of advice as to not losing anyof my height (of which I had none to spare) by stooping, saying veryamiably that, being at a disadvantage as to her own stature, she hadnever wasted a quarter of an inch of it. This little reflection upon herown proportions must have been meant as a panacea to my vanity for hercriticism of my deportment. My person was indeed of the shortest; butshe had the figure of a nymph, and was rather above than below middleheight. There was in other respects some likeness between us; she wascertainly not really handsome, but her eyes were magnificent, and herwhole countenance was very striking. 

The first time I ever saw her sister, Madame Viardot, she was sittingwith mine, who introduced me to her; Pauline Viardot continued talking, now and then, however, stopping to look fixedly at me, and at lastexclaimed, "Mais comme elle ressemble à ma Marie!" and one evening at aprivate concert in London, having arrived late, I remained standing bythe folding-doors of the drawing-room, while Lablache finished a songwhich he had begun before I came in, at the end of which he came up tome and said, "You cannot think how you frightened me, when first I sawyou standing in that doorway; you looked so absolutely like Malibran, que je ne savais en vérité pas ce que c'était. " Malibran's appearancewas a memorable event in the whole musical world of Europe, throughoutwhich her progress from capital to capital was one uninterruptedtriumph; the enthusiasm, as is general in such cases, growing with itsfurther and wider spread, so that at Venice she was allowed, in spite ofold-established law and custom, to go about in a gold and crimsongondola, as fine as the Bucentaur itself, instead of the floatinghearses that haunt the sea-paved thoroughfares, and that did not pleaseher gay and magnificent taste. 

Her _début_ in England was an absolute conquest of the nation; and whenit was shocked by the news of her untimely death, hundreds of thoseunsympathetic, unæsthetic, unenthusiastic English people put mourning onfor the wonderfully gifted young woman, snatched away in the midst ofher brilliant career. Madame Malibran composed some charming songs, buther great reputation derives little of its luster from them, --that greatreputation already a mere tradition. 

At a challenge I would not decline, I ventured upon the following harshand ungraceful but literal translation of some of the stanzas fromAlfred de Musset's fine lament for Malibran. My poetical competitorproduced an admirable version of them, and has achieved translations ofother of his verses, as perfect as translations can be; a literary featof extraordinary difficulty, with the works of so essentially national awriter, a genius so peculiarly French, as De Musset. 

 "Oh, Maria Felicia! the painter and bard Behind them, in dying, leave undying heirs. The night of oblivion their memory spares, And their great eager souls, other action debarred, Against death, against time, having valiantly warred, Though struck down in the strife, claim its trophies as theirs. 

 "In the iron engraved, one his thought leaves enshrined; With a golden-sweet cadence another's entwined Makes for ever all those who shall hear it his friends. Though he died, on the canvas lives Raphael's mind; And from death's darkest doom till this world of ours ends, The mother-clasped infant his glory defends. 

 "As the lamp guards the flame, so the bare, marble halls Of the Parthenon keep, in their desolate space, The memory of Phidias enshrined in their walls. And Praxiteles' child, the young Venus, yet calls From the altar, where, smiling, she still holds her place, The centuries conquered to worship her grace. 

 "Thus from age after age, while new life they receive, To rest at God's feet the old glories are gone; And the accents of genius their echoes still weave With the great human voice, till their speech is but one. And of thee, dead but yesterday, all thy fame leaves But a cross in the dim chapel's darkness, alone. 

 "A cross and oblivion, silence, and death! Hark! the wind's softest sob; hark! the ocean's deep breath! Hark! the fisher boy singing his way o'er the plains! Of thy glory, thy hope, thy young beauty's bright wreath, Not a trace, not a sigh, not an echo remains. "

Those Garcia sisters were among the most remarkable people of their day, not only for their peculiar high artistic gifts, their admirable musicaland dramatic powers, but for the vivid originality of their genius andgreat general cultivation. Malibran danced almost as well as she sang, and once took a principal part in a ballet. She drew and painted well, as did her sister Pauline Viardot, whose spirited caricatures of herfriends, and herself were admirable specimens both of likenesses and ofhumorous talent in delineating them. Both sisters conversed brilliantly, speaking fluently four languages, and executed the music of differentnations and composers with a perception of the peculiar character ofeach that was extraordinary. They were mistresses of all the differentschools of religious, dramatic, and national compositions, and Gluck, Jomelli, Pergolesi, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Scotch and Irish melodies, Neapolitan canzonette, and the popular airsof their own country, were all rendered by them with equal mastery. 

To resume my story (which is very like that of the knife-grinder). WhenI returned to the stage, many years after I had first appeared on it, Irestored the beautiful end of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" as hewrote it (in spite of Garrick and the original story), thinking it mereprofanation to intrude sharp discords of piercing agony into the divineharmony of woe with which it closes. 

 "Thus with a kiss I die, " "Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead, "

are full enough of bitter-sweet despair for the last chords of thatineffable, passionate strain--the swoon of sorrow ending that brief, palpitating ecstasy, the proper, dirge-like close to that triumphanthymn of love and youth and beauty. All the frantic rushing and torturedwrithing and uproar of noisy anguish of the usual stage ending seemedutter desecration to me; but Garrick was an actor, the first of actors, and his death-scene of the lovers and ending of the play is much moretheatrically effective than Shakespeare's. 

The report of my approaching appearance on the stage excited a good dealof interest among the acquaintances and friends of my family, andoccasioned a renewal of cordial relations which had formerly existed, but ceased for some time, between Sir Thomas Lawrence and my father andmother. 

Lawrence's enthusiastic admiration for my uncle John and Mrs. Siddons, testified by the numerous striking portraits in which he has recordedtheir personal beauty and dramatic picturesqueness, led to a mostintimate and close friendship between the great painter and the eminentactors, and, subsequently, to very painful circumstances, whichestranged him for years from all our family, and forbade all renewal ofthe relations between himself and Mrs. Siddons which had been so cruellyinterrupted. 

While frequenting her house upon terms of the most affectionateintimacy, he proposed to her eldest daughter, my cousin Sarah, and wasaccepted by her. Before long, however, he became deeply dejected, moody, restless, and evidently extremely and unaccountably wretched. Violentscenes of the most painful emotion, of which the cause was inexplicableand incomprehensible, took place repeatedly between himself and Mrs. Siddons, to whom he finally, in a paroxysm of self-abandoned misery, confessed that he had mistaken his own feelings, and that her youngerdaughter, and not the elder, was the real object of his affection, andended by imploring permission to transfer his addresses from the one tothe other sister. How this extraordinary change was accomplished I knownot; but only that it took place, and that Maria Siddons became engagedto her sister's faithless lover. To neither of them, however was hedestined ever to be united; they were both exceedingly delicate youngwomen, with a tendency to consumption, which was probably developed andaccelerated in its progress in no small measure by all the bitternessand complicated difficulties of this disastrous double courtship. 

Maria, the youngest, an exceedingly beautiful girl, died first, and onher death-bed exacted from her sister a promise that she would neverbecome Lawrence's wife; the promise was given, and she died, and had notlain long in her untimely grave when her sister was laid in it besideher. The death of these two lovely and amiable women broke off allconnection between Sir Thomas Lawrence and my aunt, and from that timethey never saw or had any intercourse with each other. 

CHAPTER XII. 

It was years after these events that Lawrence, meeting my fatheraccidentally in the street one day, stopped him and spoke with greatfeeling of his sympathy for us all in my approaching trial, and beggedpermission to come and see my mother and become acquainted with me, which he accordingly did; and from that time till his death, whichoccurred but a few months later, he was unwearied in acts of friendlyand affectionate kindness to me. He came repeatedly to consult with mymother about the disputed point of my dress, and gave his sanction toher decision upon it. The first dress of Belvidera, I remember, was apoint of nice discussion between them. Plain black velvet and alugubrious long vail were considered my only admissible wear, after myhusband's ruin; but before the sale of our furniture, it was concededthat I might relieve the somber Venetian patrician's black dress withwhite satin puffs and crimson linings and rich embroidery of gold andpearl; moreover, before our bankruptcy, I was allowed (not, however, without serious demur on the part of Lawrence) to cover my head with ablack hat and white feather, with which, of course, I was enamored, having never worn anything but my hair on my head before, and feeling anunspeakable accession of dignity in this piece of attire. I begged hardto be allowed to wear it through the tragedy, but this, with somelaughter at my intense desire for it, was forbidden, and I was reducedafter the first scene of the play to my own unadorned locks, which Ithink greatly strengthened my feeling of the abject misery into which Ihad fallen. 

When in town, Lawrence never omitted one of my performances, alwaysoccupying the stage box, and invariably sending me the next morning aletter, full of the most detailed and delicate criticism, showing aminute attention to every inflection of my voice, every gesture, everyattitude, which, combined with expressions of enthusiastic admiration, with which this discriminating and careful review of my performanceinvariably terminated, was as strong a dose of the finest flattery ascould well have been offered to a girl of my age, on the very first stepof her artistic career. I used to read over the last of these remarkablecriticisms, invariably, before going to the theater, in order to profitby every suggestion of alteration or hint of improvement they contained;and I was in the act of reperusing the last I ever received from him, when my father came in and said, "Lawrence is dead. "

I had been sitting to him for some time previously for a pencil sketch, which he gave my mother; it was his last work, and certainly the mostbeautiful of his drawings. He had appointed a day for beginning afull-length, life-size portrait of me as Juliet, and we had seen himonly a week before his death, and, in the interval, received a note fromhim, merely saying he was rather indisposed. His death, which was quiteunexpected, created a very great public sensation, and there wassomething sufficiently mysterious about its circumstances to give riseto a report that he had committed suicide. 

The shock of this event was terrible to me, although I have sometimessince thought it was fortunate for me rather than otherwise. Sir ThomasLawrence's enthusiastically expressed admiration for me, his constantkindness, his sympathy in my success, and the warm interest he took ineverything that concerned me, might only have inspired me with agrateful sense of his condescension and goodness. But I was a veryromantic girl, with a most excitable imagination, and such was to me themelancholy charm of Lawrence's countenance, the elegant distinction ofhis person, and exquisite refined gentleness of his voice and manner, that a very dangerous fascination was added to my sense of gratitude forall his personal kindness to me, and my admiration for his genius; and Ithink it not at all unlikely that, had our intercourse continued, andhad I sat to him for the projected portrait of Juliet, in spite of theforty years' difference in our ages, and my knowledge of his disastrousrelations with my cousins, I should have become in love with him myself, and been the fourth member of our family whose life he would havedisturbed and embittered. His sentimentality was of a peculiarmischievous order, as it not only induced women to fall in love withhim, but enabled him to persuade himself that he was in love with them, and apparently with more than one at a time. 

While I was sitting to him for the beautiful sketch he gave my mother, one or two little incidents occurred that illustrated curiously enoughthis superficial pseudo-sensibility of his. On one occasion, when hespent the evening with us, my mother had made me sing for him; and thenext day, after my sitting, he said in a strange, hesitating, brokenmanner, as if struggling to control some strong emotion, "I have a verygreat favor to beg of you; the next time I have the honor and pleasureof spending the evening with you, will you, if Mrs. Kemble does notdisapprove of it, sing this song for me?" He put a piece of music intomy hand, and immediately left us without another word. On our way homein the carriage, I unrolled the song, the title of which was, "These fewpale Autumn Flowers. " "Ha!" said my mother, with, I thought, rather apeculiar expression, as I read the words; but she added no furthercomment. Both words and music were plaintive and pathetic, and had anoriginal stamp in the melancholy they expressed. 

The next time Lawrence spent the evening with us I sang the song forhim. While I did so, he stood by the piano in a state of profoundabstraction, from which he recovered himself, as if coming back fromvery far away, and with an expression of acute pain on his countenance, he thanked me repeatedly for what he called the great favor I had donehim. 

At the end of my next sitting, when my mother and myself had risen totake leave of him, he said, "No, don't go yet, --stay a moment, --I wantto show you something--if I can;" and he moved restlessly about, takingup and putting down his chalks and pencils, and standing, and sittingdown again, as if unable to make up his mind to do what he wished. Atlength he went abruptly to an easel, and, removing from it a canvas witha few slight sketches on it, he discovered behind it the profileportrait of a lady in a white dress folded simply across her bosom, andshowing her beautiful neck and shoulders. Her head was dressed with asort of sibylline turban, and she supported it upon a most lovely handand arm, her elbow resting on a large book, toward which she bent, andon the pages of which her eyes were fixed, the exquisite eyelid andlashes hiding the eyes. "Oh, how beautiful! oh, who is it!" exclaimed I. "A--a lady, " stammered Lawrence, turning white and red, "towardwhom--for whom--I entertained the profoundest regard. " Thereupon he fledout of the room. "It is the portrait of Mrs. W----, " said my mother;"she is now dead; she was an exceedingly beautiful and accomplishedwoman, the authoress of the words and music of the song Sir ThomasLawrence asked you to learn for him. "

The great painter's devotion to this lovely person had been matter ofnotoriety in the London world. Strangely enough, but a very short timeago I discovered that she was the kinswoman of my friend Miss Cobb'smother, of whom Miss Cobb possessed a miniature, in which the fashion ofdress and style of head-dress were the same as those in the picture Isaw, and in which I also traced some resemblance to the beautiful facewhich made so great an impression on me. Not long after this Mrs. Siddons, dining with us one day, asked my mother how the sketch Lawrencewas making of me was getting on. After my mother's reply, my auntremained silent for some time, and then, laying her hand on my father'sarm, said, "Charles, when I die, I wish to be carried to my grave by youand Lawrence. " Lawrence reached his grave while she was yet tottering onthe brink of hers. 

After my next sitting, my mother, thinking he might be gratified by myaunt's feeling toward him, mentioned her having dined with us. He askedeagerly of her health, her looks, her words, and my mother telling himof her speech about him, he threw down his pencil, clasped his hands, and, with his eyes full of tears and his face convulsed, exclaimed, "Good God! did she say that?"

When my likeness was finished, Lawrence showed it to my mother, who, though she had attended all my sittings, had never seen it till it wascompleted. As she stood silently looking at it, he said, "What strikesyou? what do you think?" "It is very like Maria, " said my mother, almostinvoluntarily, I am sure, for immediately this strange man fell into oneof these paroxysms of emotion, and became so agitated as scarcely to beable to speak; and at last, with a violent effort, said, "Oh, she isvery like her; she is very like them all!"

In spite of these emotions which I heard and saw Sir Thomas Lawrenceexpress, I know positively that at his death a lady, who had been anintimate acquaintance of our family for many years, put on widow's weedsfor him, in the full persuasion that had he lived he would have marriedher, and that, the mutual regard they entertained for each otherwarranted her assuming the deepest mourning for him. Not the leastcurious part of the emotional demonstrations I have described, was thecontrast which they formed to Sir Thomas Lawrence's habitual demeanor, which was polished and refined, but reserved to a degree of coldness, and as indicative of reticent discretion and imperturbable self-controlas became a man who lived in such high social places, and frequented thepalaces of royalty and the boudoirs of the great rival beauties of theEnglish aristocracy. On my twentieth birthday, which occurred soon aftermy first appearance, Lawrence sent me a magnificent proof-plate ofReynolds's portrait of my aunt as the "Tragic Muse, " beautifully framed, and with this inscription: "This portrait, by England's greatestpainter, of the noblest subject of his pencil, is presented to her nieceand worthy successor, by her most faithful humble friend and servant, Lawrence. " When my mother saw this, she exclaimed at it, and said, "I amsurprised he ever brought himself to write those words--her 'worthysuccessor. '" A few days after, Lawrence begged me to let him have theprint again, as he was not satisfied with the finishing of the frame. Itwas sent to him, and when it came back he had effaced the words in whichhe had admitted _any_ worthy successor to his "Tragic Muse;" and Mr. H----, who was at that time his secretary, told me that Lawrence had theprint lying with that inscription in his drawing-room for several daysbefore sending it to me, and had said to him, "Cover it up; I cannotbear to look at it. "

One day, at the end of my sitting, Lawrence showed me a lovely portraitof Mrs. Inchbald, of whom my mother, as we drove home, told me a numberof amusing anecdotes. She was very beautiful, and gifted with originalgenius, as her plays and farces and novels (above all, the "SimpleStory") testify; she was not an actress of any special merit, but ofrespectable mediocrity. She stuttered habitually, but her delivery wasnever impeded by this defect on the stage; a curious circumstance, notuncommon to persons who have that infirmity, and who can read and recitewithout suffering from it, though quite unable to speak fluently. Mrs. Inchbald was a person of a very remarkable character, lovely, poor, withunusual mental powers and of irreproachable conduct. Her life wasdevoted to the care of some dependent relation, who from sickness wasincapable of self-support. Mrs. Inchbald had a singular uprightness andunworldliness, and a childlike directness and simplicity of manner, which, combined with her personal loveliness and halting, brokenutterance, gave to her conversation, which was both humorous and witty, a most peculiar and comical charm. Once, after traveling all day in apouring rain, on alighting at her inn, the coachman, dripping all overwith wet, offered his arm to help her out of the coach, when sheexclaimed, to the great amusement of her fellow-travelers, "Oh, no, no!y-y-y-you will give me m-m-m-my death of c-c-c-cold; do bring me a-a-a-a_dry_ man. " An aristocratic neighbor of hers, with whom she was slightlyacquainted, driving with his daughter in the vicinity of her very humblesuburban residence, overtook her walking along the road one very hotday, and, stopping his carriage, asked her to let him have the pleasureof taking her home; when she instantly declined, with the characteristicexcuse that she had just come from the market gardener's: "And, my lord, I-I-I have my pocket f-f-full of onions, "--an unsophisticated statementof facts which made them laugh extremely. At the first reading of one ofher pieces, a certain young lady, with rather a lean, lanky figure, being proposed to her for the part of the heroine, she indignantlyexclaimed, "No, no, no; I-I-I-I won't have that s-s-s-stick of a girl!D-d-d-do give me a-a-a girl with _bumps!_" Coming off the stage oneevening, she was about to sit down by Mrs. Siddons in the green-room, when suddenly, looking at her magnificent neighbor, she said, "No, Iwon't s-s-s-sit by you; you're t-t-t-too handsome!"--in which respectshe certainly need have feared no competition, and less with my auntthan any one, their style of beauty being so absolutely dissimilar. Somebody speaking of having oysters for supper, much surprise wasexcited by Mrs. Inchbald's saying that she had never eaten one. Questions and remonstrances, exclamations of astonishment, and earnestadvice to enlarge her experience in that respect, assailed her from thewhole green-room, when she finally delivered herself thus: "Oh no, indeed! I-I-I-I never, never could! What! e-e-e-eat the eyes andt-t-t-the nose, the teeth a-a-a-and the toes, the a-a-a-all of acreature!" She was an enthusiastic admirer of my uncle John, and thehero of her "Simple Story, " Doriforth, is supposed to have been intendedby her as a portrait of him. On one occasion, when she was sitting bythe fireplace in the green-room, waiting to be called upon the stage, she and Miss Mellon (afterward Mrs. Coutts and Duchess of St Albans)were laughingly discussing their male friends and acquaintances from thematrimonial point of view. My uncle John, who was standing near, excessively amused, at length jestingly said to Mrs. Inchbald, who hadbeen comically energetic in her declarations of who she could or would, or never could or would, have married, "Well, Mrs. Inchbald, would youhave had me?" "Dear heart!" said the stammering beauty, turning hersweet sunny face up to him, "I'd have j-j-j-jumped at you!"

One day Lawrence took us, from the room where I generally sat to him, into a long gallery where were a number of his pictures, and, leading meby the hand, desired me not to raise my eyes till he told me. On theword of command I looked up, and found myself standing close to andimmediately underneath, as it were, a colossal figure of Satan. Thesudden shock of finding myself in such proximity to this terrible imagemade me burst into nervous tears. Lawrence was greatly distressed at theresult of his experiment, which had been simply to obtain a verdict frommy unprepared impression of the power of his picture. A conversation wehad been having upon the subject of Milton and the character of Satanhad made him think of showing this picture to me. I was too muchagitated to form any judgment of it, but I thought I perceived throughits fierce and tragical expression some trace of my uncle's face andfeatures, a sort of "more so" of the bitter pride and scornfulmelancholy of the banished Roman in the Volscian Hall. Lawrence'simagination was so filled with the poetical and dramatic suggestionswhich he derived from the Kemble brother and sister, that I thought alikeness of them lurked in this portrait of the Prince of Darkness; andperhaps he could scarcely have found a better model for his archfiendthan my uncle, to whom his mother occasionally addressed thecharacteristic reproof, "Sir, you are as proud as Lucifer!" (He and thatremarkable mother of his must really have been a good deal likeCoriolanus and Volumnia. ) To console me for the fright he had given me, Lawrence took me into his drawing-room--that beautiful apartment filledwith beautiful things, including his magnificent collection of originaldrawings by the old masters, and precious gems of old and modernart--the treasure-house of all the exquisite objects of beauty andcuriosity that he had gathered together during his whole life, and that(with the exception of Raphael's and Michael Angelo's drawings, now inthe museum at Oxford) were so soon, at his most unexpected death, to bescattered abroad and become, in separate, disjointed portions, theproperty of a hundred different purchasers. Here, he said, he hopedoften to persuade my father and mother and myself to pass our unengagedevenings with him; here he should like to make my brother John, of whomI had spoken enthusiastically to him, free of his art collections; and, adding that he would write to my mother to fix the day for my firstsitting for Juliet, he put into my hands a copy of the first edition ofMilton's "Paradise Lost. " I never entered that room or his house, or sawhim again; he died about ten days after that. 

Lawrence did not talk much while he took his sketch of me, and Iremember very little that passed between him and my mother but what waspurely personal. I recollect he told me that I had a double row ofeyelashes, which was an unusual peculiarity. He expressed the mostdecided preference for satin over every other material for painting, expatiating rapturously on the soft, rich folds and infinitely variedlights and shadows which that texture afforded above all others. He hasdressed a great many of his female portraits in white satin. He alsoonce said that he had been haunted at one time with the desire to painta blush, that most enchanting "incident" in the expression of a woman'sface, but, after being driven nearly wild with the ineffectual endeavor, had had to renounce it, never, of course, he said, achieving anythingbut a _red face_. I remember the dreadful impression made upon me by astory he told my mother of Lady J---- (George the Fourth's Lady J----), who, standing before her drawing-room looking-glass, and unaware that hewas in the rooms, apostrophized her own reflection with this reflection:"I swear it would be better to go to hell at once than live to grow oldand ugly. "

Lawrence once said that we never dreamed of ourselves as younger than wewere; that even if our dreams reproduce scenes and people andcircumstances of our youth and childhood we were always represented, byour sleeping imagination, at our present age. I presume he spoke of hisown experience, and I cannot say that I recollect any instance in minethat contradicts this theory. It seems curious, if it is true, that inthe manifold freaks of our sleeping fancy self-consciousness shouldstill exist to a sufficient degree to preserve unaltered one's ownconditions of age and physical appearance. I wonder whether this isreally the common experience of people's dreams? Frederick Maurice toldme a circumstance in curious opposition to this theory of Lawrence's. Ayoung woman whom he knew, of more than usual mental and moralendowments, married a man very much her inferior in mind and character, and appeared to him to deteriorate gradually but very perceptibly underhis influence. "As the husband is, the wife is, " etc. Toward the middleof her life she told him that at one time she had carried on a doubleexistence in her sleeping and waking hours, her dreams invariably takingher back to the home and period of her girlhood, and that she resumedthis dream-life precisely where she left it off, night after night, fora considerable period of time, --poor thing!--perhaps as long as theroots of the young nobler self survived below the soil of a baserpresent existence. This story seemed to me always very pathetic. It musthave been dismal to lose that dream life by degrees, as the real one atemore and more into her nature. 

Of Lawrence's merit as a painter an unduly favorable estimate was takenduring his life, and since his death his reputation has suffered anundue depreciation. Much that he did partook of the false and bad stylewhich, from the deeper source of degraded morality, spread a taint overall matters of art and taste, under the vicious influence of the "firstgentleman of Europe, " whose own artistic preferences bore witness, quiteas much as the more serious events of his life, how little he deservedthe name. Hideous Chinese pagoda pavilions, with grotesque and monstrousdecorations, barbarous alike in form and in color; mean and uglylow-roomed royal palaces, without either magnificence or simplicity;military costumes, in which gold and silver lace were plastered togetheron the same uniform, testified to the perverted perception of beauty andfitness which presided in the court of George the Fourth. Lawrence's ownportrait of him, with his corpulent body girthed in his stays andcreaseless coat, and his heavy falling cheek supported by his stiffstock, with his dancing-master's leg and his frizzled barber's-blockhead, comes as near a caricature as a flattered likeness of the original(which was a caricature) dares to do. To have had to paint that wasenough to have vulgarized any pencil. The defect of many of Lawrence'sfemale portraits was a sort of artificial, sentimental _elegantism_. Pictures of the fine ladies of that day they undoubtedly were; picturesof _great_ ladies, never; and, in looking at them, one sighed for theexquisite simple grace and unaffected dignity of Reynolds's andGainsborough's noble and gentle women. 

The lovely head of Lady Nugent, the fine portrait I have mentioned ofMrs. W----, the splendid one of Lady Hatherton, and the noble picture ofmy grandmother, are among the best productions of Lawrence's pencil; andseveral of his men's portraits are in a robust and simple style of artworthy of the highest admiration. His likeness of Canning (which, by thebye, might have passed for his own, so great was his resemblance to thebrilliant statesman) and the fine portrait he painted for Lord Aberdeen, of my uncle John, are excellent specimens of his best work. He had aremarkable gift of producing likenesses at once striking and favorable, and of always seizing the finest expression of which a face was capable;and none could ever complain that Lawrence had not done justice to thevery best look they ever wore. Lawrence's want of conscience with regardto the pictures which he undertook and never finished, is difficult toaccount for by any plausible explanation. The fact is notorious, that invarious instances, after receiving the price of a portrait, andbeginning it, he procrastinated, and delayed, and postponed thecompletion, until, in more than one case, the blooming beauty sketchedupon his canvas had grown faded and wrinkled before the image of heryouthful loveliness had been completed. 

The renewal of intercourse between Lawrence and my parents, so soon tobe terminated by his death, was the cause to me of a loss which I shallnever cease to regret. My father had had in his library for years(indeed, as long as I remember) a large volume of fine engravings of themasterpieces of the great Italian painters, and this precious book ofart we were occasionally allowed to look at for an hour of rare delight;but it belonged to Sir Thomas Lawrence, and had accidentally been keptfor this long space of time in my father's possession. One of mymother's first acts, on again entering into friendly relations withLawrence, was to restore this piece of property to him; a precipitateact of honesty which I could not help deploring, especially when, sosoon after this deed of rash restitution, his death brought thosebeautiful engravings, with all the rest of his property, to the hammer. 

There is no early impression stronger in my mind than that of some ofthose masterpieces, which, together with Winckelmann's fine work onclassical art (our familiarity with which I have elsewhere alluded to), were among the first influences of the sort which I experienced. Nor canI ever be too grateful that, restricted as were my parents' means ofdeveloping in us the highest culture, they were still such as, combinedwith their own excellent taste and judgment, preserved us from thatwhich is far worse than ignorance, a liking for anything vulgar ortrivial. That which was merely pretty, in music, painting, or poetry, was never placed on the same level in our admiration with that which wasfine; and though, from nature as well as training, we enjoyed with greatzest every thing that could in any sense be called good, our enthusiasmwas always reserved for that which was best, an incalculable advantagein the formation of a fine taste and critical judgment. A noble idealbeauty was what we were taught to consider the proper object and resultof all art. In their especial vocation this tendency caused my family tobe accused of formalism and artificial pedantry; and the so-called"classical" school of acting, to which they belonged, has frequentlysince their time been unfavorably compared with what, by way ofcontrast, has been termed the realistic or natural style of art. I donot care to discuss the question, but am thankful that my educationpreserved me from accepting mere imitation of nature as art, on thestage or in the picture gallery; and that, without destroying my delightin any kind of beauty, it taught me a decided preference for that whichwas highest and noblest. 

All being in due preparation for my coming out, my rehearsals were theonly interruption to my usual habits of occupation, which I pursued verysteadily in spite of my impending trial. On the day of my firstappearance I had no rehearsal, for fear of over-fatigue, and spent mymorning as usual, in practicing the piano, walking in the inclosure ofSt. James's Park opposite our house, and reading in "Blunt's ScriptureCharacters" (a book in which I was then deeply interested) the chaptersrelating to St. Peter and Jacob. I do not know whether the nervoustension which I must have been enduring strengthened the impression madeupon me by what I read, but I remember being quite absorbed by it, whichI think was curious, because certainly such subjects of meditation werehardly allied to the painful undertaking so immediately pressing uponme. But I believe I felt imperatively the necessity of moderating my ownstrong nervous emotion and excitement by the fulfillment of myaccustomed duties and pursuits, and above all by withdrawing my mindinto higher and serener regions of thought, as a respite and relief fromthe pressure of my alternate apprehensions of failure and hopes ofsuccess. I do not mean that it was at all a matter of deliberatecalculation or reflection, but rather an instinct of self-preservation, which actuated me: a powerful instinct which has struggled and partiallyprevailed throughout my whole life against the irregular and passionatevehemence of my temperament, and which, in spite of a constant tendencyto violent excitement of mind and feeling, has made me a person ofunusually systematic pursuits and monotonous habits, and been a frequentsubject of astonishment, not unmixed with ridicule, to my friends, whohave not known as well as myself what wholesomeness there was in themethod of my madness. And I am persuaded that religion and reason alikejustify such a strong instinctive action in natures which derive aconstant moral support, like that of the unobserved but all-sustainingpressure of the atmosphere, from the soothing and restraining influenceof systematic habits of monotonous regularity. Amid infinite anguish anderrors, existence may preserve a species of outward symmetry and harmonyfrom this strong band of minute observance keeping down and assistingthe mind to master elements of moral and mental discord and disorder, for the due control of which the daily and hourly subjection torecurring rules is an invaluable auxiliary to higher influences. Theexternal practice does not supply but powerfully supplements theinternal principle of self-control. 

My mother, who had left the stage for upward of twenty years, determinedto return to it on the night of my first appearance, that I might havethe comfort and support of her being with me in my trial. We drove tothe theater very early, indeed while the late autumn sunlight yetlingered in the sky; it shone into the carriage, upon me, and as Iscreened my eyes from it, my mother said, "Heaven smiles on you, mychild. " My poor mother went to her dressing-room to get herself ready, and did not return to me for fear of increasing my agitation by her own. My dear aunt Dall and my maid and the theater dresser performed mytoilet for me, and at length I was placed in a chair, with my satintrain carefully laid over the back of it; and there I sat, ready forexecution, with the palms of my hands pressed convulsively together, andthe tears I in vain endeavored to repress welling up into my eyes andbrimming slowly over, down my rouged cheeks--upon which my aunt, with asmile full of pity, renewed the color as often as these heavy drops madeunsightly streaks in it. Once and again my father came to the door, andI heard his anxious "How is she?" to which my aunt answered, sending himaway with words of comforting cheer. At last, "Miss Kemble called forthe stage, ma'am!" accompanied with a brisk tap at the door, started meupright on my feet, and I was led round to the side scene opposite tothe one from which I saw my mother advance on the stage; and while theuproar of her reception filled me with terror, dear old Mrs. Davenport, my nurse, and dear Mr. Keely, her Peter, and half the _dramatis personæ_of the play (but not my father, who had retreated, quite unable toendure the scene) stood round me as I lay, all but insensible, in myaunt's arms. "Courage, courage, dear child! poor thing, poor thing!"reiterated Mrs. Davenport. "Never mind 'em, Miss Kemble!" urged Keely, in that irresistibly comical, nervous, lachrymose voice of his, which Ihave never since heard without a thrill of anything but comicalassociation; "never mind 'em! don't think of 'em, any more than if theywere so many rows of cabbages!" "Nurse!" called my mother, and onwaddled Mrs. Davenport, and, turning back, called in her turn, "Juliet!"My aunt gave me an impulse forward, and I ran straight across the stage, stunned with the tremendous shout that greeted me, my eyes covered withmist, and the green baize flooring of the stage feeling as if it rose upagainst my feet; but I got hold of my mother, and stood like a terrifiedcreature at bay, confronting the huge theater full of gazing humanbeings. I do not think a word I uttered during this scene could havebeen audible; in the next, the ball-room, I began to forget myself; inthe following one, the balcony scene, I had done so, and, for aught Iknew, I was Juliet; the passion I was uttering sending hot waves ofblushes all over my neck and shoulders, while the poetry sounded likemusic to me as I spoke it, with no consciousness of anything before me, utterly transported into the imaginary existence of the play. Afterthis, I did not return into myself till all was over, and amid atumultuous storm of applause, congratulation, tears, embraces, and ageneral joyous explosion of unutterable relief at the fortunatetermination of my attempt, we went home. And so my life was determined, and I devoted myself to an avocation which I never liked or honored, andabout the very nature of which I have never been able to come to anydecided opinion. It is in vain that the undoubted specific gifts ofgreat actors and actresses suggest that all gifts are given for rightfulexercise, and not suppression; in vain that Shakespeare's plays urgetheir imperative claim to the most perfect illustration they can receivefrom histrionic interpretation: a _business_ which is incessantexcitement and factitious emotion seems to me unworthy of a man; abusiness which is public exhibition, unworthy of a woman. 

At four different periods of my life I have been constrained bycircumstances to maintain myself by the exercise of my dramatic faculty;latterly, it is true, in a less painful and distasteful manner, byreading, instead of acting. But though I have never, I trust, beenungrateful for the power of thus helping myself and others, or forgetfulof the obligation I was under to do my appointed work conscientiously inevery respect, or unmindful of the precious good regard of so many kindhearts that it has won for me; though I have never lost one iota of myown intense delight in the act of rendering Shakespeare's creations; yetneither have I ever presented myself before an audience without ashrinking feeling of reluctance, or withdrawn from their presencewithout thinking the excitement I had undergone unhealthy, and thepersonal exhibition odious. 

Nevertheless, I sat me down to supper that night with my poor, rejoicingparents well content, God knows! with the issue of my trial; and stillbetter pleased with a lovely little Geneva watch, the first I had everpossessed, all encrusted with gold work and jewels, which my father laidby my plate and I immediately christened Romeo, and went, a blissfulgirl, to sleep with it under my pillow. 

 BUCKINGHAM GATE, JAMES STREET, December 14th. DEAREST ----, I received your letter this morning, before I was out of my room, and very glad I was to get it. You would have heard from me again ere this, had it not been that, in your present anxious state of mind respecting your brother, I did not like to demand your attention for my proceedings. My trial is over, and, thank heaven! most fortunately. Our most sanguine wishes could hardly have gone beyond the result, and at the same time that I hail my success as a source of great happiness to my dear father and mother, I almost venture to hope that the interest which has been excited in the public may tend to revive once more the decaying dramatic art. You say it is a very fascinating occupation; perhaps it is, though it does not appear to me so, and I think it carries with it drawbacks enough to operate as an antidote to the vanity and love of admiration which it can hardly fail to foster. The mere embodying of the exquisite ideals of poetry is a great enjoyment, but after that, or rather _for_ that, comes in ours, as in all arts, the mechanical process, the labor, the refining, the controlling the very feeling one has, in order to manifest it in the best way to the perception of others; and when all, that intense feeling and careful work can accomplish, is done, an actor must often see those points of his performance which are most worthy of approbation overlooked, and others, perhaps crude in taste or less true in feeling, commended; which must tend much, I think, to sober the mind as to the value of applause. Above all, the constant consciousness of the immeasurable distance between a fine conception and the best execution of it, must in acting, as in all art, be a powerful check to vanity and self-satisfaction. 

 As to the mere excitement proceeding from the public applause of a theater, I am sure you will believe me when I say I do not think I shall ever experience it. But should I reckon too much upon my own steadiness, I have the incessant care and watchfulness of my dear mother to rely on, and I do rely on it as an invaluable safeguard, both to the purity and good taste of all that I may do on the stage, and the quiet and soberness of my mind under all this new excitement. She has borne all her anxieties wonderfully well, and I now hope she will reap some repayment for them. My dear father is very happy; indeed, we have all cause for heartfelt thankfulness when we think what a light has dawned upon our prospects, lately so dismal and overcast. My own motto in all this must be, as far as possible, "Beget a temperance in all things. " I trust I shall be enabled to rule myself by it, and in the firm hope that my endeavor to do what is right will be favored and assisted, I have committed myself, nothing doubting, to the stormy sea of life. Dearest H----, the papers will give you a detailed account of my _début_; I only wish to assure you that I have not embraced this course without due dread of its dangers, and a firm determination to watch, as far as in me lies, over its effect upon my mind. It is, after all, but lately, you know, that I have become convinced that fame and gratified ambition are not the worthiest aims for one's exertions. With affectionate love, believe me ever your fondly attached

 FANNY. 

 I most sincerely hope that your brother's health is improving, and if we do not meet sooner, I shall now look forward to Dublin as our _point de réunion_; that will not be the least of the obligations I shall owe this happy turn of affairs. 

I do not know whence I derived the deep impression I expressed in thisletter of the moral dangers of the life upon which I was entering;certainly not from my parents, to whom, of course, the idea that actorsand actresses could not be respectable people naturally did not occur, and who were not troubled, I am sure, as I then was, with a perceptionof the more subtle evils of their calling. I had never heard the natureof it discussed, and was absolutely without experience of it, but thevapid vacuity of the last years of my aunt Siddons's life had made aprofound impression upon me, --her apparent deadness and indifference toeverything, which I attributed (unjustly, perhaps) less to her advancedage and impaired powers than to what I supposed the withering and dryinginfluence of the overstimulating atmosphere of emotion, excitement, andadmiration in which she had passed her life; certain it is that such wasmy dread of the effect of my profession upon me, that I added an earnestpetition to my daily prayers that I might be defended from the evilinfluence I feared it might exercise upon me. 

As for my success, there was, I believe, a genuine element in it, forpuffing can send upward only things that have a buoyant, rising qualityin themselves; but there was also a great feeling of personal sympathyfor my father and mother, of kindly indulgence for my youth, and ofrespectful recollection of my uncle and aunt; and a very general desirethat the fine theater where they had exercised their powers should berescued, if possible, from its difficulties. All this went to make up aresult of which I had the credit. 

Among my experiences of that nauseous ingredient in theatrical life, puffery, some have been amusing enough. The last time that I gave publicreadings in America, the management of them was undertaken by a worthy, respectable person, who was not, I think, exceptionally addicted to thedevices and charlatanism which appear almost inseparable from thebusiness of public exhibition in all its branches. At the end of ourfirst interview for the purpose of arranging my performances, as he wastaking his leave he said, "Well, ma'am, I think everything is quite in anice train. I should say things are in a most favorable state ofpreparation; we've a delightful article coming out in the ----. " Here hementioned a popular periodical. "Ah, indeed?" said I, not quiteapprehending what my friend was aiming at. "Yes, really, ma'am, I shouldsay first-rate, and I thought perhaps we might induce you to be goodenough to help us a little with it. " "Bless me!" said I, more and morepuzzled, "how can I help you?" "Well, ma'am, with a few personalanecdotes, perhaps, if you would be so kind. " "Anecdotes?" said I (withthree points of interrogation). "What do you mean? What about?" "Why, ma'am" (with a low bow), "about Mrs. Kemble, of course. " Now, my worthyagent's remuneration was to consist of a certain proportion of thereceipts of the readings, and, that being the case, I felt I had noright absolutely to forbid him all puffing advertisements and decentlylegitimate efforts to attract public attention and interest toperformances by which he was to benefit. At the same time, I also feltit imperatively necessary that there should be some limit to theseproceedings, if I was to be made a party to them. I therefore told himthat, as his interest was involved in the success of the readings, Icould not forbid his puffing them to some extent, as, if I did, he mightconsider himself injured. "But, " said I, while refusing the contributionof any personal anecdotes to his forthcoming article, "take care whatyou do in that line, for if you overdo it in the least, I will write anarticle, myself, on my readings, showing up all their faults, andturning them into ridicule as I do not believe any one else either wouldor could. So puff just as quietly as you can. " I rather think my agentleft me with the same opinion of my competency in business that Mr. Macready had expressed as to my proficiency in my profession, namely, that "I did not know the rudiments of it. "

Mr. Mitchell, who from the first took charge of all my readings inEngland, and was the very kindest, most considerate, and most courteousof all managers, on one occasion, complaining bitterly to my sister ofthe unreasonable objection I had to all laudatory advertisements of myreadings, said to her, with a voice and countenance of the most ruefulmelancholy, and with the most appealing pathos, "Why, you know, ma'am, it's really dreadful; you know, Mrs. Kemble won't even allow us to sayin the bills, _these celebrated readings_; and you know, ma'am, it'sreally impossible to do with less; indeed it is! Why, ma'am, you knoweven Morrison's pills are always advertised as _these celebratedpills!_"--an illustration of the hardships of his case which my sisterrepeated to me with infinite delight. 

When I saw the shop-windows full of Lawrence's sketch of me, and knewmyself the subject of almost daily newspaper notices; when plates andsaucers were brought to me with small figures of me as Juliet andBelvidera on them; and finally, when gentlemen showed me lovelybuff-colored neck-handkerchiefs which they had bought, and which had, asI thought, pretty lilac-colored flowers all over them, which proved onnearer inspection to be minute copies of Lawrence's head of me, I notunnaturally, in the fullness of my inexperience, believed in my ownsuccess. 

I have since known more of the manufacture of public enthusiasm andpublic triumphs, and, remembering to how many people it was a matter ofvital importance that the public interest should be kept alive in me, and Covent Garden filled every night I played, I have become moreskeptical upon the subject. 

Seeing lately a copy of my play of "Francis the First, " with (to myinfinite astonishment) "tenth edition" upon it, I said to a friend, "Isuppose this was a bit of bookseller's puffery; or did each editionconsist of three copies?" He replied, "Oh, no, I think not; you haveforgotten the _furor_ there was about you when this came out. " At twentyI believed it _all_; at sixty-eight I find it difficult to believe _any_of it. 

It is certain, however, that I played Juliet upward of a hundred andtwenty times running, with all the irregularity and unevenness andimmature inequality of which I have spoken as characteristics which werenever corrected in my performances. My mother, who never missed one ofthem, would sometimes come down from her box and, folding me in herarms, say only the very satisfactory words, "Beautiful, my dear!" Quiteas often, if not oftener, the verdict was, "My dear, your performancewas not fit to be seen! I don't know how you ever contrived to do thepart decently; it must have been by some knack or trick which you appearto have entirely lost the secret of; you had better give the whole thingup at once than go on doing it so disgracefully ill. " This was awful, and made my heart sink down into my shoes, whatever might have been thefervor of applause with which the audience had greeted my performance. 

My life now became settled in its new shape. I acted regularly threetimes a week; I had no rehearsals, since "Romeo and Juliet" went onduring the whole season, and so my mornings were still my own. I alwaysdined in the middle of the day (and invariably on a mutton-chop, so thatI might have been a Harrow boy, for diet); I was taken by my aunt earlyto the theater, and there in my dressing-room sat through the entireplay, when I was not on the stage, with some piece of tapestry orneedlework, with which, during the intervals of my tragic sorrows, Ibusied my fingers; my thoughts being occupied with the events of my nextscene and the various effects it demanded. When I was called for thestage, my aunt came with me, carrying my train, that it might not sweepthe dirty floor behind the scenes; and after spreading it out andadjusting its folds carefully, as I went on, she remained at the sidescene till I came off again, then gathered it on her arm, and, folding ashawl around me, escorted me back to my dressing-room and tapestry; andso my theatrical evenings were passed. My parents would not allow me togo into the green-room, where they thought my attention would bedistracted from my business, and where I might occasionally meet withundesirable associates. My salary was fixed at thirty guineas a week, and the Saturday after I came out I presented myself for the first andlast time at the treasury of the theater to receive it, and carried it, clinking, with great triumph, to my mother, the first money I everearned. 

It would be difficult to imagine anything more radical than the changewhich three weeks had made in the aspect of my whole life. From aninsignificant school-girl, I had suddenly become an object of generalpublic interest. I was a little lion in society, and the town talk ofthe day. Approbation, admiration, adulation, were showered upon me;every condition of my life had been altered, as by the wand of a fairy. Instead of the twenty pounds a year which my poor father squeezed out ofhis hard-earned income for my allowance, out of which I bought (alas, with how much difficulty, seeing how many other things I would buy!) mygloves and shoes, I now had an assured income, as long as my health andfaculties were unimpaired, of at least a thousand a year; and the thirtyguineas a week at Covent Garden, and much larger remuneration duringprovincial tours, forever forbade the sense of destitution productive ofthe ecstasy with which, only a short time before I came out, I had foundwedged into the bottom of my money drawer in my desk a sovereign that Ihad overlooked, and so had sorrowfully concluded myself penniless tillnext allowance day. Instead of trudging long distances afoot through themuddy London streets, when the hire of a hackney-coach was matter ofserious consideration, I had a comfortable and elegant carriage; I wasallowed, at my own earnest request, to take riding lessons, and beforelong had a charming horse of my own, and was able to afford the delightof giving my father one, the use of which I hoped would help toinvigorate and refresh him. The faded, threadbare, turned, and dyedfrocks which were my habitual wear were exchanged for fashionably madedresses of fresh colors and fine texture, in which I appeared to myselftransfigured. Our door was besieged with visitors, our evenings bespokenby innumerable invitations; social civilities and courtesies poured inupon us from every side in an incessant stream; I was sought and pettedand caressed by persons of conventional and real distinction, and everynight that I did not act I might, if my parents had thought it prudentto let me do so, have passed in all the gayety of the fashionable worldand the great London season. So much cordiality, sympathy, interest, andapparent genuine good-will seemed to accompany all these flatteringdemonstrations, that it was impossible for me not to be touched andgratified, --perhaps, too, unduly elated. If I was spoiled and my headturned, I can only say I think it would have needed a strong head not tobe so; but God knows how pitiful a preparation all this tinsel, suddensuccess, and popularity formed for the duties and trials of myafter-life. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Among the persons whom I used to see behind the scenes were two who, fordifferent reasons, attracted my attention: one was the Earl of W----, and the other the Rev. A. F. C----. I was presented to Lord and LadyW---- in society, and visited them more than once at their place nearManchester. But before I had made Lord W----'s acquaintance, he was anobject of wondering admiration to me, not altogether unmixed with aslight sense of the ridiculous, only because it passed my comprehensionhow any real, live man could be so exactly like the description of aparticular kind of man, in a particular kind of book. There was no faultto find with the elegance of his appearance and his remarkable goodlooks; he certainly was the beau ideal of a dandy, --with his slender, perfectly dressed figure, his pale complexion, regular features, fineeyes, and dark, glossy waves of hair, and the general aristocraticdistinction of his whole person, --and was so like the Earl of So-and-So, in the fashionable novel of the day, that I always longed to ask himwhat he did at the end of the "third volume, " and "whether he or SirReginald married Lady Geraldine. " But why this exquisite _parexcellence_ should always have struck me as slightly absurd, I cannotimagine. The Rev. A. F. C---- was the natural son of William IV. And Mrs. Jordan, and vicar of Maple Durham; when first I came out, this younggentleman attended every one of my performances, first in one of thestage boxes and afterward in a still nearer position to the stage, oneof the orchestra reserved seats. Thence, one night, he disappeared, and, to my surprise, I saw him standing at one of the side scenes during thewhole play. My mother remarking at supper his non-attendance in hisusual place, my father said that he had come to him at the beginning ofthe play, and asked, for his mother's sake, to be allowed occasionallyto present himself behind the scenes. My father said this reference toMrs. Jordan had induced him to grant the request so put, though he didnot think the back of the scenes a very proper haunt for a gentleman ofhis cloth. There, however, Mr. F. C---- came, and evening after eveningI saw his light kid gloves waving and gesticulating about, following ina sort of sympathetic dumb show the gradual development of my distress, to the end of the play. My father, at his request, presented him to me, but as I never remained behind the scenes or went into the green-room, and as he could not very well follow me upon the stage, our intercoursewas limited to silent bows and courtesies, as I went on and off, to mypalace in Verona, or from Friar Laurence's cell. Mr. F. C---- appearedto me to have slightly mistaken his vocation: that others had done sofor him was made more manifest to me by my subsequent acquaintance withhim. I encountered him one evening at a very gay ball given by theCountess de S----. Almost as soon as I came into the room he rushed atme, exclaiming, "Oh, do come and dance with me, that's a dear goodgirl. " The "dear good girl" had not the slightest objection to dancingwith anybody, dancing being then my predominant passion, and a chair aperfectly satisfactory partner if none other could be come by. Whiledancing, I was unpleasantly struck with the decidedly unreverend tone ofmy partner's remarks. Clergymen danced in those days without reproach, but I hope that even in those days of dancing clerks they did not oftentalk so very much to match the tripping of the light fantastic toe. Myamazement reached its climax when, seeing me exchange signs of amicablefamiliarity with some one across the room, Mr. F. C---- said, "Who areyou nodding and smiling to? Oh, your father. You are very fond of him, ain't you?" To my enthusiastic reply in the affirmative, he said, "Ah, yes; just so. I dare say you are. " And then followed an expression ofhis filial disrespect for the highest personage in the realm, of such arobust significance as fairly took away my breath. Surprised into amomentary doubt of my partner's sobriety, I could only say, "Mr. F. C----, if you do not change your style of conversation I must sit downand leave you to finish the dance alone. " He confounded himself inrepeated apologies and entreaties that I would finish the dance withhim, and as I could not find a word to say to him, he went on eagerly toexcuse himself by a short sketch of his life, telling me that he had notbeen bred to the Church and had the greatest disinclination to takingorders; that he had been trained as a sailor, the navy being the careerthat he preferred above all others, but that in consequence of the deathof a brother he had been literally taken from on board ship, and, inspite of the utmost reluctance on his part, compelled to go into theChurch. "Don't you think it's a hard case?" reiterated he, as I stillfound it difficult to express my opinion either of him or of his "case, "both appearing to me equally deplorable. At length I suggested that, since he had adopted the sacred calling he professed, perhaps it wouldbe better if he conformed to it at least by outward decency of languageand decorum of demeanor. To this he assented, adding with a sigh, "But, you see, some people have a natural turn for religion; you have, forinstance, I'm sure; but you see I have not. " This appeared to meincontrovertible. Presently, after a pause, he asked me if I would writea sermon for him, which tribute to my talent for preaching, of which hehad just undergone a sample, sent me into fits of laughter, though Ireplied with some indignation, "Certainly not; I am not a proper personto write sermons, and you ought to write your own!" "Yes, " said he, withrather touching humility, "but you see I can't, --not good ones, atleast. I'm sure you could, and I wish you would write one for me; Mrs. N---- has. " This statement terminated the singular conversation, whichhad been the accompaniment to a quadrille. The vicar of Maple Durham isdead; had he lived he would doubtless have become a bishop; his familyhad already furnished its contingent to the army and navy, in Lord E. And Lord A. F. C----, and the living of Maple Durham had to be filled andhe to be provided for; and whenever the virtues of the EstablishedChurch system are under discussion, I try to forget this, and one or twosimilar instances I have known of its vices as it existed in those days. But that was near "fifty years since, " and such a story as that of mypoor sailor-parson friend could hardly be told now. Nor could one oftennow in any part of England find the fellow of my friend H. D----, whowas also the predestined incumbent of a family living. He waspassionately fond of hunting; and, clinging to his beloved "pink" evenafter holy orders had made it rather indecorous wear, used to huddle onhis sacred garments of office at week-day solemnities of marrying orburying, and, having accomplished his clerical duties, rapidly divesthimself of his holy robes, and bloom forth in unmitigated scarlet andbuckskins, while the temporary cloud of sanctity which had obscured themwas rapidly rolled into the vestry closet. 

I confess to having heard with sincere sympathy the story of a certainexcellent clergyman of Yorkshire breeding, who, finding it impossible torelinquish his hunting, carried it on simultaneously with the most exactand faithful discharge of his clerical duties until, arriving at lengthat the high dignity of the archbishopric of York, though neither lessable for, nor less devoted to, his favorite pursuit, thought itexpedient to abandon it and ride to hounds no more. He still rode, however, harder, farther, faster, and better than most men, butconscientiously avoided the hunting-field. Coming accidentally, one day, upon the hounds when they had lost the scent, and trotting briskly away, after a friendly acknowledgment of the huntsman's salutation, hepresently caught sight of the fox, when, right reverend prelate as hewas, he gave a "view halloo" to be heard half the county over, and fledin the opposite direction at a full gallop, while the huntsman, in anecstasy, cheered on his pack with an exclamation of "That's gospeltruth, if ever I heard it!"

A. F. C---- was pleasant-looking, though not handsome, like the royalfamily of England, whose very noble _port de tête_ he had, with acharming voice that, my father said, came to him from his mother. 

I have spoken of my being allowed to take riding lessons, and ofpurchasing a horse, which was not only an immense pleasure to me, but, Ibelieve, a very necessary means of health and renovation, in the life ofintense and incessant excitement which I was leading. 

For some time after my first coming out I lost my sleep almost entirely, and used to lie wide awake the greater part of the night. With more useof my new profession this nervous wakefulness wore off; but I wassubject to very frequent and severe pains in the side, which any strongemotion almost invariably brought on, and which were relieved by nothingbut exercise on horseback. The refreshment of this panacea for bodilyand mental ailments was always such to me, that often, returning fromballs where I had danced till daylight, I used to feel that if I couldhave an hour's gallop in the fresh morning air, I should be revivedbeyond all sleep that I could then get. 

Once only I was allowed to test my theory, and I found that the resultanswered my expectations entirely. I had been acting in Boston everynight for a whole week, and on Saturday night had acted in two pieces, and was to start at one o'clock in the morning for New York, betweenwhich and Boston there was no railroad in those days. I was not feelingwell, and was much exhausted by my hard work, but I was sure that if Icould only begin my journey on horseback instead of in the lumbering, rolling, rocking, heavy, straw-and-leather-smelling "Exclusive Extra"(that is, private stage-coach), I should get over my fatigue and therest of the journey with some chance of not being completely knocked upby it. After much persuasion my father consented, and after the twopieces of our farewell night, to a crowded, enthusiastic house, all theexcitement of which of course told upon me even more than the actualexertion of acting, I had some supper, and at one o'clock, with ourfriend, Major M----, and ----, got on horseback, and rode out of Boston. Major M---- rode with us only about three miles, and then turned back, leaving us to pursue our road to Dedham, seven miles farther, where thecarriage, with my father and aunt, was to meet us. 

The thermometer stood at seventeen degrees below zero; it was the middleof a Massachusetts winter, and the cold intense. The moon was at thefull, and the night as bright as day; not a stone but was visible on theiron-hard road, that rang under our horses' hoofs. The whole country wassheeted with snow, over which the moon threw great floods of yellowlight, while here and there a broken ridge in the smooth, white expanseturned a sparkling, crystalline edge up to the lovely splendor. It waswonderfully beautiful and exhilarating, though so cold that my vail wasall frozen over my lips, and we literally hardly dared utter a word forfear of swallowing scissors and knives in the piercing air, which, however, was perfectly still and without the slightest breath of wind. So we rode hard and fast and silently, side by side, through the bright, profound stillness of the night, and never drew rein till we reachedDedham, where the carriage with my father and aunt had not yet arrived. Not a soul was stirring, and not a sound was heard, in the little NewEngland village; the country tavern was fast shut up; not a lighttwinkled from any window, or thread of smoke rose from any chimney;every house had closed its eyes and ears, and gone to sleep. We hadridden the whole way as fast as we could, and had kept our blood warm bythe violent exercise, but there was every danger, if we sat many minuteson our saddles in the piercing cold, that we should be all the worseinstead of the better for that circumstance. Mr. ---- rode along thehouses, looking for some possible shelter, and at last, through thechink of a shutter, spying a feeble glimmer of light, dismounted, and, knocking, asked if it were possible for me to be admitted there for afew minutes, till the carriage, which could not be far distant, came up. He was answered in the affirmative, and I jumped down from my saddle, and ran into the friendly refuge, while he paced rapidly to and frobefore the house, leading the horses, to keep himself and them alikefrom freezing; a man was to come on the coach-box with the driver, totake them back to Boston. On looking round I found myself in a miserablelittle low room, heated almost to suffocation by an iron stove, andstifling with the peculiar smell of black dye-stuffs. Here, by the lightof two wretched bits of candle, two women were working with the utmostdispatch at mourning-garments for a funeral which was to take place thatday, in a few hours. They did not speak to me after making room for menear the stove, and the only words they exchanged with each other werelaconic demands for scissors, thread, etc. ; and so they rapidly pliedtheir needles in silence, while I, suddenly transported from the coldbrightness without into this funereal, sweltering atmosphere of whatlooked like a Black Hole made of crape and bombazine, watched thelugubrious occupation of the women as if I was in a dream, till thedistant rumbling of wheels growing more and more distinct, I took leaveof my temporary hostesses with many thanks (they were poor New Englandworkwomen, by whom no other species of acknowledgment would have beenreceived), and was presently fast asleep in the corner of the carriage, and awoke only long after to feel rested and refreshed, and well able toendure the fatigue of the rest of the journey. In spite of thisfortunate result, I do not now, after a lapse of forty years, think theexperiment one that would have answered with many young women'sconstitutions, though there is no sort of doubt that the nervous energygenerated by any pleasurable emotion is in itself a great preservativefrom unfavorable influences. 

My riding-master was the best and most popular teacher inLondon--Captain Fozzard--or, as he was irreverently called among hisyoung Amazons, "Old Fozzard. " When my mother took me to the ridingschool, he recalled, with many compliments, her own proficiency as anequestrian, and said he would do his best to make me as fine ahorsewoman as she had been. He certainly did his best to improve a verygood seat, and a heavy, defective hand with which nature had endowed me;the latter, however, was incorrigible, and so, though I was always afearless horsewoman, and very steady in my saddle, I never possessed thefiner and more exquisite part of the accomplishment of riding, whichconsists in the delicate and skillful management of a horse's mouth. Fozzard's method was so good that all the best lady riders in Londonwere his pupils, and one could tell one of them at a glance, by theperfect squareness of the shoulders to the horse's head, which was oneinvariable result of his teaching. His training was eminently calculatedto produce that result, and to make us all but immovable in our saddles. Without stirrup, without holding the reins, with our arms behind us, andas often as not sitting left-sided on the saddle, to go through violentplunging, rearing, and kicking lessons, and taking our horses over thebar, was a considerable test of a firm seat, and in all these specialfeats I became a proficient. 

One day, when I had gone to the school more for exercise than a lesson, and was taking a solitary canter in the tan for my own amusement, thelittle door under the gallery opened, and Fozzard appeared, introducinga middle-aged lady and a young girl, who remained standing there whilehe advanced toward me, and presently began to put me through all my mostcrucial exercises, apparently for their edification. I was alwaysdelighted to go through these particular feats, which amused meexcessively, and in which I took great pride. So I sat through them all, till, upon a sign from the elder lady, Fozzard, with extreme deference, opened the door and escorted them forth, and then returning to dismountme, informed me that I had given a very satisfactory sample of histeaching to the Duchess of Kent and the Princess Victoria, the latter ofwhom was to be placed under his tuition forthwith. 

This was the first time I ever saw the woman who holds the most exaltedposition in the world, the Queen of England, who has so filled thatsupreme station that her name is respected wherever it is heard abroad, and that she is regarded by her own people with a loyal love such as noearthly dignity but that of personal worthiness can command. 

 JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE. DEAREST H----, The kind exertion you made in writing to me so soon after leaving London deserved an earlier acknowledgment; but when I tell you that every day since Christmas I have fully purposed writing to you, and have not been able to do so before to-day, I hope you will excuse the delay, and believe me when I assure you that not only the effort you made in going to the theater, but your seeing me at all, are appreciated by me as very strong marks of your affection for me. 

 Now let me say something to you about Lady C---- L----'s criticism of my performance. In the first place, nothing is easier than to criticise by comparison, and hardly anything much more difficult than to form a correct judgment of any work of art (be it what it may) upon the foundation of abstract principles and fundamental rules of taste and criticism; for this sort of analysis is really a study. Comparison is the criticism of the multitude, and I almost wonder at its being resorted to by a woman of such ability as Lady C----. I only say this by the way, for to be compared with either Mrs. Siddons or Miss O'Neill is above my expectation. They were both professional actresses, which I can hardly yet claim to be; women who had for years studied the mechanical part of their art, and rendered themselves proficients in their business; while although I have certainly had many advantages, in hearing the stage and acting constantly, tastefully, and thoughtfully discussed, I am totally inexperienced in all the minor technical processes, most necessary for the due execution of any dramatic conception. As to my aunt Siddons--look at her, H----; look at her fine person, her beautiful face; listen to her magnificent voice; and supposing that I were as highly endowed with poetical dramatic imagination as she was (which I certainly am not), is it likely that there can ever be a shadow of comparison between her and myself, even when years may have corrected all that is at present crude and imperfect in my efforts?

 This is my sole reply to her ladyship. To you, dearest H----, I can add that I came upon the stage quite uncertain as to the possession of any talent for it whatever; I do not think I am now deceived as to the quantity I can really lay claim to, by the exaggerated praises of the public, who have been too long deprived of any female object of special interest on the boards to be very nice about the first that is presented to them; nor am I unconscious of the amount of work that will be requisite to turn my abilities to their best use. Wait; have patience; by and by, I hope, I shall do better. It is very true that to be the greatest actress of my day is not the aim on which my happiness depends. But having embraced this career, I think I ought not to rest satisfied with any degree of excellence short of what my utmost endeavor will enable me to attain in it. .. . 

 My print, or rather the print of me, from Sir Thomas Lawrence's drawing, is out. He has promised you one, so I do not. There are also coming out a series of sketches by Mr. Hayter, from my Juliet, with a species of _avant propos_ written by Mrs. Jameson; this will interest you, and I will send you a copy of it when it is published. 

 I will tell you a circumstance of much anxious hope to us all just now, but as the result is yet uncertain, do not mention it. We have a species of offer of a living for my brother John, who, you know, is going into the Church. This is a consummation devoutly to be wished, and I most sincerely hope we may not be disappointed. He is still in Germany, very happy and very metaphysical; should we obtain this living, however, I suppose he would return immediately. Independently of my wish to see him again, I shall be glad when he leaves Germany I think; but I have not time for what I think about Germany to-day, and you must be rather tired of

 Yours most affectionately, F. A. K. 

Mr. Hayter's graceful sketches of me in Juliet were lithographed andpublished with Mrs. Jameson's beautifully written but too flatteringnotice of my performance; the original drawings were purchased by LordEllesmere. The second part assigned to me by the theater authorities wasBelvidera, in Otway's "Venice Preserved. " I had never read the playuntil I learned my part, nor seen it until I acted it. It is, I believe, one of the longest female parts on the stage. But I had still myschool-girl capacity for committing quickly to memory, and learned it inthree hours. Acting it was a very different matter. I was no longersustained by the genius of Shakespeare, no longer stimulated by thesublime passion and exquisite poetry. Juliet was a reality to me, aliving individual woman, whose nature I could receive, as it were, intomine at once, without effort, comprehending and expressing it. Belvideraseemed to me a sort of lay figure in a tragic attitude, a mere, "femalein general, " without any peculiar or specific characteristics whatever;placed as Belvidera is in the midst of sordidly painful and coarselyagonizing circumstances, there was nothing in the part itself thataffected my feelings or excited my imagination; and the miserablesituations into which the poor creature was thrown throughout the piecerevolted me, and filled me with disgust for the men she had to do with, without inspiring me with any sympathy for her. In this piece, too, Icame at once into the unfavorable light of full comparison with myaunt's performance of the part, which was one of her famous ones. Afriend of hers and mine, my dear and excellent William Harness, saidthat seeing me was exactly like looking at Mrs. Siddons through thediminishing end of an opera glass. My personal likeness to her, in spiteof my diminutive size and irregular features, was striking, and ofcourse suggested, to those who remembered her, associations which werefatal to my satisfactory performance of the part. I disliked the playand the character of Belvidera, and I am sure I must have played it veryindifferently. 

I remember one circumstance connected with my first performance of itwhich proved how painfully the unredeemed horror and wretchedness of thepiece acted upon my nerves and imagination. In the last scene, wherepoor Belvidera's brain gives way under her despair, and she fanciesherself digging for her husband in the earth, and that she at lastrecovers and seizes him, I intended to utter a piercing scream; this Ihad not of course rehearsed, not being able to scream deliberately incold blood, so that I hardly knew, myself, what manner of utterance Ishould find for my madness. But when the evening came, I uttered shriekafter shriek without stopping, and rushing off the stage ran all roundthe back of the scenes, and was pursuing my way, perfectly unconsciousof what I was doing, down the stairs that led out into the street, whenI was captured and brought back to my dressing-room and my senses. 

The next piece in which I appeared was Murphy's "Grecian Daughter;" afeeble and inflated composition, as inferior in point of dramatic andpoetical merit to Otway's "Venice Preserved, " as that is to any ofShakespeare's masterpieces. It has situations of considerable effect, however, and the sort of parental and conjugal interest that infalliblystrikes sympathetic chords in the _pater familias_ bosom of an Englishaudience. The choice of the piece had in it, in my opinion, aningredient of bad taste, which, objectionable as it seemed to me, hadundoubtedly entered into the calculation of the management, as likely toincrease the effect and success of the play; I mean the constantreference to Euphrasia's filial devotion, and her heroic and piousefforts in behalf of her old father--incidents in the piece which wereseized upon and applied to my father and myself by the public, and whichmay have perhaps added to the feeling of the audience, as they certainlyincreased my dislike for the play. Here, too, I again encountered theformidable impression which Mrs. Siddons had produced in the part, ofwhich, in spite of the turbid coldness and stilted emphasis of thestyle, she had made a perfect embodiment of heroic grandeur andclassical grace. My Euphrasia was, I am sure, a pitiful picture of anantique heroine, in spite of Macdonald's enthusiasm for the "attitude"in the last scene, and my cousin Horace Twiss's comical verdict ofapprobation, that it was all good, but especially the scene where "youtip it the tyrant. "

 JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, January 17, 1830. DEAREST H----, Although my mind is much occupied just now with a new part in which I appear to-morrow, I take advantage of the bodily rest this day affords me to write you a few lines, which I fear I might not find time for again as soon as I wish. There was enough in your last letter, dear H----, to make me melancholy, independently of the question which you ask respecting my picture in Juliet, and which the papers have by this time probably answered to you. 

 Sir Thomas Lawrence is dead. The event has been most distressing, and most sudden and unexpected to us. It really seemed as though we had seen him but the day before we heard of it; and indeed, it was but a few days since my mother had called on him, and since he had written to me a long letter on the subject of my Belvidera, full of refined taste and acute criticism, as all his letters to me were. It was a great shock; indeed, so much so, that absolute amazement for a little time prevented my feeing all the regret I have since experienced about it. Nor was it till I sat down to write to Cecilia, to request her to prevent any sudden communication of the event to my aunt Siddons, that I felt it was really true, and found some relief in crying. I had to act Belvidera that same night, and it was with a very heavy heart that I repeated those passages in which poor Sir Thomas Lawrence had pointed out alterations and suggested improvements. He is a great loss to me, individually. His criticism was invaluable to me. He was a most attentive observer; no shade of feeling or slightest variation of action or inflection of voice escaped him; his suggestions were _always_ improvements, conveyed with the most lucid clearness; and, as you will easily believe, his strictures were always sufficiently tempered with refined flattery to have disarmed the most sensitive self-love. My Juliet and Belvidera both owe much to him, and in this point of view alone his loss is irreparable to me. It is some matter of regret, too, as you may suppose, that we can have no picture of me by him, but this is a more selfish and less important motive of sorrow than my loss of his advice in my profession. I understand that my aunt Siddons was dreadfully shocked by the news, and cried, "And have I lived to see him go before me!" . .. His promise to send you a print from his drawing of me, dearest H----, he cannot perform, but I will be his executor in this instance, and if you will tell me how it can be conveyed to you, I will send you one. 

 This letter, my dearest H----, which was begun on Sunday, I now sit down to finish on Tuesday evening, and cannot do better, I think, than give you a full account of our last night's success; for a very complete success it was, I am happy to say. Murphy's play of "The Grecian Daughter" I suppose you know; or if you do not, your state is the more gracious, for certainly anything more flat, poor, and trashy I cannot well conceive. It had been, you know, a great part of my aunt Siddons's, and nothing better proves her great dramatic genius than her having clothed so meager a part in such magnificent proportions as she gave to it, and filled out by her own poetical conception the bare skeleton Mr. Murphy's Euphrasia presented to her. This frightened me a great deal; Juliet and Belvidera scarcely anybody can do ill, but Euphrasia I thought few people could do well, and I feared I was not one of them. Moreover, the language is at once so poor and so bombastic that I took double the time in getting the part by rote I should have taken for any part of Shakespeare's. My dress was beautiful; I think I will tell it you. You know you told me even an account of hat and feathers would interest you. My skirt was made immensely full and with a long train; it was of white merino, almost as fine as cashmere, with a rich gold Grecian border. The drapery which covered my shoulders (if you wish to look for the sort of costume in engravings, I give you its classical name, _peplum_) was made of the same material beautifully embroidered, leaving my arms quite free and uncovered. I had on flesh-colored silk gloves, of course. A bright scarlet sash with heavy gilt acorns, falling to my feet, scarlet sandals to match, and a beautiful Grecian head-dress in gold, devised by my mother, completed the whole, which really had a very classical effect, the fine material of which my dress was formed falling with every movement into soft, graceful folds. 

 I managed to keep a good heart until I heard the flourish of drums and trumpets, in the midst of which I had to rush on the stage, and certainly when I did come on my appearance must have been curiously in contrast with the "prave 'ords" I uttered, for I felt like nothing but a hunted hare, with my eyes starting from my head, my "nostrils all wide, " and my limbs trembling to such a degree that I could scarcely stand. The audience received me very kindly, however, and after a little while I recovered my breath and self-possession, and got on very comfortably, considering that, what with nervousness and the short time they had had to study them in, none of the actors were perfect in their parts. My father acted Evander, which added, no doubt, to the interest of the situation. The play went off admirably, and I dare say it will be of some service to me, but I fear it is too dull and poor in itself, despite all that can be done for it, to be of much use to the theater. One of my great difficulties in the play was to produce some striking effect after stabbing Dionysius, which was a point in which my aunt always achieved a great triumph. She used to fall on her knees as if deprecating the wrath of heaven for what she had done, and her mode of performing this was described to me. But, independently of my anxiety to avoid any imitation that might induce a comparison that could not but be fatally to my disadvantage, I did not (to you I may venture to confess it) feel the situation in the same manner. Euphrasia had just preserved her father's life by a deed which, in her own estimation and that of her whole nation, entitled her to an immortal dwelling in the Elysian fields. The only feeling, therefore, that I can conceive as checking for a moment her exultation would be the natural womanly horror at the sight of blood and physical suffering, the expression of which seems to me not only natural to her, as of the "feminine gender, " but not altogether superfluous to reconcile an English audience to so unfeminine a proceeding as stabbing a man. To conciliate all this I adopted the course of immediately dropping the arm that held the dagger, and with the other veiling my eyes with the drapery of my dress, which answered better my own idea of the situation, and seemed to produce a great effect. My dearest H----, this is a long detail, but I think it will interest you and perhaps amuse your niece; if, however, it wearies your spirits, tell me so, and another time I will not confine my communications so much to my own little-corner of life. 

 Cecilia dined with us on Sunday, but was very far from well. I have not seen my aunt Siddons since Sir Thomas Lawrence's death. I almost dread doing so: she must have felt so much on hearing it; he was for many years so mixed up with those dearest to her, and his memory must always recall theirs. I hear Campbell means to write his life. His letters to me will perhaps be published in it. Had I known they were likely to be so used, I would have preserved them all. As it is, it is the merest chance that all of them are not destroyed; for, admirable as they were in point of taste and critical judgment, some of them seemed to me such mere specimens of refined flattery that, having extracted the advice likely to be profitable to me, I committed the epistles themselves to the flames, which probably would have been the ultimate destination of them all; but now they have acquired a sad value they had not before, and I shall keep them as relics of a man of great genius and, in many respects, I believe, a truly amiable person. 

 The drawing, which is, you know, my mother's property, is safe in Mr. Lane's hands, and will be restored to us on Saturday. The funeral takes place to-morrow; my father, I believe, will attend; neither my mother nor myself can muster courage to witness it, although we had places offered to us. It is to take place in St. Paul's, for Westminster Abbey is full. All the beautiful unfinished portraits which filled his rooms will be returned imperfect to their owners, and I wonder who will venture to complete them, for he has certainly not left his like behind him. Reports have been widely spread that his circumstances were much embarrassed, but I fancy when all his effects are sold there will be a small surplus. He behaved with the utmost liberality about his drawing of me, for he gave it to my mother, and would not accept of any remuneration for the copyright of the print from Mr. Lane--who, it is said, made three hundred pounds by the first impressions taken from it--saying that he had had so much pleasure in the work that he would not take a farthing for either time or trouble. 

 We are all tolerably well; I am quite so, and rejoice daily in that strength of constitution which, among other of my qualifications, entitles me to the appellation of "Shetland pony. "

 How are you all? How is E----? Tell her all about me, because it may amuse her. I wish you could have seen me, dear H----, in my Greek dress; I really look very well in it, and taller than usual, in consequence of all the long draperies; moreover, I "stood grandly" erect, and put off the "sidelong stoop" in favor of a more heroic and statue-like deportment. Oh, H----, I am exceedingly happy, _et pour peu de chose_, perhaps you will think: my father has given me leave to have riding lessons, so that I shall be in right earnest "an angel on horseback, " and when I come to Ardgillan (and it won't be long first) I shall make you mount upon a horse and gallop over the sand with me; won't you, my dear? Believe me ever your affectionate

 FANNY. 

The words in inverted commas at the end of this letter had reference tosome strictures Miss S---- had made upon my carriage, and to a familyjoke against me in consequence of my having once said, in speaking of mydesire to ride, that I should not care to be an angel in heaven unless Icould be an "angel on horseback. " My invariable description of a womanriding was "a happy woman, " and after much experience of unhappiness, certainly not dissipated by equestrian exercise, I still agree withWordsworth that "the horse and rider are a happy pair. " After acting theGrecian Daughter for some time I altered my attitude in the last scene, after the murder of Dionysius, more to my own satisfaction: instead ofdropping the arm that held the dagger by my side, I raised the weapon toheaven, as if appealing to the gods for justification and tenderingthem, as it were, the homage of my deed; of course I still continued tovail my eyes and turn my head away from the sight of my victim. 

 JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, Saturday, February 20th. DEAREST H----, I need hardly apologize to you for my long silence, for I am sure that you will have understood it to have proceeded from no want of inclination on my part to answer your last, but from really not having had half an hour at my command in which to do so. I have thought, too (although that has not prevented my writing), much upon the tenor of your letter, and the evident depression it was written in, and I hardly know how to resolve: whether I ought not to forbear wearying you with matters which every way are discordant with your own thoughts and feelings, or whether it is better, by inducing you to answer me, to give you some motive, however trifling, for exertion. Dearest H----, if the effort of writing to me is too painful to you, do not do it. I give you a most disinterested counsel, for I have told you more than once how much I prize your letters, and you know it is true. Still, I do not think my "wish is father to my thought" when I say that I think it is not good for you to lose entirely even such an interest as I am to you. I say "even such an interest, " because I believe your trouble must have rendered me and my pursuits, for the present at least, less likely than they have been to occupy a place in your thoughts. But 'tis for you to decide; if my letters weary or annoy you, tell me so, dear H----, and I will not write to you until you can "follow my paces" better. If you do not like to make the exertion of answering me, I will still continue to let you know my proceedings, and take it for granted that you will not cease to love me and think of me. Dear H----, I shall see you this summer again; you, and yours, whom I love for your sake. I shall go on with this letter, because if you are inclined for a gossip you can read it; and if not, it may perhaps amuse your invalid. I have been uncommonly gay, for me, this winter, and I dare say shall continue to be so, as it does not disagree with me, and I am so fond of dancing that a quadrille renders palatable what otherwise would be, I think, disagreeable enough--the manner in which society is now organized. I was at a very large party the other night, at the poet Campbell's, where every material for a delightful evening--good rooms, pretty women, clever men--was brought into requisition to make what, after all, appeared to me nothing but a wearisome, hot crowd. The apartments were overfilled: to converse with anybody for five minutes was impossible. If one stood up one was squeezed to death, and if one sat down one was stifled. I, too (who was the small lioness of the evening), was subjected to a most disagreeable ordeal, the whole night being stared at from head to foot by every one that could pass within staring distance of me. You probably will wonder at this circumstance distressing a young person who three times a week exhibits herself on the stage to several hundred people, but there I do not distinguish the individual eyes that are fixed on me, and my mind is diverted from the annoyances of my real situation by the distressful circumstances of my feigned one. Moreover, to add to my sorrows, at the beginning of the evening a lady spilled some coffee over a beautiful dress which I was wearing for the first time. Now I will tell you what consolations I had to support me under these trials; first, the self-approving consciousness of the smiling fortitude with which I bore my gown's disaster; secondly, a lovely nosegay, which was presented to me; and lastly, at about twelve o'clock, when the rooms were a little thinned, a dance for an hour which sent me home perfectly satisfied with my fate. By the bye, I asked Campbell if he knew any method to preserve my flowers from fading, to which he replied, "Give them to me, and I will immortalize them. " I did so, and am expecting some verses from him in return. 

 On Thursday next I come out in Mrs. Beverley; I am much afraid of it. The play wants the indispensable attribute of all works of art--imagination; it is a most touching story, and Mrs. Beverley is a most admirable creature, but the story is such as might be read in a newspaper, and her character has its like in many an English home. I think the author should have idealized both his incidents and his heroine a little, to produce a really fine play. Mrs. Beverley is not one shade inferior to Imogen in purity, in conjugal devotion, and in truth, but while the one is to all intents and purposes a model wife, a poet's touch has made of the other a divine image of all that is lovely and excellent in woman; and yet, certainly, Imogen is quite as _real_ a conception as Mrs. Beverley. The absence of the poetical element in the play prevents my being enthusiastic about my part, and I am the more nervous about it for that reason; when I am excited I feel that I can excite others, but in this case--However, we shall see; I may succeed with it better than I expect, and perhaps my audience may like to see me as a quiet, sober lady, after the Belvideras and Juliets and Euphrasias they have hitherto seen me represent. I will tell you my dress: it is a silver gray silk, and a white crape hat with drooping feathers. I think it will be very pretty. My father acts Beverley with me, which will be a great advantage to me. 

 Oh! I must tell you of a delightful adventure which befell me the other night while I was acting in "The Grecian Daughter. " Mr. Abbot, who personates my husband, Phocion, at a certain part of the play where we have to embrace, thought fit to clasp me so energetically in his arms that he threw me down, and fell down himself. I fell seated, with all my draperies in most modest order, which was very fortunate, but certainly I never was more frightened or confused. However, I soon recovered my presence of mind, and helped my better half on with his part, for he was quite aghast, poor man, at his own exploit, and I do believe would have been standing with his eyes and mouth wide open to this moment, if I had not managed to proceed with the scene somehow and anyhow. 

 I gave the commission for your print of me, dear H----, to Colnaghi, and I hope you will like it, and that the more you look at it the stronger the likeness will appear to you. Was my brother John returned from Germany, when last I wrote to you? I forget. However, he has just left us to take his degree at Cambridge, previous to being ordained. Henry, too, returned yesterday to Paris, so that the house is in mourning for its liveliest inmates. I continue quite well, and indeed I think my work agrees with me; or if I am a little tired with acting, why, a night's dancing soon sets me right again. T---- B---- is in town, and came to see me the other day. I like her; she is a gentle, nice person; she is going back in a week to Cassiobury. How I wish you and I had wings, and that Heath Farm belonged to us! It is coming to the time of year when we first became acquainted; and, besides all its associations of kindly feeling and affectionate friendship, your image is connected in my mind with all the pleasantest things in nature--the spring, May blossoms, glow-worms, "bright hill and bosky dell;" and it dates from somewhere "twixt the last violet and the earliest rose, " which is not a quotation, though I have put it in inverted commas, but something that just came to the tip of my pen and looks like poetry. I must leave off now, for I got leave to stay at home to-night to write to you instead of going to the opera, with many injunctions that I would go to bed early; so, now it is late, I must do so. Good-by, dearest H----; believe me ever

 Yours most affectionately, F. A. K. 

 P. S. --This is my summer tour--Bath, Edinburgh, Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham. I am Miss _Fanny_ Kemble, because Henry Kemble's daughter, my uncle Stephen's granddaughter, is Miss Kemble by right of birth. 

The lady who spoiled my pretty cream-colored poplin dress by spillingcoffee on the front of it, instantly, in the midst of her vehementself-upbraidings and humble apologies for her awkwardness, adopted avery singular method of appeasing my displeasure and soothing mydistress, by deliberately pouring a spoonful of coffee upon the frontbreadth of her own velvet gown. My amazement at this proceeding wasexcessive, and it neither calmed my wrath nor comforted my sorrow, butexasperated me with a sense of her extreme folly and her conviction ofmine. The perpetrator of this singular act of atonement was thebeautiful Julia, eldest daughter of the Adjutant-General, Sir JohnMacdonald, and the lady whom the Duke of Wellington pronounced thehandsomest woman in London; a verdict which appeared to me toofavorable, though she certainly was one of the handsomest women inLondon. An intimate acquaintance subsisted between her family and oursfor several years, and I was indebted to Sir John Macdonald'sassistance, most kindly exerted in my behalf, for the happiness ofgiving my youngest brother his commission in the army, which Sir Johnenabled me to purchase in his own regiment; and I was indebted to thegreat liberality of Mr. John Murray, the celebrated publisher, for themeans of thus providing for my brother Henry. The generous price(remuneration I dare not call it) which he gave me for my play of"Francis the First" obtained for me my brother's commission. 

 JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, March 9th. DEAREST H----, I have been so busy all this day, signing benefit tickets, that I hardly feel as if I could write anything but "25th March, F. A. K. " Our two last letters crossed on the road, and yours was so kind an answer to mine, which you had not yet received, that I feel no further scruple in breaking in upon you with the frivolity of my worldly occupations and proceedings. 

 I was sorry that the newspapers should give you the first account of my Mrs. Beverley, but my time is so taken up with "an infinite deal of nothing" that I have not had an hour to call my own till this evening, and this evening is my only unengaged one for nearly three weeks to come. 

 The papers will probably have set your mind at ease as to the result of my appearance in "The Gamester;" but although they have forestalled me in the sum total of the account, there are some small details which may perhaps interest you, of which they can give you no knowledge. I shall talk to you much of myself, dearest H----, and hope it will not weary you; that precious little self is just now so fully occupied with its own affairs that I have little else to talk of. [I probably also felt much as our kind and most comical friend Dessauer used, when he emphatically declared, "Mais, je m'interesse extrêmement à ce qui me regarde. "]

 I do not think I ever spent a more miserable day than the one in which I acted Mrs. Beverley for the first time. Stage nervousness, my father and mother both tell me, increases instead of diminishing with practice; and certainly, as far as my own limited experience goes, I find it so. The first hazard, I should say, was not half so fearful as the last; and though on the first night that I ever stood upon the stage I thought I never could be more frightened in my life, I find that with each new part my fear has augmented in proportion as previous success would have rendered it more damaging to fail. A stumble at starting would have been bad enough, and might have bruised me; but a fall from the height to which I have been raised might break my neck, or at any rate cripple me for life. I do not believe that to fail in a part would make me individually unhappy for a moment; but so much of real importance to others, so much of the most serious interests and so much of the feelings of those most dear to me, is involved in the continuance of my good fortune, that I am in every way justified in dreading a failure. These considerations, and their not unnatural result, a violent headache and side-ache, together with no very great liking for the part (interesting as it is, it is so perfectly prosaic), had made me so nervous that the whole of the day was spent in fits of crying; and when the curtain drew up, and I was "discovered, " I'm sure I must have looked as jaded and tear-worn as poor Mrs. Beverley ever did. However, all went well with me till the last act, when my father's acting and my own previous state of nervousness combined to make my part of the tragedy anything but feigning; I sobbed so violently that I could hardly articulate my words, and at the last fell upon the dead body of Beverley with a hysterical cry that had all the merit of pure nature, if none other, to recommend it. Fortunately the curtain fell then, and I was carried to my dressing-room to finish my fit in private. The last act of that play gives me such pains in my arms and legs, with sheer nervous distress, that I am ready to drop down with exhaustion at the end of it; and this reminds me of the very difficult question which you expect me to answer, respecting the species of power which is called into play in the act, so called, of _acting_. 

 I am the worst reasoner, analyzer, and metaphysician that ever was born; and therefore whatever I say on the subject can be worth very little, as a reply to your question, but may furnish you with some data for making a theory about it for yourself. 

 It appears to me that the two indispensable elements of fine acting are a certain amount of poetical imagination and a power of assumption, which is a good deal the rarer gift of the two; in addition to these, a sort of vigilant presence of mind is necessary, which constantly looks after and avoids or removes the petty obstacles that are perpetually destroying the imaginary illusion, and reminding one in one's own despite that one is not really Juliet or Belvidera. The curious part of acting, to me, is the sort of double process which the mind carries on at once, the combined operation of one's faculties, so to speak, in diametrically opposite directions; for instance, in that very last scene of Mrs. Beverley, while I was half dead with crying in the midst of the real grief, created by an entirely unreal cause, I perceived that my tears were falling like rain all over my silk dress, and spoiling it; and I calculated and measured most accurately the space that my father would require to fall in, and moved myself and my train accordingly in the midst of the anguish I was to feign, and absolutely did endure. It is this watchful faculty (perfectly prosaic and commonplace in its nature), which never deserts me while I am uttering all that exquisite passionate poetry in Juliet's balcony scene, while I feel as if my own soul was on my lips, and my color comes and goes with the intensity of the sentiment I am expressing; which prevents me from falling over my train, from setting fire to myself with the lamps placed close to me, from leaning upon my canvas balcony when I seem to throw myself all but over it. In short, while the whole person appears to be merely following the mind in producing the desired effect and illusion upon the spectator, both the intellect and the senses are constantly engrossed in guarding against the smallest accidents that might militate against it; and while representing things absolutely imaginary, they are taking accurate cognizance of every real surrounding object that can either assist or mar the result they seek to produce. This seems to me by far the most singular part of the process, which is altogether a very curious and complicated one. I am glad you got my print safe; it is a very beautiful thing (I mean the drawing), and I am glad to think that it is like me, though much flattered. I suppose it is like what those who love me have sometimes seen me, but to the majority of my acquaintance it must appear unwarrantably good-looking. The effect of it is much too large for me, but when my mother ventured to suggest this to Lawrence, he said that that was a peculiarity of his drawings, and that he thought persons familiar with his style would understand it. 

 My dearest H----, you express something of regret at my necessity (I can hardly call it choice) of a profession. There are many times when I myself cannot help wishing it might have been otherwise; but then come other thoughts: the talent which I possess for it was, I suppose, given to me for some good purpose, and to be used. Nevertheless, when I reflect that although hitherto my profession has not appeared to me attractive enough to engross my mind, yet that admiration and applause, and the excitement springing therefrom, may become necessary to me, I resolve not only to watch but to pray against such a result. I have no desire to sell my soul for anything, least of all for sham fame, mere notoriety. Besides, my mind has such far deeper enjoyment in other pursuits; the happiness of reading Shakespeare's heavenly imaginations is so far beyond all the excitement of acting them (white satin, gas lights, applause, and all), that I cannot conceive a time when having him in my hand will not compensate for the absence of any amount of public popularity. While I can sit obliviously curled up in an armchair, and read what he says till my eyes are full of delicious, quiet tears, and my heart of blessed, good, quiet thoughts and feelings, I shall not crave that which falls so far short of any real enjoyment, and hitherto certainly seems to me as remote as possible from any real happiness. 

 This enviable condition of body and mind was mine while studying Portia in "The Merchant of Venice, " which is to be given on the 25th for my benefit. I shall be much frightened, I know, but I delight in the part; indeed, Portia is my favoritest of all Shakespeare's women. She is so generous, affectionate, wise, so arch and full of fun, and such a true lady, that I think if I could but convey her to my audience as her creator has conveyed her to me, I could not fail to please them much. I think her speech to Bassanio, after his successful choice of the casket, the most lovely, tender, modest, dignified piece of true womanly feeling that was ever expressed by woman. 

 I certainly ought to act that character well, I do so delight in it; I know nothing of my dress. But perhaps I shall have some opportunity of writing to you again before it is acted. Now all I have to say must be packed close, for I ought to be going to bed, and I have no more paper. I have taken two riding lessons and like it much, though it makes my bones ache a little. I go out a great deal, and that I like very much whenever there is dancing, but not else. My own home spoils me for society; perhaps I ought not to say it, but after the sort of conversation I am used to the usual jargon of society seems poor stuff; but you know when I am dancing I am "o'er all the ills of life victorious. " John has taken his degree and will be back with us at Easter; Henry has left us for Paris; A---- is quite well, and almost more of a woman than I am; my father desires his love to you, to which I add mine to your eldest niece and your invalid, and remain ever your affectionately attached

 F. A. K. 

 BLACKHEATH. MY DEAREST H----, I was exceedingly glad to receive your letter. You ask me for my own criticism on my Portia; you know that I think I am able to do myself tolerably impartial justice, which may be a great mistake; but whether it is or not, I request you will believe the following account in preference to any other report, newspaper or letter, public or private, whatever. 

 In the first place, on my benefit night (my first appearance in the part) I was so excessively nervous about it, and so shaken with the tremendous uproar the audience made with their applause, that I consider that performance entirely out of the pale of criticism, and quite unworthy of it. I was _frightened_ FLAT to a degree I could hardly have believed possible after my previous experience. 

 I am happy to think that I improve in the part, and sincerely hope that I shall continue to do so for some time. The principal defect of my acting in it is that it wants point--brilliancy. I do not do the trial scene one bit better or worse than the most mediocre actress would, and although the comic scenes are called delightful by people whose last idea of comedy was borrowed from Miss C---- or Miss F----, my mother says (and I believe her) they are very _vapid_. The best thing I do in the play (and I think it is the best thing I do at all, except Juliet's balcony scene) is the scene of the caskets, with Bassanio, and this I think I do _well_. But the scene is of so comparatively subdued, quiet, and uneffective a nature that I think the occupants of the stage boxes and the first three rows of the pit must be the only part of the audience who know anything about my acting of that portion of the play. I like the part better than any I have yet played. I delight in the poetry, and my heart goes with every sentiment Portia utters. I have a real satisfaction in acting it, which is more than I can say for anything else I have yet had to do. Juliet, with the exception of the balcony scene, I act; but I feel as if I _were_ Portia--and how I wish I were! It is not a part that is generally much liked by actresses, or that excites much enthusiasm in the public; there are no violent situations with which to (what is called) "bring the house down. " Even the climax of the piece, the trial scene, I should call, as far as Portia is concerned, rather grand and impressive than strikingly or startlingly effective; and with the exception of that, the whole character is so delicate, so nicely blended, so true, and so free from all exaggeration, that it seems to me hardly fit for a theater, much less one of our immense houses, which require acting almost as _splashy_ and coarse in color and outline as the scene-painting of the stage is obliged to be. Covent Garden is too large a frame for that exquisite, harmonious piece of portrait painting. This is a long lecture, but I hope it will not be an uninteresting one to you; and now let me tell you something of my dresses, which cost my poor mother sad trouble, and were really beautiful. My first was an open skirt of the palest pink levantine, shot with white and the deepest rose-color (it was like a gown made of strawberries and cream), the folds of which, as the light fell upon them, produced the most beautiful shades of shifting hues possible. The under-dress was a very pale blue satin, brocaded with silver, of which my sleeves were likewise made; the fashion of the costume was copied from sundry pictures of Titian and Paul Veronese--the pointed body, cut square over the bosom and shoulders, with a full white muslin shirt drawn round my neck, and wide white sleeves within the large blue and silver brocade ones. _Comprenez-vous_ all this? My head was covered with diamonds (_not real_; I'm anxious for my character), and what delighted me much more was that I had jewels in the roses of my shoes. I think if I had been Portia I never would have worn any ornaments but two large diamonds in my shoe bows. You see, it shows a pretty good stock of diamonds and a careless superiority to such possessions to wear them on one's feet. Now pray don't laugh at me, I was so enchanted with my fine shoes! This was my first dress; the second was simply the doctor's black gown, with a curious little authentic black velvet hat, which was received with immense applause when I put it on; I could hardly keep my countenance at the effect my hat produced. My third dress, my own favorite, was made exactly like the first, the ample skirt gathered all round into the stomacher body; the material was white satin, trimmed with old point lace and Roman pearls, with a most beautiful crimson velvet hat, a perfect Rubens, with one sweeping white feather falling over it. .. . 

 We are spending our holiday of Passion week here for the sake of a little quiet and fresh air; we had intended going to Dover, but were prevented. You ask me after my mother: she is pretty well now, but her health is extremely uncertain, and her spirits, which are likewise very variable, have so much influence over it that her condition fluctuates constantly; she has been very well, though, for the last few days. London, I think, never agrees with her, and we have been racketing to such a degree that quiet had become not only desirable but necessary. Thank you for wishing me plenty of dancing. I have abundance of it, and like it extremely; but I fear I am very unreasonable about it, for my conscience smote me the other day when I came to consider that the night before, although my mother had stayed at a ball with me till three in the morning, I was by no means gracious in my obedience to her request that I should spare myself for my work. You see, dear H----, I am much the same as ever, still as foolishly fond of dancing, and still, I fear, almost as far from "begetting a temperance in all things" as when you and I wandered about Heath Farm together. 

 We met with a comical little adventure the other evening. We were wandering over the common, and encountered two gypsies. I always had desired to have my fortune told, so A---- and I each seized hold of a sibyl and listened to our fates. 

 After predicting to me all manner of good luck and two lovers, and foretelling that I should marry blue eyes (which I will not), the gypsy went up to my father, and began, "Pray, sir, let me tell your fortune: you have been much wronged, sir, kept out of your rights, sir, and what belonged to you, sir, --and that by them as you thought was your friends, sir. " My father turned away laughing, but my mother, with a face of amazed and amazing credulity, put her hand in her pocket, exclaiming, "I must give her something for that, though!" Isn't that delicious?

 Oh, H----! how hard it is to do right and be good! But to be sure, "if to do were as easy as to know what were good to be done, " etc. How I wish I could have an hour's talk with you! I have so much to say, and I have neither time nor paper to say it in; so I must leave off. 

 Good-by, God bless you; pray look forward to the pleasure of seeing me, and believe me ever

 Your affectionate F. A. K. 

The house where I used to visit at Lea, in the neighborhood ofBlackheath, was a girls' school, kept by ladies of the name of Grimani, in which my aunt Victoire Decamp was an assistant governess. Theseladies were descended from a noble Venetian family, of which theReverend Julian Young, their nephew, has given an account in hisextremely interesting and amusing memoir of his father; his mother, Julia Grimani, being the sister of my kind friends, the directresses ofthe Blackheath school. One of these, Bellina Grimani, a charming andattractive woman, who was at one time attached to the household of theill-fated and ill-conducted Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales, died young and single. The elder Miss Grimani married a Mr. H---- withina few years. Though I have never in the intervening fifty years met withthem, I have seen two ladies who were nieces of Miss Grimani, and pupilsin her school when I was a small visitor there. My principalrecollections connected with the place were the superior moralexcellence of one of these damsels, E---- B----, who was held up beforemy unworthy eyes as a model of school-girl virtue, at once to shame andencourage me; Bellina Grimani's sweet face and voice; some very finecedar trees on the lawn, and a picture in the drawing-room of Prosperowith his three-year-old Miranda in a boat in the midst of a raging sea, which work of art used to shake my childish bosom with a tragicalpassion of terror and pity, invariably ending in bitter tears. I wasmuch spoiled and very happy during my visits to Lea, and had a blissfulrecollection of the house, garden, and whole place that justified myregret in not being able, while staying at Blackheath fifteen yearsafter, to find or identify it. 

CHAPTER XIV. 

 JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, May 2d. MY DEAREST H----, I received your kind letter the other night (that is, morning) on my return from a ball, and read your reflections on dissipation with an attention heightened by the appropriate comment of a bad headache and abject weariness from top to toe with dancing. The way in which people _prosecute_ their pleasures in this good town of London is certainly amazing; and we are (perforce) models of moderation, compared with most of our acquaintance. I met at that very ball persons who had been to one and two parties previously, and were leaving that dance to hurry to another. Independently of the great fatigue of such a life, it seems to me so strange that when people are enjoying themselves to their hearts' content in one place, they cannot be satisfied to remain there until they wish to return home, but spend half the night in the streets, running from one house to another, working their horses to death, and wasting the precious time when they might be DANCING. You see my folly is not so great but that I have philosophy to spare for my neighbors. Let me tell you again, dear H----, how truly I rejoice in your niece's restored health. The spring, too, is the very time for such a resurrection, when every day and every hour, every cloud and every flower, offer inexhaustible matter for the capabilities of delight thus regained. Indeed, "the drops on the trees are the most beautiful of all!" [E---- T----'s exclamation during one of her first drives after the long imprisonment of her nervous malady. ] A wonderful feeling of renewed hope seems to fill the heart of all created things in the spring, and even here in this smoky town it finds its way to us, inclosed as we are by brick walls, dusty streets, and all things unlovely and unnatural! I stood yesterday in the little court behind our house, where two unhappy poplars and a sycamore tree were shaking their leaves as if in surprise at the acquisition and to make sure they had them, and looked up to the small bit of blue sky above them with pleasurable spring tears in my eyes. How I wish I were rich and could afford to be out of town now! I always dislike London, and this lovely weather gives me a sort of _mal du pays_ for the country. My dearest H----, you must not dream of leaving Ardgillan just when I am coming to see you; that would be indeed a disappointment. My father is not at home at this moment, but I shall ask him before I close this letter the exact time when we shall be in Dublin. I look forward with much pleasure to making my aunt Dall known to you. She is, I am happy to say, coming with me, for indeed she is in some sense my "all the world. " You have often heard me speak of her, but it is difficult for words to do justice to one whose whole life is an uninterrupted stream of usefulness, goodness, and patient devotion to others. I know but one term that, as the old writers say, "delivers" her fully, and though it is not unfrequently applied, I think she is the only person I know who really deserves it; she is _absolutely unselfish_. I am sure, dear H----, you will excuse this panegyric, though you do not know how well it is deserved; the proof of its being so is that there is not one of us but would say the same of aunt Dall. 

 My father's benefit took place last Wednesday, when I acted Isabella; the house was crowded, and the play very successful; I think I played it well, and I take credit to myself for so doing, for I dislike both play and part extremely. The worst thing I do in it is the soliloquy when I am about to stab Biron, and the best, my death. My dresses were very beautiful, and I am exceedingly glad the whole thing is over. I suppose it will be my last new part this season. I am reading with great pleasure a purified edition, just published, of the old English dramatists; the work, as far as my ignorance of the original plays will enable me to judge, seems very well executed, and I owe the editor many thanks for some happy hours spent with his book. I have just heard something which annoys me not a little: I am to prepare to act Mrs. Haller. I know very well that nobody was ever at liberty in this world to do what they liked and that only; but when I know with what task-like feeling I set about most of my work, I am both amused and provoked when people ask me if I do not delight in acting. I have not an idea what to do with that part; however, I must apply myself to it, and try; such mawkish sentiment, and such prosaic, commonplace language seem to me alike difficult to feel and to deliver. 

 My dear H----, I shall be in Ireland the whole month of July. I am coming first to Dublin, and shall afterward go to Cork. You really must not be away when I come, for if you are, I won't come, which is good Irish, isn't it? I do not feel as you do, at all, about the sea. Instead of depressing my spirits, it always raises them; it seems to me as if the vast power of the great element communicated itself to me. I feel _strong_, as I run by the side of the big waves, with something of their strength, and the same species of wild excitement which thunder and lightning produce in me always affects me by the sea-shore. I never saw the sea but once violently agitated, and then I was so well pleased with its appearance that I took a boat and went out into the bustle, singing with all my might, which was the only vent I could find for my high spirits; it is true that I returned in much humiliation, very seasick, after a short "triumph of Galatea" indeed. 

 You ask me in one of your last why I do not send you verses any more, as I used to do, and whether I still write any. So here I send you some which I improvised the other day in your honor, and which, written hurriedly as they were, will not, I think, stand the test of any very severe criticism:--

 Whene'er I recollect the happy time When you and I held converse sweet together, There come a thousand thoughts of sunny weather, Of early blossoms, and the young year's prime. Your memory lives for ever in my mind, With all the fragrant freshness of the spring, With odorous lime and silver hawthorn twined, And mossy rest and woodland wandering. There's not a thought of you but brings along Some sunny glimpse of river, field, and sky; Your voice sets words to the sweet blackbird's song, And many a snatch of wild old melody; And as I date it still our love arose 'Twixt the last violet and the earliest rose. 

 I never go anywhere without a book wherein I may scratch my valuable ideas, and therefore when we meet I will show you my present receptacle. I take great delight in writing, and write less incorrectly than I used to do. I have not time now to go on with this letter, and as I am anxious you should know when to expect us, I shall not defer it in the hope of making it more amusing, though I fear it is rather dull. But you will not mind that, and will believe me ever your affectionate

 FANNY KEMBLE. 

The arrangement of Massinger for the family library by my friend theReverend Alexander Dyce, the learned Shakespearean editor andcommentator, was my first introduction to that mine of dramatic wealthwhich enriched the literature of England in the reigns of Elizabeth andJames the First, and culminated in the genius of Shakespeare. It is bycomparison with them, his contemporaries, that we arrive at a justestimate of his supremacy. I was so enchanted with these plays ofMassinger's, but more especially with the one called "The Maid ofHonor, " that I never rested till I had obtained from the management itsrevival on the stage. The part of Camiola is the only one that I everselected for myself. "The Maid of Honor" succeeded on its firstrepresentation, but failed to attract audiences. Though less defectivethan most of the contemporaneous dramatic compositions, the play wasstill too deficient in interest to retain the favor of the public. Thecharacter of Camiola is extremely noble and striking, but that of herlover so unworthy of her that the interest she excites personally failsto inspire one with sympathy for her passion for him. The piece in thisrespect has a sort of moral incoherency, which appears to me, indeed, not an infrequent defect in the compositions of these great dramaticpre-Shakespearites. There is a want of psychical verisimilitude, adisjointed abruptness, in their conceptions, which, in spite of theirgrand treatment of separate characters and the striking force ofparticular passages, renders almost every one of their playsinharmonious as a whole, however fine and powerful in detached parts. Their selection of abnormal and detestable subjects is a distinctindication of intellectual weakness instead of vigor; supreme geniusalone perceives the beauty and dignity of human nature and human life intheir common conditions, and can bring to the surface of vulgar, every-day existence the hidden glory that lies beneath it. 

The strictures contained in these girlish letters on the various playsin which I was called to perform the heroines, of course partake of theuncompromising nature of all youthful verdicts. Hard, sharp, andshallow, they never went lower than the obvious surface of things, anddealt easily, after the undoubting youthful fashion, with a main result, without any misgiving as to conflicting causes or painful anxiety aboutcontradictory component parts. At the beginning of life, the ignorantmoral and intellectual standard alike have definite form and decidedcolor; time, as it goes on, dissolves the outline into vagueindistinctness, and reveals lights and shades so various andinnumerable, that toward the end of life criticism grows diffident, opinion difficult, and positive judgment almost impossible. 

My first London season was now drawing to an end, and preparations werebegun for a summer tour in the provinces. There had been some talk of mybeginning with Brighton, but for some reason or other this fell through. 

 BATH, May 31, 1830. MY DEAR H----, I have owed you an answer, and a most grateful one, for some time past, for your kindness in writing me so long a letter as your last; but when I assure you that, what with leave-taking, trying on dresses, making purchases, etc. , etc. , and all the preparations for our summer tour, this is the first moment in which I have been able to draw a long breath for the last month, I am sure you will forgive me, and believe, notwithstanding my long silence, that I was made very happy indeed by your letter. I bade Covent Garden and my dear London audience farewell on Friday last, when I acted Lady Townley for the first time. The house was crammed, and as the proprietors had fixed that night for a second benefit which they gave me, I was very glad that it was so. I was very nicely dressed, and to my own fancy acted well, though I dare say my performance was a little flat occasionally. But considering my own physical powers, and the immense size of the theatre, I do not think I should have done better on the whole by acting more broadly; though I suppose it would have been more effective, I should have had to sacrifice something of repose and refinement to make it so. I was very sorry to leave my London audience: they welcomed my first appearance; they knew the history of our shipwrecked fortunes, and though perhaps not one individual amongst them would go a mile out of his way to serve us, there exists in them, taken collectively, a kind feeling and respect for my father, and an indulgent good-will toward me, which I do not hope to find elsewhere. I like Bath very much; I have not been here since I was six years old, when I spent a year here in hopes of being _bettered_ by my aunt, Mrs. Twiss. A most forlorn hope it was. I suppose in human annals there never existed a more troublesome little brat than I was for the few years after my first appearance on this earthly stage. 

 This town reminds me a little of Edinburgh. How glad I shall be to see Edinburgh once more! I expect much pleasure, too, from the pleasure of my aunt Dall, who some years ago spent some very happy time in Edinburgh, and who loves it from association. And then, dear H----, I am looking forward to seeing you once more; I shall be with you somewhere in the beginning of June. I have had my first rehearsal here this morning, "Romeo and Juliet;" the theatre is much smaller than Covent Garden, which rather inconveniences me, as a novelty, but the audience will certainly benefit by it. My fellow-laborers amuse me a good deal; their versions of Shakespeare are very droll. I wonder what your Irish ones will be. I am fortunate in my Romeo, inasmuch as he is one of my cousins; he has the family voice and manner very strongly, and at any rate does not murder the text of Shakespeare. I have no more time to spare now, for I must get my tea and go to the theater. I must tell you, though, of an instance of provincial prudery (delicacy, I suppose I ought to call it) which edified us not a little at rehearsal this morning: the Mercutio, on seeing the nurse and Peter, called out, "A sail, a sail!" and terminated the speech in a significant whisper, which, being literally inaudible, my mother, who was with me on the stage, very innocently asked, "Oh, does the gentleman leave out the shirt and the smock?" upon which we were informed that "body linen" was not so much as to be hinted at before a truly refined Bath audience. How particular we are growing--_in word!_ I am much afraid my father will shock them with the speech of that scamp Mercutio in all its pristine purity and precision. Good-by, dear H----. Ever your affectionate

 F. A. K. 

 P. S. --My mother desires to be particularly remembered to you. I want to revive Massinger's "Maid of Honor;" I want to act Camiola. 

The necessity for carrying with us into the provinces a sufficientnumber of various parts, and especially of plays in which my father andmyself could fill the principal characters, and so be tolerablyindependent of incompetent coadjutors, was the reason of my coming outin the play of "The Provoked Husband, " before leaving London. Thepassage in this letter about Lady Townley sufficiently shows how bad myperformance of it must have been, and how absolutely in the dark I waswith regard to the real style in which the part should be played. Thefine lady of my day, with the unruffled insipidity of her _low_ spirits(high spirits never came near her) and the imperturbable composure ofher smooth insolence, was as unlike the rantipole, racketing high-bredwoman of fashion of Sir John Vanbrugh's play as the flimsy elegance ofmy silver-embroidered, rose-colored tulle dress was unlike the elaboratesplendor of her hooped and feathered and high-heeled, patched-and-powderedmagnificence, with its falling laces and standing brocades. The part ofLady Townley was not only beyond my powers, but has never been seen onthe English stage since the days of Mrs. Abington and Miss Farren, thelatter elegant and spirited actress being held by those who had seenboth less like the original great lady than her predecessor; while eventhe Théâtre Français, where consummate study and reverend tradition ofelder art still prevail, has lost more and more the secret of _la grandemanière_ in a gradual descent from the _grande dame_ of MademoiselleContat to the pretty, graceful _femme comme il faut_ of MademoisellePlessis; for even the exquisite Célimène of Mademoiselle Mars was but a"pale reflex" of Molière's brilliant coquette, as played by her greatinstructress, Contat. The truth is, that society no longer possesses orproduces that creature, and a good deal of reading, not of a usual oragreeable kind, would alone make one familiar enough with Lady Townleyand her like to enable an actress of the present day to represent herwith any verisimilitude. The absurd practice, too, of dressing all theserious characters of the piece in modern costume, and all the comicones in that of the time at which it was written, renders the wholeridiculously incoherent and manifestly impossible, and destroys it as apicture of the manners of any time; for even stripped of her hoop andpowder, and her more flagrant coarseness of speech, Lady Townley isstill as unlike, in manners, language, and deportment, any modern lady, as she is unlike the woman of fashion of Hogarth's time, whose costumeshe has discarded. 

The event fully justified my expectation of far less friendly audiencesout of London than those I had hitherto made my appeals to. None of thepersonal interest that was felt for me there existed elsewhere, and Ihad to encounter the usual opposition, always prepared to cavil, in theprovinces, at the metropolitan verdict of merit, as a mere exhibition ofindependent judgment; and to make good to the expectations of thecountry critics the highly laudatory reports of the London press, bywhich the provincial judges scorned to have a decision imposed uponthem. Not unnaturally, therefore, I found a much less fervid enthusiasmin my audiences--who were, I dare say, quite justified in theirdisappointment--and a far less eulogistic tone in the provincial presswith regard to my performances. Our houses, however, were always verycrowded, which was the essential point, and for my own part I was quitesatisfied with the notices and applause which were bestowed on me. Mycousin, John Mason, was the Romeo to whom I have referred in thisletter. He was my father's sister's son, and, like so many members ofour family, he and one of his brothers and his sister had made the stagetheir profession. He had some favorable physical qualifications for it:a rather striking face, handsome figure, good voice, and plenty of fireand energy; he was tolerably clever and well-informed, but withouteither imagination or refinement. My father, who thought there was themaking of a good actor in him, was extremely kind to him. 

 GLASGOW, MONDAY, June 28, 1830. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I believe that you will have felt too well convinced that I had not had a moment to spare, to be surprised at my not having sooner acknowledged your very kind letter; nothing but the incessant occupation of my time would so long have prevented me from doing so, but I embrace the opportunity which the king's death affords me of telling you how much obliged to you I was for writing to me, and writing as you did. I have little news to return you but what concerns myself, but I shall make no coquettish excuses about that, for I really believe 'tis the subject that will interest you most of any I could find. First, then, I am very well, rather tired, and sitting at an inn window, in a dull, dark, handsome square in Glasgow. My fortnight in Edinburgh is over, and a short fortnight it has been, what with rehearsals, riding, sitting for my bust, and acting. The few hurried glimpses I have caught of my friends have been like dreams, and now that I have parted from them, no more to meet them there certainly, the whole seems to me like mere bewilderment, and I repeat to myself in my thoughts, hardly believing it, that the next time that I visit Edinburgh I shall not find the dear companionship of my cousins nor the fond affection of Mrs. Henry Siddons. This will be a severe loss to me; Edinburgh will, I fear, be without its greatest charm, and it will remain to be proved whether these lovely scenes that I have so admired and delighted in owed all their incomparable fascination to their intrinsic beauty, or to that most pleasurable frame of mind I enjoyed at the same time, the consciousness of the kind regard of the excellent human beings among whom I lived. 

 You will naturally expect me to say something of my theatrical experiences in the modern Athens. Our houses have been very fine, our audiences (as is their national nature) very cold; but upon the whole I believe they were well pleased with us, notwithstanding the damping influence of the newspapers, which have one and all been unfavorable to me. The deathlike stillness of the audience, as it afforded me neither rest nor stimulus, distressed me a good deal; which, I think I need not tell you, the newspaper criticisms did not. I was surprised, in reading them, to find how very generally their strictures were confined to my external disadvantages, --my diminutive stature and defective features; and that these far-famed northern critics discussed these rather than what I should have expected them to bestow their consideration upon, the dramatic artist's conception of character, and his (or her) execution of that conception. But had their verdicts been still more severe, I have a sufficient consolation in two notes of Sir Walter Scott's, written to the editor of one of the papers, Ballantyne, his own particular friend, which the latter sent me, and where he bears such testimony to my exertions as I do not care to transcribe, for fear my cheeks should reflect a lasting blush on my paper, but which I keep as a treasure and shall certainly show you with pride and pleasure when we meet. 

 Among the delightful occurrences of last week, I must record our breakfasting with Walter Scott. I was wonderfully happy. To whom, since Shakespeare, does the reading world owe so many hours of perfect, peaceful pleasure, of blessed forgetfulness of all things miserable and mean in its daily life? The party was a small but interesting one: Sir Walter and his daughter Anne, his old friend Sir Adam Ferguson and Lady Ferguson, and Miss Ferrier, the authoress of "Marriage" and "Inheritance, " with both which capital books I hope, for your own sake, you are acquainted. Sir Walter was most delightful, and I even forgot all awful sense of his celebrity in his kind, cordial, and almost affectionate manner toward me. He is exceedingly like all the engravings, pictures, and busts of him with which one is familiar, and it seems strange that so varied and noble an intellect should be expressed in the features of a shrewd, kindly, but not otherwise striking countenance. He told me several things that interested me very much; among others, his being present at the time when, after much searching, the regalia of Scotland was found locked up in a room in Edinburgh Castle, where, as he said, the dust of centuries had accumulated upon it, and where the ashes of fires lit more than two hundred years before were still lying in the grate. He told me a story that made me cry, of a poor old lady upward of eighty years of age, who belonged to one of the great Jacobite families, --she was a Maxwell, --sending to him at the time the Scottish crown was found, to implore permission to see it but for one instant; which (although in every other case the same petition had been refused) was granted to her in consideration of her great age and the vital importance she seemed to attach to it. I never shall forget his describing her when first she saw it, appearing for a moment petrified at sight of it, and then tottering forward and falling down on her knees, and weeping and wailing over these poor remains of the royalty of her country as if it had been the dead body of her child. 

 Sir Adam Ferguson is a delightful person, whose quick, bustling manner forms a striking contrast to Walter Scott's quiet tone of voice and deliberate enunciation I have also made acquaintance with Jeffrey, who came and called upon us the other morning, and, I hear, like some of his fellow-townsmen, complains piteously that I am not prettier. Indeed, I am very sorry for it, and I heartily wish I were; but I did not think him handsome either, and I wonder why he is not handsomer? though I don't care so much about his want of beauty as he seems to do about mine. But I am running on at a tremendous rate, and quite forget that I have traveled upward of forty miles to-day, and that I promised my mother, whenever I could, to go to bed early. Good-by, my dear Mrs. Jameson. I hope you will be able to make out this scrawl, and to decipher that I am yours affectionately, F. A. KEMBLE. 

Of the proverbial frigidity of the Edinburgh public I had beenforewarned, and of its probably disheartening effect upon myself. Mrs. Harry Siddons had often told me of the intolerable sense of depressionwith which it affected Mrs. Siddons, who, she said, after some of hergrandest outbursts of passion, to which not a single expression ofapplause or sympathy had responded, exhausted and breathless with theeffort she had made, would pant out in despair, under her breath, "Stupid people, stupid people!" Stupid, however, they undoubtedly werenot, though, as undoubtedly, their want of excitability anddemonstrativeness diminished their own pleasure by communicating itselfto the great actress and partially paralyzing her powers. That thishabitual reserve sometimes gave way to very violent exhibitions ofenthusiasm, the more fervent from its general repression, there is nodoubt; and I think it was in Edinburgh that my friend, Mr. Harness, toldme the whole of the sleep-walking scene in "Macbeth" had once been sovehemently encored that my aunt was literally obliged to go over it asecond time, before the piece was allowed to proceed. 

Scott's opinion of my acting, which would, of course, have been veryvaluable to me, let it have been what it would, was written to hisfriend and editor (_eheu!_), Ballantyne, who was also the editor of oneof the principal Edinburgh papers, in which unfavorable criticisms of myperformances had appeared, and in opposition to which Sir Walter Scotttold him he was too hard upon me, and that for his part he had seennothing so good since Mrs. Siddons. This encouraging verdict wascourteously forwarded to me by Mr. Ballantyne himself, who said he wassure I would like to possess it. The first time I ever saw Walter Scott, my father and myself were riding slowly down Princes Street, up whichScott was walking; he stopped my father's horse, which was near thepavement, and desired to be introduced to me. Then followed a string ofcordial invitations which previous engagements and our work at thetheater forbade our accepting, all but the pressing one with which hewound up, that we would at least come and breakfast with him. The firstwords he addressed to me as I entered the room were, "You appear to be avery good horsewoman, which is a great merit in the eyes of an oldBorder-man. " Every _r_ in which sentence was rolled into a combinationof double _u_ and double _r_ by his Border burr, which made it memorableto me by this peculiarity of his pleasant speech. My previousacquaintance with Miss Ferrier's admirable novels would have made mevery glad of the opportunity of meeting her, and I should have thoughtSir Adam Ferguson delightfully entertaining, but that I could not bearto lose, while listening to any one else, a single word spoken by WalterScott. 

I never can forget, however, the description Sir Adam Ferguson gave meof a morning he had passed with Scott at Abbotsford, which at that timewas still unfinished, and, swarming with carpenters, painters, masons, and bricklayers, was surrounded with all the dirt and disorderlydiscomfort inseparable from the process of house-building. The room theysat in was in the roughest condition which admitted of their occupyingit, at all; the raw, new chimney smoked intolerably. Out-of-doors thewhole place was one chaos of bricks, mortar, scaffolding, tiles, andslates. A heavy mist shrouded the whole landscape of lovely Tweed side, and distilled in a cold, persistent, and dumb drizzle. Maida, thewell-beloved staghound, kept fidgeting in and out of the room, WalterScott every five minutes exclaiming, "Eh, Adam! the puir brute's justwearying to get out;" or, "Eh, Adam! the puir creature's just crying tocome in;" when Sir Adam would open the door to the raw, chilly air forthe wet, muddy hound's exit or entrance, while Scott, with his faceswollen with a grievous toothache, and one hand pressed hard to hischeek, with the other was writing the inimitably humorous openingchapters of "The Antiquary, " which he passed across the table, sheet bysheet, to his friend, saying, "Now, Adam, d'ye think that'll do?" Such apicture of mental triumph over outward circumstances has surely seldombeen surpassed: house-builders, smoky chimney, damp draughts, restless, dripping dog, and toothache form what our friend, Miss Masson, called a"concatenation of exteriorities" little favorable to literarycomposition of any sort; but considered as accompaniments or inspirationof that delightfully comical beginning of "The Antiquary, " they are allbut incredible. 

To my theatrical avocation I have been indebted for many socialpleasures and privileges; among others, for Sir Walter Scott's noticeand acquaintance; but among the things it has deprived me of was theopportunity of enjoying more of his honorable and delightfulintercourse. A visit to Abbotsford, urged upon us most kindly, is one ofthe lost opportunities of my life that I think of always with bitterregret. Sir Walter wanted us to go down and spend a week with him in thecountry, and our professional engagements rendered it impossible for usto do so; and there are few things in my whole life that I count greaterloss than the seven days I might have passed with that admirable geniusand excellent, kind man, and had to forego. I never saw Abbotsford untilafter its master had departed from all earthly dwelling-places. I wasstaying in the neighborhood, at the house of my friend, Mrs. M----, ofCarolside, and went thither with her and my youngest daughter. The housewas inhabited only by servants; and the housekeeper, whose charge it wasto show it, waited till a sufficient number of tourists and sight-seershad collected, and then drove us all together from room to room of thehouse in a body, calling back those who outstripped her, and the laggerswho would fain have fallen a few paces out of the sound of the drearyparrotry of her inventory of the contents of each apartment. There washis writing-table and chair, his dreadnaught suit and thick walkingshoes and staff there in the drawing-room; the table, fitted like ajeweler's counter, with a glass cover, protecting and exhibiting all theroyal and precious tokens of honor and admiration, in the shape oforders, boxes, miniatures, etc, bestowed on him by the most exaltedworshipers of his genius, hardly to be distinguished under the thickcoat of dust with which the glass was darkened. Poor Anne Scott'sportrait looked dolefully down on the strangers staring up at her, and, a glass door being open to the garden, Mrs. M---- and myself stepped outfor a moment to recover from the miserable impression of sadness anddesecration the whole thing produced on us; but the inexorable voice ofthe housekeeper peremptorily ordered us to return, as it would be, shesaid (and very truly), quite impossible for her to do her duty indescribing the "curiosities" of the house, if visitors took uponthemselves to stray about in every direction instead of keeping togetherand listening to what she was saying. How glad we were to escape fromthe sort of nightmare of the affair!

I returned there on another occasion, one of a large and merry party whohad obtained permission to picnic in the grounds, but who, deterred bythe threatening aspect of the skies from gypsying (as had originallybeen proposed) by the side of the Tweed, were allowed, by Sir AdamFerguson's interest with the housekeeper, to assemble round the table inthe dining-room of Abbotsford. Here, again, the past was so present withme as to destroy all enjoyment, and, thinking how I might have had thegreat good fortune to sit there with the man who had made the wholeplace illustrious, I felt ashamed and grieved at being there then, though my companions were all kind, merry, good-hearted people, bentupon their own and each other's enjoyment. Sir Adam Ferguson had grownvery old, and told no more the vivid anecdotes of former days; and tocomplete my mental discomfort, on the wall immediately opposite to mehung a strange picture of Mary Stuart's head, severed from the trunk andlying on a white cloth on a table, as one sees the head of John theBaptist in the charger, in pictures of Herodias's daughter. It was aghastly presentation of the guillotined head of a pretty but rathercommon-looking French woman--a fancy picture which it certainly wouldnot have been my fancy to have presiding over my dinner-table. 

Only once after this dreary party of pleasure did I return, many yearslater, to Abbotsford. I was alone, and the tourist season was over, andthe sad autumnal afternoon offering little prospect of my being joinedby other sight-seers, I prevailed with the housekeeper, who admitted me, to let me wander about the place, without entering the house; and Ispent a most melancholy hour in the garden and in pacing up and down theterrace overlooking the Tweed side. The place was no longer inhabited atall; my ringing at the gate had brought, after much delay, a servantfrom Mr. Hope's new residence, built at some distance from Scott'shouse, and from her I learned that the proprietor of Abbotsford hadwithdrawn to the house he had erected for himself, leaving the poet'sdwelling exclusively as a place of pilgrimage for travelers andstrangers, with not even a servant residing under its roof. The houseabandoned to curious wayfarers; the sons and daughters, the grandson andgranddaughter, every member of the founder's family dead; Mr. Hoperemarried to a lady of the house of Arundel, and living in asemi-monastic seclusion in a house walled off from the tourist-hauntedshrine of the great man whose memory alone was left to inhabit it, --allthese circumstances filled me with indescribable sadness as I paced upand down in the gloaming, and thought of the strange passion forfounding here a family of the old Border type which had obfuscated thekeen, clear brain of Walter Scott, made his wonderful gifts subservientto the most futile object of ambition, driven him to the verge ofdisgrace and bankruptcy, embittered the evening of his laborious andglorious career, and finally ended in this, --the utter extinction of thename he had illustrated and the family he had hoped to found. And whilehis noble works remain to make his memory ever loved and honored, this_Brummagem_ mediæval mansion, this mock feudal castle with its imitationbaronial hall (upon a diminutive scale) hung round with suits of armor, testifies to the utter perversity of good sense and good taste resultingfrom this one mental infirmity, this craving to be a Border chieftain ofthe sixteenth century instead of an Edinburgh lawyer of the nineteenth, and his preference for the distinction of a petty landholder to that ofthe foremost genius of his age. Mr. Combe, in speaking of this feudalinsanity of Scott and the piteous havoc it made of his life, told methat at one time he and Ballantyne, with whom he had entered intopartnership, were staving off imminent ruin by indorsing and acceptingeach other's bills, and carried on that process to the extremest vergecompatible with honesty. What a history of astounding success and utterfailure!

 GLASGOW, July 3, 1830. 

 You will, ere this, my dear Mrs. Jameson, have received my very tardy reply to your first kind letter. I got your second last night at the theater, just after I _had given away my jewels to Mr. Beverley_. I was much gratified by your profession of affection for me, for though I am not over-desirous of public admiration and approbation, I am anxious to secure the good-will of individuals whose intellect I admire, and on whose character I can with confidence rely. Your letter, however, made me uncomfortable in some respects; you seem unhappy and perplexed. I am sure you will believe me when I say that, without the remotest thought of intruding on the sacredness of private annoyances and distresses, I most sincerely sympathize in your uneasiness, whatever may be its cause, and earnestly pray that the cloud, which the two or three last times we met in London hung so heavily on your spirits, may pass away. It is not for me to say to you, "Patience, " my dear Mrs. Jameson; you have suffered too much to have neglected that only remedy of our afflictions, but I trust Heaven will make it an efficacious one to you, and erelong send you less need of it. I am glad you see my mother often, and very glad that to assist your recollection of me you find interest and amusement in discussing the fitting up of my room with her. Pray do not forget that the drawing you made of the rooms in James Street is mine, and that when you visit me in my new abode it will be pleasant to have that remembrance before us of a place where we have spent some hours very happily together. 

 What you say of Mrs. N---- only echoes my own thoughts of her. She is a splendid creature, nobly endowed every way; too nobly to become through mere frivolity and foolish vanity the mark of the malice and envy of such _things_ as she is surrounded by, and who will all eagerly embrace the opportunity of slandering one so immeasurably their superior in every respect. I do not know much of her, but I feel deeply interested in her; not precisely with the interest inspired by loving or even liking, but with that feeling of admiring solicitude with which one must regard a person so gifted, so tempted, and in such a position as hers. I am glad that lovely sister of hers is married, though matrimony in that world is not always the securest haven for a woman's virtue or happiness; it is sometimes in that society the reverse of an "honorable estate. "

 The poor king's death gave me a holiday on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and we eagerly embraced the opportunity its respite afforded us of visiting Loch Lomond and the entrance to Loch Long. As almost my first thought when we reached the lake was, "How can people attempt to describe such places?" I shall not terminate my letter with "smooth expanses of sapphire-tinted waves, " or "purple screens of heath-clad hills rising one above another into the cloudless sky. " A volume might be written on the mere color of the water, and give no idea of it, though you are the very person whose imagination, aided by all that you've seen, would best realize such a scene from description. It was heavenly, and we had such a perfect day! I prefer, however, the glimpse we had of Loch Long to what we saw of Loch Lomond. I brought away an appropriate nosegay from my trip, a white rose from Dumbarton, in memory of Mary Stuart, an oak branch from Loch Lomond, and a handful of heather, for which I fought with the bees on the rocky shore of Loch Long. 

 I like my Glasgow audience better than my Edinburgh one; they are not so cold. I look for a pleasant audience in your country, for which we set out to-morrow, I believe. My aunt desires to be remembered to you, and so does my father, and bids me add, in answer to your modest doubt, that you are a person to be always remembered with pleasure and esteem. I am glad you did not like my Bath miniature; indeed, it was not likely that you would. 

 Believe me always yours affectionately, F. A. K. 

During our summer tour my mother, who had remained in London, superintended the preparation of a new house, to which we removed on ourreturn to town. My brother Henry's schooling at Westminster was over, which had been the reason for our taking the house at Buckingham Gate, and, though it had proved a satisfactory residence in many respects, wewere glad to exchange it for the one to which we now went, which hadmany associations that made it agreeable to my father, having been myuncle John's home for many years, and connected with him in the memoryof my parents. It was the corner house of Great Russell Street andMontague Place, and, since we left it, has been included in the newcourt-yard of the British Museum (which was next door to it) and becomethe librarian's quarters, our friend Panizzi being its first occupantafterward. It was a good, comfortable, substantial house, the twopleasantest rooms of which, to me, were the small apartment on theground floor, lined with books from floor to ceiling, and my ownpeculiar lodging in the upper regions, which, thanks to my mother'skindness and taste, was as pretty a bower of elegant comfort as anyyoung spinster need have desired. There I chiefly spent my time, pursuing my favorite occupations, or in the society of my own especialfriends: my dear H---- S----, when she was in London; Mrs. Jameson, whooften climbed thither for an hour's pleasant discussion of her book onShakespeare; and a lady with whom I now formed a very close intimacy, which lasted till her death, my dear E---- F----. 

I had the misfortune to lose the water-color sketches which Mrs. Jamesonhad made of our two drawing-rooms in James Street, Buckingham Gate. Theywere very pretty and skillful specimens of a difficult kind of subject, and valuable as her work, no less than as tokens of her regard for me. The beautiful G---- S----, to whose marriage I have referred, had shenot been a sister of her sisters, would have been considered a wit; and, in spite of this, was the greatest beauty of her day. She alwaysreminded me of what an American once said in speaking of a countrywomanof his, that she was so lovely that when she came into the room she tookhis breath away. While I was in Bath I was asked by a young artist tosit for my miniature. His portrait had considerable merit as a piece ofdelicate, highly finished workmanship; it was taken in the part ofPortia, and engraved; but I think no one, without the label underneath, would have imagined in it even the intention of my portrait. Whether ornot the cause lay in my own dissimilar expressions and dissimilaraspects at different times, I do not know; but if a collection was madeof the likenesses that have been taken of me, to the number of nearlythirty, nobody would ever imagine that they were intended to representthe same person. Certainly, my Bath miniature produced a version of myface perfectly unfamiliar to myself and most of my friends who saw it. 

CHAPTER XV. 

 DUBLIN, ----. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I received your third kind letter yesterday morning, and have no more time to-day than will serve to inclose my answer to your second, which reached me and was replied to at Glasgow; owing to your not having given me your address, I had kept it thus long in my desk. You surely said nothing in that letter of yours that the kindest good feeling could take exception to, and therefore need hardly, I think, have been so anxious about its possible miscarriage. However, "Misery makes one acquainted with strange bed-fellows, " and I am afraid distrust is one of them. You will be glad, I know, to hear that I have been successful here, and perhaps amused to know that when your letter reached me yesterday, I was going, _en lionne_, to a great dinner-party at Lady Morgan's. You ask me for advice about your Shakespeare work, but advice is what I have no diploma for bestowing; and such suggestions as I might venture, were I sitting by your side with Shakespeare in my hand, and which might furnish pleasant matter of converse and discussion, are hardly solid enough for transmission by post. 

 I have been reading the "Tempest" all this afternoon, with eyes constantly dim with those delightful tears which are called up alike by the sublimity and harmony of nature, and the noblest creations of genius. I cannot imagine how you should ever feel discouraged in your work; it seems to me it must be its own perpetual stimulus and reward. Is not Miranda's exclamation, "O brave new world, that has such people in it!" on the first sight of the company of villainous men who ruined her and her father, with the royal old magician's comment, "'Tis new to thee!" exquisitely pathetic? I must go to my work; 'tis "The Gamester" to-night; I wish it were over. Good-by, my dear Mrs. Jameson. Thank you for your kind letters; I value them very much, and am your affectionate

 F. KEMBLE. 

 P. S. --I am very happy here, in the society of an admirable person who is as good as she is highly gifted, --a rare union, --and who, moreover, loves me well, which adds much, in my opinion, to her other merits. I mean my friend Miss S----. 

My only reminiscence connected with this dinner at Lady Morgan's is ofher kind and comical zeal to show me an Irish jig, performed _secundumartem_, when she found that I had never seen her national dance. Shejumped up, declaring nobody danced it as well as herself, and that Ishould see it immediately; and began running through the rooms, with agauze scarf that had fallen from her shoulders fluttering and trailingafter her, calling loudly for a certain young member of the viceregalstaff, who was among the guests invited to a large evening party afterthe dinner, to be her partner. But the gentleman had already departed(for it was late), and I might have gone to my grave unenlightened uponthe subject of jigs if I had not seen one performed, to greatperfection, by some gay young members of a family party, while I wasstaying at Worsley with my friends Lord and Lady Ellesmere, whosechildren and guests got up an impromptu ball on the occasion of LadyOctavia Grosvenor's birthday, in the course of which the Irish nationaldance was performed with great spirit, especially by Lord Mark Kerr andLady Blanche Egerton. It resembles a good deal the saltarello of theItalian peasants in rhythm and character; and a young Irishman, servantof some friends of mine, covered himself with glory by the manner inwhich he joined a party of Neapolitan tarantella dancers, merely by dintof his proficiency in his own native jig. A great many years after myfirst acquaintance with Lady Morgan in Dublin, she renewed ourintercourse by calling on me in London, where she was spending theseason, and where I was then living with my father, who had becomealmost entirely deaf and was suffering from a most painful complicationof maladies. My relations with the lively and amusing Irish authoressconsisted merely in an exchange of morning visits, during one of which, after talking to me with voluble enthusiasm of Cardinal Gonsalvi andLord Byron, whose portraits hung in her room, and who, she assured me, were her two pre-eminent heroes, she plied me with a breathless seriesof pressing invitations to breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, eveningparties, to meet everybody in London that I did and did not know, andupon my declining all these offers of hospitable entertainment (for Ihad at that time withdrawn myself entirely from society, and wentnowhere), she exclaimed, "But what in the world do you _do_ withyourself in the evening?" "Sit with my father, or remain alone, " said I. "Ah!" cried the society-loving little lady, with an exasperated Irishaccent, "come out of that _sphare_ of solitary self-sufficiency _ye_live in, do! Come to me!" Which objurgation certainly presented in amost ludicrous light my life of very sad seclusion, and sent us bothinto fits of laughter. 

I have alluded to a friendship which I formed soon after my appearanceon the stage with Miss E---- F----. She was the daughter of Mr. F----, for many years member for Tiverton. Miss F---- and I perpetuated a closeattachment already traditional between our families, her mother havingbeen Mrs. Siddons's dearest friend. Indeed, for many years of her life, Mrs. F---- seems to me to have postponed the claims even of her husbandand children upon her time and attention, to her absolute devotion toher celebrated idol. Mr. F---- was a dutiful member of the House ofCommons, and I suppose his boy was at school and his girl too young todemand her mother's constant care and superintendence, at the time whenshe literally gave up the whole of her existence to Mrs. Siddons duringthe London season, passing her days in her society and her evenings inher dressing-room at the theater, whenever Mrs. Siddons acted. MissF---- and myself could not dedicate ourselves with any such absoluteexclusiveness to each other. Neither of our mothers would have consentedto any such absorbing arrangement, for which a certain independence offamily ties would have been indispensable; but within the limits whichour circumstances allowed we were as devoted to each other as my auntSiddons and Mrs. F---- had been, and our intercourse was as full andfrequent as possible. E---- F---- was not pretty, but her face wasexpressive of both intelligence and sensibility; her figure wantedheight, but was slender and graceful; her head was too small forpowerful though not far keen and sagacious intellect, or for beauty. Thegeneral impression she produced was that of well-born and well-bredrefinement, and she was as eager, light, and rapid in her movements as agreyhound, of which elegant animal the whole character of her appearanceconstantly reminded me. 

Mr. F---- had a summer residence close to the picturesque town ofSouthampton, called Bannisters, the name of which charming place callsup the image of my friend swinging in her hammock under the fine treesof her lawn, or dexterously managing her boat on its tiny lake, andbrings back delightful hours and days spent in happy intercourse withher. Mr. F---- had himself planned the house, which was as peculiar asit was comfortable and elegant. A small vestibule, full of fine castsfrom the antique (among others a rare original one of the gloriousNeapolitan Psyche, given to his brother-in-law, Mr. William Hamilton, bythe King of Naples), formed the entrance. The oval drawing-room, paintedin fresco by Mr. F----, recalled by its Italian scenes their wanderingsin the south of Europe. In the adjoining room were some choice pictures, among others a fine copy of one of Titian's Venuses, and in thedining-room an equally good one of his Venus and Adonis. The place ofhonor, however, in this room was reserved for a life-size, full-lengthportrait of Mrs. Siddons, which Lawrence painted for Mrs. F---- andwhich is now in the National Gallery, --a production so little to mytaste both as picture and portrait that I used to wonder how Mrs. F---- could tolerate such a representation of her admirable friend. Theprincipal charm of Bannisters, however, was the garden and grounds, which, though of inconsiderable extent, were so skillfully andtastefully laid out, that their bounds were always invisible. The lawnand shrubberies were picturesquely irregular, and still retained somekindred, in their fine oaks and patches of heather, to the beautifulwild common which lay immediately beyond their precincts. A pretty pieceof ornamental water was set in flowering bushes and well-contrivedrockery, and in a more remote part of the grounds a little dark pondreflected wild-wood banks and fine overspreading elms and beeches. Thesmall park had some charming clumps and single trees, and there was atwilight walk of gigantic overarching laurels, of a growth that datedback to a time of considerable antiquity, when the place had been partof an ancient monastery. Above all, I delighted in my friend E----'sfavorite flower-garden, where her fine eye for color reveled in groupingthe softest, gayest, and richest masses of bloom, and where in a bay ofmossy turf, screened round with evergreens, the ancient vision of loveand immortality, the antique Cupid and Psyche, watched over thefragrant, flowery domain. 

Sweet Bannisters! to me for ever a refuge of consolation and sympathy inseasons of trial and sorrow, of unfailing kindly welcome and devotedconstant affection; haven of pleasant rest and calm repose whenever Iresorted to it! How sad was my last visit to that once lovely andbeloved place, now passed into the hands of strangers, deserted, divided, desecrated, where it was painful even to call up the image ofher whose home it once was! The last time I saw Bannisters the groundswere parceled out and let for grazing inclosures to various Southamptontownspeople. The house was turned into a boys' boarding-school, and, asI hurried away, the shouts and acclamations of a roaring game of cricketcame to me from the inclosure that had been E---- F----'s flower-garden;but though I was crying bitter tears the lads seemed very happy; thefashion of this world passeth away. 

Before leaving Dublin for Liverpool, I had the pleasure of visiting myfriend Miss S---- in her home, where I returned several times, and wasalways welcomed with cordial kindness. My last visit there took placeduring the Crimean war. My friend Mrs. T---- had become a widow, and hersecond son, now General T----, was with his regiment in the very frontof the danger, and also surrounded by the first deadly outbreak of thecholera, which swooped with such fatal fury upon our troops at theopening of the campaign. I can never forget the pathetic earnestness andsolemnity of the prayers read aloud by that poor mother for the safetyof our army, nor the accent with which she implored God's protectionupon those exposed to such imminent peril in the noble discharge oftheir duty. That son was preserved to that mother, having manfully donehis part in the face of the twofold death that threatened him. 

There was a slight circumstance attending Mrs. T----'s householddevotions that charmed me greatly, and that I have never seen repeatedanywhere else where I have assisted at family prayers. The servants, asthey left the hall, bowed and courtesied to their mistress, who returnedtheir salutation with a fine, old-fashioned courtesy, full of a sweet, kindly grace, that was delightful. This act of civility to herdependents was to me a perfect expression of Mrs. T----'s real antiquetoryism, as well as of her warm-hearted, motherly kindness of nature. 

Ardgillan Castle (I think by courtesy, for it was eminently, peaceful incharacter, in spite of the turret inhabited by my dear "moping owl, "H----) was finely situated on an eminence from which the sea, with thepicturesque fishing village of Skerries stretching into it on one side, and the Morne Mountains fading in purple distance beyond its blue waterson the other, formed a beautiful prospect. A pine wood on one side ofthe grounds led down to the foot of the grassy hill upon which the housestood, and to a charming wilderness called the Dell: a sylvan recessbehind the rocky margin of the sea, from which it was completelysheltered, whose hollow depth, carpeted with grass and curtained withvarious growth of trees, was the especial domain of my dear H----. Acrystal spring of water rose in this "bosky dell, " and answered with itstiny tinkle the muffled voice of the ocean breaking on the shore beyond. The place was perfectly lovely, and here we sat together and devised, asthe old word was, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and thingsabove heaven, and things below earth, and things quite beyond ourselves, till we were well-nigh beside ourselves; and it was not the fault of mymetaphysical friend, but of my utter inability to keep pace with hermental processes, if our argument did not include every point of thatwhich Milton has assigned to the forlorn disputants of his infernalregions. My departure from Dublin ended these happy hours ofcompanionship, and I exchanged that academe and my beloved Plato inpetticoats for my play-house work at Liverpool. The following letter wasin answer to one Mrs. Jameson wrote me upon the subject of a lady whomshe had recommended to my mother as a governess for my sister, who wasnow in her sixteenth year. 

 LIVERPOOL, August 16, 1830. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, Were it not that I have a great opinion both of your kindness and reasonableness, I should feel rather uncomfortable at the period which has elapsed since I ought to have written to you; but I am very sorry not to have been able sooner to reply to your last kind letter. I shall begin by answering that which interested me most in it, which you will easily believe was what regarded my dear A---- and the person into whose hands she is about to be committed. In proportion to the value of the gem is the dread one feels of the flaws and injuries it may receive in the process of cutting and polishing; and this, of course, not in this case alone, but that of every child who still is parent to the man (or woman). My mother said in one of her letters, "I have engaged a lady to be A----'s governess. " Of course the _have_ must make the expression of regret or anxiety undesirable, since both are unavailing. I hope it is the lady you spoke of in your letter to me, for I like very much the description you give of her, and in answer to the doubt you express as to whether _I_ could be pleased with a person wanting in superficial brilliancy and refinement of intellect, I can reply unequivocally _yes_. I could be well pleased with such a person for my own companion, if the absence of such qualities were atoned for by sound judgment and sterling principle; and I am certain that such a person is best calculated to undertake the task which she is to perform in our house with good effect. The defect of our home education is that from the mental tendencies of all of us, no less than from our whole mode of life, the more imaginative and refined intellectual qualities are fostered in us in preference to our reasoning powers. We have all excitable natures, and, whether in head or heart, that is a disadvantage. The unrestrained indulgence of feeling is as injurious to moral strength as the undue excess of fancy is to mental vigor. I think young people would always be the better for the influence of persons of strong sense, rather than strong sensibility, who, by fortifying their reason, correct any tendency to that morbid excitability which is so dangerous to happiness or usefulness. 

 I do not, of course, mean that one can eradicate any element of the original character--that I believe to be impossible; nor is direct opposition to natural tendencies of much use, for that is really cultivating qualities by resistance; but by encouraging other faculties, and by putting aside all that has a tendency to weaken and enervate, the mind will assume a robust and healthy tone, and the real feelings will acquire strength by being under reasonable control and by the suppression of factitious ones. A----'s education in point of accomplishments and general cultivation of taste and intellect is already fairly advanced; and the lady who is, I hope, now to be her companion and directress will be none the worse for wanting the merely ornamental branches of culture, provided she holds them at their due value, and neither _under_ nor _over_ estimates them because she is without them. I hope she is gentle and attractive in her manners, for it is essential that one should like as well as respect one's teachers; and should these qualities be added to the character you give of her, I am sure I should like her for a governess very much myself. You see by the room this subject has occupied in my letter how much it fills in my mind; human souls, minds, and bodies are precious and wonderful things, and to fit the whole creature for its proper aim here and hereafter, a solemn and arduous work. 

 Now to other matters. You reproach me very justly for my stupid oversight; I forgot to tell you which name appeared to me best for your book; the fact is, I flew off into ecstasies about the work itself, and gave you, I believe, a tirade about the "Tempest" instead of the opinion you asked. I agree with you that there is much in the name of a work; it is almost as desirable that a book should be well called as that it should be well written; a promising title-page is like an agreeable face, an inducement to further acquaintance, and an earnest of future pleasure. For myself, I prefer "Characters of Shakespeare's Women;" it is shorter, and I think will look better than the other in print. 

 I have been spending a few happy days, previous to my departure from Ireland, in a charming place and in the companionship of a person I love dearly. All my powers of enjoyment have been constantly occupied, and I have had a breathing-time of rest and real pleasure before I recommence my work. Such seasons are like angel's visits, but I suppose one ought to rejoice that they are allowed us at all, rather than complain of their brevity and infrequency. I am getting weary of wandering, and long to be once more settled at home. 

 What say you to this French revolution? Have not they made good use of their time, that in so few years from their last bloody national convulsion men's minds should so have advanced and expanded in France as to enable the people to overturn the government and change the whole course of public affairs with such comparative moderation and small loss of, life? I was still in Dublin when the news of the recent events in France reached us, and I never witnessed anything so like tipsiness as Lady Morgan's delight at it. I believe she wished herself a Frenchwoman with all her heart, and she declared she would go over as soon as her next work, which is in the hands of the publisher, was out. Were I a man, I should have been well pleased to have been in France some weeks ago; the rising of the nation against oppression and abuse, and the creating of a new and better state of things without any outbreak of popular excess, must have been a fine thing to see. But as a woman, incapable of mixing personally in such scenes, I would rather have the report of them at a distance than witness them as a mere inactive spectator; for though the loss of life has been comparatively small, considering the great end that has been achieved, it must be horrible to see bloodshed, even that of a single individual. I believe I am a great coward. I shall not close this to-night, but wait till to-morrow, to tell you how my first appearance here goes off. 

 TUESDAY, August 17th. 

 We had a very fine house indeed last night, and everything went off remarkably well. I had every reason to be satisfied with the audience, who, though proverbially a cold one, were exceedingly enthusiastic in their applause, which, I suppose, is the best indication that they were satisfied with me. Good-by, my dear Mrs. Jameson; believe me yours ever truly, F. A. K. 

The intention of engaging a governess for my sister was not carried out, and she was taken to Paris and placed under the charge of Mrs. Foster, wife of the chaplain of the British embassy, under whose care shepursued her general education, while with the tuition of the celebratedBordogni, the first singing-master of the day, she cultivated her finevoice and developed her musical genius. 

The French Revolution of 1830, which placed Louis Philippe of Orleans onthe throne, and sent Charles X. To end his days in an obscure corner ofGermany, was the first of four revolutions which I have lived towitness; and since then I have often thought of a lady who, during thenext political catastrophe, by which Louis Philippe was shaken out ofhis seat, showing Mrs. Grote the conveniences of a charming apartment ina central part of Paris, said, "Voici mon salon, voici ma salle àmanger, et voyez comme c'est commode! De cette fenêtre je vois mesrévolutions. " The younger Bourbon of the Orleans branch had learned partof the lesson of government (of which even the most intelligent of thatrace seem destined never to learn the whole) in democratic America anddemocratic Switzerland. Perhaps it was in these two essentially_bourgeois_ countries that he learned the only virtues thatdistinguished him as the _Roi Bourgeois, par excellence_. 

 HEATON PARK, September 18, 1830. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, Were it not that I should be ashamed to look you in the face when we meet, which I hope will now be soon, I should be much tempted to defer thanking you for your last kind letter until that period, for I am at this moment in the bustle of three departures. My mother arrived in Manchester this morning, whence my aunt Dall starts to-night for Buckinghamshire, and my father to-morrow morning at seven o'clock for London, and at eight my mother and myself start for Liverpool. I am most anxious to be there for the opening of the railroad, which takes place on Wednesday. I act in Manchester on Friday, and after that we shall spend some days with Lord and Lady W----, at their seat near there; and then I return to London to begin my winter campaign, when I hope to see you less oppressed with anxiety and vexation than you were when we parted there. And now, what shall I say to you? My life for the last three weeks has been so hurried and busy that, while I have matter for many long letters, I have hardly time for condensation; you know what Madame de Sévigné says, "Si j'avais eu plus de temps, je t'aurais écrit moins longuement. " I have been sight-seeing and acting for the last month, and the first occupation is really the more exhausting of the two. I will give you a _carte_, and when we meet you shall call upon me for a detail of any or all of its contents. 

 I have seen the fine, picturesque old town of Chester; I have seen Liverpool, its docks, its cemetery, its railway, on which I was flown away with by a steam-engine, at the rate of five and thirty miles an hour; I have seen Manchester, power-looms, spinning-jennies, cotton factories, etc. ; I have stayed at the pleasant modern mansion of Heaton; I have visited Hopwood Hall, built in the reign of Edward the First, and still retaining its carved old oaken chimneys and paneled chambers and latticed windows, and intricate ups and downs of internal architecture, to present use apparently as purposeless and inconvenient as if one was living in a cat's-cradle. I have seen a rush-bearing with its classical morris dance, executed in honor of some antique observance by the country folk of Lancashire, with whom this commemoration, but no knowledge of its original significance, remains. I have seen Birmingham, its button-making, pin-making, plating, stamping, etc. ; I have seen Aston Hall, an old house two miles from the town, and two hundred from everything in it, where Charles the First slept after the battle of Edge Hill, and whose fine old staircase still retains the marks of Cromwell's cannon, --which house, moreover, possesses an oaken gallery one hundred and odd feet long, hung with old portraits, one of the most delightful apartments imaginable. How I did sin in envy, and long for that nice room to walk up and down and dream and poetize in; but as I know of no earthly way of compassing this desirable acquisition but offering myself in exchange for it to its present possessor (who might not think well of the bargain), _il n'y faut plus penser_. Moreover, as the grapes are sour, I conclude that upon the whole it might not be an advantageous one for me. I am at this moment writing in a drawing-room full of people, at Heaton (Lord W----'s place), taking up my pen to talk to you and laying it down to talk to others. I must now, however, close my double and divided conversation, because I have not brains enough to play at two games at once. I am ever yours, very sincerely, F. A. K. 

While we were acting at Liverpool an experimental trip was proposed uponthe line of railway which was being constructed between Liverpool andManchester, the first mesh of that amazing iron net which now covers thewhole surface of England and all the civilized portions of the earth. The Liverpool merchants, whose far-sighted self-interest prompted themto wise liberality, had accepted the risk of George Stephenson'smagnificent experiment, which the committee of inquiry of the House ofCommons had rejected for the government. These men, of less intellectualculture than the Parliament members, had the adventurous imaginationproper to great speculators, which is the poetry of the counting-houseand wharf, and were better able to receive the enthusiastic infection ofthe great projector's sanguine hope that the Westminster committee. Theywere exultant and triumphant at the near completion of the work, though, of course, not without some misgivings as to the eventual success of thestupendous enterprise. My father knew several of the gentlemen mostdeeply interested in the undertaking, and Stephenson having proposed atrial trip as far as the fifteen-mile viaduct, they, with infinitekindness, invited him and permitted me to accompany them; allowing me, moreover, the place which I felt to be one of supreme honor, by the sideof Stephenson. All that wonderful history, as much more interesting thana romance as truth is stranger than fiction, which Mr. Smiles'sbiography of the projector has given in so attractive a form to theworld, I then heard from his own lips. He was a rather stern-featuredman, with a dark and deeply marked countenance; his speech was stronglyinflected with his native Northumbrian accent, but the fascination ofthat story told by himself, while his tame dragon flew panting along hisiron pathway with us, passed the first reading of the "Arabian Nights, "the incidents of which it almost seemed to recall. He was wonderfullycondescending and kind in answering all the questions of my eagerignorance, and I listened to him with eyes brimful of warm tears ofsympathy and enthusiasm, as he told me of all his alternations of hopeand fear, of his many trials and disappointments, related with finescorn how the "Parliament men" had badgered and baffled him with theirbook-knowledge, and how, when at last they thought they had smotheredthe irrepressible prophecy of his genius in the quaking depths ofChatmoss, he had exclaimed, "Did ye ever see a boat float on water? Iwill make my road float upon Chatmoss!" The well-read Parliament men(some of whom, perhaps, wished for no railways near their parks andpleasure-grounds) could not believe the miracle, but the shrewdLiverpool merchants, helped to their faith by a great vision of immensegain, did; and so the railroad was made, and I took this memorable rideby the side of its maker, and would not have exchanged the honor andpleasure of it for one of the shares in the speculation. 

 LIVERPOOL, August 26th. MY DEAR H----, A common sheet of paper is enough for love, but a foolscap extra can alone contain a railroad and my ecstasies. There was once a man, who was born at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who was a common coal-digger; this man had an immense constructiveness, which displayed itself in pulling his watch to pieces and putting it together again; in making a pair of shoes when he happened to be some days without occupation; finally--here there is a great gap in my story--it brought him in the capacity of an engineer before a committee of the House of Commons, with his head full of plans for constructing a railroad from Liverpool to Manchester. It so happened that to the quickest and most powerful perceptions and conceptions, to the most indefatigable industry and perseverance, and the most accurate knowledge of the phenomena of nature as they affect his peculiar labors, this man joined an utter want of the "gift of the gab;" he could no more explain to others what he meant to do and how he meant to do it, than he could fly; and therefore the members of the House of Commons, after saying, "There is rock to be excavated to a depth of more than sixty feet, there are embankments to be made nearly to the same height, there is a swamp of five miles in length to be traversed, in which if you drop an iron rod it sinks and disappears: how will you do all this?" and receiving no answer but a broad Northumbrian "I can't tell you how I'll do it, but I can tell you I _will_ do it, " dismissed Stephenson as a visionary. Having prevailed upon a company of Liverpool gentlemen to be less incredulous, and having raised funds for his great undertaking, in December of 1826 the first spade was struck into the ground. And now I will give you an account of my yesterday's excursion. A party of sixteen persons was ushered, into a large court-yard, where, under cover, stood several carriages of a peculiar construction, one of which was prepared for our reception. It was a long-bodied vehicle with seats placed across it, back to back; the one we were in had six of these benches, and was a sort of uncovered _char à banc_. The wheels were placed upon two iron bands, which formed the road, and to which they are fitted, being so constructed as to slide along without any danger of hitching or becoming displaced, on the same principle as a thing sliding on a concave groove. The carriage was set in motion by a mere push, and, having received, this impetus, rolled with us down an inclined plane into a tunnel, which forms the entrance to the railroad. This tunnel is four hundred yards long (I believe), and will be lighted by gas. At the end of it we emerged from darkness, and, the ground becoming level, we stopped. There is another tunnel parallel with this, only much wider and longer, for it extends from the place which we had now reached, and where the steam-carriages start, and which is quite out of Liverpool, the whole way under the town, to the docks. This tunnel is for wagons and other heavy carriages; and as the engines which are to draw the trains along the railroad do not enter these tunnels, there is a large building at this entrance which is to be inhabited by steam-engines of a stationary turn of mind, and different constitution from the traveling ones, which are to propel the trains through the tunnels to the terminus in the town, without going out of their houses themselves. The length of the tunnel parallel to the one we passed through is (I believe) two thousand two hundred yards. I wonder if you are understanding one word I am saying all this while! We were introduced to the little engine which was to drag us along the rails. She (for they make these curious little fire-horses all mares) consisted of a boiler, a stove, a small platform, a bench, and behind the bench a barrel containing enough water to prevent her being thirsty for fifteen miles, --the whole machine not bigger than a common fire-engine. She goes upon two wheels, which are her feet, and are moved by bright steel legs called pistons; these are propelled by steam, and in proportion as more steam is applied to the upper extremities (the hip-joints, I suppose) of these pistons, the faster they move the wheels; and when it is desirable to diminish the speed, the steam, which unless suffered to escape would burst the boiler, evaporates through a safety-valve into the air. The reins, bit, and bridle of this wonderful beast is a small steel handle, which applies or withdraws the steam from its legs or pistons, so that a child might manage it. The coals, which are its oats, were under the bench, and there was a small glass tube affixed to the boiler, with water in it, which indicates by its fullness or emptiness when the creature wants water, which is immediately conveyed to it from its reservoirs. There is a chimney to the stove, but as they burn coke there is none of the dreadful black smoke which accompanies the progress of a steam vessel. This snorting little animal, which I felt rather inclined to pat, was then harnessed to our carriage, and, Mr. Stephenson having taken me on the bench of the engine with him, we started at about ten miles an hour. The steam-horse being ill adapted for going up and down hill, the road was kept at a certain level, and appeared sometimes to sink below the surface of the earth, and sometimes to rise above it. Almost at starting it was cut through the solid rock, which formed a wall on either side of it, about sixty feet high. You can't imagine how strange it seemed to be journeying on thus, without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace, between these rocky walls, which are already clothed with moss and ferns and grasses; and when I reflected that these great masses of stone had been cut asunder to allow our passage thus far below the surface of the earth, I felt as if no fairy tale was ever half so wonderful as what I saw. Bridges were thrown from side to side across the top of these cliffs, and the people looking down upon us from them seemed like pigmies standing in the sky. I must be more concise, though, or I shall want room. We were to go only fifteen miles, that distance being sufficient to show the speed of the engine, and to take us on to the most beautiful and wonderful object on the road. After proceeding through this rocky defile, we presently found ourselves raised upon embankments ten or twelve feet high; we then came to a moss, or swamp, of considerable extent, on which no human foot could tread without sinking, and yet it bore the road which bore us. This had been the great stumbling-block in the minds of the committee of the House of Commons; but Mr. Stephenson has succeeded in overcoming it. A foundation of hurdles, or, as he called it, basket-work, was thrown over the morass, and the interstices were filled with moss and other elastic matter. Upon this the clay and soil were laid down, and the road does float, for we passed over it at the rate of five and twenty miles an hour, and saw the stagnant swamp water trembling on the surface of the soil on either side of us. I hope you understand me. The embankment had gradually been rising higher and higher, and in one place, where the soil was not settled enough to form banks, Stephenson had constructed artificial ones of wood-work, over which the mounds of earth were heaped, for he said that though the wood-work would rot, before it did so the banks of earth which covered it would have been sufficiently consolidated to support the road. 

 We had now come fifteen miles, and stopped where the road traversed a wide and deep valley. Stephenson made me alight and led me down to the bottom of this ravine, over which, in order to keep his road level, he has thrown a magnificent viaduct of nine arches, the middle one of which is seventy feet high, through which we saw the whole of this beautiful little valley. It was lovely and wonderful beyond all words. He here told me many curious things respecting this ravine: how he believed the Mersey had once rolled through it; how the soil had proved so unfavorable for the foundation of his bridge that it was built upon piles, which had been driven into the earth to an enormous depth; how, while digging for a foundation, he had come to a tree bedded in the earth fourteen feet below the surface of the ground; how tides are caused, and how another flood might be caused; all of which I have remembered and noted down at much greater length than I can enter upon it here. He explained to me the whole construction of the steam-engine, and said he could soon make a famous engineer of me, which, considering the wonderful things he has achieved, I dare not say is impossible. His way of explaining himself is peculiar, but very striking, and I understood, without difficulty, all that he said to me. We then rejoined the rest of the party, and the engine having received its supply of water, the carriage was placed behind it, for it cannot turn, and was set off at its utmost speed, thirty-five miles an hour, swifter than a bird flies (for they tried the experiment with a snipe). You cannot conceive what that sensation of cutting the air was; the motion is as smooth as possible, too. I could either have read or written; and as it was, I stood up, and with my bonnet off "drank the air before me. " The wind, which was strong, or perhaps the force of our own thrusting against it, absolutely weighed my eyelids down. [I remember a similar experience to this, the first time I attempted to go behind the sheet of the cataract of Niagara; the wind coming from beneath the waterfall met me with such direct force that it literally bore down my eyelids, and I had to put off the attempt of penetrating behind the curtain of foam till another day, when that peculiar accident; was less directly hostile to me in its conditions. ] When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description; yet, strange as it was, I had a perfect sense of security, and not the slightest fear. At one time, to exhibit the power of the engine, having met another steam-carriage which was unsupplied with water, Mr. Stephenson caused it to be fastened in front of ours; moreover, a wagon laden with timber was also chained to us, and thus propelling the idle steam-engine, and dragging the loaded wagon which was beside it, and our own carriage full of people behind, this brave little she-dragon of ours flew on. Farther on she met three carts, which, being fastened in front of her, she pushed on before her without the slightest delay or difficulty; when I add that this pretty little creature can run with equal facility either backward or forward, I believe I have given you an account of all her capacities. 

 Now for a word or two about the master of all these marvels, with whom I am most horribly in love. He is a man of from fifty to fifty-five years of age; his face is fine, though careworn, and bears an expression of deep thoughtfulness; his mode of explaining his ideas is peculiar and very original, striking, and forcible; and although his accent indicates strongly his north-country birth, his language has not the slightest touch of vulgarity or coarseness. He has certainly turned my head. 

 Four years have sufficed to bring this great undertaking to an end. The railroad will be opened upon the 15th of next month. The Duke of Wellington is coming down to be present on the occasion, and, I suppose, what with the thousands of spectators and the novelty of the spectacle, there will never have been a scene of more striking interest. The whole cost of the work (including the engines and carriages) will have been eight hundred and thirty thousand pounds; and it is already worth double that sum. The directors have kindly offered us three places for the opening, which is a great favor, for people are bidding almost anything for a place, I understand; but I fear we shall be obliged to decline them, as my father is most anxious to take Henry over to Heidelberg before our season of work in London begins, which will take place on the first of October. I think there is every probability of our having a very prosperous season. London will be particularly gay this winter, and the king and queen, it is said, are fond of dramatic entertainments, so that I hope we shall get on well. You will be glad to hear that our houses here have been very fine, and that to-night, Friday, which was my benefit, the theater was crowded in every corner. We do not play here any more, but on Monday we open at Manchester. You will, I know, be happy to hear that, by way of answer to the letter I told you I had written my mother, I received a very delightful one from my dear little sister, the first I have had from her since I left London. She is a little jewel, and it will be a sin if she is marred in the cutting and polishing, or if she is set in tawdry French pinchbeck, instead of fine, strong, sterling gold. I am sorry to say that the lady Mrs. Jameson recommended as her governess has not been thought sufficiently accomplished to undertake the charge. I regret this the more, as in a letter I have just received from Mrs. Jameson she speaks with more detail of this lady's qualifications, which seem to me peculiarly adapted to have a good effect upon such a mind and character as A----'s. 

 I wish I had been with your girls at their ball, and come back from it and found you holding communion with the skies. My dearest H----, sublime and sweet and holy as are the feelings with which I look up to the star-paved heavens, or to the glorious summer sun, or listen to the music of the great waves, I do not for an instant mistake the adoration of the almighty power manifested in these works of God, for religion. You tell me to beware of mixing up emotional or imaginative excitement with my devotion. And I think I can truly answer that I do not do so. I told you that the cathedral service was not prayer to me; nor do I ever confound a mere emotional or imaginative enthusiasm, even when excited by the highest of all objects of contemplation, with the daily and hourly endeavor after righteousness--the humble trust, resignation, obedience, and thankfulness, which I believe constitute the vital part of religious faith. I humbly hope I keep the sacred ground of my religion clear from whatever does not belong to the spirit of its practice. As long as I can remember, I have endeavored to guard against mistaking emotion for religion, and have even sometimes been apprehensive lest the admiration I felt for certain passages in the Psalms and the Hebrew prophets should make me forget the more solemn and sacred purposes of the book of life, and the glad tidings of our salvation. And though, when I look up as you did at the worlds with which our midnight sky is studded, I feel inclined to break out, "The heavens declare the glory of God, " or, when I stand upon the shore, can hardly refrain from crying aloud, "The sea is His, and He made it, " I do not in these moments of sublime emotion forget that He is the God to whom all hearts be open; who, from the moment I rise until I lie down to rest, witnesses my every thought and feeling; to whom I look for support against the evil of my own nature and the temptations which He allots me, who bestows every blessing and inspires every good impulse, who will strengthen me for every duty and trial: my Father, in whom I live and move and have my being. I do not fear that my imagination will become over-excited with thoughts such as these, but I often regret most bitterly that my heart is not more deeply touched by them. Your definition of the love of God seemed almost like a reproach to my conscience. How miserably our practice halts behind our knowledge of good, even when tried at the bar of our own lenient judgment, and by our imperfect standard of right! how poorly does our life answer to our profession! I should speak in the singular, for I am only uttering my own self-condemnation. But as the excellence we adore surpasses our comprehension, so does the mercy, and in that lies our only trust and confidence. 

 I fear Miss W---- either has not received my letter or does not mean to answer it, for I have received no reply, and I dare not try again. Up to a certain point I am impudent enough, but not beyond that. Why do you threaten me with dancing to me? Have I lately given you cause to think I deserve to have such a punishment hung _in terrorem_ over me? Besides, threatening me is injudicious, for it rouses a spirit of resistance in me not easy to break down. I assure you _o_ [in allusion to my mispronunciation of that vowel] is really greatly improved. I take much pains with it, as also with my deportment; they will, I hope, no longer annoy you when next we meet. You must not call Mrs. J---- my friend, for I do not. I like her much, and I see a great deal to esteem and admire in her, but I do not _yet_ call her my friend. You are my friend, and Mrs. Harry Siddons is my friend, and you are the only persons I call by that name. I have read "Paul Clifford, " according to your desire, and like it very much; it is written with a good purpose, and very powerfully. You asked me if I believed such selfishness as Brandon's to be natural, and I said yes, not having read the book, but merely from your report of him; and, having read the book, I say so still. 

CHAPTER XVI. 

 DUBLIN, August, 1830. MY DEAR H----, I should have answered your letter sooner had I before been able to give you any certain intelligence of our theatrical proceedings next week, but I was so afraid of some change taking place in the list of the plays that I resolved not to write until alteration was impossible. The plays for next week are, on Monday, "Venice Preserved;" on Wednesday, "The Grecian Daughter;" Thursday, "The Merchant of Venice. " I wish your people may be able to come up, the latter end of the week; I think "Romeo and Juliet, " and "The Merchant of Venice, " are nice plays for them to see. But you have, I know, an invitation from Mrs. J---- to come into town on Monday. I do not know whether my wishes have at all influenced her in this, but she has my very best thanks for it, and I know that they will have some weight with you in inclining you to accept it; do, my dearest H----, come if you can. I shall certainly not be able to return to Ardgillan, and so my only chance of seeing you depends upon your coming into Dublin. I wish I had been with you when you sat in the sun and listened to the wind singing over the sea. I have a great admiration for the wind, not so much for its purifying influences only, as for its invisible power, strength, the quality above all others without which there is neither moral nor mental greatness possible. Natural objects endowed with this invisible power please me best, as human beings who possess it attract me most; and my preference for it over other elements of character is because I think it communicates itself, and that while in contact with it one feels as if it were _catching_; and whether by the shore, when the tide is coming up fast and irresistible, or in the books or intercourse of other minds, it seems to rouse corresponding activity and energy in one's self, persuading one, for the time being, that one is strong. I am sure I have felt taller by three inches, as well as three times more vigorous in body and mind, than I really am, when running by the sea. It seemed as if that great mass of waters, as it rushed and roared by my side, was communicating power directly to my mind as well as my bodily frame, by its companionship. I wish I was on the shore now with you. It is surprising (talking of E----) how instantaneously, and by what subtle, indescribable means, certain qualities of individual natures make themselves felt--refinement, imagination, poetical sensibility. People's voices, looks, and gestures betray these so unconsciously; and I think more by the manner, a great deal, than the matter of their speech. Refinement, particularly, is a wonderfully subtle, penetrating element; nothing is so positive in its effect, and nothing so completely escapes analysis and defies description. 

 I am glad dear little H---- thought I "grew pretty;" there is a world of discrimination in that sentence of his. To your charge that I should cultivate my judgment in preference to my imagination, I can only answer, "I am ready and willing to do so;" but it is nevertheless not altogether easy for me to do it. My life in London leaves me neither time nor opportunity for any self-culture, and it seems to me as if my best faculties were lying fallow, while a comparatively unimportant talent, and my physical powers, were being taxed to the uttermost. The profession I have embraced is supposed to stimulate powerfully the imagination. I do not find it so; it appeals to mine in a slight degree compared with other pursuits; it is too definite in its object and too confined in its scope to excite my imagination strongly; and, moreover, it carries with it the antidote of its own excitement in the necessary conditions under which it is exercised. Were it possible to act with one's mind alone, the case might be different; but the body is so indispensable, unluckily, to the execution of one's most poetical conceptions on the stage, that the imaginative powers are under very severe though imperceptible restraint. Acting seems to me rather like dancing hornpipes in fetters. And, by no means the least difficult part of the business is to preserve one's own feelings warm, and one's imagination excited, while one is aiming entirely at producing effects upon others; surrounded, moreover, as one is, by objects which, while they heighten the illusion to the distant spectator, all but destroy it to us of the _dramatis personæ_. None of this, however, lessens the value and importance of your advice, or my own conviction that "mental bracing" is good for me. My reception on Monday was quite overpowering, and I was escorted back to the hotel, after the play, by a body-guard of about two hundred men, shouting and hurrahing like mad; strange to say, they were people of perfectly respectable appearance. My father was not with us, and they opened the carriage door and let down the steps, when we got home, and helped us out, clapping, and showering the most fervent expressions of good-will upon me and aunt Dall, whom they took for my mother. One young man exclaimed pathetically, "Oh, I hope ye're not too much fatigued, Miss Kemble, by your exertions!" They formed a line on each side of me, and several of them dropped on their knees to look under my bonnet, as I ran laughing, with my head down, from the carriage to the house. I was greatly confused and a little frightened, as well as amused and gratified, by their cordial demonstration. 

 The humors of a Dublin audience, much as I had heard of them before going to Ireland, surprised and diverted me very much. The second night of our acting there, as we were leaving the theater by the private entrance, we found the carriage surrounded by a crowd eagerly waiting for our coming out. As soon as my father appeared, there was a shout of "Three cheers for Misther Char-_les!_" then came Dall, and "Three cheers for Misthriss Char-_les!_" then I, and "Three cheers for Miss Fanny!" "Bedad, she looks well by gas-light!" exclaimed one of my admirers. "Och, and bedad, she looks well by daylight too!" retorted another, though what his opportunity for forming that flattering opinion of the genuineness of my good looks had been, I cannot imagine. What further remarks passed upon us I do not know, as we drove off laughing, and left our friends still vociferously cheering. My father told us one day of his being followed up Sackville Street by two beggar-women, between whom the following dialogue passed, evidently with a view to his edification: "Och, but he's an iligant man, is Misther Char-_les_ Kemble!" "An' 'deed, so was his brudher Misther John, thin--a moighty foine man! and to see his _demanour_, puttin' his hand in his pocket and givin' me sixpence, bate all the worrld!" When I was acting Lady Townley, in the scene where her husband complains of her late hours and she insolently retorts, "I won't come home till four, to-morrow morning, " and receives the startling reply with which Lord Townley leaves her, "Then, madam, you shall never come home again, " I was apt to stand for a moment aghast at this threat; and one night during this pause of breathless dismay, one of my gallery auditors, thinking, I suppose, that I was wanting in proper spirit not to make some rejoinder, exclaimed, "Now thin, Fanny!" which very nearly upset the gravity produced by my father's impressive exit, both in me and in the audience. 

 DUBLIN, Friday, August 6, 1830. MY DEAREST H----, I fear I caused you a disappointment by not writing to you yesterday afternoon, but as it was not until between five and six o'clock that I learned we were not going to Cork, when I thought of writing you to that effect I found I was too late for the post. I hope still that Dall and I may be able to come to Ardgillan again, but we cannot leave my father alone here, and his departure for Liverpool is at present quite uncertain. I have been trying to reason myself into patience, notwithstanding a very childish inclination to cry about it, which I think I will indulge because I shall be able to be so much more reasonable without this stupid lump in my throat. 

 I hope I may see you again, dear H----. You are wrong when you say you cannot be of service to me; I can judge better of the value of your intercourse to me than you can, and I wish I could have the advantage of more of it before I plunge back into "toil and trouble. " I have two very opposite feelings about my present avocation: utter dislike to it and everything, connected with it, and an upbraiding sense of ingratitude when I reflect how prosperous and smooth my entrance upon my career has been. I hope, ere long, to be able to remember habitually what only occasionally occurs to me now, as a comfort and support, that since it was right for me to embrace this profession, it is incumbent upon me to banish all selfish regrets about the surrender of my personal tastes and feelings, which must be sacrificed to real and useful results for myself and others. You see, I write as I talk, still about myself; and I am sometimes afraid that my very desire to improve keeps me occupied too much about myself and will make a little moral egotist of me. I am going to bid good-by to Miss W---- this morning; I should like her to like me; I believe I should value her friendship as I ought. Good friends are like the shrubs and trees that grow on a steep ascent: while we toil up, and our eyes are fixed on the summit, we unconsciously grasp and lean upon them for support and assistance on our way. God bless you, dear H----. I hope to be with you soon, but cannot say at present how soon that may be. 

 F. A. K. 

A very delightful short visit to my friend at Ardgillan preceded myresuming my theatrical work at Liverpool, whence I wrote her thefollowing letter:

 LIVERPOOL August 19, 1830. DEAR H----, I received your letter about an hour ago, at rehearsal, and though I read it with rather dim eyes, I managed to swallow my tears, and go on with Mrs. Beverley. 

 The depth and solemnity of your feelings, my dear H----, on those important subjects of which we have so often spoken together, almost make me fear, sometimes, that I am not so much impressed as I ought to be with their _awfulness_. I humbly hope I _fear_ as I ought, but it is so much easier for me to love than to fear, that my nature instinctively fastens on those aspects of religion which inspire confidence and impart support, rather than those which impress with dread. I was thinking the other day how constantly in all our prayers the loftiest titles of might are added to that Name of names, "Our Father, " and yet His power is always less present to my mind than His mercy and love. You tell me I do not know you, and that may very well be, for one really _knows_ no one; and when I reflect upon and attempt to analyze the various processes of my own rather shallow mind, and find them incomprehensible, I am only surprised that there should be so much mutual affection in a world where mutual knowledge and understanding are really impossible. 

 My side-ache was much better yesterday. I believe it was caused by the pain of leaving you and Ardgillan: any strong emotion causes it, and I remember when I last left Edinburgh having an attack of it that brought on erysipelas. You say you wish to know how Juliet does. Why, very well, poor thing. She had a very fine first house indeed, and her success has been as great as you could wish it; out of our ten nights' engagement, "Romeo and Juliet" is to be given four times; it has already been acted three successive nights to very great houses. To-night it is "The Gamester, " to-morrow "Venice Preserved, " and on Saturday we act at Manchester, and on Monday here again. You will hardly imagine how irksome it was to me to be once more in my stage-trappings, and in the glare of the theater instead of the blessed sunshine in the country, and to hear the murmur of congregated human beings instead of that sound of many waters, that wonderful sea-song, that is to me like the voice of a dear friend. I made a great effort to conquer this feeling of repugnance to my work, and thought of my dear Mrs. Harry, whom I have seen, with a heart and mind torn with anxiety, leave poor Lizzy on what seemed almost a death-bed, to go and do her duty at the theater. That was something like a trial. There was a poor old lady, of more than seventy years of age, who acted as my nurse, who helped also to rouse me from my selfish morbidness--age and infirmity laboring in the same path with rather more cause for weariness and disgust than I have. She may have been working, too, only for herself, while I am the means of helping my own dear people, and many others; she toils on, unnoticed and neglected, while my exertions are stimulated and rewarded by success and the approval of every one about me. And yet my task is sadly distasteful to me; it seems such useless work that but for its very useful pecuniary results I think I would rather make shoes. You tell me of the comfort you derive, under moral depression, from picking stones and weeds out of your garden. I am afraid that antidote would prove insufficient for me; the weeds would very soon lie in heaps in my lap, and the stones accumulate in little mountains all round me, while my mind was sinking into contemplations of the nature of slow quicksands. Violent bodily exercise, riding, or climbing up steep and rugged pathways are my best remedies for the blue devils. 

 My father has received a pressing invitation from Lord and Lady W---- to go to their place, Heaton, which is but five miles from Manchester. 

 You say to me in your last letter that you could not live at the rate I do; but my life is very different now from what it was while with you. I am silent and quiet and oppressed with irksome duties, and altogether a different creature from your late companion by the sea-shore. It is true that that _was_ my natural condition, but if you were here with me now, in the midst of all these unnatural sights and sounds, I do not think I should weary you with my overflowing life and spirits, as I fear I did at Ardgillan. I was as happy there as the birds that fly in the clear sky above the sea, and much happier, for I had your companionship in addition to the delight which mere existence is in such scenes. I am glad Lily made and wore the wreath of lilac blossoms; I was sure it would become her. Give her my love and thanks for having done as I asked her. Oh, do not wish Ardgillan fifteen miles from London! Even for the sake of seeing you, I would not bring you near the smoke and dirt and comparative confinement of such a situation; I would not take you from your sea and sky and trees, even to have you within reach of me. 

 Certainly it is the natural evil of the human mind, and not the supernatural agency in the story of its development, that makes Macbeth so terrible; it is the hideousness of a wicked soul, into which enter more foul ingredients than are held in the witches' caldron of abominations, that makes the play so tremendous. I wish we had read that great work together. How it contrasts with what we did read, the "Tempest, " that brightest creation of a wholesome genius in its hour of happiest inspiration!

 I believe some people think it presumptuous to pray for any one but themselves; but it seems to me strange to share every, feeling with those we love and not associate them with our best and holiest aspirations; to remember them everywhere but there where it is of the utmost importance to us all to be remembered; to desire all happiness for them, and not to implore in their behalf the Giver of all good. I think I pray even more fervently for those I love than for myself. Pray for me, my dear H----, and God bless you and give you strength and peace. Your affectionate

 F. A. K. 

 I have not seen the railroad yet; if you do not write soon to me, we shall be gone to Manchester. 

My objection to the dramatic profession on the score of its uselessness, in this letter, reminds me of what my mother used to tell me of MissBrunton, who afterward became Lady Craven; a very eccentric as well asattractive and charming woman, who contrived, too, to be a very charmingactress, in spite of a prosaical dislike to her business, which used totake the peculiar and rather alarming turn of suddenly, in the midst ofa scene, saying aside to her fellow-actors, "What nonsense all this is!Suppose we don't go on with it. " This singular expostulation my mothersaid she always expected to see followed up by the sadden exit of herlively companion, in the middle of her part. Miss Brunton, however, hadself-command enough to go on acting till she became Countess of Craven, and left off the _nonsense_ of the stage for the _earnestness_ of highlife. 

A very serious cause for depression had added itself to the weariness ofspirit with which my distaste for my profession often affected me. Whileat Liverpool, I received a letter from my brother John which filled mewith surprise and vexation. After his return from Germany he hadexpressed his determination to go into the Church; and we all supposedhim to be in the country, zealously engaged in the necessary preparatorystudies. Infinite, therefore, was my astonishment to receive from him aletter dated from Algeciras, in Spain, telling me that he and several ofhis college companions, Sterling, Barton, Trench, and Boyd among others, had determined to lend the aid of their enthusiastic sympathy to thecause of liberty in Spain. The "cause of liberty in Spain" was thenrepresented by the rash and ill-fated rising of General Torrijos againstthe Spanish Government, that protean nightmare which, in one form oranother of bigotry and oppression, has ridden that unfortunate countryup to a very recent time, when civil war has again interfered withapparently little prospect of any better result. My distress atreceiving such unexpected news from my brother was aggravated by hisforbidding me to write to him or speak of his plans and proceedings toany one. This concealment, which would have been both difficult andrepugnant to me, was rendered impossible by the circumstances underwhich his letter reached me, and we all bore together, as well as wecould, this severe disappointment and the cruel anxiety of receiving nofurther intelligence from John for a considerable time. I was bitterlygrieved by this letter, which clearly indicated that the sacredprofession for which my brother had begun to prepare himself, and inwhich we had hoped to see him ere long honorably and usefully laboring, was as little likely to be steadily pursued by him as the legal careerwhich he had renounced for it. Richard Trench brought home a knowledgeof the Spanish tongue which has given to his own some beautifultranslations of Calderon's masterpieces; and his early crusade for theenfranchisement of Spain has not militated against the well-deserveddistinction he has achieved in the high calling to which he devotedhimself. With my brother, however, the case was different. This romanticexpedition canceled all his purposes and prospects of entering theChurch, and Alfred Tennyson's fine sonnet, addressed to him when hefirst determined to dedicate himself to the service of the temple, isall that bears witness to that short-lived consecration: it was poetry, but not prophecy. 

 MANCHESTER, September 3, 1830. MY DEAREST H----, I received you letter and the pretty Balbriggan stockings, for which I thank you very much, quite safely. I have not been able to put pen to paper till now, and even now do not know whether I can do more than just tell you that we have heard nothing further whatever from my brother. In his letter to me he said that he would write home whenever he could do so safely, but that no letter of ours would reach him; and, indeed, I do not now know where he may be. From the first moment of hearing this intelligence, which has amazed us all so much, I have felt less miserable than I could have thought possible under the circumstances; my mind, I think, has hardly taken hold of the truth of what has come so unexpectedly upon me. The very impossibility of relieving one's suspense, I suppose, compels one not to give way to its worst suggestions, which may, after all, be unfounded. I cannot communicate with him, and must wait patiently till he can write again; he is in God's hand, and I hope and pray that he may be guided and protected. My great anxiety is to keep all knowledge of his having even gone abroad, if possible, from my mother. She is not in a state to bear such a shock, and I fear that the impossibility of ascertaining anything about him at present, which helps _me_ to remain tolerably collected, would almost drive her distracted. 

 The news of the revolt in the Netherlands, together with the fact that one of our dear ones is away from us in scenes of peril and disturbance, has, I think, shaken my father's purpose of sending Henry to Heidelberg. It is a bad thing to leave a boy of eighteen so far from home control and influences; and he is of a sweet, affectionate, gentle disposition, that makes him liable to be easily led and persuaded by the examples and counsels of others. Moreover, he is at the age when boys are always in some love-scrape or other, and if he is left alone at Heidelberg, in his own unassisted weakness, at such a distance from us all, I should not be surprised to hear that he had constituted himself the lord and master of some blue-eyed _fräulein_ with whom he could not exchange a dozen words in her own vernacular, and had become a _dis_-respectable _pater familias_ at nineteen. In the midst of all the worry and anxiety which these considerations occasion, we are living here a most unsettled, flurried life of divided work and pleasure. We have gone out to Heaton every morning after rehearsal, and come in with the W----s in the evening, to act. I think to-night we shall sleep there after the play, and come in with the W----s after dinner to-morrow. They had expected us to spend some days with them, and perhaps, after our Birmingham engagement, we may be able to do so. Heaton is a charming specimen of a fine country-house, and Lady W---- a charming specimen of a fine lady; she is handsome, stately, and gentle. I like Lord W----; he is clever, or rather accomplished, and refined. They are both of them very kind to me, and most pressing in their entreaties that we should return and stay as long as we can with them. To-morrow is my last night here; on Monday we act at Birmingham, and my father thinks we shall be able to avail ourselves of the invitation of our Liverpool friends, and witness the opening of the railroad. This would be a memorable pleasure, the opportunity of which should certainly not be neglected. I have been gratified and interested this morning and yesterday by going over one of the largest manufactories of this place, where I have seen a number of astonishing processes, from the fusing of iron in its roughest state to the construction of the most complicated machinery and the work that it performs. I have been examining and watching and admiring power-looms, and spinning-jennies, and every species of work accomplished by machinery. But what pleased me most of all was the process of casting iron. Did you know that the solid masses of iron-work which we see in powerful engines were many of them cast in moulds of sand?--inconstant, shifting, restless sand! The strongest iron of all, though, gets its strength beaten into it. 

 BIRMINGHAM, September 7, 1830. 

 You see, my dearest H----, how my conversations are liable to be cut short in the midst; just at the point where I broke off, Lord and Lady W---- came to fetch us to Heaton, and until this moment, when I am quietly seated in Birmingham, I have not been able to resume the thread of my discourse. I once was told of a man who had been weather-bound at some port, whence he was starting for the West Indies; he was standing on the wharf, telling a long story to a friend, when a fair wind sprang up and he had to hurry on board. Two years after, returning thence, the first person he met on landing was his friend, whom he accosted with, "Oh, well, and so, as I was telling you, " etc. But I cannot do that, for my mind has dwelt on new objects of interest since I began this letter, and my visit to Heaton has swept sand and iron and engines all back into the great warehouse at Manchester for a time, whence I may draw them at some future day for your edification. 

 Lady W---- possesses, to a great degree, beauty, that "tangible good" which you admire so much; she has a bright, serene countenance, and very sweet and noble eyes and forehead. Her manner is peculiarly winning and simple, and to me it was cordially kind, and even affectionate. 

 During the two days which were all we could spare for Heaton, I walked and rode and sang and talked, and was so well amused and pleased that I hope, after our week's work is over here, we may return there for a short-time. I must tell you of a curious little bit of _ancientry_ which I saw at Heaton, which greatly delighted me--a "rush-bearing. " At a certain period of the year, generally the beginning of autumn, it was formerly the wont in some parts of Lancashire to go round with sundry rustic mummeries to all the churches and strew them with rushes. The religious intention of the custom has passed away, but a pretty rural procession, which I witnessed, still keeps up the memory of it hereabouts. I was sitting at my window, looking out over the lawn, which slopes charmingly on every side down to the house, when the still summer air was suddenly filled with the sound of distant shouts and music, and presently the quaint pageant drew in sight. First came an immense wagon piled with rushes in a stack-like form, on the top of which sat two men holding two huge nosegays. This was drawn by a team of Lord W----'s finest farm-horses, all covered with scarlet cloths, and decked with ribbons and bells and flowers. After this came twelve country lads and lasses, dancing the real old morris-dance, with their handkerchiefs flying, and in all the rustic elegance of apparel which they could command for the occasion. After them followed a very good village band, and then a species of flowery canopy, under which walked a man and woman covered with finery, who, Lord W---- told me, represented Adam and Eve. The procession closed with a _fool_ fantastically dressed out, and carrying the classical bladder at the end of his stick. They drew up before the house and danced their morris-dance for us. The scraps of old poetry which came into my head, the contrast between this pretty picture of a bygone time and the modern but by no means unpicturesque group assembled under the portico, filled my mind with the pleasantest ideas, and I was quite sorry when the rural pageant wound up the woody heights again, and the last shout and peal of music came back across the sunny lawn. I am very glad I saw it. I have visited, too, Hopwood Hall, an enchanting old house in the neighborhood of Heaton, some parts of which are as old as the reign of Edward the First. The gloomy but comfortable oak rooms, the beautiful and curious carving of which might afford one days of entertaining study, the low, latticed windows, and intricate, winding, up-and-down passages, contrasted and combined with all the elegant adornments of modern luxury, and the pretty country in which the house is situated, all delighted me. I must leave off writing to you now; I have to dress, and dine at three, which I am sorry for. Thank you for Mrs. Hemans's beautiful lines, which made me cry very heartily. I have not been altogether well for the last few days, and am feeling tired and out of spirits; if I can get a few days' quiet enjoyment of the country at Heaton, I shall feel fitter for my winter work than I do now. 

 MANCHESTER, September 20, 1830. MY DEAREST H----, I did not answer your letter which I received at Heaton, because the latter part of my stay there was much engrossed by walking, riding, playing battledore and shuttlecock, singing, and being exceedingly busy all day long about nothing. I have just left it for this place, where we stop to-night on our way to Stafford; Heaton was looking lovely in all the beauty of its autumnal foliage, lighted by bright autumnal skies, and I am rather glad I did not answer you before, as it is a consolatory occupation to do so now. 

 I am going with my mother to stay a day at Stafford with my godmother, an old and attached friend of hers, after which we proceed into Buckinghamshire to join my aunt Dall and Henry and my sister, who are staying there; and we shall all return to London together for the opening of the theater, which I think will take place on the first of next month. I could have wished to be going immediately to my work; I should have preferred screwing my courage to my professional tasks at once, instead of loitering by way of pleasure on the road. Besides that, in my visit to Buckinghamshire I come in contact with persons whose society is not very agreeable to me. My mother, however, made a great sacrifice in giving up her fishing, which she was enjoying very much, to come and chaperon me at Heaton, where there is no fishing so good as at Aston Clinton, so that I am bound to submit cheerfully to her wishes in the present instance. 

 You probably have by this time heard and read accounts of the opening of the railroad, and the fearful accident which occurred at it, for the papers are full of nothing else. The accident you mention _did_ occur, but though the unfortunate man who was killed bore Mr. Stephenson's name, he was not related to him. I will tell you something of the events on the 15th, as, though you may be acquainted with the circumstances of poor Mr. Huskisson's death, none but an eyewitness of the whole scene can form a conception of it. I told you that we had had places given to us, and it was the main purpose of our returning from Birmingham to Manchester to be present at what promised to be one of the most striking events in the scientific annals of our country. We started on Wednesday last, to the number of about eight hundred people, in carriages constructed as I before described to you. The most intense curiosity and excitement prevailed, and, though the weather was uncertain, enormous masses of densely packed people lined the road, shouting and waving hats and handkerchiefs as we flew by them. What with the sight and sound of these cheering multitudes and the tremendous velocity with which we were borne past them, my spirits rose to the true champagne height, and I never enjoyed anything so much as the first hour of our progress. I had been unluckily separated from my mother in the first distribution of places, but by an exchange of seats which she was enabled to make she rejoined me when I was at the height of my ecstasy, which was considerably damped by finding that she was frightened to death, and intent upon nothing but devising means of escaping from a situation which appeared to her to threaten with instant annihilation herself and all her traveling companions. While I was chewing the cud of this disappointment, which was rather bitter, as I had expected her to be as delighted as myself with our excursion, a man flew by us, calling out through a speaking-trumpet to stop the engine, for that somebody in the directors' carriage had sustained an injury. We were all stopped accordingly, and presently a hundred voices were heard exclaiming that Mr. Huskisson was killed; the confusion that ensued is indescribable: the calling out from carriage to carriage to ascertain the truth, the contrary reports which were sent back to us, the hundred questions eagerly uttered at once, and the repeated and urgent demands for surgical assistance, created a sudden turmoil that was quite sickening. At last we distinctly ascertained that the unfortunate man's thigh was broken. From Lady W----, who was in the duke's carriage, and within three yards of the spot where the accident happened, I had the following details, the horror of witnessing which we were spared through our situation behind the great carriage. The engine had stopped to take in a supply of water, and several of the gentlemen in the directors' carriage had jumped out to look about them. Lord W----, Count Batthyany, Count Matuscenitz, and Mr. Huskisson among the rest were standing talking in the middle of the road, when an engine on the other line, which was parading up and down merely to show its speed, was seen coming down upon them like lightning. The most active of those in peril sprang back into their seats: Lord W---- saved his life only by rushing behind the duke's carriage, and Count Matuscenitz had but just leaped into it, with the engine all but touching his heels as he did so; while poor Mr. Huskisson, less active from the effects of age and ill health, bewildered, too, by the frantic cries of "Stop the engine! Clear the track!" that resounded on all sides, completely lost his head, looked helplessly to the right and left, and was instantaneously prostrated by the fatal machine, which dashed down like a thunderbolt upon him, and passed over his leg, smashing and mangling it in the most horrible way. (Lady W---- said she distinctly heard the crushing of the bone. ) So terrible was the effect of the appalling accident that, except that ghastly "crushing" and poor Mrs. Huskisson's piercing shriek, not a sound was heard or a word uttered among the immediate spectators of the catastrophe. Lord W---- was the first to raise the poor sufferer, and calling to aid his surgical skill, which is considerable, he tied up the severed artery, and for a time, at least, prevented death by loss of blood. Mr. Huskisson was then placed in a carriage with his wife and Lord W----, and the engine, having been detached from the director's carriage, conveyed them to Manchester. So great was the shock produced upon the whole party by this event, that the Duke of Wellington declared his intention not to proceed, but to return immediately to Liverpool. However, upon its being represented to him that the whole population of Manchester had turned out to witness the procession, and that a disappointment might give rise to riots and disturbances, he consented to go on, and gloomily enough the rest of the journey was accomplished. We had intended returning to Liverpool by the railroad, but Lady W----, who seized upon me in the midst of the crowd, persuaded us to accompany her home, which we gladly did. Lord W---- did not return till past ten o'clock, at which hour he brought the intelligence of Mr. Huskisson's death. I need not tell you of the sort of whispering awe which this event threw over our whole circle, and yet, great as was the horror excited by it, I could not help feeling how evanescent the effect of it was after all. The shuddering terror of seeing our fellow-creature thus struck down by our side, and the breathless thankfulness for our own preservation, rendered the first evening of our party at Heaton almost solemn; but the next day the occurrence became a subject of earnest, it is true, but free discussion; and after that, was alluded to with almost as little apparent feeling as if it had not passed under our eyes, and within the space of a few hours. 

 I have heard nothing of my brother; my mother distresses me by talking of him, ignorant as she is of what would give her so much more anxiety about him. I feel, while I listen to her, almost guilty of deceit; and yet I am sure we were right in doing for her what she cannot do for herself, keeping her mind as long as possible in comparative tranquillity about him. 

 Our Sunday at Heaton terminated with much solemn propriety by Lord W---- reading aloud the evening prayers to the whole family, visitors, and servants assembled; a ceremony which, combined and contrasted with so much of the pomps and vanities of the world, gave me a pleasant feeling toward these people, who live in the midst of them without forgetting better things. I mean to make studying German and drawing (and endeavoring to abate my self-esteem) my principal occupations this winter. I have met at Heaton Lord Francis Leveson Gower, the translator of "Faust. " I like him very much; he is a young man of a great deal of talent, with a charming, gentle manner, and a very handsome, sweet face. Good-by, dear H----. Write to me soon, and direct to No. 79 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. I should like to find a letter from you there, waiting for me. 

Our arrangement for driving in to the theater from Heaton compelled meonce or twice to sit down to dinner in my theatrical costume, a devicefor saving time in dressing at the theater which might have taxed myself-possession unpleasantly; but the persons I was surrounded by wereall singularly kind and amiable to me, and my appearing among them inthese picturesque fancy dresses was rather a source of amusement to usall. Many years after, a lady who was not staying in the house, but wasinvited from the neighborhood to dine at Heaton one evening, told me howamazed she had been on the sudden wide opening of the drawing-room doorsto see me enter, in full mediæval costume of black satin and velvet, cutTitian fashion, and with a long, sweeping train, for which apparitionshe had not been previously prepared. Of Lord W---- I have alreadyspoken, and have only to add that, in spite of his character of a meredissipated man of fashion, he had an unusual taste for and knowledge ofmusic, and had composed some that is not destitute of merit; he playedwell on the organ, and delighted in that noble instrument, a finespecimen of which adorned one of the drawing-rooms at Heaton. Moreover, he possessed an accomplishment of a very different order, a remarkableproficiency in anatomy, which he had studied very thoroughly. He hadmade himself enough of a practical surgeon to be able, on the occasionof the fatal accident which befell Mr. Huskisson on the day of theopening of the railroad, to save the unfortunate gentleman from bleedingto death on the spot, by tying up the femoral artery, which had beensevered. His fine riding in the hunting-field and on the race-course wasa less peculiar talent among his special associates. Lady W---- wasstrikingly handsome in person, and extremely attractive in her manners. She was tall and graceful, the upper part of her face, eyes, brow, andforehead were radiant and sweet, and, though the rest of her featureswere not regularly beautiful, her countenance was noble and her smilehad a peculiar charm of expression at once winning and mischievous. Myfather said she was very like her fascinating mother, the celebratedMiss Farren. She was extremely kind to me, petting me almost like aspoiled child, dressing me in her own exquisite riding-habit andmounting me on her own favorite horse, which was all very delightful tome. My father and mother probably thought the acquaintance of thesedistinguished members of the highest English society advantageous to me. I have no doubt they felt both pride and pleasure in the notice bestowedupon me by persons so much my superiors in rank, and had a naturalsympathy in my enjoyment of all the gay grandeur and kindly indulgenceby which I was surrounded at Heaton. I now take the freedom to doubt howfar they were judicious in allowing me to be so taken out of my ownproper social sphere. It encouraged my taste for the luxuriousrefinement and elegant magnificence of a mode of life never likely to bemine, and undoubtedly increased my distaste for the coarse and commondetails of my professional duties behind the scenes, and the shamsplendors of the stage. The guests at Heaton of whom I have a distinctremembrance were Mr. And Lady Harriet Baring, afterward Lord and LadyAshburton. I knew them both in after-life, and liked them very much; Mr. Baring was highly cultivated and extremely amiable; his wife was muchcleverer than he, and in many respects a remarkable woman. The beautifulsisters, Anne and Isabella Forrester, with their brother Cecil, were atHeaton at this time. They were celebrated beauties: the elder, afterwardCountess of Chesterfield, was a brunette; the younger, who marriedColonel Anson, the most renowned lady-killer of his day, was a blonde;and they were both of them exquisitely pretty, and used to remind me ofthe French quatrain--

 "Vous êtes belle, et votre soeur est belle; Entre vous deux, tout choix serait bien doux. L'Amour êtait blond, comme vous, Mais il aimait une brune, comme elle. "

They had beautiful figures as well as faces, and dressed peculiarly andso as to display them to the greatest advantage. Long and very fullskirts gathered or plaited all round a pointed waist were then thefashion; these lovely ladies, with a righteous scorn of alldisfigurement of their beauty, wore extremely short skirts, which showedtheir thorough-bred feet and ankles, and were perfectly plain roundtheir waists and over their hips, with bodies so low on the shouldersand bosom that there was certainly as little as possible of theirbeautiful persons concealed. I remember wishing it were consistent withher comfort and the general decorum of modern manners that IsabellaForrester's gown could only slip entirely off her exquisite bust. Isuppose I felt as poor Gibson, the sculptor, who, looking at his friendand pupil's (Miss Hosmer's) statue of Beatrice Cenci, the back of whichwas copied from that of Lady A---- T----, exclaimed in his slow, measured, deliberate manner, "And to think that the cursed prejudices ofsociety prevent my seeing that beautiful back!" Count and CountessBatthyany (she the former widow of the celebrated Austrian general, Bubna, a most distinguished and charming woman) were visitors at Heatonat this time, as was also Henry Greville, with whom I then first becameacquainted, and who from that time until his death was my kind andconstant friend. He was for several years attached to the embassy inParis, and afterward had some small nominal post in the household of theDuchess of Cambridge, and was Gentleman Gold-Stick in waiting at court. He was not in any way intellectually remarkable; he had a passion formusic, and was one of the best society singers of his day, being (that, to me, incomprehensible thing) a _mélomane_ for one kind of music only. Passionately fond of Italian operatic music, he did not understand, andtherefore cordially detested, German music. He had a passion for thestage; but though he delighted in acting he did not particularly excelin it. He had a taste for everything elegant and refined, and his smallhouse in May-Fair was a perfect casket full of gems. He was a naturalexquisite, and perfectly simple and unaffected, a great authority in allmatters of fashion both in Paris and in London, and a universalfavorite, especially with the women, in the highest society of bothcapitals. His social position, friendly intimacy with several of themost celebrated musical and dramatic artists of his day, passion forpolitical and private gossip, easy and pleasant style of letter-writing, and general rather supercilious fastidiousness, used sometimes to remindme of Horace Walpole. He had a singularly kind heart and amiable nature, for a life of mere frivolous pleasure had not impaired the one or theother. His serviceableness to his friends was unwearied, and hisgenerous liberality toward all whom he could help either with hisinterest, his trouble, or his purse was unfailing. 

The whole gay party assembled at Heaton, my mother and myself included, went to Liverpool for the opening of the railroad. The throng ofstrangers gathered there for the same purpose made it almost impossibleto obtain a night's lodging for love or money; and glad and thankfulwere we to put up with and be put up in a tiny garret by our old friend, Mr. Radley, of the Adelphi, which many would have given twice what wepaid to obtain. The day opened gloriously, and never was seen aninnumerable concourse of sight-seers in better humor than the surging, swaying crowd that lined the railroad with living faces. How dreadfullythat brilliant opening was overcast I have described in the letter givenabove. After this disastrous event the day became overcast, and as weneared Manchester the sky grew cloudy and dark, and it began to rain. The vast concourse of people who had assembled to witness the triumphantarrival of the successful travelers was of the lowest order of mechanicsand artisans, among whom great distress and a dangerous spirit ofdiscontent with the Government at that time prevailed. Groans and hissesgreeted the carriage, full of influential personages, in which the Dukeof Wellington sat. High above the grim and grimy crowd of scowling facesa loom had been erected, at which sat a tattered, starved-lookingweaver, evidently set there as a _representative man_, to protestagainst this triumph of machinery, and the gain and glory which thewealthy Liverpool and Manchester men were likely to derive from it. Thecontrast between our departure from Liverpool and our arrival atManchester was one of the most striking things I ever witnessed. Thenews of Mr. Huskisson's fatal accident spread immediately, and hisdeath, which did not occur till the evening, was anticipated by rumor. Aterrible cloud covered this great national achievement, and its success, which in every respect was complete, was atoned for to the Nemesis ofgood fortune by the sacrifice of the first financial statesman of thecountry. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, Friday, October 1, 1830. DEAREST H----, I have risen very early, for what with excitement, and the wakefulness always attendant with me upon a new bed, I have slept but little, and I snatch this first hour of the day, the only one I may be able to command, to tell you that I have heard from my brother, and that he is safe and well, for which, thank God! Further I know nothing. He talks vaguely of being with us toward the end of the winter, but in the meantime, unless he finds some means of conveying some tidings of his welfare to me, I must remain in utter ignorance of his circumstances and situation. Your letter, which was to welcome me to my new home, arrived there two days before I did, and was forwarded to me into Buckinghamshire. A few days there--taking what interest I could in the sporting and fishing, the country quiet of the place, and above all the privilege of taking the sacrament, which, had I remained at Heaton, I should have had no opportunity of doing--gave me a breathing-time and a sense of mental repose before entering again upon that busy life whose demands are already besieging me in the inexorable form of half a dozen new stage dresses to be devised, ordered, and executed in the shortest imaginable time. 

 October 3d. 

 You see how truly I prophesied at the beginning of this letter, when I said that the hour before breakfast was perhaps the only one I should be able to command that day. I might have said that week, for this is the first instant I have been able to call my own since then. I rehearsed Juliet yesterday, and shall do so again to-morrow morning; the theater opens with it to-morrow night. I have a new nurse, and I am rehearsing for her, poor woman! She is dreadfully alarmed at taking Mrs. Davenport's place, who certainly was a very great favorite. I am half crazy with the number of new dresses to be got; for though, thanks to the kindness and activity of my mother, none of the trouble of devising them ever falls on me, yet the bare catalogue of silks and satins and velvets, hats and feathers and ruffs, fills me with amazement and trepidation. I fancy I shall go through all the old parts, and then come out in a new tragedy. I shall be most horribly frightened, but I hope I shall do well, for the sake of the poor author, who is a young man of great abilities, and to whom I wish every success. The subject of his play is taken from a Spanish one, called "The Jew of Aragon, " and the whole piece is of a new and unhackneyed order. My father and I play a Jewish father and daughter; this and the novelty of the story itself will perhaps be favorable to the play; I hope so with all my heart. 

 Mrs. Henry Siddons has taken a house in London for six months; I have not seen her yet, but am most anxious to do so. Anxiety and annoyance, I fear, have just caused her a severe indisposition, but she is a little better now. Mrs. Siddons is much better. She is staying at Leamington at present. 

 Dearest H----, returning from Buckinghamshire the other day, I passed Cassiobury, the grove, the little lane leading down to Heath Farm, and Miss M----'s cottage, and the first days of our acquaintance came back to my memory. I suppose I should have liked and loved you wherever I had met you, but you come in for a share of my love and liking of Cassiobury, and the spring, the beautiful season in which we met first. I send you the long-promised lock of my hair; you will be surprised at the lightness of the shade--at least, I was. It was cut from my forehead, and I think it is a nice bit; tell me that you get it safe. 

 Henry is staying in Buckinghamshire in all the ecstasy of a young cockney's first sporting days. When he was quite a child and was asked what profession he intended to embrace, he replied that he would be "_a gentleman and wear leather breeches_, " and I think it is the very destiny he is fitted to fill. He is the perfect picture of happiness when in his shooting-jacket and gaiters, with his gun on his shoulder and a bright day before him; and although we were obliged to return to town, my mother was unwilling to curtail his pleasure, and left him to murder pheasants and hares, and amuse himself in a manly fashion. 

 I did not like the place at which they were staying as much as they did, for though the country was very pretty, I had during the summer tour seen so much that surpassed it that I saw it at a disadvantage. Then, I have no fancy for gypsying, and the greatest taste for all the formal proprieties of life, and what I should call "silver fork existence" in general; and the inconveniences of a small country inn, without really affecting my comfort, disturb my decided preference for luxury. The principal diversion my ingenious mind discovered to while away my time with was a _fiddle_ (an elderly one), which I routed out of a lumber closet, and from which, after due invocations to St. Cecilia, I drew such diabolical sounds as I flatter myself were never excelled by Tartini or his master, the devil himself. I must now close this, for it is tea-time. 

The play of "The Jew of Aragon, " the first dramatic composition of ayoung gentleman of the name of Wade, of whose talent my father had avery high opinion, which he trusted the success of his piece wouldconfirm, I am sorry to say failed entirely. It was the first time andthe last that I had the distress of assisting in damning a piece, andwhat with my usual intense nervousness in acting a new part, my anxietyfor the interests of both the author and the theatre, and the sort ofindignant terror with which, instead of the applause I was accustomedto, I heard the hisses which testified the distaste and disapprobationof the public and the failure of the play, I was perfectly miserablewhen the curtain fell, and the poor young author, as pale as a ghost, came forward to meet my father at the side scene, and bravely holdingout his hand to him said, "Never mind for me, Mr. Kemble; I'll do betteranother time. " And so indeed he did; for he wrote a charming play on theold pathetic story of "Griselda, " in which that graceful actress MissJarman played his heroine, and my father the hero, and which had anentire and well-deserved success. I am obliged to confess that I retainno recollection whatever of the ill-fated play of "The Jew of Aragon, "or my own part in it, save the last _scene_ alone; this, I recollect, was a magnificent Jewish place of worship, in which my father, who wasthe high priest, appeared in vestments such as I believe the Jewishpriests still wear in their solemn ceremonies, and which were so closelycopied from the description of Aaron's sacred pontifical robes that Ifelt a sense of impropriety in such a representation (purely historical, as it was probably considered, and in no way differing from the costumeaccepted on the French stage in Racine's Jewish plays). And I think itextremely likely that the failure of the piece, which had been imminentall through, found its climax in the unfavorable impression made uponthe audience by this very scene, in spite of my father's noble andpicturesque appearance. 

I never heard hisses on the stage before or since; and though I was verywell aware that on this occasion they were addressed neither to me norto my performance, I think if they had been the whistling of bullets(which I have also heard nearer than was pleasant) I could not have feltmore frightened and furious. 

Young Wade's self-control and composure during the catastrophe of thisplay reminds me, by contrast, of a most ludicrous story my father usedto tell of some unfortunate authoress, who, in an evil hour for herselfand some friendly provincial manager, persuaded him to bring out anoriginal drama of hers. 

The audience (not a very discriminating or numerous one) weresufficiently appreciative to object extremely to the play, and largeenough to make their objections noisily apparent. 

The manager, in his own distress not unmindful of his poor friend, theauthoress, sought her out to console her, and found her seated at theside scene with a glass of stiff brandy and water that somecommiserating friend had administered to her for her support, rockingherself piteously to and fro, and, with the tears streaming down hercheeks, uttering between sobs and sips, in utter self-abasement, her_peccavi_ in the form of oaths and imprecations of the finestBillingsgate vernacular (all, however, addressed to herself), that wouldhave made a dragoon shake in his shoes. The original form of which _meaculpa_ seized the worthy manager with such an irresistibly ludicrouseffect that he left the poor, guilty authoress without being able toaddress a syllable to her, lest he should explode in peals of laughterinstead of decent words of condolence. 

To accompany an author or authoress (I should think especially thelatter) on the first night of the representation of their piece is by nomeans a pleasant act of duty or friendship. I remember my mother, whoseown nervous temperament certainly was extremely ill adapted for such anundertaking, describing the intolerable distress she had experienced onthe occasion of the first representation of a piece called, I think, "Father and Son, " taken from a collection of interesting storiesentitled "The Canterbury Tales, " and adapted to the stage by one of theMisses Lee, the sister authoresses of the Tales. The piece was veryfairly successful, but my mother said that though, according to her veryconsiderable experience, the actors were by no means more imperfect intheir parts than usual on a first night, her nervous anxiety was keptalmost at fever height by poor Miss Lee's incessant running commentaryof "Ah! very pretty, no doubt--very fine, I dare say--_only I neverwrote a word of it_!"

Lord Byron took the same story for the subject of his powerful play of"Werner, " in which Mr. Macready acted so finely, and with such greatsuccess. 

I cannot imagine what possessed me in an unguarded hour to consent, as Idid, to go with my friends, Messrs. Tom Taylor and Charles Reade, to seethe first representation of a play of theirs called, I think, "TheKing's Wager, " in which Charles the Second, Nell Gwynn, and the Plaguewere prominent characters. Accidental circumstances prevented one of thegentlemen from coming with me, and I have often since wondered at mytemerity in having placed myself in such a trying situation. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, October 24, 1830. DEAR H----, I have been too busy to answer your last sooner, but this hour before bedtime, the first quiet one for some time, shall be yours. I have heard nothing more of my brother, and am ignorant where he is or how engaged at present. You judged rightly with respect to the impossibility of longer keeping my mother in ignorance of his absence from England. The result was pretty much what I had apprehended; but her feelings have now become somewhat calmer on the subject. We are careful, however, as much as possible, to avoid all mention of or reference to my brother in her presence, for she is in a very cruel state of anxiety about him. 

 I am endeavoring as much as possible to follow my studies with some regularity. I have forsworn paying and receiving morning visits; so that, when no rehearsal interferes, I get my practicing, my singing, and my reading in tolerable peace. 

 I have had a key of Russell Square offered me, which privilege I shall most thankfully accept. Walking regularly is, of course, essential, and though I rather dread the idea of solitarily turning round and round that dreary emblem of eternity, a circular gravel-walk, over-_gloomed_ with soot-blackened privet bushes, I am sure I ought, and I mean to do it every day for an hour. We do not dine till six, when I do not act, and when I do, I do not go to the theater till that hour; so that from ten in the morning, when breakfast is over, I get a tolerably long day. I have obtained my father's leave to learn drawing and German, and as soon as our house is a little more comfortably settled, I shall begin both. I do not know whether I have the least talent for drawing, but I have so strong a desire to possess that accomplishment that I think, by the help of a good master and patience and hard work, I must succeed to some decent degree. I wish to provide myself with every possible resource against the engrossing excitement of my profession while I remain in it, and to fill its place whenever I leave it, or it leaves me; all my occupations are with that view and to that end. 

 My father has promised me to speak to Mr. Murray about publishing my play and my verses. I am anxious for this for several reasons, some of which I believe I mentioned to you; and to these I have since added a great wish to have some good prints I possess framed, for my little room, and I should not scruple to apply part of the money so earned to that purpose. You asked me which is my room. You remember the bathroom, next to what was my uncle John's bedroom, on the third floor; the room above that my mother has fitted up beautifully for me, and I inhabit it all day long with great complacency and a sort of comfortable, Alexander-Selkirk feeling. And this suggests a question which has seldom been out of my mind, and which I wish to recall to yours. When do you intend to come and see me? I can offer you a nest on the _fourth story_, which is excellent for your health, as free a circulation of air as a London lodging can well afford, and as fine a combination of chimney-pots as even your love of the picturesque could desire. 

 Dear H----, will you not come and pass a month with us? Now stop a bit, and I will point out to you one by one the inducements to and advantages of such a step. In the first place, my father and mother both request and wish it, and you know how truly happy it would make me. Your own people can well spare you for a month, and I am sure will be the more inclined to do so from the consideration that change of air and scene will be good for you, and that, though your stock of original ideas is certainly extraordinary, yet you cannot be expected to go on for ever, like a spider, existing mentally in the midst of your own weavings, without every now and then recruiting your strength and taking in a new supply of material. 

 You shall come to London, that huge mass of matter for thought and observation, and to me, in whom you find so interesting an epitome of all the moods, tenses, and conjugations of every regular and irregular form of "to do, to be, and to suffer;" and when you have been sufficiently _smoked, fogged_, astonished, and edified, you shall return home with one infallible result of your stay with us--increased value for a peaceful life, quiet companions, a wide sea-view, and potatoes roasted in their skins; not but what you shall have the last-mentioned luxury here, if you will but come. 

 Now, dear H----, I wish this very much, but promise to bear your answer reasonably well; I depend upon your indulging me if you can, and shall try not to behave ill if you don't; so do me justice, and do not give way to your shyness and habits of retirement. I want you to come here before the 20th of November, and then I will let you go in time to be at home for Christmas. So now my cause is in your hands--_avisez-vous_. 

 I wonder whether you have heard that my father has been thrashing the editor of the _Age_ newspaper, who, it seems, took offence at my father's not appearing on sufficiently familiar terms with him somewhere or other when they met, in revenge for which "coldness" (as he styles it) he has not ceased for the last six months abusing us, every week, in his paper. From what I hear I was the especial mark of his malice; of course I need not tell you that, knowing the character of this publication, I should never have looked at it, and the circumstance of my name appearing in its columns would hardly have been an inducement to me to do so. I knew nothing, therefore, of my own injuries, but heard general expressions of indignation against Mr. Westmacott, and saw that my father was extremely exasperated upon the subject. The other night they were all going to the play, and pressed me very much to go too, but I had something I wished to write, and remained at home. On their return my father appeared to me much excited, and I was informed that having unluckily come across Mr. Westmacott, his wrath had got the better of his self-command, and he had bestowed a severe beating upon that individual. I could not help looking very grave at this; for though I should have been very well satisfied if it could have _rained_ a good thrashing upon Mr. Westmacott from the sky, yet as I do not approve of returning injuries by injuries, I could not rejoice that my father had done so. I suppose he saw that I had no great satisfaction in the event, for he said, "The law affords no redress against such attacks as this paper makes on people, and I thought it time to take justice in my own hands when my daughter is insulted. " He then repeated some of the language made use of with reference to me in the _Age_, and I could not help blushing with indignation to my fingers' ends. 

 Perhaps, under the circumstances, it is not surprising that my father has done what he has, but I think I should have admired him more if he had not. Mr. Westmacott means to bring an action against him, and I am afraid he will have to pay dearly for his momentary indulgence of temper. 

 I must have done writing, though I had a good deal more to say. God bless you, dear. If you answer this letter directly, I will write you a better next time. 

 Ever yours, F. A. K. 

The majority of parents--mothers, I believe I ought to say--err in oneor other excess with regard to their children. Love either blinds themabsolutely to their defects, or makes them so terribly alive to them asto exaggerate every imperfection. It is hard to say which of the errorsis most injurious in its effects. I suppose according as the temperamentis desponding and diffident, or sanguine and self-sufficient, the onesystem or the other is likely to do most harm. 

My mother's intensely nervous organization, acute perceptions, andexacting taste made her in everything most keenly alive to our faultsand deficiencies. The unsparing severity of the sole reply or commentshe ever vouchsafed to our stupidity, want of sense, or want ofobservation--"I hate a fool"--has remained almost like a cut with a lashacross my memory. Her wincing sensitiveness of ear made it all butimpossible for me to practice either the piano or singing within hearingof her exclamations of impatient anguish at my false chords and flatintonations; and I suppose nothing but my sister's _unquenchable_musical genius would have sustained her naturally timid, sensitivedisposition under such discipline. 

Two of our family, my eldest brother and myself, were endowed with suchrobust self-esteem and elastic conceit as not only defied repression, but, unfortunately for us, could never be effectually snubbed; with mysister and my younger brother the case was entirely different, andencouragement was rather what they required. How well it is for the bestand wisest, as well as the least good and least wise, of trainers ofyouth, that God is above all. I do not myself understand the love thatblinds one to the defects of those dear to one; their faults are part ofthemselves, without which they could not be themselves, no more to bedenied or dissembled, it seems to me, than the color of their eyes orhair. I do not feel the scruple which I observe in others, in alludingto the failings of those they love. The mingled good and evil qualitiesin my friends make up their individual identity, and neither frommyself, nor from them, nor from others does it ever occur to me thathalf that identity should or could be concealed. I could as soon imaginethem without their arms or their legs as without their peculiar moralcharacteristics, and could no more think of them without their faultsthan without their virtues. 

Many were the pleasant hours, in spite of my misgivings, that I passedwith a book in my hand, mechanically pacing the gravel walks of RussellSquare. Certain readings of Shakespeare's plays, "Othello" and "Macbeth"especially, in lonely absorption of spirit, I associate for ever withthat place. I remember, too, reading at my father's request, duringthose peripatetic exercises, two plays written by Sheil for his amiablecountrywoman, Miss O'Neill, in which she won deserved laurels: "Evadne, or the Statue, " and "The Apostate. " I never had the pleasure of seeingMiss O'Neill act; but the impression left on my mind by those plays wasthat her abilities must have been very great to have given them theeffect and success they had. As for me, as usual, of course my reply tomy father was a disconsolate "I am sure _I_ can do nothing with them. "

My friend H---- S----, in coming to us in Russell Street, came to ahouse that had been almost a home to her and her brother when they werechildren, in the life of my uncle and Mrs. John Kemble, by whom theywere regarded with great affection, and whom they visited and stayedwith as if they had been young relations of their own. 

My hope of learning German and drawing was frustrated by the engrossingcalls of my theatrical occupations. The first study was reserved for along-subsequent season, when I had recourse to it as a temporarydistraction in perplexity and sorrow, from which I endeavored to findrelief in some sustained intellectual effort; and I mastered itsufficiently to translate without difficulty Schiller's "Mary Stuart"and some of his minor poems. 

As for drawing, that I have once or twice tried to accomplish, but thecircumstances of my unsettled and restless life have been unfavorablefor any steady effort to follow it up, and I have got no further yetthan a passionate desire to know how to draw. If (as I sometimesimagine) in a future existence undeveloped capacities and persistentyearnings for all kinds of good may find expansion and exercise, and notonly our moral but also our intellectual being put forth new powers andachieve progress in new directions, then in some of the successiveheavens to which, perhaps, I may be allowed to climb (if to any) I shallbe a painter of pictures; a mere idea that suggests a heavenly state oflong-desired capacity, to possess which, here on earth, I would give atonce the finger of either hand least indispensable to an artist. Of thetwo pursuits, a painter's or a musician's, considered not as arts but asaccomplishments merely, the former appears to me infinitely moredesirable, for a woman, than the latter far more frequently cultivatedone. The one is a sedative, the other an acute stimulant to the nervoussystem. The one is a perfectly independent and always to be commandedoccupation; the other imperatively demands an instrument, utters anaudible challenge to attention, and must either command solitude ordisturb any society not inclined to become an audience. The onecultivates habits of careful, accurate observation of nature, andrequires patient and precise labor in reproducing her models; the otherappeals powerfully to the imagination and emotions, and charms almost inproportion as it excites its votaries. With regard to natural aptitude, the most musical of nations--the German--shows by the impartial trainingof its common schools how universal it considers a certain degree ofmusical capacity. 

Our musical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theglees, madrigals, rounds, and catches, requiring considerable skill, andfamiliarly performed formerly in the country houses and home circles ofour gentry, and the noble church music of our cathedral choirs, bearwitness to a high musical inspiration, and thorough musical training intheir composers and executants. 

We seem to have lost this vein of original national music; theLancashire weavers and spinners are still good choristers, but among theGerman half of our common Teutonic race, the real feeling for andknowledge of music continues to flourish, while with the Anglo-Saxons ofBritain and America it has dwindled and decayed. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, November 8, 1830. DEAREST H----, I received your note, for I cannot honor the contents of your last with the name of a letter (whatever title the shape and quantity of the paper it was written on may claim). 

 I have made up my mind to let you make up yours, without urging you further upon the subject; but I must reply to one thing. You say to me, could you bring with you a strip of sea-shore, a corner of blue sky, or half a dozen waves, you would not hesitate. Allow my to say that whereas by the sea-side or under a bright sky your society enhances the pleasure derived from them, I now desire it (not having these) as delightful in itself, increasing my enjoyment in the beauties of nature, and compensating for their absence. But I have done; only if Mrs. K---- has held out a false hope to me, she is ferocious and atrocious, and that is all, and so pray tell her. 

 I had left myself so little room to tell you about this disagreeable business of the _Age_ newspaper, in my last, that I thought what I said of it would be almost unintelligible to you. I do not really deserve the sympathy you express for my feelings in the matter, for partly from being totally ignorant of the nature and extent of my injuries--having never, of course, read a line of that scurrilous newspaper--and partly from my indifference to everything that is said about me, I really have felt no annoyance or distress on the subject, beyond, as I told you, one moment's feminine indignation at a coarse expression which was repeated to me, but which in strict truth did not and could not apply to me; and considerable regret that my father should have touched Mr. Westmacott even with a stick, or a "pair of tongs. " That individual intends bringing a suit for damages, which makes me very anxious to have my play and rhymes published, if I can get anything for them, as I think the profits derived from my "scribbles" (as good Queen. Anne called her letters) would be better bestowed in paying for that little ebullition of my father's temper than in decorating my tiny sanctum. What does my poor, dear father expect, but that I shall be bespattered if I am to live on the highway?

 Mr. Murray has been kind enough to say he will publish my very original compositions, and I am preparing them for him. I am sorry to say I have heard nothing from my brother; _of_ him I have heard, for his whereabout is known and talked of--so much so, indeed, that my father says further concealment is at once useless and ridiculous. I may therefore now tell you that he is at this moment in Spain, trying to levy troops for the cause of the constitutionalists. I need not tell you, dearest H----, how much I regret this, because you will know how deeply I must disapprove of it. I might have thought any young man Quixotic who thus mistook a restless, turbulent spirit, eager to embrace a quarrel not his own, for patriotism and self-devotion to a sacred cause; but in my brother, who had professed aims and purposes so opposed to tumult and war and bloodshed, it seems to me a subject of much more serious regret. Heaven only knows what plans he has formed for the future! His present situation affords anxiety enough to warrant our not looking further in anticipation of vexation, but even if the present be regarded with the best hope of success in his undertaking, the natural consideration must be, as far as he is concerned, "What follows?" It is rather a melancholy consideration that such abilities should be wasted and misapplied. Our own country is in a perilous state of excitement, and these troubled times make politicians of us all. Of course the papers will have informed you of the risings in Kent and Sussex; London itself is in an unquiet state that suggests the heaving of a volcano before an eruption. It is said that the Duke of Wellington must resign; I am ignorant, but it appears to me that whenever he does it will be a bad day's work for England. The alarm and anxiety of the aristocracy is extreme, and exhibits itself, even as I have had opportunity of observing in society, in the half-angry, half-frightened tone of their comments on public events. If one did not sympathize with their apprehensions, their mode of expressing them would sometimes be amusing. 

 The aspect of public affairs is injurious to the theater, and these graver interests thin our houses while they crowd the houses of Parliament. However, when we played "The Provoked Husband" before the king and queen the other night, the theater was crammed from floor to ceiling, and presented a most beautiful _coup d'oeil_. I have just come out in Mrs. Haller. It seems to have pleased the people very much. I need not tell you how much I dislike the play; it is the quintessence of trashy sentimentalism; but our audiences cry and sob at it till we can hardly hear ourselves speak on the stage, and the public in general rejoices in what the servant-maids call "something deep. " My father acts the Stranger with me, which makes it very trying to my nerves, as I mix up all my own personal feelings for him with my acting, and the sight of his anguish and sense of his displeasure is really very dreadful to me, though it is only all about "stuff and nonsense" after all. 

 I must leave off writing; I am excruciated with the toothache, which has tormented me without respite all day. I will inclose a line to Mrs. K----, which I will beg you to convey to her. 

 With kindest love to all your circle, believe me ever yours, F. A. K. 

 Thank you for your delicious French comic song; you should come to London to hear how admirably I sing it. 

Mrs. K---- was a Miss Dawson, sister of the Right Honorable GeorgeDawson, and the wife of an eminent member of the Irish bar. She was awoman of great mental cultivation and unusual information upon subjectswhich are generally little interesting to women. She was a passionatepartisan of Owen the philanthropist and Combe the phrenologist, andentertained the most sanguine hopes of the regeneration of the wholecivilized world through the means of the theories of these benevolentreformers. Except Queen Elizabeth, of glorious memory, I do not think awoman can have existed who combined the love of things futile andserious to the same degree as Mrs. K----. Her feminine taste forfashionable society and the frivolities of dress, together with hersober and solid studies of the gravest sort and her devotion to thespeculations of her friends Owen and Combe, constituted a rare union ofcontrasts. She was a remarkable instance of the combination exemplifiedby more than one eminent person of her sex, of a capacity for seriousstudy, solid acquirements, and enlightened and liberal views upon themost important subjects, with a decided inclination for those moretrifling pursuits supposed to be the paramount interests of the femalemind. She was the dear friend of my dear friend Miss S----, andcorresponded with her upon the great subject of social progress with aperfect enthusiasm of theoretical reform. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, November 14th DEAREST H----, Thank you a thousand times for your kindness in consenting to come to us. We are all very happy in the hope of having you, nor need you be for a moment nervous or uncomfortable from the idea that we shall receive or treat you otherwise than as one of ourselves. I have left my mother and my aunt in the room which is to be yours, devising and arranging matters for you. It is a very small roost, dear H----, but it is the only spare room in our house, and although it is three stories up, it is next to mine, and I hope good neighborhood will atone for some deficiencies. With regard to interfering with the routine or occupations of the family, they are of a nature which, fortunately for your scruples, renders that impossible. There is but one thing in your letter which rather distressed me: you allude to the inconveniences of a woman traveling in mail coaches in December, and I almost felt, when I read the sentence, what my aunt Dall told me after I had requested you to come to us now, that it was a want of consideration in me to have invited you at so ungenial a season for traveling. I had one reason for doing so which I hope will excuse the apparent selfishness of the arrangement. Toward the end of the spring I shall be leaving town, I hope to come nearer your land, and the beginning of our spring is seldom much more mild and inviting or propitious for traveling than the winter itself. Then, too, the early spring is the time when our engagements are unavoidably very numerous; to decline going into society is not in my power, and to drag you to my balls (which I love dearly) would, I think, scarce be a pleasure to you (whom I love more), and to go to them when I might be with you would be to run the risk of destroying my taste for the only form of intercourse with my fellow-creatures which is not at present irksome to me. Think, dear H----, if ceasing to dance I should cease to care for universal humanity--indeed, take to hating it, and become an absolute misanthropist! What a risk!

 I have heard nothing more of or from John, but the newspaper reports of the proceedings are rather more favorable than they have been, though I fear one cannot place much reliance on them. I do not know how the papers you see speak of the aspect of affairs in England at this moment; the general feeling seems to be one of relief, and that, whatever apprehensions may have been entertained for the tranquillity of the country, the storm has blown over for the present. Everything is quiet again in London and promises to remain so, and there seems to be a sort of "drawing of a long breath" sensation in the state of the public mind, though I cannot myself help thinking not only that we have been, but that we still are, on the eve of some great crisis. 

 Mrs. Haller is going on very well; it is well spoken of, I am told, and upon the whole it seems to have done me credit, though I am surprised it has, for there is nothing in the part that gives me the least satisfaction. My next character, I hear, is to be of a very different order of frailty--Calista, in "The Fair Penitent. " However odious both play and part are, there are powerful situations in it, and many opportunities for fine acting, but I am afraid I am quite unequal to such a _turpissime_ termagant, with whom my aunt did such tremendous things. 

My performance of "The Fair Penitent" was entirely ineffective, and didneither me nor the theater any service; the play itself is a feebleadaptation of Massinger's powerful drama of "The Fatal Dowry, " and, asgenerally happens with such attempts to fit our old plays to our modernstage, the fundamentally objectionable nature of the story could not bereformed without much of the vigorous and terrible effect of theoriginal treatment evaporating in the refining process. Mr. Macreadyrevived Massinger's fine play with considerable success, but both thematter and the manner of our dramatic ancestors is too robust for theaudiences of our day, who nevertheless will go and see "Diane de Lys, "by a French company of actors, without wincing. Of Mrs. Siddons's Mrs. Haller, one of her admirers once told me that her majestic and imposingperson, and the commanding character of her beauty, militated againsther effect in the part. "No man, alive or dead, " said he, "would havedared to take a liberty with her; wicked she might be, but weak shecould not be, and when she told the story of her ill-conduct in theplay, nobody believed her. " While another of her devotees, speaking of"The Fair Penitent, " said that it was worth sitting out the piece forher scene with Romont alone, and to see "such a splendid animal in sucha magnificent rage. "

CHAPTER XVIII. 

My friend left us after a visit of a few weeks, taking my sister toIreland with her on a visit to Ardgillan. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, December 21st. MY DEAREST H----, My aunt Dall brought me home word that you wished me to send a letter which should meet you on your arrival at Ardgillan; and I would have done so, but that I had previously promised myself that I would do nothing this day till I had copied out the fourth act of "The Star of Seville, " and you know unless I am steady at my work this week, I shall break my word a second time, which is _impossible_, as it ought to have been at first. 

[A tragedy in five acts, called "The Star of Seville, " at which I wasworking, is here referred to. My father had directed my attention to thesubject by putting in my hands a sketch of the life and works of Lope deVega, by Lord Holland. The story of La Estrella de Seviglia appeared tomy father eminently dramatic, and he excited me to choose it for thesubject of a drama. I did so, and Messrs. Saunders and Ottley were goodenough to publish it; it had no merit whatever, either dramatic orpoetical (although I think the subject gave ample scope for both), and Ido not remember a line of it. ]

 However, it is nine o'clock; I have not ceased writing except to dine, and my act is copied; and now I can give you an hour before bedtime. How are you? and how is dear A----? Give her several good kisses for me; she is by this time admirable friends with all your circle, I doubt not, and slightly, superficially acquainted with the sea. Tell her she is a careless little puss, though, for she forgot the plate with my effigy on it for Hercules [Miss S----'s nephew] which she was to have given my aunt to pack up. I am quite sorry about it; tell him, however, he shall not lose by it, for I will send him both a plate with the Belvidera and a mug with my own natural head on it, the next time you return home. 

 I stood in the dining-room listening to your carriage wheels until I believe they were only rolling in my imagination; you cannot fancy how doleful our breakfast was. Henry was perfectly enraged at finding that A---- was gone in earnest, and my father began to wonder how it had ever come to pass that he had consented to let her go. After breakfast, Dall and I walked to Mr. Cartwright's (the dentist), who fortunately did not torture me much; for if he had, my spirits were so exceedingly low that I am sure I should have disgraced myself and cried like a coward. As soon as we came home I set to work, and have never stopped copying till I began this letter, when, having done my day's work, I thought I might tell you how much I miss you and dear A----. 

 My father is gone to the theater upon business to-night; my mother is very unwell, and Dall and Henry, as well as myself, are stupid and dreary. 

 My dear H----, tell me how you bore the journey and the cold, and how dear A---- fared on the road; how you found all your people, and how the dell and the sea are looking. Write to me very _soon_ and _very_ long. You have let several stitches fall in one of the muffetees you knit for me, and it is all running to ruin; I must see and pick them up at the theater on Thursday night. You have left all manner of things behind you; among others, Channing's two essays; I will keep all your property honestly for you, and shall soon have time to read those essays, which I very much wish to do. 

 A large supply of Christmas fare arrived from Stafford to-day from my godmother, and among other things, a huge nosegay for me. I was very grateful for the flowers; they are always a pleasure, and to-day I thought they tried to be a consolation to me. 

 Now I must break off. Do you remember Madame de Sévigné's "Adieu; ce n'est pas jusqu'à demain--jusqu'à samedi--jusqu' aujourd'hui en huit; c'est adieu pour un an"? and yet I certainly have no right to grumble, for our meeting as we have done latterly is a pleasure as little to have been anticipated as the events which have enabled us to do so, and for which I have so many reasons to be thankful. God bless you, dear H----; kiss dear little A---- for me, and remember me affectionately to all your people. 

 I am yours ever truly, FANNY. 

 Dall sends her best love to both, and all; and Henry bids me tell A---- that the name of the Drury Lane pantomime is "Harlequin and Davy Jones, or Mother Carey's Chickens. " Ours is yet a secret; he will write her all about it. 

Mr. Cartwright, the eminent dentist, was a great friend of my father's;he was a cultivated gentleman of refined taste, and an enlightened judgeand liberal patron of the arts. If anything could have alleviated thehalf-hour's suspense before one obtained admission to his beautifullibrary, which was on some occasions (of, I suppose, slight importance)his "operating-room, " it would have been the choice specimens of lovelylandscape painting, by the first English masters, which adorned hisdining-room. I have sat by Sir Thomas Lawrence at the hospitabledinner-table, where Mr. Cartwright gave his friends the most agreeableopportunity of using the teeth which he, preserved for them, and heardin his house the best classical English vocal music, capitally executedby the first professors of that school, and brilliant amicable rivalryof first-rate piano-forte performances by Cramer, Neukomm, Hummel, andMoscheles, who were all personal friends of their host. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, January 3, 1831. MY DEAR H----, I promised you, in the interesting P. S. I annexed to my aunt Dall's letter, to write to you to-day, and I sit down this evening to fulfill my promise. My father is gone out to dinner, my mother is asleep on the sofa, Dall reclines dozing in that blissful armchair you wot of, and Henry, happier than either, is extended snoring before the fire on the softest, thickest, splendidest colored rug (a piece of my mother's workmanship) that the most poetical canine imagination could conceive; I should think an earthly type of those heavenly rugs which virtuous dogs, according to your creed, are destined to enjoy. 

[My friend Miss S---- held (without having so eloquently advocated) thetheory of her and my friend Miss Cobbe, of the possible future existenceof animals; such animals at any rate as had formed literally a preciouspart of the earthly existence of their owners, and in whom a certainsense, so nearly resembling conscience, is developed, by their obedienceand attachment to the superior race, that it is difficult to considerthem unmoral creatures. Perhaps, however, if the choice were given ourfour-footed friends to share our future prospects and presentresponsibility, they might decline the offer, "Thankfu' they werena'men, but dogs. "]

 Dear H----, the pleasant excitement of your society assisted the natural contentedness or indifference of my disposition to throw aside many reflections upon myself and others, the life I lead and its various annoyances, which have been unpleasantly forced upon me since your departure; and when I say that I do not feel happy, you will not count it merely the blue-devilish fancy of a German brain or an English (that is bilious) stomach. 

 I have a feeling, not of dissatisfaction or discontent so much as of sadness and weariness, though I struggle always and sometimes pretty successfully to rouse myself from it. 

 You say you wish to know what we did on Christmas Day. I'll tell you. In the morning I went to church, after which I came home and copied "The Star of Seville" till dinner-time. After dinner my mother, who had proposed spending the evening at our worthy pastor's, Mr. Sterky's, finding my father disinclined for that exertion, remained at home and went to sleep; my father likewise, Dall likewise, Henry likewise; and I copied on at my play till bedtime: _voilà_. On Monday, contrary to my expectation, I had to play Euphrasia before the pantomime. You know we were to spend Christmas Eve at my aunt Siddons's; we had a delightful evening and I was very happy. My aunt came down from the drawing-room (for we danced in the dining-room on the ground floor) and sat among us, and you cannot think how nice and pretty it was to see her surrounded by her clan, more than three dozen strong; some of them so handsome, and many with a striking likeness to herself, either in feature or expression. Mrs. Harry and Cecy danced with us, and we enjoyed ourselves very much; I wished for dear A---- exceedingly. Wednesday we dined at Mrs. Mayow's. 

[My mother's dear friend, Mrs. Mayow, was the wife of a gentleman in ahigh position in one of our Government offices. She was a West Indiancreole, and a singularly beautiful person. Her complexion was of theclear olive-brown of a perfectly Moorish skin, with the color of adamask rose in her cheeks, and lips as red as coral. Her features wereclassically symmetrical, as was the soft, oval contour of her face; hereyes and hair were as black as night, and the former had a halo of finelashes of the most magnificent length. She never wore any head-dress buta white muslin turban, the effect of which on her superb dark face wasstrikingly handsome, and not only its singularity but its noble andbecoming simplicity distinguished her in every assembly, amid thevarious fantastic head-gear of each successive Parisian "fashion of theday. " As a girl she had been remarkably slender, but she grew to anenormous size, without the increased bulk of her person disfiguring orrendering coarse her beautiful face. ]

 Thursday I acted Lady Townley, and acted it abominably ill, and was much mortified to find that Cecilia had got my cousin Harry to chaperon her two boys to the play that night; because, as he never before went to see me act, it is rather provoking that the only time he did so I should have sent him to sleep, which he gallantly assured me I did. I do not find cousins so much more polite than brothers (one's natural born plagues). Harry's compliment to my acting had quite a brotherly tenderness, I think. Friday, New Year's Eve, we went to a ball at Mrs. G----'s, which I did not much enjoy; and yesterday, New Year's Day, Henry and I spent the evening at Mrs. Harry's. There was no one there but Cecy and her two boys, and we danced, almost without stopping, from eight till twelve. 

[The lads my cousin Cecilia called her boys were the two younger sons ofher brother George Siddons, Mrs. Siddons's eldest son, then and for manyyears after collector of the port at Calcutta. These lads and theirsisters were being educated in England, and were spending theirChristmas holidays with their grandmother, Mrs. Siddons. The youngest ofthese three schoolboys, Henry, was the father of the beautiful Mrs. Scott-Siddons of the present day. It was in the house of my cousinGeorge Siddons, then one of the very pleasantest and gayest in Calcutta, that his young nephew Harry, son of his sister-in-law, my dear Mrs. Harry Siddons, was to find a home on his arrival in India, andsubsequently a wife in Harriet, the second daughter of the house. ]

 I am to act Juliet to-morrow, and Calista on Thursday; Friday and Saturday I am to act Mrs. Haller and Lady Townley at Brighton. I shall see the sea, that's one comfort, and it will be something to live upon for some time to come. Next Wednesday week I am to come out in Bianca, in Milman's "Fazio. " Do you know the play? It is very powerful, and my part is a very powerful one indeed. I have hopes it may succeed greatly. Mr. Warde is to be my Fazio, for, I hear, people object to my having my father's constant support, and wish to see me act _alone_; what geese, to be sure! I wonder whether they think my father has hold of strings by the means of which he moves my arms and legs! I am very glad something likely to strike the public is to be given before "Inez de Castro" (a tragedy of Miss Mitford's), for it will need all the previous success of a fine play and part to carry us safely through that. 

 I have not seen Mr. Murray again; I conclude he is out of town just now. 

 We have made all inquiries about poor dear A----'s trunk, and of course, as soon as we hear of it, it will be sent to her; I am very sorry for her, poor dear little child, but I advise her, when she does get them, to put on each of her new dresses for an hour by turns, and sit opposite the glass in them. Good-by, dear H----. Your affectionate

 F. K. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, 6th January, 1831. DEAREST H----, I have only time to say two words to you, for I am in the midst of preparations for our flight to Brighton, to-morrow. Thank you for your last letter; I liked it very much, and will answer it at length when we come back to town. 

 Mr. Murray has got my MSS. , but I have yet heard nothing about it from him. My fire is not in that economical invention, the "miserable basket" [an iron frame fitting inside our common-sized grate to limit the extravagant consumption of coal], but well spread out in the large comfortable grate; yet I am sitting with my door and windows all wide open; it is a lovely, bright, mild spring day. I do not lose my time any more of a morning watching the fire kindling, for the housemaid lights it before I get out of bed, so my poetry and philosophy are robbed of a most interesting subject of meditation. 

 With regard to what you say about A----, I do not know that I expected her to love, though I was sure she would admire, nature; she is very young yet, and her quick, observant mind and tendency to wit and sarcasm make human beings more amusing, if not more interesting, to her than inanimate objects. It is not the beauty of nature alone, as it appeals merely to our senses, that produces that passionate love for it which induces us to prefer communion with it to the intercourse of our fellows. The elevated trains of thought, and the profound and sublime aspirations which the external beauty of the world suggests, draw and rivet our mind and soul to its contemplation, and produce a sort of awful sense of companionship with the Unseen, which cannot, I think, be an experience of early youth. For then the volatile, vivid, and various spirit, with its sympathizing and communicative tendency, has a strong propensity to spend itself on that which can return its value in like commodity; and exchange of thought and feeling is a preponderating desire and necessity, and human fellowship and intercourse is naturally attractive to unworn and unwearied human nature. I suppose the consolatory element in the beautiful _un_human world in which we live is not often fully appreciated by the young, they want comparatively so little of it; youth is itself so thoroughly its own consoler. Some years hence, I dare say A---- will love both the sea and sky better than she does now. To a certain degree, too, the love of solitude, which generally accompanies a deep love for nature, is a kind of selfishness that does not often exist in early life. 

 I am desired to close this letter immediately; I have therefore only time to add that I act Calista to-night here, Mrs. Haller to-morrow at Brighton, and Saturday, also there, Lady Townley. On Monday I act Juliet here, and on Wednesday Bianca in "Fazio"--when pray for me! Now you know where to think of me. I will write to you a _real_ letter on Sunday. 

 Kiss A---- for me, and do not be unhappy, my dear, for you will soon see me again; and in the meantime I advise you, as you think my picture so much more agreeable than myself, to console yourself with that. Good-by. 

 Your affectionate FANNY. 

The fascination of sitting by a brook and watching the lapsing water, or, on the sands, the oncoming, uprising, breaking, and melting away ofthe white wave-crests, is, I suppose, matter of universal experience. Ido not know whether watching fire has the same irresistible attractionfor everybody. It has almost a stronger charm for me; and the hours Ihave spent sitting on the rug in front of my grate, and watching thewonderful creature sparkling and glowing there, have been almost morethan I dare remember. I was obliged at last, in order not to waste halfmy day in the contemplation of this bewitching element, to renounce apractice I long indulged in of lighting my own fire; but to this momentI envy the servant who does that office, or should envy her but that shenever remains on her knees worshiping the beautiful, subtle spirit shehas evoked, as I could still find it in my heart to do. 

I think I remember that Shelley had this passion for fire-gazing; it's acomfort to think that whatever he could _say_, he could never _see_ moreenchanting things in his grate than I have in mine; but indeed, even forShelley, the motions and the colors of flames are unspeakable. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, January 9, 1831. DEAR H----, I promised you a letter to-day, and if I can do so now, at least I will begin to keep my promise, though I think it possible my courage may fail me after the first side of my sheet of paper. We arrived in town from Brighton on this afternoon at four o'clock, and though it is not yet ten I am so weary, and have so much to do to-morrow (rehearsing "Fazio" and acting Juliet), that I think I shall not sit up much longer to-night, even to write to you. 

 We found my mother tolerably well, and Henry, who had been out skating all day, in great beauty and high spirits. I must now tell you what I had not room for when I wrote you those few lines in A----'s letter. 

 Mr. Barton, a friend of John's who traveled with him in Germany, and whose sister has lately married John Sterling (of whom you have often heard us speak), called here the other day, and during the course of a long visit told us a great deal of the very beginning of this Spanish expedition, and of the share Mr. Sterling and Richard Trench [the present venerable archbishop of Dublin] had in its launching. 

 It seems (though he would not say whence they derived them) that they were plentifully supplied with funds, with which they purchased and manned a vessel destined to carry arms and ammunition to Spain for the purposes of the revolutionists. This ship they put under command of an experienced _smuggler_, and it was actually leaving the mouth of the Thames with Sterling and Mr. Trench on board it, bound for Spain, when by order of Lord Aberdeen it was stopped. Our two young gentlemen jumped into a boat and made their escape, but Mr. Sterling, hearing that government threatened to proceed against the captain of the captured vessel, came forward and owned it as his property, and exonerated the man, as far as he could, from any share of the blame attaching to an undertaking in which he was an irresponsible instrument. Matters were in this state, with a prosecution pending over John Sterling, when the ministry was changed, and nothing further has been done or said by government on the subject since. 

 My brother had gone off to Gibraltar previously to all this, to take measures for facilitating their landing; he is now quietly and I hope comfortably wintering there. Torrijos, it seems, is not at all disheartened, but is waiting for the propitious moment, which, however, from the appearance of things, I should not consider likely to be at hand just yet. Mr. Sterling has, I understand, been so seriously ill since his marriage that at one time his life was despaired of, and even now that he is a little recovered he is ordered to Madeira as soon as he can be moved. This is very sad for his poor bride. 

 Of our home circle I have nothing to tell you. My father, Dall, and I had a very delightful day on Saturday at Brighton. After a lovely day's journey, we arrived there on Friday. Our companion in the coach luckily happened to be a son of Dr. Burney's, who was an old and intimate friend of my father's, and they discoursed together the whole way along, of all sorts of events and people: of my uncle John and my aunt Siddons, in their prime; of Mrs. Jordan and the late king; of the present one, Harlow, Lawrence, and innumerable other folk of note and notoriety. Among other things they had a long discussion on the subject of Hamlet's feigned or--as my father maintains and I believe--real madness; all this formed a very amusing accompaniment to the history of Sir Launcelot du Lac, which I was reading with much delight when I was not listening to their conversation. 

 I like all that concerns the love adventures of these valorous knights of yore; but their deadly blows and desperate thrusts, their slashing, gashing, mashing, mangling, and hewing bore me to death. The fate of Guinevere interested me deeply, but Sir Launcelot's warlike exploits I got dreadfully weary of; I prefer him greatly in hall and bower rather than in tournament and battle-field. 

 We got into Brighton at half-past four, and had just time to dine, dress, and go to the theater, where we were to act "The Stranger. " The house was very full indeed, but my reception was not quite what I had expected; for whether they were disappointed in my dress (Mrs. Haller being traditionally clothed in droopacious white muslin, and I dressing her in gray silk, which is both stiff and dull looking, as I think it should be), or whether, which I think still more likely, they were disappointed in my "personal appearance, " which, as you know, is neither tragical nor heroic, I know not, but I thought their welcome rather, cold; but the truth is, I believe my London audience spoils me for every other. However, the play went off admirably, and I believe everybody was satisfied, not excepting the manager, who assured me so full and _enthusiastic_ a house had not been seen in Brighton for many years. 

 Our rooms at the inn [the old Ship was then _the_ famous Brighton hotel] looked out upon the sea, but it was so foggy when we entered Brighton that although I perceived the _motion_ of the waves through the mist that hung over them, their color and every object along the shore was quite indistinct. The next morning was beautiful. Dall and I ran down to the beach before breakfast; there are no sands, unluckily, but we stood ankle-deep in the shingles, watching the ebbing tide and sniffing the sweet salt air for a long time with great satisfaction. After breakfast we rehearsed "The Provoked Husband, " and from the theater proceeded to take a walk. 

 All this was very fine, but still it was streets and houses; and there were crowds of gay people parading up and down, looking as busy about nothing and as full of themselves as if the great awful sea had not been close beside them. In fact, I was displeased with the levity of their deportment, and the contrast of all that fashionable frivolity with the grandest of all natural objects seemed to me incongruous and discordant; and I was so annoyed at finding myself by the sea-side and _yet_ still surrounded with all the glare and gayety of London, that I think I wished myself at the bottom of the cliff and Brighton at the bottom of the sea. However, we walked on and on, beyond the Parade, beyond the town, till we had nothing but the broad open downs to contrast with the broad open sea, and then I was completely happy. I gave my muff to my father and my fur tippet to Dall, for the sun shone powerfully on the heights, and I walked and ran along the edge of the cliffs, gazing and pondering, and enjoying the solemn sound and the brilliant sight, and the nervous excitement of a slight sense of fear as I peeped over at the depth below me. From this diversion, however, my father called me away, and, to console me for not allowing me to run the risk of being dashed to pieces, offered to run a race up a small hill with me, and beat me hollow. 

 We had walked about four miles when we halted at one of the Preventive Service stations to look about us. The tide had not yet come in, but its usual height when up was indicated, first by a delicate, waving fringe of sea-weed, like very bright green moss, and then, nearer in shore, by an incrustation of chalk washed from the cliffs, which formed a deep embossed silver embroidery along the coast as far as eye could see. The sunshine was dazzling, and its light on the detached masses of milky chalk which lay far beneath us made them appear semi-transparent, like fragments of alabaster or carnelian. I was wishing that I _could but_ get down the cliff, when a worthy sailor appeared toiling up it, and I discovered his winding stair case cut in the great chalk wall, down which I proceeded without further ado. I was a little frightened, for the steps were none of the most regular or convenient, and I felt as if I were hanging (and at an uncomfortable distance from either) between heaven and earth. I got down safe, however, and ran to the water's edge, danced a galop on one smooth little sand island, waited till the tide, which was coming up, just touched my toes, gave it a kick of cowardly defiance, and then showed it a fair pair of heels and scrambled up the cliff again, very much enchanted with my expedition. 

 I think a fight with smugglers up that steep staircase at night, with a heavy sea rolling and roaring close under it, would be glorious! When I reached the top my father said it was time to go home, so we returned. The Parade was crowded like Hyde Park in the height of the season [Thackeray called Brighton London-super-Mare], and when once I was out of the crowd and could look down upon it from our windows as it promenaded up and down, I never saw anything gayer: carriages of every description--most of them open--cavalcades of ladies and gentlemen riding to and fro, throngs of smart bonnets and fine dresses; and beyond all this the high tide, with one broad crimson path across it, thrown by the sun, looking as if it led into some enchanted world beyond the waters. 

 I thought of dear A----; for though she is seeing the sea--and I think the sea at Ardgillan, with its lovely mountains on one side and Skerries on the other, far more beautiful than this--I am sure she would have been enchanted with the life, the bustle, and brilliancy of the Parade combined with its fine sea view, for I, who am apt rather selfishly to wish myself alone in the enjoyment of nature, looked at the bright, moving throng with pleasure when once I was out of it. 

 Our house at the theater at night was very fine; and now, as you are perhaps tired of Brighton, you will not be sorry to get home with me; but pray communicate the end of our "land sorrow" to A----. We were to start for London Sunday morning at ten [a journey of six hours by coach, now of less than two by rail], and my father had taken three inside places in a coach, which was to call for us at our inn. I ran down to the beach and had a few moments alone there. It was a beautiful morning, and the fishing boats were one by one putting out into the calmest sleepy sea. I longed to ask to be taken on board one of them; but I was summoned away to the coach, and found on reaching it that, the fourth place being occupied by a sickly looking woman with a sickly looking child nearly as big as herself in her lap, my father, notwithstanding the coldness of the morning, had put himself on the outside. I went to sleep; from which blessed refuge of the wretched I was recalled by a powerful and indescribable smell, which, seizing me by the nose, naturally induced me to open my eyes. Mother and daughter were each devouring a lump of black, strong, greasy plum cake; as a specific, I presume, against (or for?) sickness in a stage-coach. 

 The late Duke of Beaufort, when Marquis of Worcester, used frequently to amuse himself by driving the famous fast Brighton coach, the Highflyer. One day, as my father was hastily depositing his shilling gratuity in his driver's outstretched hand, a shout of laughter, and a "Thank ye, Charles Kemble, " made him aware of the gentleman Jehu under whose care he had performed the journey. 

 WEDNESDAY, January 12, 1831. DEAREST H----, I received your letter dated the 7th the night before last, and purposed ending this long epistle yesterday evening with an answer to it, but was prevented by having to go with my mother to dine with Mrs. L----, that witty woman and more than middle-aged beauty you have heard me speak of. I was repaid for the exertion I had not made very willingly, for I had a pleasant dinner. This lady has a large family and very large fortune, which at her death goes to her eldest son, who is a young man of enthusiastically religious views and feelings; he has no profession or occupation, but devotes himself to building chapels and schools, which he himself superintends with unwearied assiduity; and though he has never taken orders, he preaches at some place in the city, to which crowds of people flock to hear him; none of which is at all agreeable to his mother, whose chief anxiety, however, is lest some one of the fair Methodists who attend his exhortations should admire his earthly expectations as much as his heavenly prospects, and induce this young apostle to marry her for her soul's sake; all which his mother told mine, with many lamentations over the godly zeal of her "serious" son, certainly not often made with regard to young men who are likely to inherit fine fortunes and estates. One of this young gentleman's sisters is strongly imbued with the same religious feeling, and I think her impressions deepened by her very delicate state of health. I am much attracted by her gentle manner, and the sweet, serious expression of her face, and the earnest tone of her conversation; I like her very much. 

 My mother is reading Moore's "Life of Byron, " and has fallen in love with the latter and in hate with his wife. She declares that he was originally good, generous, humble, religious--indeed, everything that a man can be, short of absolute perfection. She thinks me narrow-minded and prejudiced because I do not care to read his life, and because, in spite of all Moore's assertions, I maintain that with Byron's own works in one's hand his character cannot possibly be a riddle to anybody. I dare say the devil may sometimes be painted blacker than he is; but Byron has a fancy for the character of Lucifer, and seems to me, on the contrary, _très pauvre diable_. I have no idea that Byron was half fiend, half man (at least, no more so than all of us are); I dare say he was not at all really an atheist, as he has been reputed; indeed, I do not think Lord Byron, in spite of all the fuss that has been made about him, was by any means an uncommon character. His genius was indeed rare, but his pride, vanity, and selfishness were only so in degree. You know, H----, nobody was ever a more fanatical worshiper of his poetry than I was: time was that I devoured his verses (poison as they were to me) like "raspberry tarts;" I still know, and remember with delight, their exquisite beauty and noble vigor, but they don't agree with me. And, without knowing anything of his religious doubts or moral delinquencies, I cannot at all agree with Mr. Moore that upon the showing of his own works Byron was a "good man. " If he was, no one has done him such injustice as himself; and if _he_ was _good_, then what was Milton? and what genial and gentle Shakespeare?

 Good-by, dear H----; write me along "thank you" for this longest of mortal letters, and believe that I am your ever affectionate

 F. A. K. 

 I began living upon my allowance on New Year's Day, and am keeping a most rigorous account of every farthing I spend. I have a tolerable "acquisitiveness" among my other organs, but think I would rather get than keep money, and to earn would always be pleasanter to me than to save. I act in "Fazio" to-night, Friday, and Monday next, so you will know where to find me on those evenings. 

 MONDAY, 27th. DEAR H----, Horace Twiss has been out of town, and I have been obliged to delay this for a frank. You will be glad, I know, to hear that "Fazio" has made a great hit. Milman is coming to see me in it to-night; I wish I could induce him to write me such another part. 

 We are over head and ears in the mire of chancery again. The question of the validity of our--the great theater--patents is now before Lord Brougham; I am afraid they are not worth a farthing. I am to hear from Mr. Murray some day this week; considering the features of my handwriting, it is no wonder it has taken him some time to become acquainted with the MSS. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, January 29, 1831. MY DEAR H----, All our occupations have been of a desultory and exciting kind, and all our doings and sayings have been made matter of surprise and admiring comment; of course, therefore, we are disinclined for anything like serious or solid study, and naturally conclude that sayings and doings so much admired and wondered at _are_ admirable and astonishing. A---- is possessed of strong powers of ridicule, and the union of this sarcastic vein with a vivid imagination seems to me unusual; their prey is so different that they seldom hunt in company, I think. When I heard that she was reading "Mathilde" (Madame Cottin), I was almost afraid of its effect upon her. I remember at school, when I was her age, crying three whole days and half nights over it; but I sadly overrated her sensibility. Her letter to me contained a summary, abusive criticism of "Mathilde" as a book, and ended by presenting to me one of those ludicrous images which I abhor, because, while they destroy every serious or elevated impression, they are so absurd that one cannot defend one's self from the "idiot laughter" they excite, and leave one no associations but grinning ones with one's romantic ideals. Her letters are very clever and make me laugh exceedingly, but I am sorry she has such a detestation of Mrs. Marcet and natural philosophy. As for her letters being shown about, I am not sorry that my indiscretion has relieved A---- from a restraint which, if it had only been disagreeable to her, would not have mattered so much, but which is calculated to destroy all possibility of free and natural correspondence, and inevitably renders letters mere compositions and their young authors vain and pretentious. I have always thought the system a bad one, for under it, if a girl's letters are thought dull, she feels as if she had made a failure, and if they are laughed at and passed from hand to hand with her knowledge, the result is much worse; and in either case, what she writes is no longer the simple expression of her thoughts and feelings, but samples of wit, ridicule, and comic fancy which are to be thought amusing and clever by others than those to whom they are addressed. 

 You say my mother in her note to you speaks well of my acting in Bianca. It has succeeded very well, and I think I act some of it very well; but my chief pleasure in its success was certainly her approbation. She is a very severe critic, and, as she censures sharply, I am only too thankful when I escape her condemnation. I think you will be pleased with Bianca. I was surprised when I came to act it at finding how terribly it affected me, for I am not naturally at all jealous, and in this play, while feigning to be so, it seemed to me that it must be really the most horrible suffering conceivable; I am almost sorry that I can imagine it well enough to represent it well. 

 You say that we love intellect, but I do not agree with you; I do not think intellect excites love. I do not even think that it increases our love for those we do love, though it adds admiration to our affection. I certainly do admire intellect immensely; mental power, which allied to moral power, goodness, is a force to uphold the universe. 

 I have forsworn all discussions about Byron; my mother and I differ so entirely on the subject that, as I cannot adopt her view of his character, I find it easier to be silent about my own. Perhaps her extreme admiration of him may have thrown me into a deeper disapprobation than I should otherwise have expressed. He has many excuses, doubtless: the total want of early restraint, the miserable influence of the injudicious mother who alternately idolized and victimized him, the bitter castigation of his first plunge into literature, and then the flattering, fawning, fulsome adoration of his habitual associates, of course were all against him; but, after all, one cannot respect the man who strikes colors to the enemy as one does the one who comes conqueror out of the conflict. I now believe that there is a great deal of unreality in those sentiments to which the charm of his verses lent an appearance of truth and depth; in fact, his poetical feelings will sometimes stand the test of sober reflection quite as little as his grammar will that of a severe application of the rules of syntax. He has written immensely for mere effect, but all young people read him, and young people are not apt to analyze closely what they feel strongly, and, judging by my own experience, I should think Byron had done more mischief than one would like to be answerable for. When I said this the other day to my mother, she replied by referring to his "Don Juan, " supposing that I alluded to his profligacy; but it is not "Don Juan" only or chiefly that I think so mischievous, but "Manfred, " "Cain, " "Lucifer, " "Childe Harold, " and through them all Byron's own spirit--the despondent, defiant, questioning, murmuring, bitter, proud spirit, that acts powerfully and dangerously on young brains and throws poison into their natural fermentation. 

 Since you say that my perpetual quotation of that stupid song, "Old Wilson is Dead, " worries you, I will renounce my delight in teasing you with it. The love of teasing is, of course, only a base form of the love of power. Mr. Harness and I had a long discussion the other night about the Cenci; he maintains your opinion, that the wicked old nobleman was absolutely mad; but I argued the point stoutly for his sanity, and very nearly fell into the fire with dismay when I was obliged to confess that if he was not mad, then his actuating motive was simply _the love of power_. Do you know that that play was sent over by Shelley to England with a view to Miss O'Neill acting Beatrice Cenci? If it were ever possible that the piece could be acted, I should think an audience might be half killed with the horror of that entrance of Beatrice when she describes the marble pavement sliding from beneath her feet. 

 Did my mother tell you in her note that Milman was at the play the other night, and said I had made Bianca exactly what he intended? I wish he would write another tragedy. I think perhaps he will, from something Murray said the other day. That eminent publisher still has my MSS. In his possession, but you know I can take things easily, and I don't feel anxious about his decision. I act in "Fazio" Monday and Wednesday, and Friday and Saturday Mrs. Beverley and Belvidera at Brighton. 

I was inexpressibly relieved by receiving a letter from my brother, andthe intelligence that if I answered him he would be able to receive myreply, which I made immediate speed to send him. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, My brother John is alive, safe and well, in Gibraltar. You deserve to know this, but it is all I can say to you. My mother has suffered so much that she hardly feels her joy; it has broken her down, and I, who have borne up well till now, feel prostrated by this reprieve. God be thanked for all his mercies! I can say no more. 

 F. A. K. 

CHAPTER XIX. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, February 7, 1831. MY DEAR H----, I found your lecture waiting for me on my return from Brighton; I call it thus because if your two last were less than letters your yesterday's one is more; but I shall not attempt at present to follow you to the misty heights whither our nature tends, or dive with you into the muddy depths whence it springs. I have heard from my brother John, and now expect almost hourly to see him. The Spanish revolution, as he now sees and as many foresaw, is a mere vision. The people are unready, unripe, unfit, and therefore unwilling; had it not been so they would have done their work themselves; it is as impossible to urge on the completion of such a change before the time as to oppose it when the time is come. John now writes that, all hope of rousing the Spaniards being over, and their party consequently dispersing, he is thinking of bending his steps homeward, and talks of once more turning his attention to the study of the law. I know not what to say or think. My cousin, Horace Twiss, was put into Parliament by Lord Clarendon, but the days of such parliamentary patronage are numbered, and I do not much deplore it, though I sometimes fancy that the House of Commons, could it by any means have been opened to him, might perhaps have been the best sphere for John. His natural abilities are brilliant, and his eloquence, energy, and activity of mind might perhaps have been made more and more quickly available for good purposes in that than in any other career. 

 I am not familiar with all that Burns has written; I have read his letters, and know most of his songs by heart. His passions were so violent that he seems to me in that respect to have been rather a subject for poetry than a poet; for though a poet should perhaps have a strongly passionate nature, he should also have power enough over it to be able to observe, describe, and, if I may so say, experimentalize with it, as he would with the passions of others. I think it would better qualify a man to be a poet to be able to perceive rather than liable to feel violent passion or emotion. May not such things be known of without absolute experience? What is the use of the poetical imagination, that lower inspiration, which, like the higher one of faith, is the "evidence of things not seen"? Troubled and billowy waters reflect nothing distinctly on their surface; it is the still, deep, placid element that gives back the images by which it is surrounded or that pass over its surface. I do not of course believe that a good man is necessarily a poet, but I think a devout man is almost always a man with a poetical imagination; he is familiar with ideas which are essentially sublime, and in the act of adoration he springs to the source of all beauty through the channel by which our spirits escape most effectually from their chain, the flesh, and their prison-house, the world, and rise into communion with that supreme excellence from which they originally emanated and into whose bosom they will return. I cannot now go into all I think about this, for I have so many other things to talk about. Since I began this letter I have heard a report that John is a prisoner, that he has been arrested and sent to Madrid. Luckily I do not believe a word of this; if he has rendered himself obnoxious to the British authorities in Gibraltar they may have locked him up for a week or two there, and I see no great harm in that; but that he should have been delivered to the Spaniards and sent to Madrid I do not believe, because I know that the whole revolutionary party is going to pieces, and that they have neither the power nor the means to render themselves liable to such a disagreeable distinction. We expect him home every day. Only conceive, dear H----, the ill-fortune that attends us: my father, or rather the theater, is involved in six lawsuits I He and my mother are neither of them quite well; anxiety naturally has much share in their indisposition. 

 I learned Beatrice this morning and the whole of it, in an hour, which I tell you because I consider it a feat. I am delighted at the thoughts of acting it; it will be the second part which I shall have acted with real pleasure; Portia is the other, but Beatrice is not nearly so nice. I am to act it next Thursday, when pray think of me. 

 I do not know whether you have seen anything in the papers about a third theater; we have had much anxiety, vexation, and expense about it, but I have no doubt that Mr. Arnold will carry the question. The great people want a plaything for this season, and have set their hearts upon that. I acted Belvidera to my father's Jaffier at Brighton; you cannot imagine how great a difference it produced in my acting. Mrs. Siddons and Miss O'Neill had a great advantage over me in their tragic partners. Have you heard that Mr. Hope, the author of "Anastasius, " is just dead? That was a wonderfully clever book, of rather questionable moral effects, I think; the same sort of cynical gloom and discontent which pervade Byron's writings prevail in that; and I thought it a pity, because in other respects it seems a genuine book, true to life and human nature. A few days before I heard of his death, Mr. Harness was discussing with me a theory of Hope's respecting the destiny of the human soul hereafter. His notion is that all spirit is after death to form but one whole spiritual existence, a sort of _lumping_ which I object to. I should like always to be able to know myself from somebody else. 

 I _do_ read the papers sometimes, dear H----, and, whenever I do, I wonder at you and all sensible people who make a daily practice of it; the proceedings of Parliament would make one angry if they did not make one so sad, and some of the debates would seem to me laughable but that I know they are lamentable. 

 I have just finished Channing's essay on Milton, which is admirable. 

 My cousin Harry sails for India on Thursday; his mother is making a brave fight of it, poor soul! I met them all at my aunt Siddons's last night; she was remarkably well, and "charming, " as she styles herself when that is the case. Good-by. Always affectionately yours, FANNY. 

I suppose it is one of the peculiarities of the real poeticaltemperament to receive, as it were, a double impression of its ownphenomena--one through the senses, affections, and passions, and onethrough the imagination--and to have a perpetual tendency to makeintellectual capital of the experiences of its own sensuous, sentimental, and passionate nature. In the above letter, written so manyyears ago, I have used the term _experimentalizing_ with his own natureas the process of a poet's mind; but though self-consciousness andself-observation are almost inseparable from the poetical organization, Goethe is the only instance I know of what could, with any propriety, betermed self-experimentalizing--he who wrung the heart and turned thehead of the whole reading Europe of his day by his own love passageswith Madame Kestner transcribed into "The Sorrows of Werther. "

Self-illustration is perhaps a better term for the result of thatpassionate egotism which is so strong an element in the nature of mostpoets, and the secret of so much of their power. _Ils s'intéressenttellement à ce qui les regarde_, that they interest us profoundly in ittoo, and by the law of our common nature, and the sympathy that pervadesit, their great difference from their kind serves but to enforce theirgreater likeness to it. 

Goethe's nature, however, was not at all a predominantly passionate one;so much the contrary, indeed, that one hardly escapes the impression allthrough his own record of his life that he _felt_ through hisovermastering intellect rather than his heart; and that he analyzed toowell the processes of his own feelings ever to have been carried by thembeyond the permission of his will, or out of sight of that æstheticself-culture, that development, which really seems to have been hisprevailing passion. A strong histrionic vein mixes, too, with his moreimaginative mental qualities, and perpetually reveals itself in hisassumption of fictitious characters, in his desire for producing"situations" in his daily life, and in his conscious "effects" uponthose whom he sought to impress. 

His genius sometimes reminds me of Ariel--the subtle spirit who, observing from aloof, as it were (that is, from the infinite distance ofhis own _unmoral_, demoniacal nature), the follies and sins and sorrowsof humanity, understands them all and sympathizes with none of them; anddescribes, with equal indifference, the drunken, brutish delight in hismusic expressed by the coarse Neapolitan buffoons and the savagegorilla, Caliban, and the abject self-reproach and bitter, poignantremorse exhibited by Antonio and his fellow conspirators; tellingProspero that if _he_ saw them he would pity them, and adding, in hispassionless perception of their anguish, "I should, sir, _were Ihuman_. "

There is a species of remote partiality in Goethe's mode of delineatingthe sins and sorrows of his fellows, that seems hardly human and stillless divine; "_Das ist dämonisch_, " to use his own expression aboutShakespeare, who, however, had nothing whatever in common with thatquality of moral _neutrality_ of the great German genius. 

Perhaps nothing indicates what I should call Goethe's intellectual_unhumanity_ so much as his absolute want of sympathy with the progressof the race. He was but mortal man, however, though he had the head ofJove, and Pallas Athena might have sprung all armed from it. Once, andonce only, if I remember rightly, in his conversations with Eckermann, the cause of mankind elicits an expression of faith and hope from him, in some reference to the future of America. I recollect, on reading thesecond part of "Faust" with my friend Abeken (assuredly the mostcompetent of all expounders of that extraordinary composition), when Iasked him what was the signification of that final cultivation of thebarren sea sand, in Faust's blind old age, and cried, "Is it possiblethat he wishes to indicate the hopelessness of all attempt at progress?"his replying, "I am afraid he was no believer in it. " And so it comesthat his letters to Madame von Stein leave one only amazed with the moresorrowful admiration that the unrivaled genius of the civilized world inits most civilized age found perfect satisfaction in the inane routineof the life of a court dignitary in a petty German principality. 

It is worthy of note how, in the two instances of his greatmasterpieces, "Faust" and "Wilhelm Meister, " Goethe has worked up in asequel all the superabundant material he had gathered for his subject;and in each case how the life-blood of the poet pulses through the firstpart, while the second is, as it were, a mere storehouse of splendidintellectual supply which he has wrought into elaborate phantasmagoria, dazzling in their brilliancy and wonderful in their variety, but allalike difficult to comprehend and sympathize with--the rare mentalfragments, precious like diamond dust, left after the cutting of thosetwo perfect gems. 

Free-trade had hardly uttered a whisper yet upon any subject of nationalimportance when the monopoly of theatrical property was attacked by Mr. Arnold, of the English Opera House, who assailed the patents of the twogreat theaters, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and demanded that theright to act the legitimate drama (till then their especial privilege)should be extended to all British subjects desirous to open play-housesand perform plays. A lawsuit ensued, and the proprietors of the greathouses--"his Majesty's servants, " by his Majesty's royal patent sincethe days of the merry monarch--defended their monopoly to the best oftheir ability. My father, questioned before a committee of the House ofCommons upon the subject, showed forth the evils likely, in his opinion, to result to the dramatic art and the public taste by throwing open tounlimited speculation the right to establish theaters and givetheatrical representations. The great companies of good sterling actorswould be broken up and dispersed, and there would no longer existestablishments sufficiently important to maintain any large body ofthem; the best plays would no longer find adequate representatives inany but a few of the principal parts, the characters of theatricalpieces produced would be lowered, the school of fine and careful actingwould be lost, no play of Shakespeare's could be decorously put on thestage, and the profession and the public would alike fare the worse forthe change. But he was one of the patented proprietors, one of themonopolists, a party most deeply interested in the issue, and therefore, perhaps, an incompetent judge in the matter. The cause went against us, and every item of his prophecy concerning the stage has undoubtedly cometo pass. The fine companies of the great theaters were dissolved, andeach member of the body that together formed so bright a constellationwent off to be the solitary star or planet of some minor sphere. Thebest plays no longer found decent representatives for any but one or twoof their first parts; the pieces of more serious character and higherpretension as dramatic works were supplanted by burlesques and parodiesof themselves; the school of acting of the Kembles, Young, the Keans, Macready, and their contemporaries, gave place to no school at all ofvery clever ladies and gentlemen, who certainly had no pretension to acttragedy or declaim blank verse, but who played low comedy better thanhigh, and lowest farce best of all, and who for the most part wore theclothes of the sex to which they did not belong. Shakespeare's plays_all_ became historical, and the profession was decidedly the worse forthe change; I am not aware, however, that the public has suffered muchby it. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March 5, 1831. MY DEAREST H----, I am extremely obliged to you for your long account of Mrs. John Kemble, and all the details respecting her with which, as you knew how intensely interesting they were likely to be to me, you have so kindly filled your letter. Another time, if you can afford to give a page or two to her interesting dog, Pincher, I shall be still more grateful; you know it is but omitting the superfluous word or two you squeeze in about yourself. 

 As for the journal I keep, it is--as what is not?--a matter of mingled good and bad influences and results. I am so much alone that I find this pouring out of my thoughts and feelings a certain satisfaction; but unfortunately one's book is only a recipient, and not a commentary, and I miss the sifting, examining, scrutinizing, discussing intercourse that compels one to the analysis of one's own ideas and sentiments, and makes the society of any one with whom one communicates unreservedly so much more profitable, as well as pleasurable, than this everlasting self-communion. I miss my wholesome bitters, my daily dose of contradiction; and you need not be jealous of my book, for it is a miserable _pis aller_ for our interminable talks. 

 I had a visit from J---- F---- the other day, and she stayed an hour, talking very pleasantly, and a little after your fashion; for she propounded the influence of matter over mind and the impossibility of preserving a sound and vigorous spirit in a weak and suffering body. I am blessed with such robust health that my moral shortcomings, however anxious I may be to refer them to side-ache, toothache, or any other ache, I am afraid deserve small mercy on the score of physical infirmity; but she, poor thing, I am sorry to say, suffers much and often from ill health, and complained, with evident experience, of the difficulty of preserving a cheerful spirit and an even temper in the dreary atmosphere of a sick-room. 

 When she was gone I set to work with "Francis I. , " and corrected all the errors in the meter which Mr. Milman had had the kindness to point out to me. I then went over Beatrice with my mother, who takes infinite pains with me and seems to think I profit. She went to the play with Mrs. Fitzgerald and Mrs. Edward Romilly, who is a daughter of Mrs. Marcet, and, owing to A----'s detestation of that learned lady's elementary book on natural philosophy, I was very desirous they should not meet one another, though certainly, if any of Mrs. Marcet's works are dry and dull, it is not this charming daughter of hers. 

 But A---- was rabid against "Nat. Phil. , " as she ignominiously nick-named Mrs. Marcet's work on natural philosophy, and so I brought her to the theater with me; and she stayed in my dressing-room when I was there, and in my aunt Siddons's little box when I was acting, as you used to do; but she sang all the while she was with me, and though I made no sign, it gave me the nervous fidgets to such a degree that I almost forgot my part. In spite of which I acted better, for my mother said so; and there is some hope that by the time the play is withdrawn I shall not play Beatrice "like the chief mourner at a funeral, " which is what she benignly compares my performance of the part to. 

 The alteration in my gowns met with her entire approbation--I mean the taking away of the plaits from round the waist--and my aunt Dall pronounced it an immense improvement and wished you could see it. 

 Lady Dacre and her daughter, Mrs. Sullivan, and Mr. James Wortley were in the orchestra, and came after the play to supper with us, as did Mr. And Mrs. Fitzgerald, Mrs. Edward Romilly, and Mr. Harness: a very pleasant party, for the ladies are all clever and charming, and got on admirably together. 

 It is right, as you are a shareholder in that valuable property of ours, Covent Garden, you should know that there was a very fine house, though I cannot exactly tell you the amount of the receipts. 

 I miss you dreadfully, my dear H----, and I do wish you could come back to us when Dorothy has left you; but I know that cannot be, and so I look forward to the summer time, the sunny time, the rosy time, when I shall be with you again at Ardgillan. 

 Yesterday, I read for the first time Joanna Baillie's "Count Basil. " I am not sure that the love she describes does not affect me more even than Shakespeare's delineation of the passion in "Romeo and Juliet. " There is a nerveless despondency about it that seems to me more intolerable than all the vivid palpitating anguish of the tragedy of Verona; it is like dying of slow poison, or malarial fever, compared with being shot or stabbed or even bleeding to death, which is life pouring out from one, instead of drying up in one's brains. I think the lines beginning--

 "I have seen the last look of her heavenly eyes, "

 some of the most poignantly pathetic I know. I afterward read over again Mr. Procter's play; it is extremely well written, but I am afraid it would not act as well as it reads. I believe I told you that "Iñez de Castro" was finally given up. 

 Sally and Lizzy Siddons came and sat with me for some time; they seem well and cheerful. Their mother, they said, was not very well; how should she be! though, indeed, regret would be selfish. Her son is gone to fulfill his own wishes in pursuing the career for which he was most fit; he will find in his uncle George Siddons's house in Calcutta almost a second home. Sally, whom you know I respect almost as much as love, said it was surprising how soon they had learned to accept and become reconciled to their brother's departure. Besides all our self-invoked aids of reason and religion, nature's own provision for the need of our sorrows is more bountiful and beneficent than we always perceive or acknowledge. No one can go on living upon agony; we cannot grieve for ever if we would, and our most strenuous efforts of self-control derive help from the inevitable law of change, against which we sometimes murmur and struggle as if it wronged our consistency in sorrow and constancy in love. The tendency to _heal_ is as universal as the liability to _smart_. You always speak of change with a sort of vague horror that surprises me. Though all things round us are for ever shifting and altering, and though we ourselves vary and change, there is a supreme spirit of steadfastness in the midst of this huge unrest, and an abiding, unshaken, immovable principle of good guiding this vanishing world of fluctuating atoms, in whose eternal permanence of nature we largely participate, and our tendency toward and aspiration for whose perfect stability is one of the very causes of the progress, and therefore mutability, of our existence. Perhaps the most painful of all the forms in which change confronts us is in the increased infirmities and diminished graces which after long absence we observe in those we love; the failure of power and vitality in the outward frame, the lessened vividness of the intellect we have admired, strike us with a sharp surprise of distress, and it is startling to have revealed suddenly to us, in the condition of others, how rapidly, powerfully, and unobservedly time has been dealing with ourselves. But those who believe in eternity should be able to accept time, and the ruin of the altar from which the flame leaps up to heaven signifies little. 

 My father and I went to visit Macdonald's collection of sculpture to-day. I was very much pleased with some of the things; there are some good colossal figures, and an exquisite statue of a kneeling girl, that charmed me greatly; there are some excellent busts, too. How wonderfully that irrevocable substance assumes the soft, round forms of life! The color in its passionless purity (absence of color, I suppose I should say) is really harder than the substance itself of marble. I could not fall in love with a statue, as the poor girl in Procter's poem did with the Apollo Belvidere, though I think I could with a fine portrait: how could one fall in love with what had no eyes! Was it not Thorwaldsen who said that the three materials in which sculptors worked--clay, plaster, and marble--were like life, death, and immortality? I thought my own bust (the one Macdonald executed in Edinburgh, you know) very good; the marble is beautiful, and I really think my friend did wonders with his impracticable subject; the shape of the head and shoulders is very pretty. I wonder what Sappho was like! An ugly woman, it is said; I do not know upon what authority, unless her own; but I wonder what kind of ugliness she enjoyed! Among other heads, we saw one of Brougham's mother, a venerable and striking countenance, very becoming the mother of the Chancellor of England. There was a bust, too, of poor Mr. Huskisson, taken after death. I heard a curious thing of him to-day: it seems that on the night before the opening of the railroad, as he was sitting with some friends, he said, "I cannot tell what ails me; I have a strange weight on my spirits; I am sure something dreadful will happen to-morrow; I wish it were over;" and that, when they recapitulated all the precautions, and all the means that had been taken for security, comfort, and pleasure, all he replied was, "I wish to God it were over!" There is something awful in these stories of presentiments that always impresses me deeply--this warning shadow, projected by no perceptible object, falling darkly and chilly over one; this indistinct whisper of destiny, of which one hears the sound, without distinguishing the sense; this muffled tread of Fate approaching us!

 Did you read Horace Twiss's speech on the Reform Bill? Every one seems to think it was excellent, whether they agree with his opinions and sentiments or not. I saw by the paper, to-day, that an earthquake had been felt along the coast near Dover. A---- says the world is coming to an end. We certainly live in strange times, but for that matter so has everybody that ever lived. 

[In the admirable letter of Lord Macaulay to Mr. Ellis, describing thedivision of the house on the second reading of the Reform Bill, given inMr. Trevelyan's life of his uncle, the great historian says HoraceTwiss's countenance at the liberal victory looked like that of a "damnedsoul. " If, instead of a lost soul, he had said poor Horace looked like a_lost seat_, he would have been more accurate, if not as picturesque. Mr. Twiss sat for one of Lord Clarendon's boroughs, and the passage ofthe Reform Bill was sure to dismiss him from Parliament; a serious thingin his future career, fortunes, and position. ]

 I must now tell you what I do next week, that you may know where to find me. Monday, the king goes to hear "Cinderella, " and I have a holiday and go with my mother to a party at Dr. Granville's. Tuesday, I act Belvidera, and _afterward_ go to Lady Dacre's; I do this because, as I fixed the day myself for her party, not expecting to act that night, I cannot decently get off. Lady Macdonald's dinner party is put off; so until Saturday, when I play Beatrice, I shall spend my time in practicing, reading, writing (_not_ arithmetic), walking, working cross-stitch, and similar young-ladyisms. 

 Good-by, my dear H----. Give my love to Dorothy, if she will take it; if not, put it to your own share. I think this letter deserves a long answer. Mrs. Norton, Chantrey, and Barry Cornwall have come in while I have been finishing this letter; does not that sound pretty and pleasant? and don't you envy us some of our _privileges?_ My mother has been seeing P----'s picture of my father in Macbeth this morning, and you never heard anything funnier than her rage at it: "A fat, red, round, staring, _pudsy_ thing! the eyes no more like his than mine are!" (certainly, no human eyes could be more dissimilar); "and then, his jaw!--bless my soul, how could he miss it! the Kemble jawbone! Why, it was as notorious as Samson's!" Good-by. Your affectionate

 FANNY. 

Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby, the famous friends of Llangollen, kept during the whole life they spent together under such peculiarcircumstances a daily diary, so minute as to include the mention notonly of every one they saw (and it must be remembered that theirhermitage was a place of fashionable pilgrimage, as well as a hospitablerefuge), but also _what they had for dinner every day_--so I have beentold. 

The little box on the stage I have alluded to in this letter as Mrs. Siddons's was a small recess opposite the prompter's box, and of muchthe same proportions, that my father had fitted up for the especialconvenience of my aunt Siddons whenever she chose to honor myperformances with her presence. She came to it several times, but thedraughts in crossing the stage were bad, and the exertion and excitementtoo much for her, and her life was not prolonged much after my comingupon the stage. 

Lord and Lady Dacre were among my kindest friends. With Lady Dacre Icorresponded from the beginning of our acquaintance until her death, which took place at a very advanced age. She was strikingly handsome, with a magnificent figure and great vivacity and charm of manner andconversation. Her accomplishments were various, and all of so masterlyan excellence that her performances would have borne comparison with thebest works of professional artists. She drew admirably, especiallyanimals, of which she was extremely fond. I have seen drawings of groupsof cattle by her that, without the advantage of color, recall the lifeand spirit of Rosa Bonheur's pictures. She was a perfect Italianscholar, having studied enthusiastically that divine tongue with theenthusiast Ugo Foscolo, whose patriotic exile and misfortunes werecheered and soothed by the admiring friendship and cordial kindness ofLord and Lady Dacre. Among all the specimens of translation with which Iam acquainted, her English version of Petrarch's sonnets is one of themost remarkable for fidelity, beauty, and the grace and sweetness withwhich she has achieved the difficult feat of following in English theprecise form of the complicated and peculiar Italian prosody. Thesetranslations seem to me as nearly perfect as that species of literaturecan be. But the most striking demonstrations of her genius were thegroups of horses which Lady Dacre modeled from nature, and which, copiedand multiplied in plaster casts, have been long familiar to the public, without many of those who know and admire them being aware who was theirauthor. It is hardly possible to see anything more graceful andspirited, truer at once to nature and the finest art, than thesecompositions, faithful in the minutest details of execution, and highlypoetical in their entire conception. Lady Dacre was the finest femalerider and driver in England; that is saying, in the world. Had she livedin Italy in the sixteenth century her name would be among the notednames of that great artistic era; but as she was an Englishwoman of thenineteenth, in spite of her intellectual culture and accomplishments shewas _only_ an exceedingly clever, amiable, kind lady of fashionableLondon society. 

Of Lord Dacre it is not easy to speak with all the praise which hedeserved. He inherited his title from his mother, who had married Mr. Brand of the Hoo, Hertfordshire, and at the moment of his becoming heirto that estate was on the point of leaving England with Colonel Talbot, son of Lord Talbot de Malahide, to found with him a colony in BritishCanada, where Arcadia was to revive again, at a distance from all thedepraved and degraded social systems of Europe, under the auspices ofthese two enthusiastic young reformers. Mr. Brand had completed hisstudies in Germany, and acquired, by assiduous reading and intimatepersonal acquaintance with the most enlightened and profound thinkers ofthe philosophical school of which Kant was the apostle, a mentalcultivation very unlike, in its depth and direction, the usualintellectual culture of young Englishmen of his class. 

He was an enthusiast of the most generous description, in love withliberty and ardent for progress; the political as well as the social andintellectual systems of Europe appeared to him, in his youthful zeal forthe improvement of his fellow-beings, belated if not benighted on theroad to it, and he had embraced with the most ardent hopes and purposesthe scheme of emigration of Colonel Talbot, for forming in the New Worlda colony where all the errors of the Old were to be avoided. But hismother died, and the young emigrant withdrew his foot from the deck ofthe Canadian ship to take his place in the British peerage, to bear anancient English title and become master of an old English estate, tomarry a brilliant woman of English fashionable society, and bethenceforth the ideal of an English country gentleman, that mostenviable of mortals, as far as outward circumstance and position canmake a man so. 

His serious early German studies had elevated and enlarged his mind farbeyond the usual level and scope of the English country gentleman'sbrain, and freed him from the peculiarly narrow class prejudices whichit harbors. He was an enlightened liberal, not only in politics but inevery domain of human thought; he was a great reader, with a wide rangeof foreign as well as English literary knowledge. He had exquisitetaste, was a fine connoisseur and critic in matters of art, and was thekindliest natured and mannered man alive. 

At his house in Hertfordshire, the Hoo, I used to meet Earl Grey; hisson, the present earl (then Lord Howick); Lord Melbourne; the Duke ofBedford; Earl Russell (then Lord John), and Sidney and Bobus Smith--allof them distinguished men, but few of them, I think, Lord Dacre'ssuperiors in mental power. Altogether the society that he and Lady Dacregathered round them was as delightful as it was intellectuallyremarkable; it was composed of persons eminent for ability, andinfluential members of a great world in which extraordinary capacity wasnever an excuse for want of urbanity or the absence of the desire toplease; their intercourse was charming as well as profoundly interestingto me. 

During a conversation I once had with Lady Dacre about her husband, shegave me the following extract from the writings of Madame Huber, thecelebrated Therëse Heyne, whose first husband, Johann Georg Forster, wasone of the delegates which sympathizing Mentz sent to Paris in 1793, tosolicit from the revolutionary government the favor of annexation to theFrench republic. 

"In the year 1790 Forster had attached to himself and introduced in hisestablishment a young Englishman, who came to Germany with the view ofstudying the German philosophy [Kant's system] in its original language. He was nearly connected with some of the leaders of the then opposition. He was so noble, so simple, that each virtue seemed in him an instinct, and so stoical in his views that he considered every noble action as thevictory of self-control, and never felt himself good enough. The friends[Huber and Forster] who loved him with parental tenderness sometimesrepeated with reference to him the words of Shakespeare--

 'So wise, so young, they say, do ne'er live long. '

But, thanks to fate, he has falsified that prophecy; the youth is growninto manhood; he lives, unclaimed by any mere political party, with themore valuable portion of his people, and satisfies himself with being agood man so long as circumstances prevent him from acting in his senseas a good citizen. Our daily intercourse with this youth enabled us tocombine a knowledge of English events with our participation in theproceedings on the Continent. His patriotism moderated many of ourextreme views with regard to his country; his estimate of manyindividuals, of whom from his position he possessed accurate knowledge, decided many a disputed point amongst us; and the tenderness which weall felt for this beloved and valued friend tended to produce justiceand moderation in all our conflicts of opinion. "[A]

[A] Sketch of Lord Dacre's character by Madame Huber. 

Lady Dacre had had by her first marriage, to Mr. Wilmot, an only child, the Mrs. Sullivan I have mentioned in this letter, wife of the ReverendFrederick Sullivan, Vicar of Kimpton. She was an excellent and mostagreeable person, who inherited her mother's literary and artisticgenius in a remarkable degree, though her different position and lessleisurely circumstances as wife of a country clergyman and mother of alarge family, devoted to the important duties of both callings, probablyprevented the full development and manifestation of her fineintellectual gifts. She was a singularly modest and diffident person, and this as well as her more serious avocations may have stood in theway of her doing justice to her uncommon abilities, of which, however, there is abundant evidence in her drawings and groups of modeledfigures, and in the five volumes of charming stories called "Tales of aChaperon, " and "Tales of the Peerage and the Peasantry, " which were notpublished with her name but simply as edited by Lady Dacre, to whomtheir authorship was, I think, generally attributed. The mental gifts ofLady Dacre appear to be heirlooms, for they have been inherited forthree generations, and in each case by her female descendants. 

The gentleman who accompanied her to her house, on the evening Ireferred to in my letter, was the Honorable James Stuart Wortley, youngest son of the Earl of Wharncliffe, who was prevented by failure ofhealth alone from reaching the very highest honors of the legalprofession, in which he had already attained the rank ofsolicitor-general, when his career was prematurely closed by disastrousillness. At the time of my first acquaintance with him he was a veryclever and attractive young man, and though intended for a future LordChancellor he condescended to sing sentimental songs very charmingly. 

Of my excellent and amiable friend, the Reverend William Harness, abiography has been published which tells all there is to be told of hisuneventful life and career. Endowed with a handsome face and sweetcountenance and very fine voice, he was at one time a fashionable Londonpreacher, a vocation not incompatible, when he exercised it, with agreat admiration for the drama. He was an enthusiastic frequenter of thetheater, published a valuable edition of Shakespeare, and wrote twoplays in blank verse which had considerable merit; but his pre-eminentgift was goodness, in which I have known few people who surpassed him. Objecting from conscientious motives to hold more than one living, hereceived from his friend, Lord Lansdowne, an appointment in the HomeOffice, the duties of which did not interfere with those of his clericalprofession. He was of a delightfully sunny, cheerful temper, and veryfond of society, mixing in the best that London afforded, and frequentlyreceiving with cordial hospitality some of its most distinguishedmembers in his small, modest residence. He was a devoted friend of myfamily, had an ardent admiration for my aunt Siddons, and honored mewith a kind and constant regard. 

Miss Joanna Baillie was a great friend of Mrs. Siddons's, and wroteexpressly for her the part of Jane de Montfort, in her play of "DeMontfort. " My father and mother had the honor of her acquaintance, and Iwent more than once to pay my respects to her at the cottage inHampstead where she passed the last years of her life. 

The peculiar plan upon which she wrote her fine plays, making each ofthem illustrate a single passion, was in great measure the cause oftheir unfitness for the stage. "De Montfort, " which has always beenconsidered the most dramatic of them, had only a very partial success, in spite of its very great poetical merit and considerable power ofpassion, and the favorable circumstance that the two principalcharacters in it were represented by the eminent actors for whom theauthoress originally designed them. In fact, though Joanna Baillieselected and preferred the dramatic form for her poetical compositions, they are wanting in the real dramatic element, resemblance to life andhuman nature, and are infinitely finer as poems than plays. 

But the desire and ambition of her life had been to write for the stage, and the reputation she achieved as a poet did not reconcile her to herfailure as a dramatist. I remember old Mr. Sotheby, the poet (I add thistitle to his name, though his title to it was by some esteemed butslender), telling me of a visit he had once paid her, when, calling himinto her little kitchen (she was not rich, kept few servants, and didnot disdain sometimes to make her own pies and puddings), she bade him, as she was up to the elbows in flour and paste, draw from her pocket apaper; it was a play-bill, sent to her by some friend in the country, setting forth that some obscure provincial company was about to performMiss Joanna Baillie's celebrated tragedy of "De Montfort. " "There, "exclaimed the culinary Melpomene, "there, Sotheby, I am so happy! Yousee my plays can be acted somewhere!" Well, too, do I remember the toneof half-regretful congratulation in which she said to me, "Oh, you luckygirl--you lucky girl; you are going to have your play acted!" This was"Francis I. , " the production of which on the stage was a bitterannoyance to me, to prevent which I would have given anything Ipossessed, but which made me (vexed and unhappy though I was at thecircumstance on which I was being congratulated) an object of positiveenvy to the distinguished authoress and kind old lady. 

In order to steer clear of the passion of revenge, which is in facthatred proceeding from a sense of injury, Miss Joanna Baillie in herfine tragedy of "De Montfort" has inevitably made the subject of it an_antipathy_--that is, an instinctive, unreasoning, partly physicalantagonism, producing abhorrence and detestation the most intense, without any adequate motive; and the secret of the failure of her nobleplay on the stage is precisely that this is not (fortunately) a naturalpassion common to the majority of human beings (which hatred that _has_a motive undoubtedly is, in a greater or less degree), but an abnormalelement in exceptionally morbid natures, and therefore a sentiment (orsensation) with which no great number of people or large proportion of apublic audience can sympathize or even understand. Intense and causelesshatred is one of the commonest indications of insanity, and, alas! onethat too often exhibits itself toward those who have been objects of thetenderest love; but De Montfort is not insane, and his loathing isunaccountable to healthy minds upon any other plea, and can find nocomprehension in audiences quite prepared to understand, if not tosympathize with, the vindictive malignity of Shylock and the savageferocity of Zanga. Goethe, in his grand play of "Tasso, " gives the poetthis morbid detestation of the accomplished courtier and man of theworld, Antonio; but then, Tasso is represented as on the very verge ofthat madness into the dark abyss of which he subsequently sinks. 

Shakespeare's treatment of the passion of hatred, in "The Merchant ofVenice, " is worthy of all admiration for the profound insight with whichhe has discriminated between that form of it which all men comprehend, and can sympathize with, and that which, being really nothing butdiseased idiosyncrasy, appears to the majority of healthy minds a mereform of madness. 

In his first introduction to us the Jew accounts for his detestation ofAntonio upon three very comprehensible grounds: national race hatred, infeeling and exciting which the Jews have been quite a "peculiar people"from the earliest records of history; personal injury in the defeat ofhis usurious prospects of gain; and personal insult in the unmanlytreatment to which Antonio had subjected him. However excessive indegree, his hatred is undoubtedly shown to have a perfectlycomprehensible, if not adequate cause and nature, and is a _reasonable_hatred, except from such a moral point of view as allows of none. 

An audience can therefore tolerate him with mitigated disgust throughthe opening portions of the play. When, however, in the grand climax ofthe trial scene Shakespeare intends that he shall be no longer toleratedor tolerable, but condemned alike by his Venetian judges and his Englishaudience, he carefully avoids putting into his mouth any one of thereasons with which in the opening of the play he explains and justifieshis hatred. He does not make him quote the centuries-old Hebrew scorn ofand aversion to the Gentiles, nor the merchant's interference with hiscommercial speculations, nor the man's unprovoked spitting at, spurning, and abuse of him; but he will and _can_ give _no_ reason for hisabhorrence of Antonio, whom he says he _loathes_ with the inexplicablerevulsion of nature that certain men feel toward certain animals; andthe mastery of the poet shows itself in thus making Shylock's crueltymonstrous, and accounting for it as an abnormal monstrosity. 

Hatred that has a reasonable cause may cease with its removal. SupposingAntonio to have become a converted Jew, or to have withdrawn allopposition to Shylock's usury and compensated him largely for the losseshe had caused him by it, and to have expressed publicly, with the utmosthumility, contrition for his former insults and sincere promises offuture honor, respect, and reverence, it is possible to imagine Shylockrelenting in a hatred of which the reasons he assigned for it no longerexisted. But from the moment he says he has _no_ reason for his hatredother than the insuperable disgust and innate enmity of an antagonisticnature--the deadly, sickening, physical loathing that in rare instancesaffects certain human beings toward others of their species, and towardcertain animals--then there are no calculable bounds to the ferocity ofsuch a blind instinct, no possibility of mitigating, by considerationsof reflection or feeling, an inherent, integral element of a morbidorganization. And Shakespeare, in giving this aspect to the lastexhibition of Shylock's vindictiveness, cancels the original appeal topossible sympathy for his previous wrongs, and presents him as adangerous maniac or wild beast, from whose fury no one is safe, and whomit is every one's interest to strike down; so that at the miserableJew's final defeat the whole audience gasps with a sense of unspeakablerelief. Perhaps, too, the master meant to show--at any rate he hasshown--that the deadly sin of hatred, indulged even with a cause, endsin the dire disease of causeless hate and the rabid frenzy of a maniac. 

It has sometimes been objected to this wonderful scene that Portia'sreticence and delay in relieving Antonio and her husband from theirsuspense is unnatural. But Portia is a very _superior woman_, able tocontrol not only her own palpitating sympathy with their anguish, buther impatient yearning to put an end to it, till she has made evereffort to redeem the wretch whose hardness of heart fills her withincredulous amazement--a heavenly instinct akin to the divine love thatdesires not that a sinner should perish, which enables her to postponeher own relief and that of those precious to her till she has exhaustedendeavor to soften Shylock; and Shakespeare thus not only justifies thestern severity of her ultimate sentence on him, but shows her endowedwith the highest powers of self-command, and patient, long-sufferingwith evil; her teasing her husband half to death afterward restores thebalance of her humanity, which was sinking heavily toward perfection. 

Bryan Waller Procter, dear Barry Cornwall--beloved by all who knew him, even his fellow-poets, for his sweet, gentle disposition--had married(as I have said elsewhere) Anne Skepper, the daughter of our friend, Mrs. Basil Montague. They were among our most intimate and friendlyacquaintance. Their house was the resort of all the choice spirits ofthe London society of their day, her pungent epigrams and brilliantsallies making the most delightful contrast imaginable to the cordialkindness of his conversation and the affectionate tenderness of hismanner; she was like a fresh lemon--golden, fragrant, firm, andwholesome--and he was like the honey of Hymettus; they were anincomparable compound. 

The play which I spoke of as his, in my last letter, was Ford's "WhiteDevil, " of which the notorious Vittoria Corrombona, Duchess ofBracciano, is the heroine. The powerful but coarse treatment of theItalian story by the Elizabethan playwright has been chastened intosomething more adapted to modern taste by Barry Cornwall; but, even withhis kindred power and skillful handling, the work of the early masterretained too rough a flavor for the public palate of our day, and veryreluctantly the project of bringing it out was abandoned. 

The tragical story of Vittoria Corrombona, eminently tragical in thatage of dramatic lives and deaths, has furnished not only the subject ofthis fine play of Ford's, but that of a magnificent historical novel, bythe great German writer, Tieck, in which it is difficult to say whichpredominates, the intense interest of the heroine's individual career, or that created by the splendid delineation of the whole state of Italyat that period--the days of the grand old Sixtus the Fifth in Rome, andof the contemporary Medici in Florence; it is altogether a masterpieceby a great master. Superior in tragic horror, because unrelieved by thegeneral picture of contemporaneous events, but quite inferior as a workof imagination, is the comparatively short sketch of VittoriaCorrombona's life and death contained in a collection of Italian storiescalled "Crimes Célèbres, " by Stendal, where it keeps company with othertragedies of private life, which during the same century occupied withtheir atrocious details the tribunals of justice in Rome. Among thecollection is the story from which Mr. Fechter's melodrama of "BelDemonio" was taken, the story of the Cenci, and the story of a certainDuchess of Pagliano, all of them inconceivably horrible and revolting. 

About the same time that this play of Barry Cornwall's was given up, along negotiation between Miss Mitford and the management of CoventGarden came to a conclusion by her withdrawal of her play of "Iñez deCastro, " a tragedy founded upon one of the most romantic and picturesqueincidents in the Spanish chronicle. After much uncertainty and manydifficulties, the project of bringing it out was abandoned. I rememberthinking I could do nothing with the part of the heroine, whose corpseis produced in the last act, seated on the throne and receiving thehomage of the subjects of her husband, Pedro the Cruel--a very ghastlyincident in the story, which I think would in itself have endangered thesuccess of the play. My despondency about the part of Inez had nothingto do with the possible effect of this situation, however, but was myinvariable impression with regard to every new part that was assigned tome on first reading it. But I am sure Miss Mitford had no cause toregret that I had not undertaken this; the success of her play in myhands ran a risk such as her fine play of "Rienzi, " in those of Mr. Young or Mr. Macready, could never have incurred; and it was well forher that to their delineation of her Roman tribune, and not mine of herAragonese lady, her reputation with the public as a dramatic writer wasconfided. 

I have mentioned in this last letter a morning visit from Chantrey, theeminent sculptor, who was among our frequenter. His appearance andmanners were simple and almost rustic, and he was shy and silent insociety, all which may have been results of his obscure birth and earlywant of education. It was to Sir Francis Chantrey that my father'sfriends applied for the design of the beautiful silver vase which theypresented to him at the end of his professional career. The sculptor'sidea seemed to me a very happy and appropriate one, and the design wasadmirably executed; it consisted of a simple and elegant figure ofHamlet on the cover of the vase, and round it, in fine relief, the"Seven Ages of Man, " from Jacques's speech in "As You Like It;" thewhole work was very beautiful, and has a double interest for me, as thatnot only of an eminent artist, but a kind friend of my father's. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March 7, 1831. MY DEAREST H----, With regard to change as we contemplate it when parting from those we love, I confess I should shrink from the idea of years intervening before you and I met again; not that I apprehend any diminution of our affection, but it would be painful to be no longer young, or to have grown _suddenly_ old to each other. But I hope this will not be so; I hope we may go on meeting often enough for that change which is inevitable to be long imperceptible; I hope we may be allowed to go on _wondering_ together, till we meet where you will certainly be happy, if wonder is for once joined to _knowledge_. I remember my aunt Whitelock saying that when she went to America she left my father a toddling thing that she used to dandle and carry about; and the first time she saw him after her return, he had a baby of his own in his arms. That sort of thing makes one's heart jump into one's mouth with dismay; it seems as if all the time one had been _living away_, unconsciously, was thrown in a lump at one's head. 

 J---- F---- told me on Thursday that her sister, whose wedding-day seemed to be about yesterday, was the mother of four children; she has lost no time, it is true, but my "yesterday" must be five years old. After dinner, yesterday, I wrote a new last scene to "Francis I. " I mean to send it to Murray. 

 A---- says you seem younger to her than I do; which, considering your fourteen years' seniority over me, is curious; but the truth is, though she does not know it, I am still _too young_; I have not lived, experienced, and suffered enough to have acquired the self-forgetfulness and gentle forbearance that make us good and pleasant companions to our _youngers_. 

 Henry and I are going together to the Zoological Gardens one of these days; that lovely tigress hangs about my heart, and I must go and see her again. Ever your affectionate

 F. A. KEMBLE. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March 9, 1831. MY DEAR H----, Why are you not here to kiss and congratulate me? I am so proud and happy! Mr. Murray has given me four hundred and fifty pounds for my play alone! the other things he does not wish to publish with it. Only think of it--was there ever such publishing munificence! My father has the face to say _it is not enough!_ but looks so proud and pleased that his face alone shows it is _too much_ by a great deal; my mother is enchanted, and I am so happy, so thankful for this prosperous result of my work, so delighted at earning so much, so surprised and charmed to think that what gave me nothing but pleasure in the doing has brought me such an after-harvest of profit; it is too good almost to be true, and yet it is true. 

 But I am happy and have been much excited from another reason to-day. Richard Trench, John's dear friend and companion, is just returned from Spain, and came here this morning to see us. I sat with him a long while. John is well and in good spirits. Mr. Trench before leaving Gibraltar had used every persuasion to induce my brother to return with him, and had even got him on board the vessel in which they were to sail, but John's heart failed him at the thought of forsaking Torrijos, and he went back. The account Mr. Trench gives of their proceedings is much as I imagined them to have been. They hired a house which they denominated Constitution Hall, where they passed their time smoking and drinking ale, John holding forth upon German metaphysics, which grew dense in proportion as the tobacco fumes grew thick and his glass grew empty. You know we had an alarm about their being taken prisoners, which story originated thus: they had agreed with the constitutionalists in Algeciras that on a certain day the latter were to _get rid_ of their officers (murder them civilly, I suppose), and then light beacons on the heights, at which signal Torrijos and his companions, among them our party who were lying armed on board a schooner in the bay, were to make good their landing. The English authorities at Gibraltar, however, had note of this, and while they lay watching for the signal they were boarded by one of the Government ships and taken prisoners. The number of English soldiers in whose custody they found themselves being, however, inferior to their own, they agreed that if the beacons made their appearance they would turn upon their guards and either imprison or kill them. But the beacons were never lighted; their Spanish fellow-revolutionists broke faith with them, and they remained ingloriously on board until next day, when they were ignominiously suffered to go quietly on shore again. 

CHAPTER XX. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March 8, 1831. 

 I am going to be very busy signing my name; my benefit is fixed for the 21st; I do not yet know what the play is to be. Our young, unsuccessful playwright, Mr. Wade, whom I like very much (he took his damnation as bravely as Capaneo), and Macdonald, the sculptor, dined with us on Sunday. On Monday I went to the library of the British Museum to consult Du Bellay's history for my new version of the last scene of "Francis I. " I looked at some delightful books, and among others, a very old and fine MS. Of the "Roman de la Rose, " beautifully illuminated; also all the armorial bearings, shields, banners, etc. , of the barons of King John's time, the barons of Runnymede and the Charter, most exquisitely and minutely copied from monuments, stained glass, brass effigies, etc. ; it was a fine work, beautifully executed for the late king, George IV. I wish it had been executed for me. I did get A---- to walk in the square with me once, but she likes it even less than I do; my intellectual conversation is no equivalent for the shop-windows of Regent Street and the counters of the bazaar, and she has gone out with my aunt every day since, "leaving the square to solitude and me;" so I take my book with me (I can read walking at my quickest pace), and like to do so. 

 Tuesday evening I played Belvidera. I was quite nervous at acting it again after so long a period. After the play my father and I went to Lady Dacre's and had a pleasant party enough. Mrs. Norton was there, more entertaining and blinding beautiful than ever. Henry desired me to give her his "desperate love, " to which she replied by sending the poor youth her "deadly scorn. " Lord Melbourne desired to be introduced to me, and I think if he likes, he shall be the decrepit old nobleman you are so afraid of me marrying. I was charmed with his face, voice, and manner; we dine with him next Wednesday week, and I will write you word if the impression deepens. 

 My dear H----, only imagine my dismay; my father told me that after Easter I should have to play Lady Macbeth! It is no use thinking about it, for that only frightens me more; but, looking at it as calmly and reasonably as possible, surely it is too great an undertaking for so young a person as myself. Perhaps I may play it better than most girls of my age would; what will that amount to? That towering, tremendous woman, what a trial of courage and composure for me! If you were a good friend, now, you would come up to town "for that occasion only, " and sustain me with your presence. 

 The beautiful Miss Bayley is at length married to William Ashley [the present Earl of Shaftesbury], and everybody is rejoicing with them or for them; it is pleasant to catch glimpses of fresh shade and flowers as one goes along the dusty highroad of life. 

 I must now tell you what I am going to do, that you may know where to find me: to-morrow, I go to a private morning concert with my mother; in the evening, I act Beatrice, and after the play all sorts of people are coming here to supper. On Monday, I act Fazio; Wednesday, we dine at Lady Macdonald's; Thursday, I act Mrs. Haller; and Saturday, Beatrice again. I have not an idea what will be done for my benefit; we are all devising and proposing. I myself want them to bring out Massinger's "Maid of Honor;" I think it beautiful. 

 Now, dear H----, I must leave off, and sign my tickets. We all send our loves to you: my mother tells me not to let you forget her; she says she is afraid you class her with Mrs. John Kemble. If ever there were two dissimilar human beings, it is those two. Ever your affectionate

 FANNY. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March 13, 1831. DEAR H----, I received your letter yesterday, and must exult in my self-command, for Mrs. Jameson was with me, and I did not touch it till she was gone. Thank you first of all for Spenser; that _is_ poetry! I was much benefited as well as delighted by it. Considering the power of poetry to raise one's mind and soul into the noblest moods, I do not think it is held in sufficient reverence nowadays; the bards of old were greater people in their society than our modern ones are; to be sure, modern poetry is not all of a purely elevating character, and poets are _paid_, besides being asked out to dinner, which the bards always were. I think the tone of a good deal of Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope" very noble, and some of Mrs. Hemans's things are very beautiful in sentiment as well as expression. But then, all that order of writing is so feeble compared with the poetry of our old masters, who do not so much appeal to our feelings as to our reason and imagination combined. I do not believe that to be sublime is in the power of a woman, any more than to be logical; and Mrs. Hemans, who is neither, writes charmingly, and one loves her as a Christian woman even more than one admires her as a writer. 

 Yes, it is very charming that the dove, the favorite type of gentleness and tenderness and "harmlessness, " should have such a swift and vigorous power of flight; _suaviter--fortiter_, a good combination. 

 We are having the most tempestuous weather; A---- is horribly frightened, and I am rather awed. I got the encyclopædia to-night to study the cause of the equinoctial gales, which I thought we should both be the better for knowing, but could find nothing about them; can you tell me of any book or treatise upon this subject?

 My dear H----, shut your eyes while you read this, because if you don't, they'll never shut again. Constance is what I am to play for my benefit. I am horribly frightened; it is a cruel weight to lay upon my shoulders: however, there is nothing for it but doing my best, and leaving the rest to fate. I almost think now I could do Lady Macbeth better. I am like poor little Arthur, who begged to have his tongue cut off rather than have his eyes put out; that last scene of Constance--think what an actress one should be to do it justice! Pray for me. 

 And so the Poles are crushed! what a piteous horror! Will there never come a day of retribution for this!

 Mrs. Jameson came and sat with me some time yesterday evening, and read me a good deal of her work on Shakespeare's female characters; they are very pleasing sketches--outlines--but her criticism and analysis are rather graceful than profound or powerful. Tuesday next my mother and I spend the evening with her; Wednesday, we dine at Sir John Macdonald's; Thursday, I act Mrs. Haller; Friday, we have an evening party at home; Saturday, I play Beatrice; Monday, Constance (come up for it!); Tuesday, we dine with Lord Melbourne; and this is as much of the book of fate as is unrolled to me at present. 

 Mrs. Harry came here to-day; it is the first time I have seen her this month; she is looking wretchedly, and talks of returning to Edinburgh. My first feeling at hearing this was joy that I shall not go there and find the face and voice for ever associated with Edinburgh in my heart away from it. But I am not really glad, for it is the failure of some plan of hers which obliges her to do this. I have the loves of all to give you, and they are all very troublesome, crying, "Give mine separately, " "Don't lump mine;" so please take them each separately and singly. I have been sobbing my heart out over Constance this morning, and act Fazio to-night, which is hard work. 

 Your affectionate

 F. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, Saturday, March 19th. DEAR H----, You ask if Mr. Trench's account of their Spanish escapade is likely to soften my father's view of the folly of the expedition. I think not, by any means--as how should it? But the yesterday papers reported a successful attack upon Cadiz and the proclamation of Torrijos general-in-chief by the Constitutionalists, who were rising all over the country. This has been again contradicted to-day, and may have been a mere stock-jobbing story, after all. If it be true, however, the results may be of serious importance to my brother. Should the Constitutionalists get the upper hand, his adherence to Torrijos may place him in a prominent position, I am afraid; perhaps, however, though success may not alter my father's opinion of the original folly of John's undertaking, it may in some measure reconcile him to it. I suppose it is not impossible now that John should become an officer in the Spanish army, and that after so many various and contradictory plans his career may finally be that of a soldier. How strange and sad it all seems to me, to be sure!

 You say it's a horrid thing one can't "try on one's body" and choose such a one as would suit one; but do you consider your body accidental, as it were, or do you really think we could do better for ourselves than has been done for us in this matter? After all, our souls get used to our bodies, and in some fashion alter and shape them to fit; then you know if we had different bodies we should be different people and not our _same selves_ at all; if I had been tall, as I confess I in my heart of hearts wish I were, what another moral creature should I have been. 

 You urge me to work, dear H----, and study my profession, and were I to say I hate it, you would retort, "You do it, therefore take pains to do it well. " And so I do, as well as I can; I have been studying Constance with my father, and rubbed off some of the rough edges of it a little. 

 I am sorry to say I shall not have a good benefit; unluckily, the second reading of the Reform Bill comes on to-morrow (to-night, by the bye, for it is Monday), and there will be as many people in the House of Commons as in _my_ house, and many more in Parliament Street than in either; it is unfortunate for me, but cannot be helped. I was going to say, pray for me, but I forgot that you will not get this till "it is bedtime, Hal, and all is well. " The publication of my play is not to take place till after this Reform fever has a little abated. 

 Dear H----, this is Wednesday, the 23rd; Monday and King John and my Constance are all over; but I am at this moment still so _deaf with nervousness_ as not to hear the ticking of my watch when held to one of my ears; the other side of my head is not deaf any longer _now_; but on Monday night I hardly heard one word I uttered through the whole play. It is rather hard that having endeavored (and succeeded wonderfully, too) in possessing my soul in peace during that trial of my courage, my nervous system should give way in this fashion. I had a knife of pain sticking in my side all through the play and all day long, Monday; as I did not hear myself speak, I cannot tell you anything of my performance. My dress was of the finest pale-blue merino, all folds and drapery like my Grecian Daughter costume, with an immense crimson mantle hung on my shoulders which I could hardly carry. My head-dress was exactly copied from one of my aunt's, and you cannot imagine how curiously like her I looked. My mother says, "You have done it better than I believe any other girl of your age would do it. " But of course that is not a representation of Constance to satisfy her, or any one else, indeed. You know, dear H----, what my own feeling has been about this, and how utterly incapable I knew myself for such an undertaking; but you did not, nor could any one, know how dreadfully I suffered from the apprehension of failure which my reason told me was well founded. I assure you that when I came on the stage I felt like some hunted creature driven to bay; I was really half wild with terror. The play went off admirably, but I lay, when my part was over, for an hour on my dressing-room floor, with only strength enough left to cry. Your letter to A---- revived me, and just brought me enough to life again to eat my supper, which I had not felt able to touch, in spite of my exhaustion and great need of it; when, however, I once began, my appetite justified the French proverb and took the turn of voracity, and I devoured like a Homeric hero. I promised to tell you something of our late dinner at Lord Melbourne's, but have left myself neither space nor time. It was very pleasant, and I fell out of my love for our host (who, moreover, is absorbed by Mrs. Norton) and into another love with Lord O----, Lord T----'s son, who is one of the most beautiful creatures of the male sex I ever saw; unluckily, he does not fulfill the necessary conditions of your theory, and is neither as old nor as decrepit as you have settled the nobleman I am to marry is to be; so he won't do. 

 We are going to a party at Devonshire House to-night. Here I am called away to receive some visitors. Pray write soon to your affectionate

 FANNY. 

 To-morrow I act Constance, and Saturday Isabella, which is all I know for the present of the future. I have just bought A---- a beautiful guitar; I promised her one as soon as my play was out. My room is delicious with violets, and my new blue velvet gown heavenly in color and all other respects except the--well, _un_heavenly price Dévy makes me pay for it. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, April 2, 1831. DEAR H----, I am truly sorry for M----'s illness, just at the height of all her gay season gayeties, too; it is too provoking to have one's tackle out of order and lie on the beach with such a summer sea sparkling before one. I congratulate L---- on her father's relenting and canceling his edict against waltzing and galloping. And yet, I am always _rather_ sorry when a determination of that sort, firmly expressed, is departed from. Of course our views and opinions, not being infallible, are liable to change, and may not unreasonably be altered or weakened by circumstances and the more enlightened convictions of improved powers and enlarged experience, but it is as well, therefore, for our own sakes, not to promulgate them as if they were Persian decrees. One can step gracefully down from a lesser height, where one would fall from a greater. But with young people generally, I think, to retreat from a position you have assumed is to run the risk of losing some of their consideration and respect; for they have neither consciousness of their own frailty, nor charity for the frailty of others, nor the wisdom to perceive that a resolution may be better broken than kept; and though perhaps themselves gaining some desired end by the yielding of their elders, I believe any indulgence so granted (that is, after being emphatically denied) never fails to leave on the youthful mind an impression of want of judgment or determination in those they have to do with. 

 We dine with the Fitzhughs on Tuesday week; I like Emily much, though she will talk of human souls as "vile;" I gave her Channing to read, and she liked it very much, but said that his view of man's nature was not that of a Christian; I think her contempt for it still less such. As we are immortal in spite of death, so I think we are wonderful in spite of our weakness, and admirable in spite of our imperfection, and capable of all good in spite of all our evil. 

 A----'s guitar is a beauty, and wears a broad blue scarf and has a sweet, low, soft voice. Mr. Pickersgill is going to paint my portrait; it is a present Major Dawkins makes my father and mother, but I do wish they would leave off trying to take my picture. My face is too bad for anything but nature, and never was intended for _still_ life. The intention, however, is very kind, and the offer one that can scarcely be refused. I wish you would come and keep me awake through my sittings. 

 Our engagements--social and professional--are a dinner party at the Mayows to-morrow; an evening party on Monday; Tuesday, the opera; Wednesday I act Isabella; Thursday, a dinner at Mr. Harness's; Friday I act Bianca; Saturday we have a dinner party at home; the Monday following I act Constance; Tuesday there is a dance at the Fitzhughs'; and sundry dissipations looming in the horizon. 

 Good-by, and God bless you, my dear H----. I look forward to our meeting at Ardgillan, three months hence, with delight, and am affectionately yours, F. A. K. 

 A---- and I begin our riding lessons on Wednesday next. We have got pretty dark-brown habits and red velvet waistcoats, and shall look like two nice little robin-redbreasts on horseback; all I dread is that she may be frightened to death, which might militate against her enjoyment, perhaps. 

 What you say about my brother John is very true; and though my first care is for his life, my next is for his happiness, which I believe more likely to be secured by his remaining in the midst of action and excitement abroad, than in any steady pursuit at home. My benefit was not as good as it ought to have been; it was not sufficiently advertised, and it took place on the night of the reading of the Reform Bill, which circumstance was exceedingly injurious to it. 

 To-day is John's birthday. I was in hopes it might not occur to my mother, but she alluded to it yesterday. I was looking at that little sketch of him in her room this morning, with a heavy heart. His lot seems now cast indeed, and most strangely. I would give anything to see him and hear his voice again, but I fear to wish him back again among us. I am afraid that he would neither be happy himself, nor make others so. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, 1831. 

 It is a long time, dear H----, since I have written to you, and I feel it so with self-reproach. To-day, except paying a round of visits with my mother and acting this evening, I have nothing to prevent my talking with you in tolerable peace and quiet--so here I am. You have no idea what a quantity of "things to be done" has been crowded into the last fortnight: studying Camiola, rehearsing for two hours and a half every other day, riding for two hours at a time, and sitting for my picture nearly as long, running from place to place about my dresses, and now having Lady Teazle and Mrs. Oakley to _get up_, immediately, --all this, with my nightly work or nightly gayeties, makes an amount of occupation of one sort and another that hardly leaves me time for thought. 

 You will be glad to hear that "The Maid of Honor" was entirely successful; that it will have a "great run, " or bring much money to the theater, I doubt. It is a _cold_ play, according to the present taste of audiences, and there are undoubted defects in its construction which in the fastidious judgment of our critics weigh down its sterling beauties. 

 It has done me great service, and to you I may say that I think it the best thing I have acted. Indeed, I like my own performance of it so well (which you know does not often happen to me), that I beg you will make A---- tell you something about it. I was beautifully dressed and looked very nice. 

 We have heard nothing of John for some time now, and my mother has ceased to express, if not to feel, anxiety about him, and seems tranquil at present; but after all she has suffered on his account, it is not, perhaps, surprising that she should subside into the calm of mere exhaustion from that cruel over-excitement. 

 Our appeal before the Lords, after having been put off once this week, will, in consequence of the threatened dissolution of Parliament, be deferred _sine die_, as the phrase is. Oh, what weary work this is for those who are tremblingly waiting for a result of vital importance to their whole fate and fortune! Thank Heaven, I am liberally endowed with youth's peculiar power and privilege of disregarding future sorrow, and unless under the immediate pressure of calamity can keep the anticipation of it at bay. My journal has become a mere catalogue of the names of people I meet and places I go to. I have had no time latterly for anything but the briefest possible registry of my daily doings. Mrs. Harry Siddons has taken a lodging in this street, nearly opposite to us, so that I have the happiness of seeing her rather oftener than I have been able to do hitherto; the girls come over, too; and as we have lately taken to acting charades and proverbs, we spend our evenings very pleasantly together. 

 We are going to get up a piece called "Napoleon. " I do not mean my cousins and ourselves, but that prosperous establishment, Covent Garden Theatre. Think of Bonaparte being acted! It makes one grin and shudder. 

 I have been three or four times to Mr. Pickersgill, and generally sit two hours at a time to him. I dare say he will make a nice picture of me, but his anxiety that it should in no respect resemble Sir Thomas Lawrence's drawing amuses me. I was in hopes that when I had done with him I should not have to sit to anybody for anything again. But I find I am to undergo that boredom for a bust by Mr. Turnerelli. I wish I could impress upon all my artist friends that my face is an inimitable original which nature never intended should be copied. Pazienza! I must say, though, that I grudge the time thus spent. I want to get on with my play, but I'm afraid for the next three weeks that will be hopeless. 

 To add to my occupations past, present, and to come, not having enough of acting with my professional duties in that line, I am going to take part in some private theatricals. Lord Francis Leveson wants to get up his version of Victor Hugo's "Hernani, " at Bridgewater House, and has begged me, as a favor, to act the heroine; all the rest are to be amateurs. I have consented to this, not knowing well how to refuse, yet for one or two reasons I almost think I had better not have done so. I expect to be excessively amused by it, but it will take up a terrible deal of my time, for I am sure they will need rehearsals without end. I do not know at all what our summer plans are; but I believe we shall be acting in the provinces till September, when if all things are quiet in Paris my father proposes going over with me and one or two members of the Covent Garden company, and playing there for a month or so. I think I should like that. I fancy I should like acting to a French audience; they are people of great intellectual refinement and discrimination, and that is a pleasant quality in an audience. I think my father seems inclined to take A---- with us and leave her there. A musical education can nowhere better be obtained, and under the care of Mrs. Foster, about whom I believe I wrote to you once a long letter, there could be no anxiety about her welfare. 

 I showed that part of your last letter which concerned my aunt Dall to herself, because I knew it would please her, and so it did; and she bids me tell you that she values your good-will and esteem extremely, and should do still more if you did not _misbestow so much of them on me_. 

 Emily Fitzhugh sent me this morning a Seal with a pretty device, in consequence of my saying that I thought it was pleasanter to lean upon one's friends, morally, than to be leant upon by them--an oak with ivy clinging to it and "Chiedo sostegno" for the motto. I do not think I shall use it to many people, though. 

 To-morrow Sheridan Knowles dines with us, to read a new play he has written, in which I am to act. In the evening we go to Lady Cork's, Sunday we have a dinner-party here, Monday I act Camiola, Tuesday we go to Mrs. Harry's, Wednesday I act Camiola, and further I know not. Good-by, dear; ever yours, F. A. K. 

The piece which I have referred to in this letter, calling itself"Bonaparte, " was a sensational melodrama upon the fate and fortunes ofthe great emperor, beginning with his first exploits as a youngartillery officer, himself pointing and firing the cannon at Toulon, tothe last dreary agony of the heart-broken exile of St. Helena. It waswell put upon the stage, and presented a series of historical picturesof considerable interest and effect, not a little of which was due tothe great resemblance of Mr. Warde, who filled the principal part, tothe portraits of Napoleon. He had himself, I believe, been in the army, and left it under the influence of a passion for the stage, which hisdramatic ability hardly justified; for though he was a very respectableactor, he had no genius whatever, and never rose above irreproachablemediocrity. But his military training and his peculiar likeness toBonaparte helped him to make his part in this piece very striking andeffective, though it was not in itself the merest peg to hang"situations" on. 

I was at this time sitting for my picture to Mr. Pickersgill, with whoseportrait of my father in the part of Macbeth I have mentioned mymother's comically expressed dissatisfaction. Our kind friend, MajorDawkins, wished to give my father and mother a good portrait of me, andsuggested Mr. Pickersgill, a very eminent portrait-painter, as theartist who would be likely to execute it most satisfactorily. Mr. Pickersgill, himself, seemed very desirous to undertake it, and greatlyas my sittings interfered with my leisure, of which I had but little, itwas impossible under the circumstances that I should refuse, especiallyas he represented that if he succeeded, as he hoped to do, his paintingme would be an advantage to him; portraits of public exhibitors being ofcourse recognizable by the public, and, if good, serving the purpose ofadvertisements. Unluckily, Mrs. Jameson proposed accompanying me, inorder to lighten by her very agreeable conversation the tedium of theprocess. Her intimate acquaintance with my face, with which Mr. Pickersgill was not familiar, and her own very considerable artisticknowledge and taste made her, however, less discreet in her comments andsuggestions with regard to his operations than was altogether pleasantto him; and after exhibiting various symptoms of impatience, on oneoccasion he came so very near desiring her to mind her own business, that we broke off the sitting abruptly; and the offended painter adding, to my dismay, that it was quite evident he was not considered equal tothe task he had undertaken, our own attitude toward each other became soconstrained, not to say disagreeable, that on taking my leave I declinedreturning any more, and what became of Mr. Pickersgill's beginning of meI do not know. Perhaps he finished it by memory, and it is one of thevarious portraits of me, _qui courent le monde_, for some of which Inever sat, which were taken either from the stage or were mere effortsof memory of the artists; one of which, a head of Beatrice, painted bymy friend Mr. Sully, of Philadelphia, was engraved as a frontispiece toa small volume of poems I published there, and was one of the bestlikenesses ever taken of me. 

The success of "The Maid of Honor" gave me great pleasure. The sterlingmerits of the play do not perhaps outweigh the one insuperable defect ofthe despicable character of the hero; one can hardly sympathize withCamiola's devotion to such an idol, and his unworthiness not onlylessens the interest of the piece, but detracts from the effect of herotherwise very noble character. The performance of the part always gaveme great pleasure, and there was at once a resemblance to and differencefrom my favorite character, Portia, that made it a study of muchinterest to me. Both the women, young, beautiful, and of unusualintellectual and moral excellence, are left heiresses to enormouswealth, and are in exceptional positions of power and freedom in thedisposal of it. Portia, however, is debarred by the peculiar nature ofher father's will from bestowing her person and fortune upon any one ofher own choice; chance serves her to her wish (she was not born to beunhappy), and gives her to the man she loves, a handsome, extravagantyoung gentleman, who would certainly have been pronounced by all of usquite unworthy of her, until she proved him worthy by the very fact ofher preference for him; while Camiola's lover is separated from her bythe double obstacle of his royal birth and religious vow. 

The golden daughter of the splendid republic receives and dismissesprinces and kings as her suitors, indifferent to any but their personalmerits; we feel she is their equal in the lowest as their superior inthe highest of their "qualities;" with Camiola it is impossible not tosuspect that her lover's rank must have had some share in the glamor hethrows over her. In some Italian version of the story that I have read, Camiola is called the "merchant's daughter;" and contrasting her bearingand demeanor with the easy courtesy and sweet, genial graciousness ofPortia, we feel that she must have been of lower birth and breeding thanthe magnificent and charming Venetian. Portia is almost always in anattitude of (unconscious) condescension in her relations with all aroundher; Camiola, in one of self-assertion or self-defense. There is anelement of harshness, bordering upon coarseness, in the texture of hercharacter, which in spite of her fine qualities makes itselfunpleasantly felt, especially contrasted with that of Portia, to whomthe idea of encountering insolence or insult must have been as_impossible_ as to the French duchess, who, warned that if she went intothe streets alone at night she would probably be insulted, replied withineffable security and simplicity, "Qui? moi!" One can imagine themerchant's daughter _growing up_ to the possession of her great wealth, through the narrowing and hardening influences of sordid circumstancesand habits of careful calculation and rigid economy, thrifty, prudent, just, and eminently conscientious; of Portia one can only think as of acreature born in the very lap of luxury and nursed in the midst of sunnymagnificence, whose very element was elegant opulence and refinedsplendor, and by whose cradle Fortune herself stood godmother. She seemslike a perfect rose, blooming in a precious vase of gold and gems andexquisite workmanship. Camiola's contemptuous rebuff of her insolentcourtier lover; her merciless ridicule of her fantastical, half-wittedsuitor; her bitter and harsh rebuke of Adorni when he draws his swordupon the man who had insulted her; above all, her hard and coldinsensibility to his unbounded devotion, and the cruelty of making himthe agent for the ransom of her lover from captivity (the selfishness ofher passion inducing her to employ him because she knows how absolutelyshe may depend upon the unselfishness of his); and her final stern andperemptory claim of Bertrand's promise, are all things that Portia couldnever have done. Portia is the Lady of Belmont, and Camiola is themerchant's daughter, a very noble and magnanimous woman. In themunificent bestowal of their wealth, the one to ransom her husband'sfriend from death, the other to redeem her own lover from captivity, themanner of the gift is strikingly characteristic of the two natures. WhenPortia, radiant with the joy of relieving Bassanio's anguish, speaks ofAntonio's heavy ransom as the "petty debt, " we feel sure that if it hadbeen half her fortune it would have seemed to her an insignificant priceto pay for her husband's peace of mind. Camiola reads the price set uponher lover's head, and with grave deliberation says, "Half my estate, Adorni, " before she bids him begone and purchase at that cost theprince's release from captivity. Moreover, in claiming her right ofpurchase over him, at the very moment of his union with another woman, she gives a character of barter or sale to the whole transaction, andappeals for justice as a defrauded creditor, insisting upon her "money'sworth, " like Shylock himself, as if the love with which her heart isbreaking had been a mere question of traffic between the heir of Sicilyand the merchant's daughter. In spite of all which she is a very finecreature, immeasurably superior to the despicable man who accepts herfavors and betrays her love. It is worthy of note that Bassanio, who isclearly nothing else remarkable, is every inch a gentleman, and in thatrespect no unfit mate for Portia; while the Sicilian prince is ablackguard utterly, beneath Camiola in every particular but that of hisbirth. 

I remember two things connected with my performance of Camiola whichamused me a good deal at the time. In the last scene, when she proclaimsher intention of taking the vail, Camiola makes tardy acknowledgment toAdorni for his life-long constancy and love by leaving him a third ofher estate, with the simple words, "To thee, Adorni, for thy true andfaithful service" (a characteristic proceeding on the part of themerchant's daughter. Portia would have given him the ring from herfinger, or the flower from her bosom, besides the fortune). I used topause upon the last words, endeavoring to convey, if one look and tonemight do it, all the regretful gratitude which ought to have filled herheart, while uttering with her farewell that first, last, and onlyrecognition of his infinite devotion to her. One evening, when theaudience were perfectly silent and one might have "heard a pin drop, " asthe saying is, as I spoke these words, a loud and enthusiasticexclamation of, "Beautiful!" uttered by a single voice resounded throughthe theater, and was followed by such a burst of applause that I wasstartled and almost for a moment frightened by the sudden explosion offeeling, for which I was quite unprepared, and which I have neverforgotten. 

Another night, as I was leaving the stage, after the play, I met behindthe scenes my dear friend Mr. Harness, with old Mr. Sotheby; both werevery kind in their commendation of my performance, but the latter keptrepeating with much emphasis, "But how do you contrive to make yourselflook so beautiful?" a rather equivocal compliment, which had a peculiarsignificance; my beauty, or rather my lack of it, being a sore subjectbetween us, as I had made it the reason for refusing to act Mary Stuartin his play of "Darnley, " assuring him I was too ugly to look the partproperly; so upon this accusation of making myself "look beautiful, " Icould only reply, with much laughing, "Good-looking enough for Camiola, but not for Queen Mary. "

I received with great pleasure a congratulatory letter from Mrs. Jameson, which, in spite of my feeling her praise excessive, confirmedme in my opinion of the effect the piece ought to produce uponintelligent spectators. She had seen all the great dramatic performersof the Continental theaters, and had had many opportunities, both athome and abroad, of cultivating her taste and forming her judgment, andher opinion was, therefore, more valuable to me than much of thecriticism and praise that I received. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March, 1831. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, My mother is confined to her bed with a bad cold, or she would have answered your note herself; but, being disabled, she has commissioned me to do so, and desires me to say that both my father and herself object to my going anywhere without some member of my family as chaperon; and as this is a general rule, the infringement of it in a particular instance, however much I might wish it, would be better avoided, for fear of giving offense where I should be glad to plead the prohibition. She bids me add that she fears she cannot go out to-morrow, but that some day soon, at an early hour, she hopes to be able to accompany us both to the British Gallery. Will you come to us on Sunday evening? You see what is hanging over me for Thursday next; shall you go to see me?

 Yours affectionately, F. A. K. 

I did not, and do not, at all question the good judgment of my parentsin not allowing me to go into society unaccompanied by one or the otherof themselves. The only occasion on which I remember feeling veryrebellious with regard to this rule was that of the coronation of KingWilliam and Queen Adelaide, for which imposing ceremony a couple ofpeers' tickets had been very kindly sent us, but of which I was unableto avail myself, my father being prevented by business from escortingme, my mother being out of town, and my brother's countenance andprotection not being, in their opinion, adequate for the occasion. SoJohn went alone to the abbey, and say the fine show, and my peer'sticket remained unused on my mantelpiece, a constant suggestion of thegreat disappointment I had experienced when, after some discussion, itwas finally determined that he was too young to be considered a properchaperon for me. Dear me! how vexed I was! and how little charmed withmy notoriety, which was urged as the special reason for my being hedgedround with the utmost conventional decorum!

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March, 1831. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I have but two minutes to say two words to you, in answer to your very kind note. Both my mother and myself went out of town, not to recover from absolute indisposition, but to recruit strength. I am sorry to say she is far from well now, however; but as I think her present suffering springs from cold, I hope a few warm days will remove it. I am myself very well, except a bad cough which I have had for some time, and a very bad side-ache, which has just come on, and which, if I had time in addition to the inclination which I have, would prevent me from writing much more at present. I envy you your time spent in the country; the first days of spring and last of autumn should never be spent between brick houses and stone pavements. I am truly sorry for the anxieties you have undergone; your father is, I trust, quite recovered; and as to your dear baby (Mrs. Jameson's niece), remember it is but beginning to make you anxious, and will continue to do so as long as it lives, which is a perfect Job's comforter, is it not? The story of your old man interested me very much; I suppose a parent can love all through a whole lifetime of absence: but do you think there can be a very strong and enduring affection in a child's bosom for a parent hardly known except by hearsay? I should doubt it. I must leave off now, and remain, Always yours most truly, F. A. KEMBLE. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March 29, 1831. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, Will you be kind enough to forward my very best acknowledgments to Sir Gerard Nöel, both for his good wishes and the more tangible proof of interest he sent me (a considerable payment for a box on my benefit night)? I am sorry you were alarmed on Monday. You alarmed us all; you looked so exceedingly ill that I feared something very serious had occurred to distress and vex you. Thank you for your critique upon my Constance; both my mother and myself were much delighted with it; it was every way acceptable to me, for the censure I knew to be deserved, and the praise I hoped was so, and they were blended in the very nicest proportions. We dine at six to-morrow. Lady Cork insisted upon five, but that was really too primitive, because, as the dandy said, "we cannot eat meat in the morning. "

 Ever yours most truly, F. A. K. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March 30, 1831. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, Thank you for your money; it is necessary to be arithmetical if one means to be economical, and I receive your tribute with more pleasure than that of a duchess. I sometimes hear people lament that they have anything to do with money. I do not at all share that feeling; money, after all, only represents other things. If one has much, it is always well to look to one's expenditure, or the much will become much less; and if one has little, and works hard for it, I cannot understand being above receiving the price of one's labor. In all kinds "the laborer is worthy of his hire, " and I think it very foolish to talk as if we set no value upon that which we value enough to toil for. With regard to the tickets you wish me to send you, I must refer you to the theater; for, finding that my wits and temper were both likely to be lost in the box-book, I sent the whole away to Mr. Notter, the box-book keeper, to whom you had better apply. 

 Yours ever truly, F. A. K. 

This and the preceding note refer to my benefit, of which, according toa not infrequent custom with the more popular members of the profession, I had undertaken to manage the business details, but found myself, as Ihave here stated, quite incompetent to encounter the worry ofapplications for boxes, and seats, and special places, etc. , etc. , andhave never since, in the course of my whole public career, had anythingto do with the management of my own affairs. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March, 1831. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I was not at home yesterday afternoon when you sent to our house, and all the evening was so busy studying that I had not time to answer your dispatch. Thank you for your last year's letter; it is curious to look back, even to so short a time, and see how the past affected one when it was the present. I remember I was very happy and comfortable at Bath, the critics notwithstanding. Thank you, too, for your more recent epistle. I am grateful for, and gratified by, your minute observation of my acting. I am always thankful for your criticisms, even when I do not quite agree with them; for I know that you are always kindly anxious that I should not destroy my own effects, which I believe I not unfrequently do. With regard to my action, unless in passages which necessarily require a specific gesture, such as, "You'll find them at the Marchesa Aldabella's, " I never determine any one particular movement; and, of course, this must render my action different almost every time; and so it depends upon my own state of excitement and inspiration, so to speak, whether the gesture be forcible or not. My father desires me to send you Retsch's "Hamlet;" it is his, and I request you not to judge it too hastily: I have generally heard it abused, but I think in many parts it has very great merit. I am told that Retsch says he has no fancy for illustrating "Romeo and Juliet, " which seems strange. One would have thought he would have delighted in portraying those lovely human beings, whom one always imagines endowed with an outward and visible form as youthful, beautiful, and full of grace, as their passion itself was. Surely the balcony, the garden, and grave-yard scenes, would have furnished admirable subjects for his delicate and powerful hand. Is it possible that he thinks the thing beyond him? I must go to work. Good-by. 

 Ever yours truly, F. A. K. 

 You marked so many things in my manuscript book that I really felt ashamed to copy them all, for I should have filled more than half yours with my rhymes. I have just added to those I did transcribe a sonnet I wrote on Monday night after the play. 

It may have been that the execution of "Faust, " his masterpiece, disinclined Retsch for the treatment of another love story. He didsubsequently illustrate "Romeo and Juliet" with much grace and beauty;but it is, as a whole, undoubtedly inferior to his illustrations ofGoethe's tragical love story. Retsch's genius was too absolutely Germanto allow of his treating anything from any but a German point of view. Shakespeare, Englishman as he is, has written an Italian "Romeo andJuliet;" but Retsch's lovers are Teutonic in spite of their costume, andnowhere, as in the wonderful play, is the Southern passion made manifestthrough the Northern thought. 

The private theatricals at Bridgewater House were fruitful of seriousconsequences to me, and bestowed on me a lasting friendship and anephemeral love: the one a source of much pleasure, the other of somepain. They entailed much intimate intercourse with Lord and Lady FrancisLeveson Gower, afterward Egerton, and finally Earl and Countess ofEllesmere, who became kind and constant friends of mine. Victor Hugo'splay of "Hernani, " full of fine and striking things, as well as ofexaggerations verging on the ludicrous, had been most admirably renderedinto rhymed verse by Lord Ellesmere. His translations from the Germanand his English version of "Faust, " which was one of the first attemptsto give a poetical rendering in our language of Goethe's masterpiece, had won him some literary reputation, and his rhymed translation of"Hernani" was a performance calculated to add to it considerably. He wasa very accomplished and charming person; good and amiable, clever, cultivated, and full of fine literary and artistic taste. He wassingularly modest and shy, with a gentle diffidence of manner and sweet, melancholy expression in his handsome face that did no justice to a keenperception of humor and relish of fun, which nobody who did not know himintimately would have suspected him of. 

Of Lady Ellesmere I have already said that she was a sort of idol ofmine in my girlhood, when first I knew her, and to the end of her lifecontinued to be an object of my affectionate admiration. She wasexcellently conscientious, true, and upright; of a direct and simpleintegrity of mind and character which her intercourse with the greatworld to which she belonged never impaired, and which made her singularand unpopular in the artificial society of English high life. Herappearance always seemed to me strikingly indicative of her mind andcharacter. The nobly delicate and classical outline of her face, herpure, transparent complexion, and her clear, fearless eyes were alloutward and visible expressions of her peculiar qualities. Herbeautifully shaped head and fine profile always reminded me of thePallas Athene on some antique gem, and the riding cap with the visor, which she first made fashionable, increased the classical resemblance. She was curiously wanting in imagination, and I never heard anythingmore comically literal than her description of her own utter_destitution_ of poetical taste. After challenging in vain heradmiration for the great poets of our language, I quoted to her, notwithout misgiving, some charmingly graceful and tender lines, addressedto herself by her husband, and asked her if she did not like those: "Ohyes, " replied she, "I think they are very nice, but you know I thinkthey would be just as nice _if they were not verses_; and whenever Ihear any poetry that I like at all, I always think how much better Ishould like it if it was prose;" an explanation of her taste thatirresistibly reminded me of the delightful Frenchman's sentiment aboutspinach: "Je n'aime pas les épinards, et je suis si content que je neles aime pas! parce que si je les aimais, j'en mangerais beaucoup, et jene peux pas les souffrir. "

My intercourse with Lady Ellesmere, which had been a good dealinterrupted during the years I passed out of England, was renewed theyear before her death, when I visited her at Hatchford, where she wasresiding in her widowhood, and where I promised her when I left her Iwould return and stay with her again, but was never fortunate enough todo so, her death occurring not long afterward. 

During one of my last visits to Worsley Hall, Lord Ellesmere's seat inLancashire, Lady Ellesmere had taken me all over the beautiful churchthey were building near their house, which was to be his and her finalresting-place. After her death I made a pilgrimage to it for her sake, and when the service was over and the young members of the family hadleft their place of worship near the grave of their parents, I went intotheir chapel, where a fine monument with his life-sized effigy in marblehad been dedicated to him by her love, and where close beside it andbelow it lay the marble slab on which her name was inscribed. 

Our performance at Bridgewater House was highly successful and created agreat sensation, and we repeated it three times for the edification ofthe great gay world of London, sundry royal personages included. Two ofour company, Mr. Craven and Mr. St. Aubin, were really good actors; therest were of a tolerably decent inoffensiveness. Mrs. Bradshaw, thecharming Maria Tree of earlier days, accepted the few lines that had tobe spoken by Donna Sol's duenna, and delivered the epilogue, which, besides being very graceful and playful, contains some lines for which Ifelt grateful to Lord Ellesmere's kindness, though he had certainlytaken a poet's full license of embellishing his subject in his laudatoryreference to his Donna Sol. 

The whole thing amused me very much, and mixed up, as it soon came to befor me, with an element of real and serious interest, kept up theatmosphere of nervous excitement in which I was plunged from morningtill night. 

The play which Sheridan Knowles came to read to us was "The Hunchback. "He had already produced several successful dramas, of which the moststriking was Virginius, in which Mr. Macready performed the Roman fatherso finely. The play Knowles now read to us had been originally taken byhim to Drury Lane in the hope and expectation that Kean would accept theprincipal man's part of Master Walter. Various difficulties anddisagreements arising, however, about the piece, the author brought itto my father; and great was my emotion and delight in hearing him readit. From the first moment I felt sure that it would succeed greatly, andthat I should be able to do justice to the part of the heroine, and Iwas anxious with my father for its production. The verdict of the GreenRoom was not, however, nearly as favorable as I had expected; and I wassurprised to find that when the piece was read to the assembled companyit was received with considerable misgiving as to its chance of success. 

CHAPTER XXI. 

It is very curious that their experience tells so little amongtheatrical people in their calculation of the probable success of a newpiece; perhaps it may be said that they cannot positively foresee theeffect each actor or actress may produce with certain parts; but giventhe best possible representation of the piece, the precise temper of theparticular audience who decides its fate on the first night ofrepresentation is always an unknown quantity in the calculation, and notechnical experience ever seems to arrive at anything like evenapproximate certainty with regard to that. I felt perfectly sure of thesuccess of "The Hunchback, " but I think that was precisely because of mywant of theatrical experience, which left me rather in the position ofone of the public than one of the players, and there was much gravehead-shaking over it, especially on the part of our excellentstage-manager, Mr. Bartley, who was exceedingly faint-hearted about theexperiment. 

My father, with great professional disinterestedness, took theinsignificant part of the insignificant lover, and Knowles himselffilled that of the hero of the piece, the hunchback; a circumstancewhich gave the part a peculiar interest, and compensated in some measurefor the loss of the great genius of Kean, for whom it had been written. 

The same species of uncertainty which I have said characterizes thejudgments of actors with regard to the success of new pieces sometimesaffects the appreciation authors themselves form of the relative meritsof their own works, inducing them to value more highly some which theyesteem their best, and to which that pre-eminence is denied by popularverdict. Knowles, while writing "The Hunchback, " was so absorbed withthe idea of what Kean's impersonation of it would probably be, that hewas entirely unconscious of what the great actor himself probablyperceived, that on the stage the part of Julia would overweigh andeclipse that of Master Walter. Knowles felt sure he had written a fineman's part, and was really not aware that the woman's part was stillfiner. What is yet more singular is that while he was writing "TheWife, " which he did immediately afterward, with a view to my acting theprincipal female character, he constantly said to me, "I am writing_such_ a part for you!" and had no notion that the only part capable ofany effect at all in the piece was that of Julian St. Pierre, thegood-for-nothing brother of the duchess. 

The play of "The Wife" was singularly wanting in interest, and except inthe character of St. Pierre was ineffective and flat from beginning toend, in that respect a perfect contrast to "The Hunchback, " in which theinterest is vivid and strong, and never flags from the first scene tothe last. I was quite unable to make anything at all of the part ofMarianna, nor have I ever heard of its becoming prominent or striking inthe hands of any one else. 

"The Hunchback, " according to my confident expectation, succeeded. Knowles played his own hero with great force and spirit, though he wasin such a state of wild excitement that I expected to see him fly on thestage whenever he should have been off it, and _vice versâ_, andfollowed him about behind the scenes endeavoring to keep him in hisright mind with regard to his exits and his entrances, and receivingfrom him explosive Irish benedictions in return for my warnings andpromptings. Throughout the whole first representation I was really asnervous for and about him as I was about the play itself and my ownparticular part in it. My father did the impossible with Sir ThomasClifford, in making him both dignified and interesting; and Miss Taylorwas capital in the saucy Helen. My part played itself and was greatlyliked by the audience; the piece was one of the most popular originalplays of my time, and has continued a favorite alike with the public andthe players. The part of the heroine is one, indeed, in which it wouldbe almost impossible to fail; and every Julia may reckon upon thesympathy of her audience, the character is so pre-eminently effectiveand dramatic. 

Of the play as a composition not much is to be said; it has littlepoetical or literary merit, and even the plot is so confused and obscurethat nobody to my knowledge (not even the author himself, of whom I onceasked an explanation of it) was ever able to make it out or give aplausible account of it. The characters are inconsistent and wanting inverisimilitude to a degree that ought to prove fatal to them with anytolerably reasonable spectators; in spite of all which the play isinteresting, exciting, affecting, and humorous. The powerfully dramaticeffect of the situations, and the two characters of Master Walter andJulia, the great scope for good acting in all the scenes in which theyappear, the natural fire, passion, and pathos of the dialogue, in shortthe great merits of the piece as an acting play cover all its defects;even the heroine's vulgar, flighty folly and the hero's absurdeccentricity interfering wonderfully little with the sympathy of theaudience for their troubles and their final triumph over them. "TheHunchback" is a very satisfactory play to _see_, but let nobody who hasseen it well acted attempt to read it in cold blood!

It had an immense run, and afforded me an opportunity of testing thedifference between an infinite repetition of the text of Shakespeare andthat of any other writer. I played Juliet upward of a hundred nightswithout any change of part and did not weary of it; Julia, in "TheHunchback, " after half the repetition became so tiresome to me that Iwould have given anything to have changed parts with my sprightly Helen, if only for a night, to refresh myself and recover a little from theextreme weariness I felt in constantly repeating Julia. The audiencecertainly would have suffered by the exchange, for Miss Taylor would nothave played my part so much better than I, as I should have played hersworse than she did. Indeed, her performance of the character of Helensaved it from the reproach of coarseness, which very few actresses wouldhave been able to avoid while giving it all the point and lively humorwhich she threw into it. I had great pleasure in acting the piece withher, she did her business so thoroughly well and was so amiable andagreeable a fellow-worker. 

In my last letter to Miss S---- I have spoken of a party at the Countessof Cork's, to which I went. She was one of the most curious figures inthe London society of my girlish days. Very aged, yet retaining much ofa vivacity of spirit and sprightly wit for which she had been famous asMary Monckton, she continued till between ninety and a hundred years oldto entertain her friends and the gay world, who frequently during theseason assembled at her house. 

I have still a note begging me to come to one of her evening parties, written under her dictation by a young person who used to live with her, and whom she called her "Memory;" the few concluding lines scrawled byherself are signed "_M. Cork, æt_. 92. " She was rather apt to appeal toher friends to come to her on the score of her age; and I rememberRogers showing me an invitation he had received from her for one of theancient concert evenings (these were musical entertainments of thehighest order, which Mr. Rogers never failed to attend), couched inthese terms: "Dear Rogers, leave the ancient music and come to ancientCork, 93. " Lady Cork's drawing-rooms were rather peculiar in theirarrangement: they did not contain that very usual piece of furniture, apianoforte, so that if ever she especially desired to have music shehired an instrument for the evening; the rest of the furniture consistedonly of very large and handsome armchairs placed round the apartmentsagainst the walls, to which they were _made fast_ by some mysteriousprocess, so that it was quite impossible to form a small circle orcoterie of one's own at one of her assemblies. I remember when first Imade this discovery expressing my surprise to the beautiful Lady Harrietd'Orsay, who laughingly suggested that poor old Lady Cork's infirmitywith regard to the property of others (a well-known incapacity fordiscriminating between _meum_ and _tuum_) might probably be the cause ofthis peculiar precaution with regard to her own armchairs, which itwould not, however, have been a very easy matter to have stolen even hadthey not been chained to the walls. In the course of the conversationwhich followed, Lady E----, apparently not at all familiar withChesterfield's Letters, said that it was Lady Cork who had originatedthe idea that after all heaven would probably turn out very dull to her_when she got there; sitting on damp clouds and singing "God save theKing_" being her idea of the principal amusements there. This ratherdreary image of the joys of the blessed was combated, however, by LadyE----, who put forth her own theory on the subject as far more genial, saying, "Oh dear, no; she thought it would be all splendid _fêtes_ anddelightful dinner parties, and charming, clever people; _just like theLondon season, only a great deal pleasanter because there would be nobores. _" With reference to Lady Cork's theory, Lady Harriet said, "Isuppose it would be rather tiresome for her, poor thing! for you knowshe hates music, and there would be nothing to steal _but one another'swings_. "

Lady Cork's great age did not appear to interfere with her enjoyment ofsociety, in which she lived habitually. I remember a very comicalconversation with her in which she was endeavoring to appoint some dayfor my dining with her, our various engagements appearing to clash. Shetook up the pocket-book where hers were inscribed, and began readingthem out with the following running commentary: "Wednesday--no, Wednesday won't do; Lady Holland dines with me--naughty lady!--won't do, my dear. Thursday?" "Very sorry, Lady Cork, we are engaged. " "Ah yes, soam I; let's see--Friday; no, Friday I have the Duchess of C----, anothernaughty lady; mustn't come then, my dear. Saturday?" "No, Lady Cork, Iam very sorry--Saturday, we are engaged to Lady D----. " "Oh dear, ohdear! improper lady, too! but a long time ago, everybody's forgotten allabout it--very proper now! quite proper now!"

Lady Cork's memory seemed to me to stretch beyond the limits of whateverybody had forgotten. She was quite a young woman at the time of theyouth of George III. , and spoke of Frederick, Prince of Wales, to whosewife she, then the Honorable Mary Monckton, was maid of honor. It is amost tantalizing circumstance to me now, to remember a fragment of aconversation between herself and my mother, on the occasion of the firstvisit I was ever taken to pay her. I was a very young girl; it was justafter my return from school at Paris, and the topics discussed by mymother and her old lady friend interested me so little that I waslooking out of the window, and wondering when we should go away, when myattention was arrested by these words spoken with much emphasis by LadyCork: "Yes, my dear, I was alone in the room, and the picture turned inits frame, and Lord Bute came out from behind it;" here, perceiving myeyes riveted upon her, she lowered her voice, and I distinctly felt thatI was expected to look out of the window again, without having any idea, however, that the question was probably one of the character of a"naughty lady" of higher rank than those so designated to me some yearslater by old Lady Cork, who, if I may judge by this fragment of gossip, might have cleared up some disputed points as to the relations betweenthe Princess of Wales and the Prime Minister. 

I do not know that Lady Cork's reputation for beauty ever equaled thatshe had for wit, but when I knew her, at upward of ninety, she wasreally a very comely old woman. Her complexion was still curiously fineand fair, and there was great vivacity in her eyes and countenance, aswell as wonderful liveliness in her manner. Her figure was very slightand diminutive, and at the parties at her own house she always wasdressed entirely in white--in some rich white silk, with a white bonnetcovered with a rich blonde or lace vail on her head; she looked like alittle old witch bride. I recollect a curious scene my mother describedto me, which she witnessed one day when calling on Lady Cork, whom shehad known for many years. She was shown into her dressing-room, wherethe old lady was just finishing her toilet. She was about to put on hergown, and remaining a moment without it showed my mother her arms andneck, which were even then still white and round and by no meansunlovely, and said, pointing to her maid, "Isn't it a shame! she won'tlet me wear my gowns low or my sleeves short any more. " To which themaid responded by throwing the gown over her mistress's shoulders, exclaiming at the same time, "Oh, fie, my lady! you ought to be ashamedof yourself to talk so at your age!"--a rebuke which the nonagenarianbeauty accepted with becoming humility. 

The unfortunate propensity of poor Lady Cork to appropriate all sorts ofthings belonging to other people, valueless quite as often as valuable, was matter of public notoriety, so that the fashionable Londontradesmen, to whom her infirmity in this respect was well known, neverallowed their goods to be taken to her carriage for inspection, butalways exacted that she should come into their shops, where anindividual was immediately appointed to follow her about and watch herduring the whole time she was making her purchases. 

Whenever she visited her friends in the country, her maid on her returnhome used to gather together whatever she did not recognize as belongingto her mistress, and her butler transmitted it back to the house wherethey had been staying. I heard once a most ludicrous story of hercarrying off, _faute de mieux_, a _hedgehog_ from a place where thecreature was a pet of the porters, and was running tame about the hallas Lady Cork crossed it to get into her carriage. She made her poor"Memory" seize up the prickly beast, but after driving a few miles withthis unpleasant spiked foot-warmer, she found means to dispose of it ata small town, where she stopped to change horses, to a baker, to whomshe gave it in payment for a sponge cake, assuring him that a hedgehogwould be invaluable in his establishment for the destruction of blackbeetles, with which she knew, from good authority, that the premises ofbakers were always infested. 

The following note was addressed to Lady Dacre on the subject of apretty piece called "Isaure, " which she had written and very kindlywished to have acted at Covent Garden for my benefit. It was, however, judged of too slight and delicate a texture for that large frame, andthe purpose was relinquished. I rather think it was acted in private atHatfield House, Lady Salisbury filling the part of the heroine, which Iwas to have taken had the piece been brought out at Covent Garden. 

 MY DEAR LADY DACRE, Will you be kind enough to send "Isaure" to my father? We will take the greatest possible care of her, and return her to you in all safety. I am only sorry that he cannot have the pleasure of hearing you read it; for though it can take its own part very well, you know even Shakespeare is not the worse for the interpretation of a sweet voice, musical accent, and correct emphasis. With regard to the production of the piece on the stage, I do not like to venture an opinion, because my short experience has been long enough already to show me how easily I might be mistaken in such matters. 

 There is no rule by which the humors of an audience can be predicted. On a benefit night, indeed, I feel sure that the piece would succeed, and answer your kind intention of adding to the attractions of the bill, be they what they might; but our judges are not the same, you know, two consecutive evenings, and therefore it is impossible to foretell the sentence of a second representation, for no "benefit" but that of the public itself. Isaure is a refined patrician beauty, and I am sometimes inclined to think that the Memphian head alone is of fit proportions for uttering oracles in the huge space of our modern stage. My father, however, is, from long experience, the best guesser of these riddles, and he will tell you honestly his opinion as to your heroine's public capacity. I am sure he will find his own reward in making her acquaintance. I am, my dear Lady Dacre, faithfully yours, FANNY KEMBLE. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, Thank you for the book you were so good as to send me. I have read that which concerns the Cenci in it, and think Leigh Hunt's reflections on the story and tragedy very good. I am glad you were at the play last night, because I thought I acted well--at least, I tried to do so. I stayed the first act of the new after-piece, and was rather amused by it. I do not know how the ladies' "inexpressibles" might affect the fortunes of the second act, but I liked all their gay petticoats in the first, extremely. The weather is not very propitious for us; we start to-morrow at nine. I send you the only copy of Sophocles I can lay my hand on this morning. Yours ever truly, F. A. KEMBLE. 

A little piece called "The Invincibles, " in which a smart corps of youngAmazons in uniform were officered by Madame Vestris in the prettiestregimentals ever well worn by woman, was the novelty I alluded to. Theeffect of the female troop was very pretty, and the piece was verysuccessful. 

I had only lately read Shelley's great tragedy, and Mrs. Jameson hadbeen so good as to lend me various notices and criticisms upon it. Thehideous subject itself is its weak point, and his selection of it onecause for doubting Shelley's power as a dramatic writer. Everything elsein the terrible play suggests the probable loss his death may have beento the dramatic literature of England. At the same time, the tenor ofall his poems denotes a mind too unfamiliar with human life and humannature in their ordinary normal aspects and conditions for a good writerof plays. His metaphysical was almost too much for his poeticalimagination, and perhaps nothing between the morbid horror of that Cencistory and the ideal grandeur of the Greek Prometheus would have excitedhim to the dramatic handling of any subject. 

His translation from Calderon's "El Magico Prodigioso, " and his bit ofthe Brocken scene from "Faust, " are fine samples of his power ofdramatic style; he alone could worthily have translated the whole of"Faust;" but I suppose he really was too deficient in the vigorousflesh-and-blood vitality of the highest and healthiest poetical geniusto have been a dramatist. He could not deal with common folk nor handlecommon things; humor, that great _tragic_ element, was not in him; theheavens and all their clouds and colors were his, and he floated andhovered and soared in the ethereal element like one native to it. Uponthe firm earth his foot wants firmness, and men and women as they are, are at once too coarse and complex, too robust and too infinitelyvarious for his delicate, fine, but in some sense feeble handling. 

Browning is the very reverse of Shelley in this respect; both havewritten one fine play and several fine dramatic compositions; butthroughout Shelley's poetry the dramatic spirit is deficient, while inBrowning's it reveals itself so powerfully that one wonders how he hasescaped writing many good plays besides the "Blot on the Scutcheon" andthat fine fragmentary succession of scenes, "Pippa Passes. "

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I fear I am going to disappoint you, and 'tis with real regret that I do so, but I have been acting every night almost for the last month, and when to-day I mentioned my project of spending this my holiday evening with you, both my aunt and my father seemed to think that in discharging my debt to you I was defrauding nearer and older creditors; and suggested that my mother, who really sees but little of me now, might think my going out to-night unkind. I cannot, therefore, carry out my plan of visiting you, and beg that you will forgive my not keeping my promise this evening. I am moreover so far from well that my company would hardly give you much pleasure, nor could I stay long if I came, for early as it is my head is aching for its pillow already. 

 As soon as a week occurs in which I have _two_ holidays I will try to give you one of them. I send you back Crabbe, which I have kept for ever; for a great poet, which he is, he is curiously unpoetical, I think. Yours ever truly, F. A. KEMBLE. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, My mother bids me say that you certainly will suppose she is mad, or else _Mother Hubbard's dog_; for when you called she was literally ill in bed, and this evening she cannot have the pleasure of receiving you, because she is engaged out, here in our own neighborhood, to a very quiet tea. She bids me thank you very much for the kindness of your proposed visit, and express her regret at not being able to avail herself of it. If you can come on Thursday, between one and two o'clock, I shall be most happy to see you. Thank you very much for Lamb's "Dramatic Specimens;" I read the scene you had copied from "Philaster" directly; how fine it is! how I should like to act it! Mr. Harness has sent me the first volume of the family edition of the "Old Plays. " I think sweeping those fine dramas clean is a good work that cannot be enough commended. What treasures we possess and make no use of, while we go on acting "Gamesters" and "Grecian Daughters, " and such poor stuff! But I have no time for ecstasies or exclamations. Yours ever most truly, F. A. KEMBLE. 

I have said that hardly any new part was ever assigned to me that I didnot receive with a rueful sense of inability to what I called "doanything with it. " Julia in "The Hunchback, " and Camiola in "The Maid ofHonor, " were among the few exceptions to this preparatory attack ofdespondency; but those I in some sort choose myself, and all my othercharacters were appointed me by the management, in obedience to whosedictates, and with the hope of serving the interests of the theater, Isuppose I should have acted Harlequin if I had been ordered to do so. 

Lady Teazle and Mrs. Oakley were certainly no exceptions to thisexperience of a cold fit of absolute incapacity with which I receivedevery new part appointed me, and my studying of them might have beencalled lugubrious, whatever my subsequent performance of them may havebeen. My mother was of invaluable assistance to me in the process, and Iowe to her whatever effect I produced in either part. She had greatcomic as well as pathetic power, and the incisive point of her deliverygave every shade of meaning of the dialogue with admirable truth andpungency; her own performance of Mrs. Oakley had been excellent; I actedit, even with the advantage of her teaching, very tamely. Jealousy, inany shape, was not a passion that I sympathized with; the tragic miseryof Bianca's passion was, however, a thing I could imagine sufficientlywell to represent it; but not so Mrs. Oakley's fantastical frenzies. Butthe truth is that it was not until many years later and in my readingsof Shakespeare that I developed any real comic faculty at all; and Ihave been amused in the later part of my public career to find comedyoften considered my especial gift, rather than the tragic and patheticone I was supposed at the beginning of it to possess. 

The fact is that except in broad farce, where the principal ingredientbeing humor, animal spirits and a grotesque imagination, which are of noparticular age, come strongly into play, comedy appears to me decidedlya more mature and complete result of dramatic training than tragedy. Theeffect of the latter may, as I myself exemplified, be tolerably achievedby force of natural gifts, aided but little by study; but a finecomedian _must_ be a fine artist; his work is intellectual, and notemotional, and his effects address themselves to the critical judgmentand not the passionate sympathy of an audience. Tact, discretion, finetaste, are quite indispensable elements of his performance; he must bereally a more complete actor than a great tragedian need be. Theexpression of passion and emotion appears to be an interpretation ofnature, and may be forcibly rendered sometimes with but little beyondthe excitement of its imaginary experience on the actor's ownsensibility; while a highly educated perfection is requisite for theactor who, in a brilliant and polished representation of the follies ofsociety, produces by fine and delicate and powerful delineations thepicture of the vices and ridicules of a highly artificial civilization. 

Good company itself is not unapt to be very good acting of high comedy, while tragedy, which underlies all life, if by chance it rises to thesmooth surface of polite, social intercourse, agitates and disturbs itand produces even in that uncongenial sphere the rarely heard discord ofa natural condition and natural expression of natural feeling. 

Of my performance of Mrs. Oakley I have but one recollection, which isthat of having once, while acting it with my father, disconcerted him tosuch a degree as to compel him to turn up the stage in an uncontrollablefit of laughter. I remember the same thing happening once when I wasplaying Beatrice to his Benedict. I have not the least notion what I didthat struck my father with such irrepressible merriment, but I supposethere must have been something in itself irresistibly ludicrous to him, toward whom my manner was habitually respectfully deferential (for ourintercourse with our parents, though affectionate, was not familiar, andwe seldom addressed them otherwise than as "sir" and "ma'am"), to bepelted by me with the saucy sallies of Beatrice's mischievous wit, orpummeled with the grotesque outbursts of poor Mrs. Oakley's jealousfury. 

Our personal relation, which thus rendered our performance of comedytogether especially comical to my father, added infinitely to mydistress in all tragedies in which we acted together; the sense of hisdispleasure or the sight of his anguish invariably bringing him, myfather, and not the part he was acting, before me; and, as in the playof "The Stranger" and the pathetic little piece of "The Deserter, "affecting me with almost uncontrollable emotion. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, April 10, 1831. MY DEAREST H----, I owe you something like an explanatory note after that ejaculatory one I sent you the other day. You must have thought me crazy; but indeed, since all these late alarming reports from Spain, until the news came of John's safety, I did not know how much fear and anxiety lay under the hope and courage I had endeavored to maintain about him. 

 From day to day I had read the reports and tried to reason with regard to their probability, and to persuade my mother that we had every cause for hoping the best; and it was really not until that hope was realized that it seemed as if all my mental nerves and muscles, braced to the resistance of calamity, had suddenly relaxed and given way under the relief from all further apprehension of it. I have kept much of my forebodings to myself, but they have been constant and wretched enough, and my gratitude for this termination of them is unspeakable. 

 I heard last night a report which I have not mentioned to my mother for fear it should prove groundless. Horace Twiss showed me a note in which a gentleman assured him that John had positively taken his passage in a Government vessel, and was now on his way home; even if this is true, I am afraid to tell my mother, because if the vessel should be delayed a day or two by weather or any other cause, her anxiety will have another set of apprehensions to feed upon, and to prey upon her with. She desires her best love to you; she likes your pamphlet on "The Education of the People" very much, at the same time that it has not convinced her that instruction is wholesome for the lower orders; she thinks the dependence of helplessness and ignorance a better security (for them, or for those above them, I wonder?) than the power of reasoning rightly and a sense of duty, in which opinion, as you will believe, I do not agree. 

 Thank you for your account of your visit to Wroxton Abbey [the seat of the Earl of Guilford]; it interested me very much; trees are not to me, as they seem to be to you, the most striking and beautiful of all natural objects, though I remember feeling a good deal of pain at the cutting down of a particular tree that I was very fond of. 

 At the entrance of Weybridge was a deserted estate and dilapidated mansion, Portmore Park, once a royal domain, through which the river ran and where we used to go constantly to fish. There was a remarkably beautiful cedar tree whose black boughs spread far over the river, and whose powerful roots, knotted in every variety of twist, formed a cradle from which the water had gradually washed away the earth. Here I used to sit, or rather lie, reading, or writing sometimes, while the others pursued their sport, and enjoying the sound and sight of the sparkling water which ran undermining my bed and singing treacherous lullabies to me the while. For two years this tree was my favorite haunt; the third, on our return to Weybridge from London, on my running to the accustomed spot, I found the hitherto intercepted sun staring down upon the water and the bank, and a broad, smooth, white _tabula rasa_ level with the mossy turf, which was all that remained of my cedar canopy; and though it afforded an infinitely more commodious seat than the twisted roots, I never returned there again. 

 To-morrow we dine with the F----s, and there is to be a dance in the evening; on Wednesday I act Constance; Thursday there is a charade party at the M----s'; Friday I play Mrs. Beverley; and Monday and Wednesday next, Camiola. I hope by and by to act Camiola very well, but I am afraid the play itself can never become popular; the size of the theater and the public taste of the present day are both against such pieces; still, the attempt seemed to me worth making, and if it should prove successful we might revive one or two more of Massinger's plays; they are such sterling stuff compared with the Isabellas, the Jane Shores, the everything but Shakespeare. You saw in my journal what I think about Camiola. I endeavor as much as I can to soften her, and if I can manage to do so I shall like her better than any part I have played, except my dear Portia, who does not need softening. 

 I am too busy just now to read "Destiny" [Miss Ferrier's admirable novel]; my new part and dresses and rehearsals will occupy me next week completely. I have taken a new start about "The Star of Seville" [the play I was writing], and am working away hard at it. I begin to see my way through it. I wish I could make anything like an acting play of it; we want one or two new ones so very much. 

 My riding goes on famously, and Fozzard thinks so well of my progress that the other day he put me upon a man's horse--an Arab--which frightened me half to death with his high spirits and capers; but I sat him, and what is more, rode him. Tuesday we go to a very gay ball a little way out of town; Saturday we go to a party at old Lady Cork's, who calls you Harriet and professes to have known you well and to remember you perfectly. 

 Now, H----, as to what you say of fishing, if you are bloody-minded enough to desire to kill creatures for sport, in Heaven's name why don't you do it? The sin lies in the inclination (by the bye, I think that's _half_ a mistake). Never mind, your inclination to fish and my desire to be the tigress at the Zoological Gardens have nothing whatever in common. I admire and envy the wild beast's swiftness and strength, but if I had them I don't think I would tear human beings to bits unless I were _she_, which was not what I wished to be, only as strong and agile as she; do you see? I am in a great hurry, dear, and have written you an inordinately stupid letter; never mind, the next shall be inconceivably amusing. Just now my head is stuffed full of amber-colored cashmere and white satin. My mother begs to be kindly remembered to Mrs. Kemble. Always affectionately yours, F. A. K. 

My determination to _soften_ the character of Camiola is anotherindication of my imperfect comprehension of my business as an actress, which was not to reform but to represent certain personages. Massinger's"Maid of Honor" is a stern woman, not without a very positive grain ofcoarse hardness in her nature. My attempt to _soften_ her was animpertinent endeavor to alter his fine conception to something more inharmony with my own ideal of womanly perfection. I was a veryindifferent actress and had not begun to understand my work, nor was Mr. Macready far wrong when, many years after, he spoke to me as "notknowing the rudiments of my profession. "

 JOURNAL, 1831. 

 _Thursday, April 21st. _--Walked in the square, and studied Lady Teazle. The trees are thickly clothed with leaves, and the new-mown grass, even in the midst of London, smelt fresh and sweet; I was quite alone in the square, and enjoyed something like a _country_ sensation. I went to Pickersgill, and Mrs. Jameson came while I was sitting to him; that Medora of his is a fine picture, full of poetry. We dined with the Harnesses; Milman and Croly were among the guests (it was a sort of _Quarterly Review_ in the flesh). I like Mr. Milman; not so the other critic. 

 _Friday, 22d. _--Visiting with my mother; called on Lady Dacre, who gave me her pretty little piece of "Wednesday Morning, " with a view to our doing it for my father's benefit. It is really very pretty, but I fear will look in our large theater as a lady's water-color sketch of a landscape would by way of a scene. I walked in the square in the afternoon, and studied Lady Teazle, which I do not like a bit, and shall act abominably. At the theatre to-night the house was not very full, and the audience were unpleasantly inclined to be political; they took one of the speeches, "The king, God bless him, " and applied it with vehement applause to his worthy Majesty, William IV. 

 _Saturday, 23d. _--After my riding lesson, went and sat in the library to hear Sheridan Knowles's play of "The Hunchback. " Mr. Bartley and my father and mother were his only audience, and he read it himself to us. A real play, with real characters, individuals, human beings, it is a good deal after the fashion of our old playwrights, and does not disgrace its models. I was delighted with it; it is full of life and originality; a little long, but that's a trifle. There is a want of clearness and coherence in the plot, and the comic part has really no necessary connection with the rest of the piece; but none of that will signify much, or, I think, prevent it from succeeding. I like the woman's part exceedingly, but am afraid I shall find it very difficult to act. 

 After dinner there was a universal discussion as to the possibility and probability of Adorni's self-sacrifice in "The Maid of Honor, " and as the female voices were unanimous in their verdict of its truth and likelihood, I hold it to be likely and true, for Dante says we have the "intellect of love, " and Cherubino (a very different kind of authority) says the same thing; and I suppose we are better judges of such questions than men. The love of Adorni seems to me, indeed, more like a woman's than a man's, but that does not tell against its verisimilitude. Our love is characterized generally by self-devotion and self-denial, but the qualities which naturally belong to our affection were given to Adorni by his social and conventional position. He was by birth and fortune dependent on and inferior to Camiola, as women are by nature dependent on and inferior to men; and so I think his love for her has something of a feminine quality. 

 In the evening went with my mother to a party at old Lady Cork's. We started for our assembly within a few minutes of Sunday morning. Such rooms--such ovens! such boxes full of fine folks and foul air! in which we stood and sat, and looked and listened, and talked nonsense and heard it talked, and perspired and smothered and suffocated. On our arrival, as I was going upstairs, I was nearly squeezed flat against the wall by her potent grace, the Duchess of St. Albans. We remained half an hour in the steaming atmosphere of the drawing-rooms, and another half-hour in the freezing hall before the carriage could be brought up; caught a dreadful cold and came home; did not get to bed till two o'clock, with an intolerable face-ache and tooth-ache, the well-earned reward of a well-spent evening. 

[The career of the Duchess of St. Albans was, as far as worldlycircumstances went, a curious one. As Miss Mellon she was one of mymother's stage contemporaries; a kind-hearted, good-humored, buxom, rather coarse actress, with good looks, and good spirits of a somewhatunrefined sort, which were not without their admirers; among these theold banker, Mr. Coutts, married her, and dying, left her the solepossessor and disposer of his enormous wealth. My mother, who had alwaysremained on friendly though not intimate terms with her old stage-mate, went to see her in the early days of her widowhood, when Mrs. Couttsgave her this moderate estimate of her "money matters:" "Ah, I assureyou, dear Mrs. Charles, the reports of what poor, dear Mr. Coutts hasleft me are very much exaggerated--not, I really believe, more than afew hundred thousand pounds. To be sure" (after a dejected pause), "there's the bank--they say about fifty thousand a year. "

This small fortune and inconsiderable income proved sufficient to themoderate desires of the young Duke of St. Albans, who married thisdestitute widow, who thenceforth took her place (and a large one) in theBritish aristocracy, and chaperoned the young Ladies Beauclerc, herhusband's sisters, in society. She was a good-natured woman, and morethan once endeavored to get my father and mother to bring me to herballs and magnificent parties. This, however, they steadily declined, and she, without resenting it, sent her invitations to my youngestbrother alone, to whom she took a great fancy, and to whose acceptingher civilities no objection was made. At her death she left her greatwealth to Mr. Coutts's granddaughter, Miss Burdett Coutts, the ladywhose excellent use of her riches has made her known all over the worldas one of the most munificently charitable of Fortune's stewards. 

The Duchess of St. Albans was not without shrewd sense and some humor, though entirely without education, and her sallies were not always inthe best possible taste. Her box at Covent Garden could be approachedmore conveniently by crossing the stage than by the entrance from thefront of the house, and she sometimes availed herself of this easierexit to reach her carriage with less delay. One night when my father hadbeen acting Charles II. , the Duchess of St. Albans crossing her oldwork-ground, the stage, with her two companions, the pretty LadiesBeauclerc, stopped to shake hands with him (he was still in his stagecostume, having remained behind the scenes to give some orders), andpresenting him to her young ladies, said, "There, my dears; there's yourancestor. " I suppose in her earlier day she might not have been a badrepresentative of their "ancestress. "]

 _Monday, April 25th. _--Finished studying Lady Teazle. In the evening at the theater the house was good, but the audience was dull and I was in wretched spirits and played very ill. 

 Dall was saying that she thought in two years of hard work we might--that is, my father and myself--earn enough to enable us to live in the south of France. This monstrous theater and its monstrous liabilities will banish us all as it did my uncle Kemble. But that I should be sorry to live so far out of the reach of H----, I think the south of France would be a pleasant abode: a delicious climate, a quiet existence, a less artificial state of society and mode of life, a picturesque nature round me, and my own dear ones and my scribbling with me--I think with all these conditions I could be happy enough in the south of France or anywhere. 

 The audience were very politically inclined, applied all the loyal speeches with fervor, and called for "God save the King" after the play. The town is illuminated, too, and one hopes and prays that the "Old Heart of Oak" will weather these evil days, but sometimes the straining of the tackle and the creaking of the timbers are suggestive of foundering even to the most hopeful. The lords have been vindicating their claim to a share in _common_ humanity by squabbling like fishwives and all but coming to blows; the bishops must have been scared and scandalized, lords spiritual not being fighting men nowadays. 

 After the play Mr. Stewart Newton, the painter, supped with us--a clever, entertaining man and charming artist; a little bit of a dandy, but probably he finds it politic to be so. He told us some comical anecdotes about the Royal Academy and the hanging of the pictures. 

 The poor, dear king [William IV. ], who it seems knows as much about painting as _una vacca spagnuola_, lets himself, his family, and family animals be painted by whoever begs to be allowed that honor. So when the pictures were all hung the other day, somebody discovered in a wretched daub close to the ceiling a portrait of Lady Falkland [the king's daughter], and another of his Majesty's favorite _cat_, which were immediately _lowered_ to a more honorable position, to accomplish which desirable end, Sir William Beechey [then president of the academy] removed some of his own paintings. On a similar occasion during the late King George IV. 's life, a wretched portrait of him having been placed in one of the most conspicuous situations in the room, the Duke of Wellington and sundry other distinguished _cognoscenti_ complimented Sir Thomas Lawrence on it _as his_; this was rather a bitter pill, and must have been almost too much for Lawrence's courtierly equanimity. 

 _Wednesday, April 27th. _--To the riding school, where Miss Cavendish and I discoursed on the _stay-at-home_ sensation, and agreed that it is bad to encourage it too far, as one may narrow one's social circle till at last it resolves itself into _one's self_. 

 Wrote to thank Dr. Thackeray [provost of King's College, Cambridge, and father of my life-long friend A---- T----] for the Shakespeare he has sent me, and Lady Dacre for her piece of "Wednesday Morning. " In the evening they all drove out in the open carriage to see the illuminations; I stayed at home, for the carriage was full and I had no curiosity about the sight. The town is one blaze of rejoicing for the Reform Bill triumph; the streets are thronged with people and choked up with carriages, and the air is flashing and crashing with rockets and squibs and crackers, to the great discomfort of the horses. So many R's everywhere that they may stand for reform, revolution, ruin, just as those who run may choose to read, or according to the interpretation of every individual's politics; the most general acceptation in which they will be taken by the popular understanding will assuredly be _row_. 

 _Friday, 29th. _--Went off to rehearsal without any breakfast, which was horrible! but not so horrible as my performance of Lady Teazle promises to be. If I do the part according to my notion, it will be mere insipidity, and yet all the traditional pokes and pats with the fan and _business_ of the part, as it is called, is so perfectly unnatural to me that I fear I shall execute it with a doleful bad grace. It seems odd that Sir Peter always wears the dress of the last century, while the costume of the rest of the _dramatis personæ_ is quite modern. Indeed, mine is a ball dress of the present day, all white satin and puffs and clouds of white tulle, and garlands and wreaths of white roses and jasmine; it is very anomalous, and makes Lady Teazle of no date, as it were, for her mariners are those of a rustic belle of seventeen hundred and something, and her costume that of a fine lady of the present day in the height of the present fashion, which is absurd. 

 Mrs. Jameson paid me a long visit; she threatens to write a play; perhaps she might; she is very clever, has a vast fund of information, a good deal of experience, and knowledge and observation of the world and society. She wanted me to have spent the evening with her on the 23d, Shakespeare's birth and death day, an anniversary all English people ought to celebrate. Lady Dacre called, in some tribulation, to say that she had committed herself about her little piece of "Wednesday Morning, " and that Lady Salisbury, who wants it for Hatfield, does not like its being brought out on the stage. 

 Lady Dacre says Lady Salisbury is "afraid of comparisons" (between herself and me, in the part), _I_ think Lady Salisbury, would not like "our play" to be made "common and unclean" by vulgar publicity. In the evening I went to the theater to see a new comedy by a Spaniard. The house was literally empty, which was encouraging to all parties. The piece is slightly constructed in point of plot, but the dialogue is admirably written, and, as the work of a foreigner, perfectly surprising. I was introduced to Don Telesforo de Trueba, the author, an ugly little young man, all hair and glare, whiskers and spectacles; he must be very clever and well worth knowing, Mr. Harness took tea with us after the play. 

[The comedy, in five acts, of "The Exquisites" was a satirical pieceshowing up the ridiculous assumption of affected indifference of theyoung dandies of the day. The special airs of impertinence by whichcertain officers of a "crack" regiment distinguished themselves hadsuggested several of the most telling points of the play, which was inevery respect a most remarkable performance for a foreigner. ]

 _Saturday, April 30th. _--Received a letter from John; he has determined not to leave Spain at present; and were he to return, what is there for him to do here? In the evening to Mrs. C----'s ball; it was very gay, but I am afraid I am turning "exquisite, " for I didn't like the music, and my partners bored me, and the dancing tired me, and my journal is getting like K----'s head--full of naked facts, unclothed with a single thought. 

 _Sunday, May 1st. _--As sulky a day as ever _glouted_ in an English sky. The "young morn" came picking her way from the east, leading with her a dripping, draggled May, instead of Milton's glorious vision. 

 After church, sundry callers: Mr. C---- bringing prints of the dresses for "Hernani, " and the W----s, who seem in a dreadful fright about the present state of the country. I do not suppose they would like to see Heaton demolished. 

 In the evening we went to the Cartwrights'. It is only in the morning that one goes there to be tortured; in the evening it is to eat delicious dinners and hear delightful music. 

 Hummel, Moscheles, Neukomm, Horsley, and Sir George Smart, and how they did play! _à l'envi l'un de l'autre_. They sang, too, that lovely glee, "By Celia's Arbor. " The thrilling shudder which sweet music sends through one's whole frame is a species of acute pleasure, very nearly akin to pain. I wonder if by any chance there is a point at which the two are one and the same thing!

 _Tuesday, May 3d. _--I wrote the fourth scene of the fifth act of my play ["The Star of Seville"], and acted Lady Teazle for the first time; the house was very good, and my performance, as I expected, very bad; I was as flat as a lady amateur. I stayed after the play to hear Braham sing "Tom Tug, " which was a refreshment to my spirit after my own acting; after I came home, finished the fifth act of "The Star of Seville. " "Joy, joy for ever, my task is done!" I have not the least idea, though, that "heaven is won. "

 _Wednesday, May 4th. _--A delightful dinner at the B----s', but in the evening a regular crush; however, if one is to be squeezed to death (though 'tis an abolished form of torture), it may as well be in good company, among the fine world, and lots of pleasant people besides: Milman, Sotheby, Lockhart, Sir Augustus Calcott, Harness, Lady Dacre, Joanna Baillie, Lady Calcott, etc. 

 _Friday, May 6th. _--Real March weather: cold, piercing, damp, wretched, in spite of which I carried Shakespeare to walk with me in the square, and read all over again for the fiftieth time all the conjectures of everybody about him and his life. How little we know _about him_, how intimately we seem to know _him_! I had the square all to myself, and it was delicious: lilac, syringa, hawthorn, lime blossoms, and new-mown grass in the midst of London--and Shakespeare to think about. How grateful I felt for so much enjoyment! When I got home, corrected the proof-sheets of "Francis I. , " and thought it looked quite pretty in print. 

 Out so late dancing, Wednesday and Thursday nights, or rather _mornings_, that I had no time for journal-writing. What a life I do lead!

 _Friday, May 13th. _--At twelve o'clock to Bridgewater House for our first rehearsal of "Hernani. " Lady Francis wants us to go down to them at Oatlands. I should like of all things to see Weybridge once more; there's many a nook and path in those woods that I know better than their owners. The rehearsal lasted till three, and was a tolerably tidy specimen of amateur acting. Mr. Craven is really very good, and I shall like to act with him very much, and Mr. St. Aubin is very fair. Was introduced to Mrs. Bradshaw, whose looks rather disappointed me, because she "did contrive to make herself look so beautiful" on the stage, in Clari and Mary Copp and everything she did; I suppose her exquisite acting got into her face, somehow. Henry Greville is delightful, and I like him very much. When we left Bridgewater House we drove to my aunt Siddons's. Every time I see that magnificent ruin some fresh decay makes itself apparent in it, and one cannot but feel that it must soon totter to its fall. 

 What a price she has paid for her great celebrity!--weariness, vacuity, and utter deadness of spirit. The cup has been so highly flavored that life is absolutely without savor or sweetness to her now, nothing but tasteless insipidity. She has stood on a pinnacle till all things have come to look flat and dreary; mere shapeless, colorless, level monotony to her. Poor woman! what a fate to be condemned to, and yet how she has been envied, as well as admired!

 After dinner had only just time to go over my part and drive to the theater. My dear, delightful Portia! The house was good, but the audience dull, and I acted dully to suit them; but I hope my last dress, which was beautiful, consoled them. What with sham business and real business, I have had a busy day. 

 _Saturday, May 14th. _--Received a note from Theodosia [Lady Monson], and a whole cargo of delicious flowers from Cassiobury. She writes me that poor old Foster [an old cottager who lived in Lord Essex's park and whom my friend and I used to visit] is dying. The last I saw of that "Old Mortality" was sitting with him one bright sunset under his cottage porch, singing to him and dressing his hat with flowers, poor old man! yet after walking this earth upward of ninety-seven years the spirit as well as the flesh must be weary. His cottage will lose half its picturesqueness without his figure at the door; I wonder who will take care now of the roses he was so fond of, and the pretty little garden I used to forage in for lilies of the valley and strawberries! I shall never see him again, which makes me sad; I was often deeply struck by the quaint wisdom of that old human relic, and his image is associated in my thoughts with evening walks and summer sunsets and lovely flowers and lordly trees, and he will haunt Cassiobury always to me. I went with my mother to buy my dresses for "Hernani, " which will cost me a fortune and a half. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, Saturday. MY DEAREST H----, You see I have taken your advice, and, moreover, your paper, in order that, in spite of the dispersion of Parliament and the unattainability of franks, our correspondence may lose nothing in bulk, though it must in frequency. I think you are behaving very shabbily in not writing to me. Are you consulting your own pleasure, or my purse? I dedicate so much of my income to purposes which go under the head of "money thrown away;" don't you think the cost of our correspondence may be added to that without seriously troubling my conscience? What shall I say to you? "Reform" is on the tip of my pen, and great as are our private matters of anxiety, they scarcely outweigh in our minds the national interest that is engrossing almost every thinking person throughout the country. You know I am no politician, and my shallow causality and want of adequate information alike unfit me from understanding, much less discussing, public questions of great importance; but the present crisis has aroused me to intense interest and anxiety about the course events are taking. You can have no conception of the state of excitement prevailing in London at this moment. The scene in the House of Lords immediately preceding the dissolution the papers will have described to you, though if the spectators and participators in it may be believed, the tumult, the disorder, the Billingsgate uproar on that occasion would not be easy to describe. Lord Londonderry, it seems, thought that the days of _faust-recht_ had come back again, and I fancy more than he are of that opinion. 

 An illumination was immediately ordered by the Lord Mayor Donkin (or _key_, as "t'other side" call him); but, owing to the shortness of the notice he gave, it seems the show of light was not satisfactory to the tallow chandler part of the population, so another was appointed two nights after. My mother and the two Harrys went out in the open carriage to drive through the streets. I was depressed and disinclined for sight-seeing, and did not go, which I regretted afterward, as all strong exhibitions of public feeling are curious and interesting. They say the crowd was immense in all the principal thoroughfares, and of the lowest order. They testified their approbation of the various illuminated devices by shouts and hurrahs and applause; their displeasure against the various non-illuminators was more violently manifested by assailing their houses and breaking their windows. 

 Sundry were the glass sacrifices offered at the shrine of consistent Tory patriotism at the West End of the town. The mottoes and sentences on some of the illuminations were noteworthy for their democratic flavor: "The king and the people, " "The people of England, " "The glorious dissolution, " "The glorious reform, " "The people and the press, " "The people's triumph. " A man who seemed by his dress to belong to the very lowest class (a cross apparently between a scavenger and a rag-seller), with a branch of laurel waving in his tattered hat, stopped before this last sentence and exclaimed, "No--they don't yet; but they will. "

 I have been having quite a number of holidays at the theater lately. They have brought out a comedy in which I do not play, and are going to bring out a sort of historical melodrama on the life of Bonaparte, so that I think I shall have easy work, if that succeeds, for the rest of the season. I have just finished correcting the proof-sheets of "Francis I. , " and think it looks quite pretty in print, and have dedicated it to my mother, which I hope will please her. .. . 

 Dear H----, this is Saturday, the 14th, and 'tis now exactly three weeks since I began this letter. I know not what you will think of this, but, indeed, I am almost worn out with the ceaseless occupations of one sort and another that are crowded into every day, and the impossibility of commanding one hour's quiet out of the twenty-four. .. . 

 I am afraid we shall not come to Ireland this summer, after all, my dear H----. The Dublin manager and my father have not come to terms, and I hear Miss Inverarity (a popular singer) is engaged there, so that I conclude we shall not act there this season. This is so great a disappointment to me that I cannot say anything whatever about it. I have been acting Lady Teazle for Mr. Bartley and my father's benefit. It seems to have pleased the public very well. Without caring for it much myself, I find it light and amusing work, and much easier for me than Lady Townley, because it is a natural and that an entirely artificial character; the whole tone and manners, too, of Sheridan's rustic belle are much more within my scope than those of the woman of fashion of Sir John Vanbrugh's play. 

 On Friday we had our first rehearsal of "Hernani, " at Bridgewater House, and I was greatly surprised with some of the acting, which, allowing for a little want of technical experience, was, in Mr. Craven's instance, really very good. He is the grandson of old Lady Craven, the Margravine of Anspach, and enacts the hero of the piece, which I think he will do very well. The whole play, I think, will be fairly acted for an amateur performance. Lord and Lady Francis have pressed my mother very much to go down for a little while to Oatlands, the beautiful place close to Weybridge, which belonged to the Duke of York, and of which they have taken a lease. My mother has accepted their invitation, and looks forward with great pleasure to revisiting her dear Weybridge. I know a good deal more of that lovely neighborhood and all its wild haunts than the present proprietors of Oatlands. Lady Francis is a famous horsewoman, and told me by way of inducement to go there that we would gallop all over the country together, which sounded very pleasant. .. . 

 I called on my aunt Siddons the other day, and was shocked to find her looking wretchedly ill; she has not yet got rid of the erysipelas in her legs, and complained of intense headache. Poor woman! she suffers dreadfully. .. . Cecilia's life has been one enduring devotion and self-sacrifice. I cannot help wishing, for both their sakes, that the period of her mother's infirmity and physical decay may be shortened. I received a charming letter from Theodosia yesterday, accompanying a still more charming basketful of delicious flowers from dear Cassiobury--how much nicer they are than human beings! I don't believe I belong to man (or woman) kind, I like so many things--the whole material universe, for example--better than what one calls one's fellow-creatures. She told me that old Foster (you remember the old cottager in Cassiobury Park) was dying. The news contrasted sadly with the sweet, fresh, living blossoms that it came with. The last time that I saw that old man I sat with him under his porch on a bright sunny evening, talking, laughing, winding wreaths round his hat, and singing to him, and that is the last I shall ever see of him. He was a remarkable old man, and made a strong impression on my fancy in the course of our short acquaintance. There was a strong and vivid _remnant_ of mind in him surviving the contest with ninety and odd years of existence; his manner was quaint and rustic without a tinge of vulgarity; he is fastened to my memory by a certain wreath of flowers and sunset light upon the brook that ran in front of his cottage, and the smell of some sweet roses that grew over it, and I shall never forget him. 

 I went to the opera the other night and saw Pasta's "Medea" for the first time. I shall not trouble you with any ecstasies, because, luckily for you, my admiration for her is quite indescribable; but I have seen grace and majesty as perfect as I can conceive, and so saying I close my account of my impressions. I fancied I was slightly disappointed in Taglioni, whose dancing followed Pasta's singing, but I suppose the magnificent tragical performance I had just witnessed had numbed as it were my power of appreciation of her grace and elegance, and yet she seemed to me like a _dancing flower_; so you see I must have like her very much. 

 God bless you, dear; pray write to me very soon. I want some consolation for not seeing you, nor the dear girls, nor the sea. I could think of that fresh, sparkling, fresh looking, glassy sea till I cried for disappointment. 

 Ever yours, F. A. K. 

The Miss Inverarity mentioned in this letter was a young Scotch singerof very remarkable talent and promise, who came out at Covent Gardenjust at this time. She was one of the tallest women I ever saw, and hada fine soprano voice as high as herself, and sang English music well. She was a very great favorite during the short time that I remember heron the stage. 

 MY DEAREST H----, My mother has just requested me to talk with A---- about her approaching first communion, and it troubles me because I fear I cannot do so satisfactorily to her (I mean my mother) and myself. I think my feeling about the sacrament, or rather the preparation necessary for receiving it, is different from hers. It is not so much to me an awful as a merciful institution. One goes to the Lord's Table because one is weak and wicked and wretched, not because one is, or even has striven to be, otherwise. A holy reverence for the holy rite is indispensable, but not, I think, such a feeling as would chill us with fear, or cast us down in despondency. The excess of our poverty and humility is our best claim to it, and therefore, though the previous "preparations, " as it is rather technically called, may be otherwise beneficial, it does not seem to me necessary, much less indispensable. Our Lord did not say, "Cleanse yourselves, amend yourselves, strip yourselves of your own burdens and come to me;" but, "Come to me and I will cleanse you, I will cure you, I will help you and give you rest. " It is remembering this that I venture to take the sacrament, but I know other people, and I believe my mother among them, think a much more specific preparation necessary, and I am afraid, therefore, that I might not altogether meet my mother's views in what I might say to A---- upon the subject. I wish you would tell me what your opinion and feeling is about this. 

 Your affectionate F. A. K. 

 _Sunday, May 15th. _--Walked home from church with Mrs. Montagu and Emily and Mrs. Procter, discussing among various things the necessity for "preparation" before taking the sacrament. I suppose the publican in the parable had not prepared his prayer, and I suppose he would have been a worthy communicant. 

 They came in and sat a long time with my mother talking about Sir Thomas Lawrence, of whom she spoke as a perfect riddle. I think he was a dangerous person, because his experience and genius made him delightfully attractive, and the dexterity of his flattery amounted in itself to a fine art. The talk then fell upon the possibility of friendship existing between men and women without sooner or later degenerating, on one part or the other, into love. The French rhymster sings--

 "Trop tot, hélas, l'amour s'enflamme, Et je sens qu'il est mal aisé; Que l'ami d'une belle dame, Ne soit un amant déguisé. "

 My father came in while the ladies were still here, and Mrs. Procter behaved admirably well about her husband's play. .. . 

 I do think it is too bad of the management to have made use of my name in rejecting that piece, when, Heaven knows, so far from _rejecting_, I never even _object_ to anything I am bidden to do; that is, never visibly or audibly. .. . 

 Mrs. P---- called, and the talk became political and lugubriously desponding, and I suddenly found myself inspired with a contradictory vein of hopefulness, and became vehement in its defense. In spite of all the disastrous forebodings I constantly have, I cannot but trust that the spread of enlightenment and general progress of intelligence in the people of this country--the good judgment of those who have power and the moderation of those who desire improvement--will effect a change without a _crash_ and achieve reform without revolution. 

 _Wednesday, May 18th. _--My mother and I started at two o'clock for Oatlands. The day was very enjoyable, for the dust and mitigated east wind were in our backs; the carriage was open, and the sun was almost too powerful, though the earth has not yet lost its first spring freshness, nor the trees, though full fledged, their early vivid green. The turf has not withered with the heat, and the hawthorn lay thick and fragrant on every hedge, like snow that the winter had forgotten to melt, and the sky above was bright and clear, and I was very happy. I had taken "The Abbot" with me, which I had never read; but my mother did not sleep, so we chatted instead of my reading. She recalled all our former times at Weybridge. It was a great pleasure to retrace this well-known road, and again to see dear old Walton Bridge and the bright, broad Thames, with the noble chestnut trees on its banks, the smooth, smiling fields stretching beyond it, and the swans riding in such happy majesty on its bosom. I really think I do deserve to live in the country, it is so _delightsome_ to me. We reached Oatlands an hour before dinner-time and found the party just returned from riding. We sauntered through part of the grounds to the cemetery of the Duchess of York's dogs. .. . We had some music in the evening. Lady Francis sang and I sang, and was frightened to death, as I always am when asked to do so. .. . 

 _Thursday, 19th. _--A bright sunny morning, the trees all bowing and bending, and the water chafing and crisping under a fresh, strong, but not cold, wind. I lost my way in the park and walked toward Walton, thinking I was going to Weybridge, but, discovering my mistake, turned about, and crossing the whole park came out upon the common and our old familiar cricketing ground. I flew along the dear old paths to our little cottage, but "Desolate was the dwelling of Morna"--the house closed, the vine torn down, the grass knee-deep, the shrubs all trailing their branches and blossoms in disorderly luxuriance on the earth, the wire fence broken down between the garden and the wood, the gate gone; the lawn was sown with wheat, and the little pine wood one tangled maze, without path, entrance, or issue. I ran up the mound to where John used to stand challenging the echo with his bugle. .. . 

 O tempo passato!--the absent may return and the distant be brought near, the dead be raised and in another world rejoin us, but a day that is gone is gone, and all eternity can give us back no single minute of the past! I gathered a rose and some honeysuckle from the poor disheveled shrubs for my mother, and ran back to Oatlands to breakfast. After breakfast we went over "Hernani, " with Mrs. Sullivan for prompter, and when that was over everybody went out walking; but I was too tired with my morning's tramp, and sat under a tree on the lawn reading a very good little book on the sacrament, which went over the ground of my late discussion with Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Procter on the subject of "preparation" for taking it. 

 After lunch there was a general preparation for riding, and just as we were all mounted it began to rain, and persevered till, in despair, Mr. And Mrs. Sullivan rode off without our promised escort. Mr. C---- arrived just as we had disequipped, and the gentlemen all dispersed. Lady Francis and I sang together for some time, and suddenly the clouds withholding their tears, she and I, in one of those instants of rapid determination which sometimes make or mar a fate, tore on our habits again, jumped on our horses, and galloped off together over the park. We had an enchanting, gray, soft afternoon, with now and then a rain-drop and sigh of wind, like the last sob of a fit of crying. The earth smelt deliriously fresh, and shone one glittering, sparkling, vivid green. Our ride was delightful, and we galloped back just in time to dress for dinner. 

 In the evening, sauntering on the lawn and pleasant, bright talk indoors. Lord John (the present venerable Earl Russell) would be quite charming if he wasn't so afraid of the rain. I do not think he is made of sugar, but, politically, perhaps he is the salt of the earth; he certainly succeeds in keeping himself _dry_. 

 _Friday, Oatlands. _--Walked out before breakfast; the night's rain had refreshed the earth and revived every growing thing, the east wind had blown itself away, and a warm, delicious western breeze came fluttering fitfully over the new-mown lawn. After breakfast we rehearsed Mr. Craven's and Captain Shelley's and my scenes in "Hernani. " I think they will do very well if they do not shy at the moment of action, or rather acting. We had some music, and then the gentlemen went out shooting. I took "The Abbot" and established myself on a hay-cock, leaving Lady Francis to her own indoor devices. By and by the whole party came out, and we sat on the lawn laughing and talking till the gentlemen's carriage was announced, and our rival heroes took their departure for town, cheek by jowl, in a pretty equipage of Mr. Craven's, in the most amicable mood imaginable. As soon as they were off we mounted and rode out, past our old cottage, down by Brooklands, through the second wood, and by the Fairies' Oak. O Lord King, Lord King (we were riding through the property of the Earl of Lovelace, then Lord King), if I was one of those bishops whom you do not love, I would curse, excommunicate, and anathematize you for cutting down all those splendid trees and laying bare those deep, dark, leafy nooks, the haunts of a thousand "Midsummer Night's Dreams, " to the common air and the staring sun. The sight of the dear old familiar paths brought the tears to my eyes, for, stripped and thinned of their trees and robbed of their beauty, my memory restored all their former loveliness. On we went down to Byefleet to the mill, to Langton's through the sweet, turfy meadows, by hawthorn hedges musical as sweet, over the picturesque little bridge and along that deep, dark, sleepy water flowing so silently in its sullen smoothness. On we went a long way over a wide common, where the coarse-grained peaty earth and golden glory of the flowering gorse reminded me of Suffolk's motto--

 "Cloth of gold, do not despise That thou art mix'd with cloth of frieze; Cloth of frieze, be not too bold That thou art mix'd with cloth of gold. "

 Back by St. George's Hill, snatching many a leaf and blossom as I rode to carry back to A---- mementoes of our dear Weybridge days, and so home by half-past seven, just time to dress for dinner. As we rode along, Lord Francis and I discussed poets and poetry _in general_--more particularly Byron, Keats, and Shelley; it was a very pretty and proper discourse for such a ride. 

 In the evening heard all manner of delicious ghost stories; afterward made music, Lady Francis and I trying all sorts of duets, my mother keeping up a "humming" third and Lord Francis listening and applauding with equal zeal and discretion. .. . 

 _Saturday, May 21st. _--My brother John come home from Spain. .. . 

 _Sunday, 22d. _--What a very odd process dreaming is! I _dreamt_ in the night that John had come home, and flung myself out of bed in my sleep to run downstairs to him, which naturally woke me; and then I remembered that he was come home and that I had seen and welcomed him, which it seems to me I might as well have dreamed too while I was about it, and saved myself the jump out of bed. I hate dreaming; it's like being mad--having one's brain work without the control of one's will. 

 Dear A---- took the sacrament for the first time at the Swiss church. On my return from church in the afternoon found Sir Ralph and Lady Hamilton and Don Telesforo de Trueba. I like that young Spaniard; he's a clever man. It was such fun his telling me all the story of the Star of Seville, little imagining I had just perpetrated a five-act tragedy on that identical subject. 

 _Tuesday, May 24th. _--Drove down to Clint's studio to see Cecilia's (Siddons's) portrait. It's a pretty picture of a "fine piece of a woman, " as the Italians say, but it has none of the very decided character of her face. .. . 

 _Wednesday, May 25th. _--After dinner went over my part, dressed and set off for Bridgewater House for our dressed rehearsal of "Hernani. " Found the stage in a state of _unfinish_, the house topsy-turvy, and every body to the right and left. Sat for an hour in the drawing-room while our very specially small and select audience arrived. Then heard Lady Francis, Henry Greville, Mrs. Bradshaw, and Mr. Mitford try their glee--one of Moore's melodies arranged for four voices--which they sang at the top of their lungs in order to hear themselves, while the carpenters and joiners hammered might and main at the other end of the gallery finishing the theater. 

 About nine they were getting under way, and we presently began the rehearsal. The dresses were all admirable; they (not the clothes, but the clothes pegs) were all horribly frightened. I was a little nervous and rather sad, and I felt strange among all those foolish lads, taking such immense delight in that which gives me so very little, dressing themselves up and acting. To be sure, "nothing pleaseth but rare accidents. " Mr. M----, our prompter, thought fit by way of prompting to keep up a rumbling bass accompaniment to our speaking by reading every word of the play aloud, as the singers are prompted at the opera house, which did not tend much to our assistance. Everything went very smoothly till an unlucky young "mountaineer" rushed on the stage and terrified me and Hernani half to death by _in_articulating some horrible intelligence of the utmost importance to us, which his fright rendered quite incomprehensible. He stood with his arms wildly spread abroad, stuttering, sputtering, madly ejaculating and gesticulating, but not one articulate word could he get out. I thought I should have exploded with laughter, but as the woman said who saw the murder, "I knew I mustn't (faint), and I didn't. " With this trifling exception it all went off very well. Either I was fagged with my morning's ride or the constitution of the gallery is bad for the voice; I never felt so exhausted with the mere effort of speaking, and thought I should have died prematurely and in earnest in the last scene, I was so tired. When it was over we adjourned with Lord and Lady Francis and the whole _dramatis personæ_ to Mrs. W----'s magnificent house and splendid supper. .. . 

 While we were at table everybody suddenly stood up, my mother and myself reverently with the rest, when the whole company drank my health, and I collapsed down into my chair as red and as _limp_ as a skein of scarlet wool, and my mother with some confusion expressed my obligation and her own surprise at the compliment. I talked a good deal to Captain Shelley, who is a nice lad, and, considering his beauty, and the admiration bestowed on him by all the fine ladies in London, remarkably unaffected. We are asked down to Oaklands again, and I hope my work at the theater will allow of my going. What a shocking mess those young gentlemen actors did make of their greenroom this evening, to be sure! rouge, swords, wine, mustaches, soda water, and cloaks strewed in every direction. I wonder what they would say to the drawing-room decorum of our Covent Garden greenroom. 

 _Thursday, May 26th. _--Tried on dresses with Mrs. Phillips, and talked all the while about the characteristics of Shakespeare's women with Mrs. Jameson, who had come to see me. I pity her from the bottom of my heart; she has a heavy burden to carry, poor woman. .. . Went in the evening to rather a dull dinner, after which, however, I had the pleasure of hearing Mrs. Frere sing, which she did very charmingly, and so as quite to justify her great society musical reputation. After our dinner at the F----s' we went to Mrs. W----'s evening party, where I sat alone, heard somebody sing a song, was introduced to a man, spoke incoherently to several people, got up, was much jostled in a crowd of human beings, and came home--and that's society. We are asked to a great supper at Chesterfield House, after a second representation which is to be given of "Hernani. " My mother thinks it is too much exertion and dissipation for me, and as it is not a ball I do not care to go. 

 _Friday, May 27th. _--At eight o'clock drove with my mother to Bridgewater House. We went into the library, where there was nobody, and Lady Francis, Henry Greville, and Lady Charlotte came and sat with us. I was literally crying with fright. Lady Francis took me to my dressing-room, my mother rouged me, blessed me, and went off to join the audience assembled in the great gallery. I went over my part once and my room a hundred times in every direction. At nine they began; the audience very wisely were totally in the dark, which threw out the brilliantly illuminated stage to great advantage, and considering that they were the finest folk in England they behaved remarkably well--listened quietly and attentively, and applauded like Covent Garden galleries. It all went well except poor Mr. Craven's first speech, in which he got out. I don't know whether Lady L---- was among the spectators, and gave him _des éblouissements_. It all went off admirably, however, and oh, how glad I was when it was over!

 _Saturday, May 28th. _--I was awakened by a basket of flowers from Cassiobury, and a letter from Theodosia. Old Foster is dead. I wish he might be buried near the cottage. I should like to know where to think of his resting-place, poor old man!. .. 

 In the evening Mrs. Jameson, the Fitzhughs, R---- P----, and a Mr. K----, a friend of John's, and sundry and several came. .. . We acted charades, and they all went away in high good humor. 

 _Sunday, May 29th. _--An "eternal, cursed, cold, and heavy rain, " as Dante sings. My mother, A----, and I went to the Swiss church; the service is shorter and more unceremonious than I like; that sitting to sing God's praise, and standing to pray to Him, is displeasing to all my instincts of devotion. 

 After church my mother was reading Milton's treatise on Christian doctrine, and read portions of it aloud to me. I always feel afraid of theological or controversial writings, and yet the faith that shrinks from being touched lest it should totter is certainly not on the right foundation. I suppose we ought, on the contrary, to examine thoroughly the reason of the faith that is in us. Declining reading upon religious subjects may be prudent, but it may be indolence, cowardice, or lack of due interest in the matter. I think I must read that treatise of Milton's. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, May 29th, 1831. MY DEAREST H----, I have but little time for letter-writing, getting daily "deeper and deeper still" in the incessant occupations of one sort and another that crowd upon and almost overwhelm me; and now my care is not so much whether I shall have time to write you a long letter, as how I shall get leisure to write to you at all. You complain that, in spite of the present interest I profess in public affairs, I have given you no details of my opinion about them--my hopes or fears of the result of the Reform movement. I have other things that I care more to write to you about than politics, and am chary of my space, because, though I can cross my letter, I can only have one sheet of paper. "The Bill, " modified as it now is, has my best prayers and wishes, for to say that the removal of certain abuses will not give the people bread which they expect is nothing against it; but, at the same time that I sincerely hope this measure will be carried, I cannot conceive what Government will do _next_, for though trade is at this moment prosperous, great poverty and discontent exist among large classes of the people, and as soon as these needy folk find out that Reform is really not immediate bread _and_ cheese _and_ beer, they will seek something else which they may imagine will be those desired items of existence, and that is what it may be difficult to give them. In the mean time party spirit here has reached a tremendous pitch; old friendships are broken up and old intimacies cease; former cordial acquaintances refuse to meet each other, houses are divided, and the dearest relations disturbed, if not destroyed. Society is become a sort of battle-field, for every man (and woman too) is nothing if not political. In fact, there really appears to be no middle or moderating party, which I think strange and to be deplored. It seems as if it were a mere struggle between the nobility and the mobility, and the middle-class--that vast body of good sense, education, and wealth, and efficient to hold the beam even between the scales--throws itself man by man into one or the other of them, and so only swells the adverse parties on each side. 

 Parliament meets again in a few days, and then comes the tug of war. Lord John Russell was at Oatlands while we were there, and as the Francis Egertons and their guests were all anti-Reformers, they led him rather a hard life. He bore all their attacks with great good humor, however, and with the well-satisfied smile of a man who thinks himself on the right, and knows himself on the safe side, and wisely forbore to reply to their sallies. Our visit there was delightful. 

 As the distance is but one and twenty miles, my mother and I posted down in the open carriage. The only guests we found on our arrival were Mr. And Mrs. Sullivan (she is a daughter of Lady Dacre's, and a charming person), Lord John Russell, and two of our _corps dramatique_, Mr. Craven and Captain Shelley, son of Sir John Shelley, a handsome, good-humored, pleasant young gentleman, who acts Charles V. In "Hernani. " I got up very early the first morning I was there and went down before breakfast to our little old cottage. In the lane leading to it I met a poor woman who lived near us, and whom we used to employ. I spoke to her, but she did not know me again. I wonder if these four years can have changed me so much? The tiny house had not been inhabited since we lived there. .. . My aunt Siddons is better, and Cecy very well. 

 Your affectionate F. A. K. 

[The beautiful domain of Oatlands was only rented at this time by LordFrancis Egerton, who delighted so much in it that he made overtures forthe purchase of it. The house was by no means a good one, though it hadbeen the abode of royalty; but the park was charming, and the wholeneighborhood, especially the wooded ranges of St. George's Hill, extremely wild and picturesque. .. . Lord Francis Egerton bought St. George's Hill, at the foot of which he built Hatchford, Lady Ellesmere'scharming dower house and residence after his death, and the house ofOatlands became a country inn, very pleasant to those who had neverknown it as the house of former friends, and therefore did not meetghosts in all its rooms and garden walks; and the park was cut up intosmall villa residences and rascally inclined citizen's boxes. Hatchford, the widowed home of Lady Ellesmere and burial-place of her brother, towhose memory she erected there an elaborate mausoleum, has passed out ofthe family possessions and become the property of strangers. One son ofthe house lives on St. George's Hill, and has his home where I have sooften drawn rein while riding with his father and mother to look overthe wild, wooded slopes to the smiling landscape stretching in sunnybeauty far below us. ]

 _Monday, May 30th. _ . .. The Francis Egertons called, and sat a long time discussing "Hernani. " . .. I must record such a good pun of his, which he only, alas, _dreamt_. He dreamt Lord W---- came up to him, covered with gold chains and ornaments of all sorts, and that he had called him the "Chain Pier. " . .. In the evening to Bridgewater House. As soon as we arrived, I went to my own private room, and looked over my part. We began at nine. Our audience was larger than the last time. The play went off extremely well; we were all improved. I was very anxious to play well, for the Archbishop of York was in the front row, and he (poor gentleman!) had never had the happiness of seeing me, the play-house being forbidden ground to him. [This seems rather inconsistent, as all the lesser clergy at this time frequented the theater without fear or reproach. Dr. Hughes, the Very Reverend Prebend of St. Paul's, Milman, Harness, among our own personal friends, were there constantly, not to speak of my behind-the-scenes acquaintance, the Rev. A. F. ] I should like to seduce an old Archbishop into a liking for the wickedness of my mystery, so I did my very best to edify him, according to my kind and capacity. .. . At the end of the play, as I lay dead on the stage, the king (Captain Shelley) was cutting three great capers, like Bayard on his field of battle, for joy his work was done, when his pretty dancing shoes attracted, in spite of my decease, my attention, and I asked, with rapidly reviving interest in existence, what they meant, on which I was informed that the supper at Mrs. Cunliffe's was indeed a ball. I jumped up from the dead, hurried off my stage robes, and hurried on my private apparel, and followed my mother into the saloon. Here I had delightful talk (though I believe I was dancing on my mind's feet all the while) with Lord John Russell, Miss Berry, Lady Charlotte Lindsay, and that charming person, James Wortley, and I got a glimpse of Lord O----'s lovely face, who is a beautiful creature. After being duly stared at by the crowds of my exalted fellow-beings who filled the room, Lady Francis said she would send them away, and we adjourned to Mrs. Cunliffe's, and had a very fine ball; that is to say, we had neither room to dance, nor space to sit, nor power to move. 

 "Oh, pleasure is a very pleasant thing, " as Byron sings and H---- for ever says, and certainly a good ball is a pleasant thing, and in spite of the above drawbacks I was enchanted with everything. Such shoals of partners! such nice people! such perfect music! such a delightful floor! Danced till the day had one eye wide open, and then home to bed--what a good thing it is to have one under the circumstances! I hope I have not been very tipsy to-night, but it is difficult with so many stimulants to keep _quite_ sober. Broad daylight! Six o'clock!

 _Tuesday, May 21st. _--My feet ache so with dancing that I can hardly stand. Did not some traditional princesses of German fairyland dance their shoes and stockings to pieces?

 Going into the drawing-room I found my darling Dr. Combe there, and if I had not been so tired I must have made a jump at his neck, I was so very glad to see him. He brought me a letter from Mr. Combe, whom I love only one step lower. He sat with us but a short time, and leaves town to-morrow, which I am sorry for, first, because I should like to have seen him again so very much, and next, because I should have been glad that my mother became better acquainted with the mental charms and seductions of the man whose outward appearance seems to have allayed some of her apprehensions for the safety of my heart and those of my Edinburgh cousins. Mrs. W---- called soon after. She is intent upon my acting Mlle. Mar's part in "Henri Trois. " I can do nothing with any French part in Covent Garden. If they can find a theater of half that size to get it up in, well and good; but seen from a distance, which defies discrimination of objects, a thistle is as good as a rose, and in that enormous frame refinement is mere platitude, and finish of detail an unnecessary minutia. 

 We went to the theater to see a new piece, I believe by Mrs. Norton. The pit and galleries were very indifferent; the dress circle and private boxes full of fine folk. Lady St. Maur (Georgiana Sheridan, Mrs. Norton's youngest sister, afterward Duchess of Somerset and Queen of Beauty) and her husband, with Corinne and Mr. Norton, in a box opposite ours. What a terrible piece! what atrocious situations and ferocious circumstances! tinkering, starving, hanging--like a chapter out of the Newgate Calendar. But, after all, she's in the right; she has given the public what they desire, given them what they like. Of course it made one cry horribly; but then of course one cries when one hears of people reduced by sheer craving to eat nettles and cabbage-stalks. Destitution, absolute hunger, cold and nakedness, are no more subjects for artistic representation than sickness, disease, and the _real_ details of idiotcy, madness, and death. All art should be an idealized; elevated representation (not imitation) of nature; and when beggary and low vice are made the themes of the dramatist, as in this piece, or of the poet, as in the works of Crabbe, they seem to me to be clothing their inspirations in wood or lead, or some base material, instead of gold or ivory. The clay of the modeler is more _real_, but the marble of the sculptor is the clay glorified. In Crabbe's writings one has at least the comfort and consolation of a high moral sense, charming versification, and an occasional tender, exquisite expression of the beauties of nature. Our play to-night could not boast of these _alleviations_. 

 _Wednesday, June 1st. _--At the riding school saw Miss C----, who wants me to get the play changed at Covent Garden _for this evening_--"rien que cela!" What a fine thing it is to be "one of those people!" They fancy that anybody's business of any sort can be postponed to the first whim that enters their head. My mother came with Dr. Combe in the carriage to fetch me from the riding school. At home found a note from Lady Francis and the epilogue Lord Francis has written to "Hernani, " which I am certainly bound to like, for it is highly complimentary to me. 

 I went to the real theater in the evening to do real work. The house was good, but I played like a wretch--ranted, roared, and acted altogether infamously. The fact was I was tired to death, and of course violence always has to supply the place of strength. Unluckily all the F----s were there, and I felt sorry for them. To be sure, they had never seen "The Hunchback" before, and I should think would heartily desire never to see it again; my performance was shameful. 

 _Thursday, June 2d. _--Mr. Hayter called. Lord Francis has spoken to him about the picture he wishes him to do of me, and he came to take the position, and I gave him his choice of three or four. I dare say he will make a very pretty picture. As for my likeness, that _I_ am not hopeful about. I have gone through the operation in vain so very often. Murray has sent me some beautiful and delightful books. .. . A third representation of "Hernani" is called for, it seems, and, as far as I am concerned, they are welcome to it; but Lady Francis came to say that the Duchess of Gloucester wants it to be acted on the 23d, and I am afraid that will not do for my theater arrangements; they must try and have it earlier, if possible. Lady Francis has half bribed me with a ball. They want us to go down to Oatlands for Saturday and Sunday, and I hope we may be able to manage it. .. . After Lady F---- was gone, my mother had a visit from Mrs. B----; her manner is bad, her matter is good. She is clever and excellent, and I have a great respect for her. She interested me immensely by her account of Mrs. Fry's visits to Newgate. What a blessed, happy woman to do so much good; to be the means of comfort and consolation, perhaps of salvation, to such desolate souls! How I did honor and love what I heard of her. Mrs. B---- said Mrs. Fry would be delighted to take me with her some day when she went to the prison. My mother laughingly said she was afraid Mrs. Fry would convert me--surely not to Quakerism. I do not think I need a new faith, but power to act up to the one I profess. I need no Quaker saint to tell me I do not do that. 

[I had the great honor of accompanying Mrs. Fry in one of her visits toNewgate, but from various causes received rather a painful impressioninstead of the very different one I had anticipated. Her divine labor oflove had become _famous_, and fine ladies of fashion pressed eagerly toaccompany her, or be present at the Newgate exhortations. Theunfortunate women she addressed were ranged opposite their lessexcusable sister sinners of the better class, and I hardly dared to lookat them, so entirely did I feel out of my place by the side of Mrs. Fry, and so sick for their degraded attitude and position. If I had beenalone with them and their noble teacher I would assuredly have gone andsat down among them. On the day I was there a poor creature sat in themidst of the congregation attired differently from all the others, whowas pointed out to me as being under sentence of transportation forwhatever crime she committed. Altogether I felt broken-hearted for_them_ and ashamed for _us_. ]

 My mother has had a letter from my father (he was acting in the provinces), who says he has met and shaken hands with Mr. Harris (his co-proprietor of Covent Garden, and antagonist in our ruinous lawsuit about it). I wonder what benefit is to be expected from that operation with--such a person. 

 _Sunday, June 5th. _ . .. On my return from afternoon service found Mr. Walpole with my mother; they amused me extremely by a conversation in which they ran over, as far as their memories would stretch (near sixty years), the various fashions and absurd modes of dress which have prevailed during that period. Toupees, fêtes, toques, bouffantes, hoops, bell hoops, sacques, polonaises, levites, and all the paraphernalia of horsehair, powder, pomatum, and pins, in the days when court beauties had their heads dressed over-night for the next day's drawing-room, and sat up in their chairs for fear of destroying the edifice by lying down. No wonder they were obliged to rouge themselves--the days when once in a fortnight was considered often enough for ridding the hair of its horrible paste of flour and grease. We are certainly cleaner than our grandmothers, and much more comfortable, though it is not so long since my own head was dressed _à la giraffe_, in three bows over pins half a foot high, so that I could not sit upright in the carriage without knocking against the top of it. My mother's and Mr. Walpole's recollections and descriptions were like seeing a set of historical caricatures pass before one. 

 _Monday, June 6th. _--The house was very full at the theater this evening, and Miss C---- sent me round a delicious fresh bouquet. I acted well, I think; the play was "Romeo and Juliet. " It is so very pleasant to return to Shakespeare, after _reciting_ Bianca and Isabella, etc. I reveled in the glorious poetry and the bright, throbbing _reality_ of that Italian girl's existence; and yet Juliet is nothing like as nice as Portia--_nobody_ is as nice as Portia. But the oftener I act Juliet the oftener I think it ought never to be acted at all, and the more absurd it seems to me to try to act it. After the play my mother sent a note with the carriage to say she would not go to the ball, so I dressed myself and drove off with my father from the theater to the Countess de S----'s. At half-past eleven the ball had not begun. Mrs. Norton was there in splendid beauty; at about half-past twelve the dancing began, and it was what is called a very fine ball. While I was dancing with Mr. C----, I saw my father talking to a handsome and very magnificent lady, who my partner told me was the Duchess of B----; after our quadrille, when I rejoined my father, he said to me, "Fanny, let me present you to ----" here he mumbled something perfectly inaudible, and I made a courtesy, and the lady smiled sweetly and said some civil things and went away. "Whose name did you mention, " said I to my father, with some wickedness, "just now when you introduced me to that lady?" "Nobody's, my dear, nobody's; I haven't the remotest idea who she is. " "The Duchess of B----, " said I, glibly, strong in the knowledge I had just acquired from my partner. "Bless my soul!" cried the poor man, with a face of the most ludicrous dismay, "so it was! I had quite forgotten her, though she was good enough to remember me, and here I have been talking cross-questions and crooked answers to her for the last half-hour!"

 Was ever any thing so terrible! I feared my poor father would go home and remain awake all night, sobbing softly to himself, like the eldest of the nine Miss Simmonses in the ridiculous novel, because in her nervous flurry at a great dinner party she had refused instead of accepting a gentleman's offer to drink wine with her. Lady G---- then came up, whom he did remember, and who was "truly gracious;" and I left him consoled, and, I hope, having forgotten his dreadful duchess again. All the world, as the saying is, was at this ball, and it certainly was a very fine assembly. We danced in a splendid room hung with tapestry--a magnificent apartment, though it seemed to me incongruous for the purpose; dim burning lights and flitting ghosts and gusts of wind and distant footfalls and sepulchral voices being the proper _furniture_ of the "tapestried chamber, " and not wax candles, to the tune of sunlight and bright eyes and dancing feet and rustling silks and gauzes and laughing voices, and all the shine and shimmer and flaunting flutter of a modern ball. .. . 

 At half-past two, though the carriage had been ordered at two, my father told me he would not "spoil sport, " and so angelically stayed till past four. He is the best of fathers, the most affectionate of parents, the most benevolent of men! There is a great difference between being chaperoned by one's father instead of one's mother: the latter, poor dear! never flirts, gets very sleepy and tired, and wants to go home before she comes; the former flirts and talks with all the pretty, pleasant women he meets, and does not care till what hour in the morning--a frame of mind favorable to much dancing for the _youngers_. After all, I had to come away in the middle of a delightful mazurka. 

 _Tuesday, June 7th. _-- . .. We had a very pleasant dinner at Mr. Harness's. Moore was there, but Paganini was the chief subject discussed, and we harped upon the one miraculous string he fiddles on without pauses. .. . After dinner I read one of Miss Mitford's hawthorny sketches out of "Our Village, " which was lying on the table; they always carry one into fresh air and green fields, for which I am grateful to them. 

 _Wednesday, June 8th. _--While I was writing to H---- my mother came in and told me that Mrs. Siddons was dead. I was not surprised; she has been ill, and gradually failing for so long. .. . I could not be much grieved for myself, for of course I had had but little intercourse with her, though she was always very kind to me when I saw her. .. . She died at eight o'clock this morning--peaceably, and without suffering, and in full consciousness. .. . I wonder if she is gone where Milton and Shakespeare are, to whose worship she was priestess all her life--whose thoughts were her familiar thoughts, whose words were her familiar words. I wonder how much more she is allowed to know of all things now than she did while she was here. As I looked up into the bright sky to-day, while my father and mother were sadly recalling the splendor of her day of beauty and great public power, I thought of the unlimited glory she perhaps now beheld, of the greater holiness and happiness I trust she now enjoys, and said in my heart, "It must be well to be as she is. " I had never thought it must be well to be as she _was_. .. . 

 As soon as the news came my father went off to see what he could do for Cecilia, poor thing, and to bring her here, if she can be persuaded to leave Baker Street. He was not much shocked, though naturally deeply grieved by the event; my aunt has now been ill so long that any day might have brought the termination of the protracted process of her death. When he returned he said Cecilia was composed and quiet, but would not leave the house at present. I have written to Lady Francis to decline going to Oatlands, which we were to have done this week. 

 At dinner my father told me some of the arrangements he has made for the summer. We are to act at Bristol, Bath, Exeter, Plymouth, and Southampton. He then said, "Suppose we take steamer thence to Marseilles, and so on to Naples?" My heart jumped into my mouth at the thought; but how should I ever come back again?. .. Everything here is _so ugly_, even without comparison with that which is beautiful elsewhere; from Italy how should one come back to live in London?

 _Thursday, June 9th. _-- . .. And so I am to act Lady Macbeth! I feel as if I were standing up by the great pyramid of Egypt to see how tall I am! However, it must be done; perhaps I may even do it less ill than Constance--the greater intensity of the character may perhaps render majesty less _indispensable_. Power (if one had enough of it) might atone for insufficient dignity. Lady Macbeth made herself a queen by dint of wickedness; Constance was royal born--a radical difference, which ought to be in my favor. But dear, dear, dear, what a frightful undertaking for a poor girl, let her be never so wicked!

 And _the_ Lady Macbeth will never be seen again! I wish just now that in honor of my aunt the play might be forbidden to be performed for the next ten years. My father and myself have a holiday at the theater--but only for the week--because of Mrs. Siddons's death, and we are to go down to Oatlands--nobody being there but ourselves, that is my brother and I--for the rest and quiet and fresh air of these few days. 

 _Friday, June 10th. _--Before three the carriage was announced, and we started for the country. We dropped Henry at Lord Waldegrave's and had a very pleasant drive, though the day was as various in its moods as if we were in April instead of June. We arrived at about six, and found Mr. C---- had been made an exception to the "positively nobody" who was to meet us. .. . 

 _Saturday, June 11th. _--Read the French piece called "Une Faute, " which half killed me with crying. It is exceedingly clever, but altogether _too_ true, in my opinion, for real art. It is not dramatic truth, but absolute imitation of life, and instead of the mitigated emotion which a poetical representation of tragic events excites, it produces a sense of positive suffering too acutely painful for an artistic result; it is a perfectly prosaical reproduction of the familiar vice and its inseparable misery of modern everyday life; it wants elevation and imagination--aërial perspective; it is close upon one, and must be agonizing to see well acted. My studies were certainly not of the most cheerful order, for after finishing this morbid anatomy of human hearts I read an article in the _Phrenological Journal_ on Bouilland's "Anatomy of the Brain, " which made me feel as if my brain was stuck full of pins and needles. 

 _Perhaps_ a certain amount of experience must be attained through experiment, and if the wits of the human species are to be better understood, governed, and preserved by the results obtained by cutting and hacking the brains of living animals, _perhaps_ some of our more immediate mercy is to be sacrificed to our humanity in the lump; but if this is not the forbidden doing evil that good may come of it, I do not know what is. One of the effects of Mr. Bouilland's excruciating experiments on his victims was to turn me already sick and give me an agonizing pain in _my_ brain. I hope their beneficial consequences did not end there. 

 I did all this reading before breakfast, and when I left my room it was still too early for any one to be up, so I set off for a run in the park. The morning was lovely, vivid, and bright, with soft shadows flitting across the sky and chasing one another over the sward, while a delicious fresh wind rustled the trees and rippled the grass; and unable to resist the temptation, bonnetless as I was, I set off at the top of my speed, running along the terrace, past the grotto, and down a path where the syringa pelted me with showers of mock-orange blossoms, till I came under some magnificent old cedars, through whose black, broad-spread wings the morning sun shone, drawing their great shadows on the sweet-smelling earth beneath them, strewed with their russet-colored shedding. I thought it looked and smelt like a Russia-leather carpet. Then I came to the brink of the water, to a little deserted fishing pavilion surrounded by a wilderness of bloom that was once a garden, and then I ran home to breakfast. After breakfast I went over the very same ground with Lady Francis, extremely demure, with my bonnet on my head and a parasol in my hand, and the utmost propriety of decorous demeanor, and said never a word of my mad morning's explorings. A girl's run and a young lady's walk are very different things, and I hold both pleasant in their way. The carriage was ordered to take my mother to Addlestone to see poor old Mrs. Whitelock, and during her absence Lady Francis and I repaired to her own private sitting-room, and we entertained each other with extracts from our respective journals. I was struck with the high esteem she expressed for Lord Carlisle; in one place in her journal she said she wished she could hope her boys would grow up as excellent men as he is, and this in spite of her party politics, for she is a Tory and he a Whig, and she is really a partisan politician. 

 In the afternoon, after a charming meandering ride, we determined to go to Monks Grove, the place Lady Charlotte Greville has taken on St. Anne's Hill. .. . In the evening we had terrifical ghost stories, which held, us fascinated till _one o'clock in the morning_. 

 "The stones done, to bed they creep, By whispering winds soon lull'd asleep. "

 _Sunday, June 12th. _-- . .. It's nearly five years since I said my prayers in that dear old little Weybridge church. .. . 

 On our return, as the horses are never used on Sunday, we went down to the water and got into the boat. The day was lovely, and as we glided along the bright water my mother and Lady Francis and I murmured, half voice, all sorts of musical memories, which made a nice accompaniment to Lord Francis's occasional oar-dip that just kept the boat in motion. When we landed, my mother returned to the house, and the rest of us set off for a long delightful stroll to the farm, where I saw a monstrous and most beautiful dog whom I should like to have hugged, but that he looked so grave and wise it seemed like a liberty. We walked on through a part of the park called America, because of the magnificent rhododendrons and azaleas and the general wildness of the whole. The mass was so deep one's feet sank into it; the sun, setting, threw low, slanting rays along the earth and among the old tree trunks. It was a beautiful bit of forest scenery; how like America I do not know. Upon the racecourse we emerged into a full, still afternoon atmosphere of brilliant and soft splendor; the whole park was flooded with sunshine, and little creeks of light ran here and there into the woods we had just left, touching with golden radiance a solitary tree, and glancing into leafy nooks here and there, while the mass of woodland was one deep shadow. .. . 

 Much discussion as to the possibilities and probabilities of our being able to stay here another day. When we came back from our afternoon ride at near eight, found Mr. Greville and Lady Charlotte here, and a letter from my father, saying that I could be spared from my work at the theater a little longer, and promising to come down to us. .. . In the evening Mr. C---- and I acted some of Racine's "Andromaque" for them; my old school part of Hermione which I have not forgotten, and then two scenes from Scribe's pretty piece of "_les premières Amours_. " He acts French capitally, and, moreover, bestowed upon me the two following ridiculous conundrum puns, for which I shall be forever grateful to him:

 "Que font les Vaches à Paris?"

 "Des Vaudevilles" (des Veaux de Ville). 

 "Quelle est la sainte qui n'a pas lesoin de Jarretières?"

 "Ste. Sébastienne" (ses has se tiennent). 

 What absurd, funny stuff!

 _Tuesday, June 14th. _--Gardening on the lawn--hay-making in the meadow--delightful ride in the afternoon, the beginning of which, however, was rather spoiled by some very disagreeable accounts Mr. C---- was giving us of Lord and Lady ----'s _mènage_. What might, could, would, or _should_ a woman do in such a case? Endure and endure till her heart broke, I suppose. Somehow I don't think a man would have the heart to _break_ one's heart; but, to be sure, I don't know. .. . 

 We did not return home till near nine, and so, instead of dinner, all sat down to high tea, at which everybody was very cheerful and gay, and the talk very bright. .. . 

 I wish I could have painted my host and hostess this morning as they stood together on the lawn; she with her beautiful baby in her arms, her bright, fair forehead and eyes contrasting so strikingly with his fine, dark head. I never saw a more charming picture. (Landseer has produced one version of it in his famous "Return from Hawking. ") Are not all such groups "Holy Families"? They looked to me holy as well as handsome and happy. 

 _Wednesday, June 15th. _-- . .. The races in the park were to begin at one, and we wished, of course, to keep clear of them and all the gay company; so at twelve my mother and I got into the pony carriage, and drove to Addlestone to my aunt Whitelock's pretty cottage there. It rained spitefully all day, and the races and all the fine racing folk were drenched. At about six o'clock my father came from London, bringing me letters; the weather had brightened, and I took a long stroll with him till time to dress for dinner. .. . In the evening music and pleasant talk till one o'clock. 

 _Thursday, June 16th. _--At eight o'clock my mother and I walked with my father to meet the coach, on the top of which he left us for London. After breakfast took my mother down to my "Cedar Hall, " and established her there with her fishing, and then walked up the hill to the great trees and amused myself with bending down the big branches, and, seating myself on them, let them spring up with me. Climbing trees, as poor Combe would say, excites one's "wonder" and one's "caution" very agreeably, and I like it. I took Lord Francis's translation of "Henri Trois" back to the "Cedar Hall, " where my mother was still watching her float. I was a good deal struck with it. He has not finished the whole of the first act yet, but there is one scene between the Duchess of Guise and St. Megrin that I should think ought to be very effective on the stage; and I can imagine how charming Mdlle. Mars must have been in her sleep-walking gestures and intonations. The situation, which is highly dramatic, is, I think, quite new; I cannot recollect any similar one in any other play. .. . 

 After lunch my mother, Lady Charlotte, and Mr. Greville drove off to Monks Grove, and we followed them on horse-back; it is a little paradise of a place, with its sunny, smooth sloping lawns and bright, sparkling piece of water, the masses of flowers blossoming in profuse beauty, and the high, overhanging, sheltering woods of St. Anne's Hill rising behind it. On our way home much talk of Naples. I might like to go there, no doubt; the question is how I should like to come back to London after Naples, and I think not at all. In the evening read the pretty French piece of "Michel et Christine" which my father had sent me. 

 _Friday, June 17th. _-- . .. My mother, Mr. C----, and I drove together back to town; so good-by, Oatlands. 

 _Monday, June 20th. _--Went to rehearsal at half-past ten for John Mason, who is to come out in Romeo to-night; he had caught a dreadful cold and could hardly speak, which was terribly provoking, poor fellow! After my theater rehearsal of "Romeo and Juliet" drove to Bridgewater House to rehearse "Hernani. " In the evening the house was very good at Covent Garden; I played well. John Mason was suffering dreadfully from cold and hoarseness; the audience were very good-natured, however, and he got through uncommonly well. My mother said I played "beautifully, " which was saying much indeed for her. I was delighted, especially as the Francis Levesons and ---- were all there. 

 _Tuesday, June 21st. _--Went to Bridgewater House to rehearse. Charles Young was among our morning audience; I was so glad to see him, for dear old acquaintanceship. The king was going to the House of Parliament, and Palace Yard was thronged with people, and we sat round one of the Bridgewater House windows to see the show. At about one the royal carriages set out--such lovely cream-colored horses, with blue and silver trappings; such splendid, shining, coal-black ones, with coral-colored trappings. The equipages looked like some enchanted present in a fairy story. The king--God bless him!--cannot, I should think, have been much annoyed by the clamorous greetings of his people. I'm afraid that ominous, sullen silence is a bad sign of the times. We rehearsed very steadily. Lord Francis, who is taking the old duke's part because of Mr. St. Aubin going abroad, is much improved by some teaching Young has bestowed upon him; but still he is by no means so good as Mr. St. Aubin was. .. . 

 _Wednesday, 22d. _--Read "La Chronique de Charles Neuf, " which is very clever, but the history of that period in France is so revolting that works of fiction founded upon it are as disagreeable as the history itself. Hogarth's pictures and Le Sage's novels are masterpieces, and yet admirable only as excellent representations of what in itself is odious. However, they are satirical works, and so have their _raison d'être_, which I do not think a serious novel about detestable times and people has. Drove to Bridgewater House, feeling so unwell that I could scarcely stand, and was obliged to lie down till I was called to go on the stage. We had a magnificent audience--all the grandeurs in England except the King. The Queen, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland, Princess Elizabeth, Prince Leopold, the Duke of Brunswick. And lesser magnificoes the room full. Such very superior people make a dull audience, of course; the presence of royalty is always understood to bar applause, which is not etiquette when a Majesty is by. I played very ill; my voice was quite unmanageable, and broke twice, to my extreme dismay. The fact is, I am fagged _half_ to death; but as I cannot give up my work and cannot _bear_ to give up my play, the only wonder is that I am not fagged _whole_ to death. Mr. Craven acted really capitally, and I wondered how he could. They put us out terribly in one scene by forgetting the bench on which I have to sit down. Hernani managed with great presence of mind and cleverness in its absence, but it spoilt our prettiest picture. After the play Lady Francis came to fetch me to be presented to the Queen; her Majesty was most gracious in her reception of me, and so were the Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Gloucester, who came and had quite a long chat with me. When I had received my dismissal from her Majesty I ran to disrobe, and returned to join the crowd in the drawing-room. .. . When they were all gone we adjourned to Lady Gower's--a most magnificent supper, which _we_ enjoyed in the perfection of comfort, in a small boudoir opening into and commanding the whole length of the supper saloon. Our snuggery just held my mother, Lady Francis, myself, Charles Greville, and three of our _corps dramatique_, and we not only enjoyed a full view of the royal table, but what was infinitely amusing, poor Lord Francis's disconsolate countenance, which half killed us with laughing. Supper done, we all proceeded downstairs to see the Royalty depart, and looked at a fine picture of Lawrence's of that handsome creature, Lord Clanwilliam. Took leave of my friends for some months, I am sorry to say; took Mr. ----home in our carriage and set him down just at day-dawn. It was past four o'clock before I saw my bed; and the life I am leading is really enough to kill any one. 

 _Thursday, June 23d. _--Quite unwell, and in bed all day. Mrs. Jameson came and sat with me some time. We talked of marriage, and a woman's chance of happiness in giving her life into another's keeping. I said I thought if one did not expect too much one might secure a reasonably fair amount of happiness, though of course the risk one ran was immense. I never shall forget the expression of her face; it was momentary, and passed away almost immediately, but it has haunted me ever since. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET. DEAR LADY DACRE, I am commissioned by my mother to request your kind permission to bring my brother to your evening party on Saturday; she hopes you will have no scruple in refusing this request, if for any reason you would rather not comply with it. .. . I have been thinking much about what you said to me both _viva voce_ and in your note upon that "obnoxious word" in my play. Let me entreat you to put aside conventional regards of age and sex, which have nothing to do with works of art or literature, and view the subject without any of those considerations, which have their own proper domain, doubtless--although I think you have in this instance admitted their jurisdiction out of it. .. . I hope as long as I live that I shall never write anything offensive to decency or morality, or their pure source, religion; and I hope in my own manners and conversation always to preserve the decorum prescribed by society, good taste, and good feeling; but as a dramatic writer, supposing I am ever to be one, I shall have to depict men as well as women, coarse and common men as well as refined and courtly ones, and all and each, if I fulfill my task, must speak the language that their nature under their several circumstances points out as individually appropriate. But I forget that I am addressing one far better able than I am to say what belongs to all questions of poetry and art. Forgive me, my dear Lady Dacre, and allow me to add that, as when I put my play into your hands I told you that should you find it too intolerably dull and bad I would release you from your kind promise of accepting its dedication to yourself, I can only repeat my readiness to do so if upon any other ground whatever you feel reluctant to grace my title-page with your name. Pray tell me so without hesitation, as I had rather forego that honor than owe it to your courtesy without your entire good-will. 

 In any event pray accept my best acknowledgments for your kindness, and believe me always

 Your very truly obliged F. A. K. 

This letter was written in answer to some strictures of Lady Dacre's onwhat appeared to her coarseness of language in my play of "The Star ofSeville, " which she thought unbecoming a "young lady. " If I rememberrightly, too, she said that the introduction of a scene in a bedchambermight be deemed objectionable. I had asked her permission to dedicatethe play to her, which she had granted; and though she failed toconvince me that a young-lady element had any business whatever in aplay, she very kindly allowed her name to adorn the title-page of my_un_-young ladylike drama. 

Soon after this my father and aunt and myself left London for our summertour in the provinces, which we began at Bristol. 

 _Monday, July 4th, Bristol. _--The play was "Romeo and Juliet, " and the nurse was a perfect farce in herself; she really was worth any money, and her soliloquy when she found me "up and dressed and down again, " very nearly made me scream with laughter in the middle of my trance. Indeed, the whole play was probably considered an "improved version" of Shakespeare's Veronese story, both in the force and delicacy of the text. Sundry wicked words and coarse appellations were decorously dispensed with; many fine passages received judicious additions; not a few were equally judiciously omitted altogether. What a shocking hash!

 _Tuesday, July 5th. _--After breakfast we sallied forth to the market, to my infinite delight and amusement. It is most beautifully clean; the fruit and vegetables look so pretty, and smell so sweet, and give such an idea of plentiful abundance, that it is delightful to walk about among them. Even the meat, which I am generally exceedingly averse to go near, was so beautifully and nicely arranged that it had none of its usual repulsiveness; and the sight of the whole place, and the quaint-looking rustic people, was so pleasantly envious. We stopped to gossip with a bewitching old country dame, whose market stock might have sat, with her in the middle of it, for its picture; the veal and poultry so white and delicate-looking, the bacon like striped pink and white ribbons, the butter so golden, fresh, and sweet, in a great basket trimmed round with bunches of white jasmine, the green leaves and starry blossoms and exquisite perfume making one believe that butter ought always to be served, not in a "lordly dish, " but in a bower of jasmine. The good lady told us she had just come up from "the farm, " and that the next time she came she would bring us some home-made bread, and that she was going back to brew and to bake. She looked so tidy and _rural_, and her various avocations sounded so pleasant as she spoke of them, that I felt greatly tempted to beg her to let me go with her to "the farm, " which I am sure must be an enchanting place, neat and pretty, and flowery and comfortable, and full of rustic picturesqueness; and _while the sun shone_, I think I should like a female farmer's life amazingly. Went to the theater and rehearsed "Venice Preserved, " which is an entirely different kind of thing. Charles Mason dined with us. After dinner I finished reading Miss Ferrier's novel of "Destiny, " which I like very much; besides being very clever, it leaves a pleasant taste, in one's mind's mouth. Went to the theater at six; the play was "Venice Preserved, " and I certainly have seldom seen a more shameful exhibition. In the first place C---- did not even know his words, and that was bad enough; but when he was out, instead of coming to a stop decently, and finishing at least with his cue, he went on extemporizing line after line, and speech after speech, of his own, by way of mending matters. I think I never saw such a performance. He stamps and bellows low down in his throat like an ill-suppressed bull; he rolls his eyes till I feel as if they were flying out of their sockets at me, and I must try and catch them. He quivers and quavers in his speech, and pulls and _wrenches_ me so inhumanly, that what with inward laughter and extreme rage and pain, I was really all but dead in earnest at the end of the play. I acted very ill myself till the last scene, when my Jaffier having been done justice to by the Venetian Government, I was able to do justice to myself, and having gone mad, and no wonder, died rather better than I had lived through the piece. 

 _July 6th, Bristol. _--Walked out to order the horses, and afterwards went on to look at the Abbey Church. We examined one or two interesting old monuments; but were obliged to curtail our explorings, as the doors were about to be closed. We have been talking much lately of a remote possibility of going to America; and as I left this old brown pile to-day, it seemed to me curious to think of a country which has no cathedrals, no monuments of the Old Faith. How venerable, in spite of its superstitions and abuses; for its long undisputed sway over all civilized lands; for the great and good men who honored it by their lives and works--the religion of Augustine, of Bruno, Benedict, Francis d'Assisi, Francis de Sales, Fénelon, and how many more--the Christianity of Europe in its feudal, chivalrous times, those days of noble, good, as well as fierce, evil deeds and lives, the faith that kings and warriors bowed to when sovereignty was absolute and military power supreme. America has no gray abbeys, no ruined cloisters, to tell of monastic brotherhoods--the preserves of ancient historic chronicles, the guardians of the early wells and springs of classic learning and genius. In America there are no great, old, time-stained, weather-beaten, ivy-mantled churches full of tombs, such as we saw to-day, with curious carvings and quaint effigies, and where the early rulers of the land embraced the faith and received the baptism of Christ. That must be a very strange country. But they have Plymouth Rock, on the shore where the Protestant Pilgrims landed. 

 The horses having come to the door, we set off for our ride; our steeds were but indifferent hacks, but the road was charming, and the evening serene and pure, and I was with my father, a circumstance of enjoyment to me always. The characteristic feature of the scenery of this region is the vivid, deep-toned foliage of the hanging woods, through whose dense tufts of green, masses of gray rock and long scars of warm-colored red-brown earth appear every now and then with the most striking effect. The deep-sunk river wound itself drowsily to a silver thread at the base of steep cliffs, to the summit of which we climbed, reaching a fine level land of open downs carpeted with close, elastic turf. On we rode, up hill and down dale, through shady lanes full of the smell of lime-blossom, skirting meadows fragrant with the ripe mellow hay and honey-sweet clover, and then between plantations of aromatic, spicy fir and pine, all exhaling their perfumes under the influence of the warm sunset. At last we made a halt where the road, winding through Lord de Clifford's property, commanded an enchanting view. On our right, rolling ground rising gradually into hills, clothed to their summits with flourishing evergreens, firs, larches, laurel, arbutus--a charming variety in the monotony of green. On the farthest of these heights Blaise Castle, with two gray towers, well defined against the sky, looked from its bosky eminence over the whole domain, which spread on our left in sloping lawns, where single oaks and elms of noble size threw their shadows on the sunlit sward, which looked as if none but fairies' feet had ever pressed it. Beyond this, through breaks and frames, and arches made by the trees, the broad Severn glittered in the wavy light. It was a beautiful landscape in every direction. We returned home by sea wall and the shore of the Severn, which seemed rather bare and bleak after the soft loveliness we had just left. .. . 

 _Thursday, July 7th. _--Went to the theater to rehearse "The Gamester. " In the afternoon strolled down to the river with my father and Dall. We took boat and rowed toward the cliffs. Our time, however, was limited; and just as we reached the loveliest part of the river, we were obliged to turn home again. .. . At dinner, as we were talking about America, and I was expressing my disinclination ever to go thither, my father said: "If my cause (our Chancery suit) goes ill before the Lords, I think the best thing I can do will be to take ship from Liverpool and sail to the United States. " I choked a little at this, but presently found voice to say, "Ebben son pronta;" but he replied, "No, that he should go alone. " That you never should, my own dear father!. .. But I do hate the very thought of America. 

 _Saturday, July 9th. _ . .. In the afternoon drove out in an open carriage with Dall to Shirehampton, by the same road my father and I took in our ride the other day. 

 BRISTOL, July 10th, 1831. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I can neither bid you confirm nor deny any "_reports_ you may hear, " for I am in utter ignorance, I am happy to say, of the world's surmisings on my behalf, and had indeed supposed that my time for being honored by its notice in any way was pretty well past and over. 

 I am glad you are having rest, as you speak of it with the enjoyment which those alone who work hard are entitled to. I trust, too, that in the instance of your eyes no news is good news, for you say nothing of them, and I therefore like to hope that they have suffered you to forget them. 

 I'm disappointed about your Shakespeare book. I should like to have had it by my next birthday, which is the 27th of November, and to which I look forward with unusually mingled feelings. However, it cannot be helped; and I have no doubt the booksellers are right in point of fact, for we are embarked on board too troublous times to carry mere _passe temps_ literature with us. "We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns, " I am afraid, and shall find small public taste or leisure for _polite letters_. 

 I like this place very well; it is very quiet, and my life is always a happy one with my father. He always spoils me, and that is always pleasant, you know. 

 The Bristol people are rather in a bad state just now for our purposes, for trade here is in a very unprosperous condition; and the recent failure of many of their great mercantile houses does no good to our theatrical ones. The audiences are very pleasant, however, and the company by no means bad. We are here another week, and then take ship for Ilfracombe, and thence by land to Exeter; after that Plymouth and Southampton. .. . I wish I could be in London for "Anna Bolena. " I cannot adequately express my admiration for Madame Pasta; I saw her in Desdemona the Saturday night on which I scrawled those few lines to you. I think if you knew how every look and tone and gesture of hers affects me, you would be satisfied. She is almost equal to an imagination; more than that I cannot say. If you rate "imagination" as I think you must, I need say nothing more. We shall certainly be back in London by the end of September, if not before. In the mean time believe me ever yours most truly, F. A. K. 

 _Sunday, July 10th. _--My father wickedly _dawdled_ about till we were nearly late for church, and had to scamper along the quays and up the steep street, to poor dear Dall's infinite discomfiture, who grumbled and puffed, and shuffled and shambled along, while I plunged on, breathlessly ejaculating, "It is so hateful to be late for church!" The cathedral (which I believe it is not) was quite full, but we obtained seats in the organ gallery, where we could not hear very well, but had a very fine view of the _coup d'oeil_ presented by the choir and church below us. The numerous and many-colored congregation, the white surpliced choristers, the charity-school children in their uniforms surrounding the altar, all framed in by the dark old oak screens with their quaint readings, and partially vividly illuminated by occasional gleams of strong sunlight which poured suddenly through the colored windows, presented a beautiful picture. The service was very well performed: the organ is a remarkably good one, and one or two of the boys' voices were exquisitely soft and clear. It is a fine service, and yet I do not like it by way of religious worship. It does not make me devout, in the proper form of the term; it appeals too much to my senses and my imagination; it is religion _set_ to music and painting, and artistic religion does not suit me. The incessant passing of people through the church, too, disturbs one, and gives an unpleasant air of irreverence to the whole. .. . I think I might like to go to a cathedral for afternoon service, much as I like to spend my Sunday leisure in reading Milton, though I should not be satisfied to make my whole devotional _exercises_ consist in reading "Paradise Lost. " A wretchedly weak, poor sermon; how strange that such a theme should inspire nothing better than such a discourse! However, I suppose this sort of ministering is the inevitable result of a "ministry" embraced merely as a means of subsistence. No one could paint pictures or compose music, _only_ because they wanted bread, so I do not see why any one should preach sermons fit to be heard, only because they want bread. If I was a despot, I would suppress hebdomadal writing of sermons, and people should be _forbidden_ instead of _bidden_ to talk nonsense upon sacred subjects. 

 _Monday, 11th. _--At night the theater was very full, and the audience pleasant. During supper my father, Charles Mason, and I had a long discussion about Kean. I cannot help thinking my father wrong about him. Kean _is_ a man of decided genius, no matter how he neglects or abuses nature's good gift. He has it. He has the first element of all greatness--power. No taste, perhaps, and no industry, perhaps; but let his deficiencies be what they may, his faults however obvious, his conceptions however erroneous, and his characters, each considered as a whole, however imperfect, he has the one atoning faculty that compensates for everything else, that seizes, rivets, electrifies all who see and hear him, and stirs down to their very springs the passionate elements of our nature. Genius alone can do this. 

 As an actor, one whose efforts are the result of study, of mental research, reflection, and combination; as an intellectual anatomist, whose knowledge must dissect, and then re-form and reproduce again in beauty and harmony the image he has taken to pieces; as an artist, who is bound to conceal both the first and last processes, the dismembering of the parts and the reuniting them in a whole, and whose business is to make the most deliberate mental labor and the most studied personal effects appear the spontaneous result of unpremeditated passion and emotion (feigned passion and emotion, which are to appear real)--in capacity for all this Kean may be defective. He may not be an actor, he may not be an artist, but he _is_ a man of genius, and instinctively with a word, a look, a gesture, tears away the veil from the heart of our common humanity, and lays it bare as it beats in every human heart, and as it throbs in his own. Kean speaks with his whole living frame to us, and every fiber of ours answers his appeal. 

 I do not know that I ever saw him in any character which impressed me as a _whole work of art_; he never seems to me to intend to be any one of his parts, but I think he intends that all his parts should be _him_. So it is not Othello who is driven frantic by doubt and jealousy, nor Shylock who is buying human flesh by its weight in gold, nor Sir Giles Overreach who is selling his child to hell for a few years of wealth and power; it is Kean, and in every one of his characters there is an intense personality of his _own_ that, while one is under its influence, defies all criticism--moments of such overpowering passion, accents of such tremendous power, looks and gestures of such thrilling, piercing meaning, that the excellence of those _parts_ of his performances more than atones for the want of greater unity in conception and smoothness in the entire execution of them. 

 The discussion about Kean led naturally to some talk about his most famous parts, particularly Shylock. My father's conception of Shylock seems to me less the right one than Kean's; but then, if my father took what _I_ think the right view of the part, he would have to give up acting it. The real Shylock--that is, Shakespeare's--is a creature totally opposite in his whole organization, physical and mental, to my father's; and as my father cannot force his nature in any particular into uniformity with that of Shylock, he endeavors to persuade himself that the theory by which he tries to bring it into harmony with his individuality, and within the compass of his powers, is the right one; but I think him entirely mistaken about it. Kean did with the part exactly what my father wants to do--adapted his conceptions to his means of execution; but Kean's physical constitution was much better suited to express Shylock as Shylock should be expressed than my father's. My father attempts to make Shylock "poetical" (in the superficial sense), because that is the bias of his own mind in matters of art. Classical purity and refinement of taste are his specialties as an actor, and neither power nor intensity. 

 Shylock's master passion is not revenge, which is a savage, but avarice, which is a sordid motive. His hatred is inspired more by defeated hope of gain and positive losses and threatened ventures, than by the personal insults and contumely he has received. 

 Avarice is an absolutely base passion, and a grand poetical character cannot consistently be raised upon such a foundation, nor can a nature be at once groveling and majestic. Besides, Shakespeare has not made Shylock "poetical. " The concentrated venom of his passion is prosaic in its vehement utterance--close, concise, vigorous, logical, but not imaginative; and in the scenes where his evil nature escapes the web of his cunning caution, and he is stung to fury by his complicated losses, there is intense passion but no elevation in his language. 

 There is a vein of humor in Shylock. A grim, bitter, sardonic flavor pervades the part, that blends naturally with the sordid thrift and shrewd, watchful, eager vigilance of the miser. It infuses a terrible grotesqueness into his rage, and curdles one's blood in the piercing, keen irony of his mocking humility to Antonio, and adds poignancy to the ferocity of his hideous revenge. This Kean rendered admirably, and in this my father entirely fails, but it is an important element of the character. 

 My father is hard upon Kean's defects because they are especially antagonistic to his artistic taste and tendency, but I think, too, there is a slight infusion of the vexation of unappreciated labor in my father's criticism of Kean. He forgets that power is universally felt and understood, and refinement seldom the one or the other, and for a thousand who applaud Kean's "What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?" probably not ten people are aware of his exquisite "nevertheless" in the reading of Antonio's letter. Most eyes can "see a church by daylight;" not many stop to look at the lights and shadows that are forever varying and adding to the beauty of its aspect. I wonder how, being as well aware as my father is of all the fine work that escapes the eyes of the public, he can care for this kind of thing as he does. 

 _Tuesday, 12th. _--We are having events at the theater, and not of a pleasant sort. Mr. Brunton, the manager, is in "difficulties" (civilized plural for debt), and it seems that last night during the play one of his creditors put an execution into the theater, and laid violent hands upon the receipts, which, as it was my father's benefit, rather dismayed us. So after breakfast this morning, having put out my dresses for my favorite Portia for to-night, I went to the theater to ascertain if there was to be a rehearsal or not. My father had gone in search of Mr. Brunton to see how matters could be arranged, and at all events to represent that we could not go on acting unless our money was secured to us. Charles Mason, Dall, and I in the mean time found the poor actors in the theater very much at a loss how to proceed, as it seemed extremely doubtful whether there would be any performance; so we returned home, where we found my father, who said that at all events there must be a rehearsal, for it was absolutely necessary if we did act to-night, and could do us no harm if we did not; so we repaired again to the theater, where the scattered and scared _corps dramatique_ having been got together again, we proceeded to business. 

 _Wednesday, 13th. _--Mr. K---- called and told us that some arrangement had been made with the truculent creditor of our poor manager by which _we_ shall not lose any more in this unlucky business. My father will be quit for about a hundred pounds. I am very sorry for Mr. Brunton, but he should not have placed us in such an uncomfortable position. My father has offered to act one night beyond our engagement for the sake, if possible, of making up to the actors the arrears of salary Mr. Brunton owes them. They are all poor, hard-working people, earning no more than the means of subsistence, and this withholding of their due falls very heavily on them. 

 _Thursday, 14th. _-- . .. At the theater the house was very good, and the audience very pleasant. The play was "The Provoked Husband, " and I'm sure I play his provoking wife badly enough to provoke anybody; but she's not a person to my mind, which is an artistic view of the case. 

[My modes of dealing with my professional duties at this very unripestage of my career irresistibly remind me of a not very highly educatedfemale painter who had taken it into her head to make an historicalpicture of Cleopatra. Sending to a friend for a few "references" uponthe subject of that imperial gypsy's character and career, she sent themhastily back, saying she had relinquished her purpose, "having really noidea Cleopatra was that sort of person. "]

 _Friday, July 15th. _--Miserrima! I have broken a looking-glass! and on Friday, too! What do I think will happen to me! Had a long talk this morning with dear Dall about my dislike to the stage. I do not think it is the acting itself that is so disagreeable to me, but the public personal exhibition, the violence done (as it seems to me) to womanly dignity and decorum in thus becoming the gaze of every eye and theme of every tongue. If my audience was reduced to my intimates and associates I should not mind it so much, I think; but I am not quite sure that I should like it then. 

 At the theater the house was very full, and the audience particularly amiable. In the interval between the fourth and fifth acts Charles Mason made a speech to them, informing them of Mr. Brunton's distress, and our intention of acting for him on Monday. They applauded very much, and I hope they will do more, and come. My part of the charity is certainly not small; to be pulled and pushed and dragged hither and thither, and generally "knocked about, " as the miserable Belvidera, for three mortal hours, is a sacrifice of self which my conscience bears me witness is laudable. I would much rather pay with my purse than my person in this case. Unfortunately, je n'ai pas de quoi. 

 _Sunday, July 17th. _--To Redcliffe Church with my father and Dall. What a beautiful old building it is!. .. What a sermon! Has the truth, as our Church holds it, no fitter expounders than such a preacher? Are these its stays, props, and pillars--teachers to guide, enlighten, and instruct people as cultivated and intelligent as the people of this country on the most momentous of all subjects? Are these the sort of adversaries to oppose to men like Channing? As for not going to church because of bad or foolish sermons, that is quite another matter, though I not unfrequently hear that reason assigned for staying away. One goes to church to say one's prayers, and not to hear more or less fine discourses; one goes because it is one's duty, and a delight and comfort, and a quite distinct duty and delight from that of private prayer. A good sermon, Heaven knows, is a rare blessing to be thankful for, but if one went to church only in the expectation of that blessing, one might stay away most Sundays in the year. 

[My youthful scorn of "poor preaching" reminds me of what I once heardEdward Everett say, who, before becoming his country's "Minister, " inthe diplomatic sense of the word, had been a powerful and eloquentUnitarian preacher: "I hear a good deal of criticism upon sermons whichare supposed to be religious or moral exhortations, not intellectualexercises. I dare say many sermons are not _first rate_, but moderategood preaching is not a bad thing, and _pretty poor preaching_ is betterthan most men's practice. "]

 _Monday, July 18th. _--The theater was crowded to-night, which delighted me. It is pleasant to see malicious and evil actions produce such a result. I was very nervous and excited, and nearly went into hysterics over one small incident of the evening. At the close of the first separation scene--the play was "Venice Preserved"--when Jaffier is carried out by the nape of the neck by Pierre, and Belvidera _extracted_ on the other side in the arms (and iron ones they were) of Bedamar, the audience of course were affected, harrowed, overcome by the poignant pathos of the situation. Charles looked woebegone. I called upon him in tones of the most piercing anguish (an agony not entirely feigned, as my bruises can bear witness). The curtain descended slowly amidst sympathetic sobs and silence--the musicians themselves, deeply moved, no doubt, with the sorrows of the scene, mournfully resumed their fiddles, and struck up "ti _ti_ tum _tiddle_ un _ti_ tum _ti_"--the jolliest jig you ever heard. The bathos was irresistible; we behind the scenes, the principal sufferers (perhaps) in the night's performance, were instantly comforted, and all but shouted with laughter. I hope the audience were equally revived by this grotesque sudden cheering of their spirits. After the tragedy a Bristolian Paganini performed a concerto on one string. Dall declares that the whole orchestra played the whole time--but some sounds reached me in my dressing-room that were decidedly _unique_ more ways than one, not at all unlike our favorite French fantasia--"Complainte d'un cochon au lait qui rêve. " But the audience were transported; they clapped and the fiddle squeaked, they shouted and the fiddle squealed, they hurrahed and the fiddle uttered three terrific screams, and it was over and Paganini is done for--here, at any rate. He need never show face or fiddle here; he hasn't a string (even one) left to his bow in Bristol. "So Orpheus fiddled, " etc. 

 _Tuesday, July 19th. _--Dinner-party at the ---- which ought to have been chronicled by Jane Austen. I sat by a gentleman who talked to me of the hanging gardens of Semiramis and what might have been cultivated therein (hemp perhaps), then of the derivation of languages--he still kept among roots--and finally of _tea_, which he told me he was endeavoring to grow on the Welsh mountains. Some of the table-talk deserved printing _verbatim_, only it was almost too good to be true, or at any rate believed. 

 _Wednesday, July 20th. _--Charles Mason came after breakfast, and told us that there was some chance of poor Mr. Brunton's getting out of prison (into which his creditor has thrust him), for that the latter had been so universally scouted for his harsh proceeding that he probably would be shamed into liberating him. 

 We shall not leave Bristol to-day. The wind is contrary and the weather quite unfavorable for a party of pleasure, which our trip by sea to Ilfracombe was to be. It's very disagreeable living half in one's trunks and traveling-bags, as this sort of uncertainty compels one to do. I studied Dante, wrote verses and sketched, and tried to be busy; but a defeated departure leaves one's mind and thoughts only half unpacked, and I felt idle and unsettled, though I worked at "The Star of Seville" till dinner-time. 

 After dinner I studied politics in the Examiner and read an article on Cobbett, which made me laugh, and the motto to which might have been "Malvolio, thou art sick of self-conceit. " . .. 

 _Thursday, July 21st. _--At dinner a discussion, suggested by Mr. D----'s conduct to Mr. Brunton, on the subject of returning evil for evil, and the difficulty of not doing so, if not deliberately and in deed, upon impulse and by thought. Nothing is easier in such matters than to say what one would do, and nothing, I suppose, more difficult than to do what one should do. So God keep us all from convenient opportunities of revenging ourselves. .. . 

[Occasionally one hears in the streets voices in which the making of afortune lies, and when one remembers what fortunes some voices havecommanded, it seems bitterly cruel to think of such a possession beggingits bread for want of the chance that might have made it available byculture. A woman, some years ago, used to sing at night in theneighborhood of St. James's Street, whose voice was so exquisite, sopowerful, sweet, and thrilling, a mezzo soprano of such pure tone andvibrating quality, that Lady Essex, my sister, and myself, at differenttimes, struck by the woman's magnificent gift and miserable position, had her into our houses, to hear her sing and see if nothing could bedone to give her the full use of her noble natural endowment. She was aplain young woman of about thirty, tolerably decently dressed, and witha quiet, simple manner. She said her husband was a house-paperer in asmall way, and when he was out of employment she used to go out in theevening and see what her singing would bring her. Poor thing! it wasimpossible to do anything for her; she was too old to learn or unlearnanything. No training could have corrected the low cockney vulgarity andcoarse, ignorant indistinctness and incorrectness of her enunciation. And so in after years, as I returned repeatedly to England, after longeror shorter intervals of time, and always inhabited the same neighborhoodin London, I still continued to hear, on dark drizzly evenings (andnever without a thrill of poignant pain and pity) this angel's voicewandering in the muddy streets, its perfect, round, smooth edge becomingby degrees blunted and broken, its tones rough and coarse and harsh, some of the notes fading into feeble indistinctness--the fine, bold, true intonation hiding its tremulous uncertainty in trills and quavers, alternating with pitiful husky coughing, while every now and then one ortwo lovely, rich, pathetic notes, surviving ruin, recalled the earlysweetness and power of the original instrument. The idea of what thatwoman's voice might have been to her used to haunt me. 

It was hearing Rachel singing (barefoot) in the streets of Paris thatJules Janin's attention was first excited by her. Her singing, as Iheard it on the stage in the drinking song of the extraordinary piececalled "Valeria, " in which she played two parts, was really nothing morethan a chanting in the deep contralto of her speaking voice, and couldhardly pass for a musical performance at all, any more than herwonderful uttering of the "Marseillaise, " with which she made thewomen's blood run cold, and the men's hair stand on end, and everybody'sflesh creep. 

My sister and I used often to plan an expedition of street-singing forthe purpose of seeing how much we could collect in that way for somecharity. We were to put ourselves in "poor and mean attire"--I do notknow that we were to "smirch our faces" with brown paint; we thoughtlarge battered poke-bonnets would answer the purpose, and, thusdisguised, we were to go the rounds of the club windows, my fatherwalking at a discreet distance for our protection on one side of thestreet, and our formidable pirate friend Trelawney on the other. Wenever carried out this project, though I have no doubt it would havebrought us a very pretty penny for any endowment we might have wished tomake. ]

 _Friday, July 22d. _--Long and edifying talk with dear Dall upon my prospects in marrying. "While you remain single, " says she, "and choose to work, your fortune is an independent and ample one; as soon as you marry, there's no such thing. Your position in society, " says she, "is both a pleasanter and more distinguished one than your birth or real station entitles you to; but that also is the result of your professional exertions, and might, and probably would, alter for the worse if you left the stage; for, after all, it is mere frivolous fashionable popularity. " I ought to have got up and made her a courtesy for that. So that it seems I have fortune and fame (such as it is)--positive real advantages, which I cannot give with myself, and which I cease to own when I give myself away, which certainly makes my marrying any one or any one marrying me rather a solemn consideration; for I lose everything, and my marryee gains nothing in a worldly point of view--says she--and it's incontrovertible and not pleasant. So I took up Dante, and read about devils boiled in pitch, which refreshed my imagination and cheered my spirits very much. 

[How far my ingenious mind was from foreseeing the days when men of highrank and social station would marry singers, dancers, and actresses, andbe condescending enough to let their wives continue to earn their breadby public exhibition, and even to appropriate the proceeds of theirtheatrical labors! I have not yet made up my mind whether, in thesecases, the _gentleman_ ought not to take his wife's name in private, asa compensation for her not taking his in public. Poor Miss Paton's noblehusband was the only Englishman, that I know of, who committed that actof self-effacement. To go much further back in dramatic and socialhistory, the old, accomplished, mad Earl of Peterborough married thefamous singer Anastasia Robinson, and refused to acknowledge the facttill her death. To be sure, this was a more cowardly, but a less dirtymeanness. He withheld his name from her, but did not take her money. ]

 It is settled now that we go to Exeter by coach, and now that we have given up our pretty sea trip to Ilfracombe, the weather has become lovely--perverse creature!--but I am glad we are going away in every way. 

 _Saturday, Bristol, July 23d. _ . .. We started at eight, and taking the whole coach to ourselves as we do, I think traveling by a public conveyance the best mode of getting over the road. They run so rapidly; there is so little time lost, and so much trouble with one's luggage saved. The morning was gray and soft and promised a fine day, but broke its promise at the end of our second stage, and began to pelt with rain, which it continued to do the live-long blessed day. We could see, however, that the country we were passing through was charming. One or two of the cottages by the roadside, half-smothered in vine and honeysuckle, reminded me of Lady Juliana, [B] who, when she said she could live in a desert with her lover, thought that it was a "sort of place full of roses. " . .. These laborers' cottages were certainly the poor dwellings of very poor people, but there was nothing unsightly, repulsive, or squalid about them--on the contrary, a look of order, of tidy neatness about the little houses, that added the peculiarly English element of comfort and cleanliness to the picturesqueness of their fragrant festoons of flowery drapery, hung over them by the sweet season. The little plots of flower-garden one mass of rich color; the tiny strip of kitchen-garden, well stocked and trimly kept, beside it; the thriving fruitful orchard stretching round the whole; and beyond, the rich cultivated land rolling its waving corn-fields, already tawny and sunburnt, in mellow contrast with the smooth green pasturages, with their deep-shadowed trees and bordering lines of ivied hawthorn hedgerows, marking boundary-lines of division without marring the general prospect--a lovely landscape that sang aloud of plenty, industry, and thrift. I wonder if any country is more blessed of God than this precious little England? I think it is like one of its own fair, nobly blooming, vigorous women; her temper--that's the climate--not perfection, to be sure (but, after all, the old praise of it is true; it admits of more constant and regular out-of-door exercise than any other); the religion it professes, pure; the morality it practises, pure, probably by comparison with that of other powerful and wealthy nations. Oh, I trust that neither reform nor its extreme, revolution, will have power to injure this healthily, heartily constituted land. .. . 

 [B] In Miss Ferrie's novel, "Marriage. "

 EXETER, July 24th, 1831. DEAREST H----, We arrived here last night, or rather evening, at half-past six o'clock, and I found your letter, which, having waited for me, shall not wait for my answer. .. . 

 Thank you for John's translation of the German song, the original of which I know and like very much. The thoughts it suggested to you must constantly arise in all of us. I believe that in these matters I feel all that you do, but not with the same intensity. To adore is most natural to the mind contemplating beauty, might, and majesty beyond its own powers; to implore is most natural to the heart oppressed with suffering, or agitated with hopes that it cannot accomplish, or fears from which it cannot escape. The difference between natural and revealed religion is that the one worships the loveliness and power it perceives, and the other the goodness, mercy, and truth in which it believes. The one prays for exemption from pain and enjoyment of happiness for body and mind in this present existence; the other for deliverance from spiritual evils, or the possession of spiritual graces, by which the soul is fitted for that better life toward which it tends. .. . 

 I do not think "Juliet" has written to you hitherto, and I am rather affronted at your calling me so. I have little or no sympathy with, though much compassion for, that Veronese young person. .. . There is but one sentiment of hers that I can quote with entire self-application, and that is--

 "I have no joy of this contract to-night; It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden. "

 In spite of which the foolish child immediately secures her lover's word, appoints the time for meeting, and makes every arrangement for following up the declaration she thought too sudden by its as sudden execution. Poor Juliet! I am very sorry for her, but do not like to be called after her, and do not think I am like her. I have been working very hard every day since you left Bristol (my belief is that Juliet was very idle). I am sorry to say I find my playing very hard work; but easy work, if there is such a thing, would not be best for me just now. 

 Yours ever, F. A. K. 

 _Sunday, Exeter. _--To church with Dall and my father, a blessing that I can never enjoy in London, where he is all but stared out of countenance if he shows his countenance in a church, and it requires more devotion to the deed than I fear he possesses to encounter the annoyance attendant upon it. We heard an excellent sermon, earnest, sober, simple, which I was especially grateful for on my father's account. Women don't mind bad preaching; they have a general taste for sermons, and, like children with sweeties, will swallow bad ones if they cannot get good. "We have a natural turn for religion, " as A. F. Said of me; but men, I think, get a not unnatural turn against it when they hear it ill advocated. .. . 

 The day has been lovely, and from my perch among the clouds here I am looking down upon a lovely view. Following the irregular line of buildings of the street, the eye suddenly becomes embowered in a thick rich valley of foliage, beyond which a hill rises, whose sides are covered with ripening corn-fields, meadows of vivid green, and fields where the rich red color of the earth contrasts beautifully with the fresh hedgerows and tall, dark elm trees, whose shadows have stretched themselves for evening rest down in the low rosy sunset. It is all still and bright, and the Sabbath bells come up to me over it all with intermitting sweetness, like snatches of an interrupted angels' chorus, floating hither and thither about the earth. 

 _Monday. _--We contrived to get some saddle-horses, and rode out into the beautiful country round Exeter, but the preface to our poem was rather dry prose. We rode for about an hour between powdery hedges all smothered in dust, up the steepest of hills, and under the hottest of suns; but we had our reward when we halted at the top, and looked down upon a magnificent panorama of land and water, hill and dale, broad smiling meadows, and dark shadowy woodland--a vast expanse of various beauty, over which the eye wandered and paused in slow contentment. As we came leisurely down the opposite side of the hill, we met a gypsy woman, and I reined up my horse and listened to my fortune: "I have a friend abroad who is very fond of me. " I hope so. "I have a relation far abroad who is very fond of me too. " I know so. "I shall live long. " More is the pity. "I shall marry and have three children. " Quite enough. "I shall take easily to love, but it will not break my heart. " I am glad to hear that. "I shall cross the sea before I see London again. " Ah! I am afraid not. "The end of my summer will be happier than its beginning"--and that may very easily be. For that I gave my prophetess a shilling. Oh, Zingarella! my blessing on your black eyes and red-brown cheeks! May you have spoken true!. .. 

 Meantime, my companions, my father and Mr. Kean, were discussing the fortunes of Poland. If I were a man, with a hundred thousand pounds at my disposal, I would raise a regiment and join the Poles. The Russians have been beaten again, which is good hearing. Is it possible this cause should fall to the earth? On our way home, had a nice smooth, long canter by the river-side. We turned off our road to visit a pretty property of Mr. F----'s, the house half-way up a hill, prettily seated among pleasant woods. We galloped up some fields above it to the brow of the rise, and had three mouthfuls of delicious fresh breeze, and a magnificent view of Exeter and the surrounding country. .. . After dinner, off to the theater; it was my benefit, "The Gamester. " The house was very full, and I played and looked well; but what a Stukely! I was afraid my eyes would scarcely answer my purpose, but that I should have been obliged to "employer l'effort de mon bras" to keep him at a proper distance. What ruffianly wooing! and not one of the actors knew their parts. Stukely said to me in his love-speech, "Time has not gathered the roses from your cheeks, though often washed them. " I had heard of Time as the thinner of people's hair, but never as the washer of their faces. 

 _Sunday, July 31st. _--Went to church, to St. Sidwell's. .. . We had another good sermon; that preacher must be a good man, and I should like to know him. .. . 

 Our dinner-party this evening was like nothing but a chapter out of one of Miss Austen's novels. What wonderful books those are! She must have written down the very conversations she heard _verbatim_, to have made them so like, which is Irish. .. . How many things one ought to die of and doesn't! That dinner did come to an end. In the drawing-room afterward, in spite of the dreadful heat, two fair female friends actually divided one chair between them; I expected to see them run into one every minute, and kept speculating then which they would be, till the idea fascinated me like a thing in a nightmare. As we were taking our departure, and had got half way down the stairs, a general rush was made at us, and an attempt, upon some pretext, to get us back into that dreadful drawing-room. I thought of Malebranche hooking the miserable souls that tried to escape back again into the boiling pitch. But we got away and safe home, and leave Exeter to-morrow. 

 EXETER, July 31, 1831. DEAREST H----, I am content to be whatever does not militate against your affection for me. .. . I had a long letter from dear A----, a day ago, from Weybridge. She is quite well, and says my mother is as happy as the day is long, now she is once more in her beloved haunts. I love Weybridge too very much. .. . It seems to me that memory is the special organ of pain, for even when it recalls our pleasures, it recalls only the past, and half their sweetness becomes bitter in the process. I have a tenacious and acute memory, and, as the phrenologists affirm, no hope, and feel disposed to lament that, not having both, I have either. The one seems the necessary counterpoise of the other; the one is the source of most of the pain, as the other is of most of the pleasure, which we derive from the things that are not; and I feel daily more and more my deficiency in the more cheerful attribute. .. . 

 You have been to the Opera, and seen what even one's imagination does not shrug its shoulders at; I mean Madame Pasta. I admire her perfectly, and she seems to me perfect. How I wish I had been with you! And yet I cannot fancy you in the Opera House; it is a sort of atmosphere that I find it difficult to think of your breathing. .. . I wish you had not asked me to write verses for you upon that picture of Haydon's "Bonaparte at St. Helena. " Of course, I know it familiarly through the engraving, and, in spite of its sunshine, what a shudder and chill it sends to one's heart! It is very striking, but I have neither the strength nor concentrativeness requisite for writing upon it. The simplicity of its effect is what makes it so fine; and any poetry written upon it would probably fail to be as simple, and therefore as powerful, as itself. I cannot even promise you to attempt it, but if ever I fall in with a suitable frame of mind for so bold an experiment, I will remember you and the rocks of St. Helena. "My lady" (an Italian portrait on which I had written some verses) "Mia Donna, " or "Madonna, " more properly to speak, was a most beautiful Italian portrait that I saw, not in Augustin's gallery, but in a small collection of pictures belonging to Mr. Day, and exhibited at the Egyptian Hall. Sir Thomas Lawrence told me when I described it to him, that he thought it was a painting of Giordano's. It was a lovely face, not youthful in its character of beauty; there is a calm seriousness about the brow and forehead, a clear, intellectual severity about the eye, and a sweet, still placidity round the mouth, that united, to my fancy, all the elements of beauty, physical, mental, and moral. What an incomparable friend that woman must have been! Why is it that we rejoice that a soul fit for heaven is constrained to tarry here, but that, in truth, the fittest for this is also the fittest for that life? For it seems to me more natural not to wish to detain the bright spirit from its brighter home, and not to sorrow at the decree which calls it hence to perfect its excellence in higher spheres of duty. .. . 

 I think a blight of uncertainty must have pervaded the atmosphere when I was born, and penetrated, not certainly my nature, but my whole earthly destiny, with its influence; from my plans and projects for to-morrow on to those of next year, all is mist and indistinct indecision. I suppose it is the trial that suits my temper least, and therefore fits it best. It surely is that which "willfulness, conceit, and egotism" find hardest to endure. Yesterday I determined so far to escape from, or cheat, my destiny as to have a peep into futurity by the help of a gypsy. Riding with my father, and the whole hour, time, day, and scene, were in admirable harmony: the dark, sunburnt face, with its bright, laughing eyes and coal-black curls and flashing teeth; the old gateway against which she was leaning; the blue summer sky and sunny road skirted with golden corn-fields--the whole picture in which she was set was charming. 

 "I know it is a sin to be a mocker;"

 and I am sure I need not tell you that I am sincerely grateful for all the kindness and civility that is bestowed upon us wherever we go. .. . What with riding, rehearsing, and acting, my days are completely filled. We start for Plymouth to-morrow at eight, and act "Romeo and Juliet" in the evening, which is rather laborious work. We play there every night next week. When next I write I will tell you of our further plans, which are at this moment still uncertain. .. . 

 Affectionately yours, F. A. K. 

[These were the days before railroads had run everything and everybodyup to London. There were still to be found then, in various parts ofEngland, life that was peculiar and provincial, and manners that had inthem a character of their own and a stamp of originality that had oftenquite as much to attract as to repel. Men and women are, of course, still the same that sat to that enchanting painter, Jane Austen, but thewhole form and color and outward framing and various countenance oftheir lives have merged its distinctiveness in a commonplace conformityto universal custom; and in regard to the more superficial subjects ofher fine and gentle satire, if she were to return among us she wouldfind half her occupation gone. ]

 _Monday, August 1st. _--I got some books while waiting for the coach, and we started at half-past eight. The heat was intolerable and the dust suffocating, but the country through which we passed was lovely. For a long time we drove along the brow of a steep hill. The valley was all glorious with the harvest: corn-fields with the red-gold billows yet untouched by the sickle; others full of sunburnt reapers sweeping down the ripe ears; others, again, silent and deserted, with the tawny sheaves standing, bound and dry, upon the bristling stubble, on the ground over which they rippled and nodded yesterday, a great rolling sea of burnished grain. All over the sunny landscape peace and prosperity smiled, and gray-steepled churches and red-roofed villages, embowered in thick protecting shade, seemed to beckon the eye to rest as it wandered over the charming prospect. The white-walled mansions of the lords of the land glittered from the verdant shelter of their surrounding plantations, and the thirsty cattle, beautiful in color and in grouping, stood in pools in the deeper parts of the brooks, where some giant tree threw its shadow over the water and the smooth sheltered sward round its feet. In spite of this charming prospect I was very sad, and the purple heather bordering the road, with its thick tufts, kept suggesting Weybridge and the hours I had lately spent there so happily. .. . To shake myself I took up "Adam Blair;" and, good gracious! what a shaking it did give me! What a horrible book! And how could D---- have recommended me to read it? It is a very fine and powerful piece of work, no doubt; but I turned from it with infinite relief to "Quentin Durward. " Walter Scott is quite exciting enough for wholesome pleasure; there is no poison in anything that he has ever written: for how many hours of harmless happiness the world may bless him!

 At Totnes we got out of the coach to shake ourselves, for we were absolute dust-heaps, and then resumed our powdery way, and reached Plymouth at about four o'clock. As we walked up toward our lodgings, we were met by Mr. Brunton, with the pleasing intelligence that those we had bespoken had been let, by some mistake, to another family. Dusty, dreary, and disconsolate, I sat down on the stairs which were to have been ours, while Dall upbraided the hostess of the house, and my father did what was more to the purpose--posted off to find other apartments for us; no easy matter, for the town is crammed to overflowing. In the mean time a little blue-eyed fairy, of about two years old, came and made friends with me, and I presently had her fast asleep in my lap. After carrying my prize into an empty room, and sitting by it for nearly half an hour while it slept the sleep of the blessed, I was called away from this very new interest, for my father had succeeded in finding house-room for us, and I had yet all my preparations to make for the evening. 

 The theater is a beautiful building for its purpose, of a perfectly discreet size, neither too large nor too small, of a very elegant shape, and capitally constructed for the voice. The house was very _full_; the play, "Romeo and Juliet. " I played abominably ill, and did not like my audience, who must have been very good-natured if they liked me. 

 _Tuesday, August 2d. _--Rose at seven, and went off down to the sea, and that was delightful. In the evening the play was "Venice Preserved. " I acted very well, notwithstanding that I had to prompt my Jaffier through every scene, not only as to words, but position on the stage, and "business, " as it is called. How unprincipled and ungentlemanlike this is! The house was very fine, and a pleasanter audience than the first night. Found a letter from Mrs. Jameson after the play, with an account of Pasta's "Anna Bolena. " How I wish I could see it!

 _Wednesday, August 3d. _--Rose at seven, and went down to the sea to bathe. The tide was out, and I had to wait till the nymphs had filled my bath-tub. .. . At the theater in the evening, the play was "The Stranger. " The house not so good as last night, and the audience were disagreeably noisy. .. . 

 _Thursday, August 4th. _--They will not let me take my sea-bath every morning; they say it makes me too weak. Do they mean in the head, I wonder?. .. "Let the sanguine then take warning, and the disheartened take courage, for to every hope and every fear, to every joy and every sorrow, there comes a last day, " which is but a didactic form of dear Mademoiselle Descuillier's conjuring of our impatiences: "Cela viendra, ma chère, cela viendra, car tout vient dans ce monde; cela passera, ma chère, cela passera, car tout passe dans ce monde. " . .. I finished my drawing, and copied some of "The Star of Seville. " I wonder if it will ever be acted? I think I should like to see a play of mine acted. In the evening at the theater, the play was "Isabella. " The house was very full, and I played well. The wretched manager will not afford us a green baize for our tragedies, and we faint and fall and die upon bare boards, and my unhappy elbows are bruised black and blue with their carpetless stage, barbarians that they be!

 _Friday, August 5th. _--Down to the sea at seven o'clock; the tide was far out, the lead-colored strand, without its bright foam-fringes, looked bleak and dreary; it was not expected to be batheable till eleven, and as I had not breakfasted, I could not wait till then. Lingered on the shore, as Tom Tug says, thinking of nothing at all, but inhaling the fresh air and delicious sea-smell. I stood and watched a party of pleasure put off from the shore, consisting of a basket of fuel, two baskets of provisions, a cross-looking, thin, withered, bony woman, wrapped in a large shawl, and with boots thick enough to have kept her dry if she had walked through the sea from Plymouth to Mount Edgecombe. Her _tête-à-tête_ companion was a short, thick, squat, stumpy, dumpy, dumpling of a man, in a round jacket, and very tight striped trousers. "Sure such a pair were never seen. " The sour she, stepped into their small boat first, but as soon as her fat playfellow seated himself by her, the poor little cockle-shell dipped so with the increased weight that the tail of the cross-shawl hung deep in the water. I called after them, and they rectified the accident without sending me back a "Thank you. " I love the manners of my country-folk, they are so unsophisticated with civility. 

 At the theater the play was "The Gamester, " for my benefit, and the house was very fine. My father played magnificently; I "not even excellent well, but only so-so. " The actors none of them knew their parts, abominable persons; and as for Stukely--well! Mdlle. Dumesnil, in her great, furious scene in Hermione, ended her imprecations against Orestes by spitting in her handkerchief and throwing it in his face. The handkerchief spoils the frenzy. I wonder if it ever occurred to Mrs. Siddons so to wind up her abuse of Austria in "King John. " By the by, it was when asked to give his opinion of the comparative merits of Clairon and Dumesnil, that Garrick said, "Mdlle. Clairon was the greatest actress of the age, but that for Mdlle. Dumesnil he was not aware that he had seen her, but only Phedre, Rodogund, and Hermione, when she did them. " After the play the audience clamored for my father. He thought that "l'envie leur en passerait;" and not being in a very good humor, he declined appearing. The uproar went on, the overture to the farce was inaudible, and the curtain drew up amid the deafening shouts of "Kemble! Kemble!"--they would not suffer the poor _farçeurs_ to go on, even in dumb show. I was at the side scene, and thought it really a pity not to put an end to all the fuss; so I went to my father, who was standing at the stage door in the street, and requested him to stop the disturbance by coming forward at once. He turned round, and without saying anything but "Tu me le conseilles, " walked straight upon the stage, and addressed the audience as follows: "Ladies and gentlemen, I had left the theater when word was brought to me that you had done me the honor to call for me; as I conclude you have done so merely in conformity to a custom which is becoming the fashion of calling for certain performers after the play, I can only say, ladies and gentlemen, that I enter my protest against such a custom. It is a foreign fashion, and we are Englishmen; therefore I protest against it. I will take my leave of you by parodying Mercutio's words: Ladies and gentlemen, _bon soir_; there's a French salutation for you. " So saying he walked off the stage, leaving the audience rather surprised; and so was I. I think he is laboring under an incipient bilious attack. 

 We had a long discussion to-day as to the possibility of women being good dramatic writers. I think it so impossible that I actually believe their physical organization is against it; and, after all, it is great nonsense saying that intellect is of no sex. The brain is, of course, of the same sex as the rest of the creature; besides, the original feminine nature, the whole of our training and education, our inevitable ignorance of common life and general human nature, and the various experience of existence, from which we are debarred with the most sedulous care, is insuperably against it. Perhaps some of the manly, wicked Queens Semiramis, Cleopatra, could have written plays; but they lived their tragedies instead of writing them. 

 _Saturday, August 6th. _--After breakfast our excellent architect came to fetch us for our expedition to the breakwater. My father complained of being dreadfully bilious, a bad preparation for the purpose. I wanted to stay at home with him, or at all events to put off the party for an hour or two; but he would not hear of either plan. So as soon as I was ready we set off. We walked first to the M----s', and then proceeded in a body to the shore, where a Government boat was waiting for us; and what a cargo we were, to be sure! My father, certainly no feather; our worthy friend, who must weigh eighteen stone, if a pound; Mr. And Mrs. W----, thinnish bodies; but her friend, Dall, and myself decidedly thickish ones; then the pilot, a gaunt, square Scotchman; and four stout sailors. The gallant little craft courtesied and courtesied as she received us, one by one, and at length, when we were all fairly and pretty closely packed, she put off, and breasted the water bravely, rising and dancing on the back of the waves like a dolphin. I should have enjoyed it but for my father's ghastly face of utter misery. The day was dull, the sky and sea lead-colored, the brown coast by degrees lost its distinctness, and became covered with a dark haze that seemed to blend everything into a still, stony, threatening iron-gray mass. The wind rose, the sea became inky black and swelled into heavy ridges, which made our little vessel dip deep and spring high, as she toiled forward; and then down came the rain--such tremendous rain! Cloaks, shawls, and umbrellas were speedily produced; but we were two miles from shore, between the rising sea and the falling clouds, sick, wet, squeezed. Oh the delights of that party of pleasure! My father looked cadaverous, Dall was portentously silent, I shut my eyes and tried to sleep, being in that state when to see, or hear, or speak, or be spoken to, is equally fatal. At length we reached the foot of the breakwater, and I sprang out of the boat, too happy to touch the stable rock. The rain literally fell in sheets from the sky, and the wind blew half a hurricane; but I was on firm ground, and taking off my bonnet, which only served the purpose of a water-spout down my back, I ran, while Mr. M----, holding my arm, strode along the mighty water-based road, while the angry sea, turning up black caldrons full of boiling foam, dashed them upon the barrier man has raised against its fury in magnificent, solemn wrath. This breakwater is a noble work; the daring of the conception, its vast size and strength, and the utility of its purpose, are alike admirable. We do these things and die; we ride upon the air and water, we guide the lightning and we bridle the sea, we borrow the swiftness of the wind and the fine subtlety of the fire; we lord it in this universe of ours for a day, and then our bodies are devoured by these material slaves we have controlled, and helplessly mingle their dust with the elements that have obeyed our will, who reabsorb the garment of our soul when that has fled--whither?

 The rain continuing to fall in torrents, and my father being wretchedly unwell, we gave up our purpose of visiting Mount Edgecombe, and returned to Plymouth. The sea was horribly rough, even inside the breakwater; but I shut my eyes that I might not see how we heaved, and sang that I might not think how sick I was: and so we reached shore, and I ran up and down the steep beach while the rest were disembarking, and the wind soon dried my light muslin clothes. The other poor things continued drenched till we reached home. After a good rest, we went to our dinner at Mr. W----'s; my father was all right again, and our party, that had separated in such dismal plight, met again very pleasantly in the evening. Mr. W---- got quite tipsy with talking, an accident not uncommon with eager, excitable men, and all but overwhelmed me with an argument about dramatic writing, in which he was wrong from beginning to end. .. . We leave Plymouth to-morrow. 

 _Sunday, August 7th. _--Started for Exeter at seven, and slept nearly the whole way by little bits; between each nap getting glimpses of the pleasant land that blended for a moment with my hazy, dream-like thoughts, and then faded away before my closing eyes. One patch of moorland that I woke to see was lovely--all purple heather and golden gorse; nature's royal mantle thrown, it is true, over a barren soil, whose gray, cold, rifted ridges of rock contrasted beautifully with its splendid clothing. We got to Exeter at two o'clock, and I was thankful to rest the rest of the day. 

 _Monday, August 8th. _--I read old Biagio's preface to Dante, which, from its amazing classicality, is almost as difficult as the crabbed old Florentine's own writing. Worked at a rather elaborate sketch tolerably successfully, and was charmingly interrupted by having our landlady's pretty little child brought in to me. She is a beautiful baby, but will be troublesome enough by and by. .. . At the theater the house was very good; I played tolerably well upon the whole, but felt so fagged and faint toward the end of the play that I could hardly stand. 

 _Tuesday, August 9th. _--I sometimes wish I was a stone, a tree, some senseless, soulless, irresponsible thing; that ebbing sea rolling before me, its restlessness is obedience to the law of its nature, not striving against it, neither is it "the miserable life in it" urging it to ceaseless turmoil and agitation. We dined early, and then started for Dorchester, which we reached at half-past ten, after a most fatiguing journey. It was a still, gray day, an atmosphere and light I like; there is a clearness about it that is pleasanter sometimes than the dazzle of sunshine. Some of the country we drove through was charming, particularly the vale of Honiton. .. . I have an immense bedroom here; a whole army of ghosts might lodge in it. I hope, if there are any, they will be civil, well-behaved, and, above all, invisible. 

 _Wednesday, August 10th. _ . .. At ten o'clock we started for Weymouth, where we arrived in the course of an hour, and found it basking on the edge of a lovely summer sea, with a dozen varying zones of color streaking its rippling surface; from the deep, dark purple heaving against the horizon to the delicate pearl-edged, glassy golden-green that spreads its transparent sheets over the sparkling sand of the beach. The bold chalky cliffs of the shore send back the burning sunlight with blinding brightness, and stretch away as far as eye can follow in hazy outlines, that glimmer faintly through the shimmering mist. It is all very beautiful. .. . I got ready my things for the theater, . .. And when I got there I was amused and amazed at its absurdly small proportions; it is a perfect doll's playhouse, and until I saw that my father really could stand upon the stage, I thought that I should fill it entirely by myself. How well I remember all the droll stories my mother used to tell about old King George III. And Queen Charlotte, who had a passion for Weymouth, and used to come to the funny little theater here constantly; and how the princesses used to dress her out in their own finery for some of her parts. [I long possessed a very perfect coral necklace of magnificent single beads given to my mother on one of these occasions by the Princess Amelia. ] The play was "Romeo and Juliet, " and our masquerade scene was in the height of the modern fashion, for there was literally not room to stir; and what between my nurse and my father I suffered very nearly total eclipse, besides much danger of being knocked down each time either of them moved. In the balcony, besides me, there was a cloud, which occasionally interfered with my hair, and I think must have made my face appear to the audience like a chin and mouth speaking out of the sky. To be sure, this inconvenient scenic decoration made rather more appropriate the lines which Shakespeare wrote (only unfortunately Romeo never speaks them), "Two of the stars, " etc. I acted very well, but was so dreadfully tired at the end of the play that they were obliged to carry me up to my dressing-room, where I all but fainted away; in spite of which, as I got out of the carriage at the door of our lodging, hearing the dear voice of the sea calling me, I tried to persuade Dall to come down to it with me; but she, thinking I had had enough of emotion and exertion, made me go in and eat my supper and go to bed, which was detestable on her part, and so I told her, which she didn't mind in the least. 

 _Thursday, August 11th. _--A kind and courteous and most courtly old Mr. M---- called upon us, to entreat that we would dine with him during our stay in Weymouth; but it is really impossible, with all our hard work, to do society duty too, so I begged permission to decline. After he was gone we walked down to the pier, and took boat and rowed to Portland. The sky was cloudless, and the sea without a wave, and through its dark-blue transparent roofing we saw clearly the bottom, one forest of soft, undulating weeds, which, catching the sunlight through the crystal-clear water, looked like golden woods of some enchanted world within its depths; and it looks just as weird and lovely when folks go drowning down there, only they don't see it. I sang Mrs. Hemans's "What hid'st thou in thy treasure-caves and cells?" and sang and sang till, after rowing for an hour over the hardly heaving, smooth surface, we reached the foot of the barren stone called Portland. We landed, and Dall remained on the beach while my father and I toiled up the steep ascent. The sun's rays fell perpendicularly on our heads, the short, close grass which clothed the burning, stony soil was as slippery as glass with the heat, and I have seldom had a harder piece of exercise than climbing that rock, from the summit of which one wide expanse of dazzling water and glaring white cliffs, that scorched one's eyeballs, was all we had for our reward. To be sure, exertion is a pleasure in itself, and when one's strength serves one's courage, the greater the exertion the greater the pleasure. We saw below us a railroad cut in the rock to convey the huge masses of stone from the famous quarries down to the shore. The descent looked almost vertical, and we watched two immense loads go slowly down by means of a huge cylinder and chains, which looked as if the world might hang upon them in safety. I lay down on the summit of the rock while my father went off exploring further, and the perfect stillness of the solitude was like a spell. There was not a sound of life but the low, drowsy humming of the bees in the stone-rooted tufts of fragrant thyme. On our return we had to run down the steep, slippery slopes, striking our feet hard to the earth to avoid falling; firm walking footing there was none. When we joined Dall we found, to our utter dismay, that it was five o'clock; we bundled ourselves _pêle-mêle_ into the boat and bade the boatman row, row, for dear life; but while we were indulging in the picturesque he had been indulging in fourpenny, which made him very talkative, and his tongue went faster than his arms. I longed for John to make our boat fly over the smooth, burnished sea; the oars came out of the water like long bars of diamond dropping gold. We touched shore just at six, swallowed three mouthfuls of dinner, and off to the theater. The play was "Venice Preserved. " I dressed as quick as lightning, and was ready in time. The house was not very good, and I am sure I should have wondered if it had been, when the moon is just rising over the fresh tide that is filling the basin, and a delicious salt breeze blows along the beach, and the stars are lighting their lamps in heaven; and surely nobody but those who cannot help it would be breathing the gas and smoke and vile atmosphere of the playhouse. I played well, and when we came home ran down and stood a few minutes by the sea; but the moon had set, and the dark palpitating water only reflected the long line of lights from the houses all along the curving shore. 

 _Friday, August 12th, Portsmouth. _-- . .. The hotel where we are staying is quite a fine house, and the Assembly balls used to be held here, and so there is a fine large "dancing-hall deserted" of which I avail myself as a music-room, having entire and solitary possession of it and a piano. .. . At the theater the house was good, and I played well. .. . 

 _Monday, August 15th, Southampton. _--After breakfast practised till eleven, and then went to rehearsal; after which Emily Fitzhugh came for me, and we drove out to Bannisters. Poor Mrs. Fitzhugh was quite overcome at seeing my father, whom she has not seen since Mrs. Siddons's death; we left her with him to talk over Campbell's application to her for my aunt's letters. He has behaved badly about the whole business, and I hope Mrs. Fitzhugh will not let him have them. .. . When we came in I went and looked at Lawrence's picture of my aunt in the dining-room (now in the National Gallery; it was painted for Mrs. Fitzhugh). It is a fine rich piece of coloring, but there is a want of ease and grace in the figure, and of life in the countenance, and altogether I thought it looked like a handsome dark cow in a coral necklace. O ox-eyed Juno! forgive the thought. .. . At the theater the house was good; the play was "Romeo and Juliet, " and I played well. While I was changing my dress for the tomb scene--putting on my grave-clothes, in fact--I had desired my door to be shut, for I hate that lugubrious funeral-dirge. How I do hate, and have always hated, that stage funeral business, which I never see without a cold shudder at its awful unfitness. I can't conceive how that death's pageant was ever tolerated in a theater. [I think Mrs. Bellamy, in her "Memoirs, " mentions that it was first introduced as a piece of new sensation when she and Garrick were dividing the town with the efforts of their rival managership. ] At present the pretext for it is to give the necessary time for setting the churchyard scene and for Juliet to change her dress, which she has no business to do according to the text, for it expressly says that she shall be buried in all her finest attire, according to her country's custom. In spite of which I was always arrayed in long white muslin draperies and veils, with my head bound up, corpse fashion, and lying, as my aunt had stretched me, on the black bier in the vault, with all my white folds drawn like carved stone robes along my figure and round my feet, with my hands folded and my eyes shut. I have had some bad nervous minutes, sometimes fancying, "Suppose I should really die while I am lying here, making believe to be dead!" and imagining the surprise and dismay of my Romeo when I didn't get up; and at others fighting hard against heavy drowsiness of over-fatigue, lest I should be fast asleep, if not dead, when it came to my turn to speak--though I might have depended upon the furious bursting open of the doors of the vault for my timely waking. Talking over this with Mrs. Fitzhugh one day she told me a comical incident of the stage life of her friend, the fascinating Miss Farren. The devotion of the Earl of Derby to her, which preceded for a long time the death of Lady Derby, from whom he was separated, and his marriage to Miss Farren, made him a frequent visitor behind the scenes on the nights of her performance. One evening, in the famous scene in Joseph Surface's library in "The School for Scandal, " when Lady Teazle is imprisoned behind the screen, Miss Farren, fatigued with standing, and chilled with the dreadful draughts of the stage, had sent for an armchair and her furs, and when this critical moment arrived, and the screen was overturned, she was revealed, in her sable muff and tippet, entirely absorbed in an eager conversation with Lord Derby, who was leaning over the back of her chair. 

 _Tuesday, 16th, Southampton. _--After breakfast walked down to the city wall, which has remnants of great antiquity they say, as old as the Danes, one bit being still heroically called "Canute's Castle. "

 _Wednesday, August 17th. _--Went to the theater, and rehearsed "The Stranger. " On my return found Emily waiting for me, and drove with her to Bannisters. .. . In the evening, at the theater, the house was very good, but I played only so-so, and not at all excellent well. .. . 

 _Thursday, August 18th. _--While I was practising I came across that pretty piece of ballad pathos, "The Banks of Allan Water, " and sang myself into sobbing. Luckily I was interrupted by Dall and my father, who came in with a little girl, poor unfortunate! whose father had brought her to show how well she deserved an engagement at Covent Garden. She sat down to the piano at his desire, and panted through the great cavatina in the "Gazza Ladra. " Poor little thing! I never heard or saw anything that so thoroughly impressed me with the brutal ignorance of our people; for there is scarcely an Englishman of that man's condition, situated as he is, who would not have done the same thing. A child of barely ten years old made to sing her lungs away for four hours every day, when it is not possible yet to know what the character and qualities of her voice will be, or even if she will have any voice at all. Wasting her health and strength in attempting "The Soldier Tired" and "Di piacer, " it really was pitiful. We gave her plenty of kind words and compliments, and sundry pieces of advice to him, which he will not take, and in a few months no doubt we shall hear of little Miss H---- singing away as a prodigy, and in a few years the voice, health, and strength will all be gone, and probably the poor little life itself have been worn out of its fragile case. Stupid barbarian! After rehearsal drove to Bannisters. .. . In the evening, at the theater, the play was "The Provoked Husband. " The house was very full; I played fairly well. I was rather tired, and Lady Townley's bones ached, for I had been taking a rowing lesson from Emily, and supplied my want of skill, tyro fashion, with a deal of unnecessary effort. 

 _Friday, August 19th. _-- . .. It sometimes occurs to me that our spirits, when dwelling with the utmost intensity of longing upon those who are distant from us, must create in them some perception, some consciousness of our spiritual presence, so that not by the absent whom I love thinking of me, but by my thinking of them, they must receive some intimation of the vividness with which my soul sees and feels them. It seems to me as if my earnest desire and thought must not bring those they dwell on to me, but render me in some way perceptible, if not absolutely visible, to them. 

 "Though thou see me not pass by, Thou shalt feel me with thine eye. "

 I fancy I must create my own image to their senses by the clinging passion with which my thoughts dwell on them. And yet it would be rather fearful if one were thus subject, not only to the disordered action of one's own imagination, but to the ungoverned imaginations of others; and so, upon the whole, I don't believe people would be allowed to pester other people with their presence only by dint of thinking hard enough and long enough about them. It would be intolerable, and yet I have sometimes fancied I was thinking myself visible to some one. .. . In the evening, at the theater, the house was very good; the play was "The Gamester, " and I played very ill. I felt fagged to death; my work tires me, and I am growing old. 

 _Saturday, 20th. _--At Bannisters all the morning. Emily gave me two charming Italian songlets, and then they drove us down to Southampton. At the theater this evening the house was all but empty, owing to some stupid blunder in the advertisement. The play was "The School for Scandal, " and I played well. .. . To-morrow I shall be at home once more in smoky London. 

 SOUTHAMPTON, August 19, 1831. MY DEAREST H----, I do not like to defer answering you any longer, though I am not very fit to write, for I am half blind with crying, and have a torturing side-ache, the results of bodily fatigue and nervous anxiety; but if I do not write to you to-night I know not when I shall be able to do so, for I shall have to rehearse every morning and to act every night, and I expect the intermediate hours will be spent on the road to and from Bannisters, the Fitzhughs' place near here. I have been traveling ever since half-past eight to-day, and, have hardly been three hours out of the coach which brought us from Weymouth, where we have been acting for the last week. Your letter followed me from Plymouth, and right glad I was to get it. .. . I do not know what I can write you of if not myself, and I dare say, after all, my thoughts are more amusing to you, or rather, perhaps, more useful, in your processes of observing and studying human nature in general, through my individual case, than if I wrote you word what plays we had been acting, etc. , etc. .. . To meet pain, no matter how severe, the mind girds up its loins, and finds a sort of strength of resistance in its endurance, which is a species of activity. To endure helplessly prolonged suspense is another matter quite, and a far heavier demand upon all patient power than is in one. .. . 

 So you have seen the railroad; I am so glad you have seen that magnificent invention. I wish I had been on it with you. I wish you had seen Stephenson; you would have delighted in him, I am sure. The hope of meeting him again is one of the greatest pleasures Liverpool holds out to me. .. . With regard to what are called "fine people, " and liking their society better than that of "not fine people, " I suppose a good many tolerable reasons might be adduced by persons who have that preference. They do not often say very wise or very witty things, I dare say; but neither do they tread on one's feet or poke their elbows into one's side (figuratively speaking) in their conversation, or commit the numerous solecisms of manner of less well-bred people. For myself, my social position does not entitle me to mix with the superior class of human beings generally designated as "fine people. " My father's indolence renders their society an irksome exertion to him, and my mother's pride always induces her to hang back rather than to make advances to anybody. We are none of us, therefore, inclined to be very keen tuft-hunters. But for these very reasons, if "fine people" seek me, it is a decided compliment, by which my vanity is flattered. A person with less of that quality might be quite indifferent to their notice, but I think their society, as far as I have had any opportunity of observing it, has certain positive merits, which attract me irrespectively of the gratification of my vanity. Genius and pre-eminent power of intellect, of course, belong to no class, and one would naturally prefer the society of any individual who possessed these to that of the King of England (who, by the by, is not, I believe, particularly brilliant). I would rather pass a day with Stephenson than with Lord Alvanley, though the one is a coal-digger by birth, who occasionally murders the king's English, and the other is the keenest wit and one of the finest gentlemen about town. But Stephenson's attributes of genius, industry, mental power, and perseverance are his individually, while Lord Alvanley's gifts and graces (his wit, indeed, excepted) are, in good measure, those of his whole social set. Moreover, in the common superficial intercourse of society, the minds and morals of those you meet are really not what you come in contact with half the time, while from their manners there is, of course, no escape; and therefore those persons may well be preferred as temporary associates whose manners are most refined, easy, and unconstrained, as I think those of so-called "fine people" are. Originality and power of intellect belong to no class, but with information, cultivation, and the mental advantages derived from education, "fine people" are perhaps rather better endowed, as a class, than others. Their lavish means for obtaining instruction, and their facilities for traveling, if they are but moderately endowed by nature and moderately inclined to profit by them, certainly enable them to see, hear, and know more of the surface of things than others. This is, no doubt, a merely superficial superiority; but I suppose that there are not many people, and certainly no class of people, high, low, or of any degree, who go much below surfaces. .. . If you knew how, long after I have passed it, the color of a tuft of heather, or the smell of a branch of honeysuckle by the roadside, haunts my imagination, and how many suggestions of beauty and sensations of pleasure flow from this small spring of memory, even after the lapse of weeks and months, you would understand what I am going to say, which perhaps may appear rather absurd without such a knowledge of my impressions. I think I like fine places better than "fine people;" but then one accepts, as it were, the latter for the former, and the effect of the one, to a certain degree, affects one's impressions of the other. A great ball at Devonshire House, for instance, with its splendor, its brilliancy, its beauty, and magnificence of all sorts, remains in one's mind with the enchantment of a live chapter of the "Arabian Nights;" and I think one's imagination is still more impressed with the fine residences of "fine people" in the country, where historical and poetical associations combine with all the refinements of luxurious civilization and all the most exquisitely cultivated beauties of nature to produce an effect which, to a certain degree, frames their possessors to great advantage, and invests them with a charm which is really not theirs; and if they are only tolerably in harmony with the places where they live, they appear charming too. I believe the pleasure and delight I take in the music, the lights, the wreaths, and mirrors of a splendid ball-room, and the love I have for the smooth lawns, bright waters, and lordly oaks of a fine domain, would disgracefully influence my impressions of the people I met amongst them. Still, I humbly trust I do not like any of my friends, fine or coarse, only for their belongings, though my intercourse with the first gratifies my love of luxury and excites what my Edinburgh friends call my ideality. I don't think, however. I ever could like anybody, of any kind whatever, that I could not heartily respect, let their intellectual gifts, elegance, or refinement of manners be what they might. Good-by, dearest H----. 

 Ever your affectionate F. A. K. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, October 3, 1831. MY DEAREST H----, I received your last letter on Thursday morning, and as I read it exclaimed, "We shall be able to go to her!" and passed it to Dall, who seemed to think there was no reason why we should not, when my father said he was afraid it could not be managed, as the theater, upon second arrangements, would require me before this month was over. It seems to me that, instead of one disappointment, I have had twenty about coming to you, dear H----, and the last has fairly broken the poor camel's back. My father promised to see what could be done for me, and to get me spared as long as possible; but the final arrangement is, that on the 24th I shall have to act Queen Katharine, for which, certainly, a week of daily rehearsals will be barely sufficient preparation. This, you see, will leave me hardly time enough to stay at Ardgillan to warrant the fatigue and expense of the journey. I am afraid it would be neither reasonable nor right to spend nearly a week in traveling and the money it must cost, to pass a fortnight with you. .. . Give my love to your sister, and tell her how willingly I would have accepted her hospitality had circumstances permitted it; but "circumstances, " of which we are so apt to complain, may, perhaps, at some future time, allow me to be once more her guest. The course of events is, after all, far more impartial than, in moments of disappointment, we are apt to admit, and quite as often procures us unexpected and unthought-of pleasures as defeats those we had proposed for ourselves. Pazienza! Dear Dall, who, I see, has produced her invariable impression upon your mind, bids me thank you for the kind things you say of her, at the same time that she says, "though they are undeserved, she is thankful for the affection that dictates them. " She is excellent. You bid me tell you of my father, and how his health and spirits continue to struggle against his exertions and anxieties: tolerably well, thank God! I sometimes think they have the properties of that palm tree which is said to grow under the pressure of immense weights. He looks very well, and, except the annoyances of his position in the theater, has rather less cause for depression than for some time past. Though we have not yet obtained our "decree, " we understand that the Lord Chancellor says openly that we shall get it, so that uncertainty of the issue no longer aggravates the wearisome delays of this unlucky appeal. .. . I need not tell you what my feeling about acting Queen Katharine is; you, who know how conscious I am of my own deficiencies for such an undertaking, will easily conceive my distress at having such a task assigned me. Dall, who entirely agrees with me about it, wishes me to remonstrate upon the subject, but that I will not do. I am in that theater to earn my living by serving its interests, and if I was desired to act Harlequin, for those two purposes, should feel bound to do so. But I cannot help thinking the management short-sighted. I think their real interest, as far as I am concerned, which they overlook for some immediate tangible advantage, is not to destroy my popularity by putting me into parts which I must play ill, and not to take from my future career characters which require physical as well as mental maturity, and which would be my natural resources when I no longer become Juliet and her youthful sisters of the drama. But of course they know their own affairs, and I am not the manager of the theater. Those who have its direction, I suppose, make the best use they can of their instruments. 

[My performance of Queen Katharine was not condemned as an absolutefailure only because the public in general didn't care about it, and thefriends and well-wishers of the theater were determined not to considerit one. But as I myself remember it, it deserved to be called nothingelse; it was a school-girl's performance, tame, feeble, and ineffective, entirely wanting in the weight and dignity indispensable for the part, and must sorely have tried the patience and forbearance of such of myspectators as were fortunate and unfortunate enough to remember my aunt;one of whom, her enthusiastic admirer, and my excellent friend, Mr. Harness, said that seeing me in that dress was like looking at Mrs. Siddons through the diminishing end of an opera-glass: I should think myacting of the part must have borne much the same proportion to hers. Iwas dressed for the trial scene in imitation of the famous picture byHarlow, and of course must have recalled, in the most provoking andabsurd manner, the great actress whom I resembled so little and so much. In truth, I could hardly sustain the weight of velvet and ermine inwhich I was robed, and to which my small girlish figure was as littleadapted as my dramatic powers were to the matronly dignity of thecharacter. I cannot but think that if I might have dressed the part asQueen Katharine really dressed herself, and been allowed to look as likeas I could to the little dark, hard-favored woman Holbein painted, itwould have been better than to challenge such a physical as well asdramatic comparison by the imitation of my aunt's costume in the part. Englishmen of her day will never believe that Katharine of Arragon couldhave looked otherwise than Mrs. Siddons did in Shakespeare's play of"Henry VIII. ;" but nothing could in truth be more unlike the historicalwoman than the tall, large, bare-armed, white-necked, Juno-eyed, ermine-robed ideal of queenship of the English stage. That quintessenceof religious, conscientious bigotry and royal Spanish pride is given, both in the portraits of contemporary painters and in Shakespeare'sdelineation of her; the splendid magnificence of my aunt's person anddress, as delineated in Harlow's picture, has no affinity whatever tothe real woman's figure, or costume, or character. ]

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, October 12, 1831. DEAREST H----, I received my book and your letter very safely about a week ago, and would have written to say so sooner, but have been much occupied with one thing and another that has prevented me. So you are beaten, _vieilles perukes_ that you are! not by one or two, but by forty-one; and your bones are all the likelier to ache, and I am not at all sorry. Think of Brougham going down on his marrow-bones (there can be none in them, though), and adjuring the Lords, con quella voce! e quel viso! to pass the Bill, like good boys, and remember the schoolmaster, who surely, when he is at home, cannot be said to be abroad. A good _coup de théâtre_ is not an easy thing, and requires a good deal of tact and skill. I cannot help thinking there must have been something grotesque in this performance of Brougham's, as when Liston turned tragedian and recited Collins's "Ode to the Passions" in a green coat and top boots. The excitement, however, was tremendous; the House thronged to suffocation; as many people crammed into impossible space as the angels in the famous Needle-point controversy. Lady Glengall declares that she sat for four hours on an iron bar. I think this universal political effervescence has got into my head. And what will you do now? You cannot create forty-one Peers; the whole Book of Genesis affords no precedent. I suppose Parliament will be prorogued, ministers will go out, a "cloth of gold" and "cloth of frieze" Government, with Brougham and Wellington brought together into it, will be cobbled, and a new Bill, which will set the teeth of the Lords so badly on edge, will be concocted, which the people will accept rather than nothing, if they are taken in the right way. That, I suppose, is what you Whigs will do; for an adverse majority of forty-one must be turned somehow or other, as it can hardly be gone straight at by folks who mean to keep on the box, or hold the reins, or carry the coach to the end of the journey. .. . 

 I do not know at all how I should like to live in a palace; I am furiously fond of magnificence and splendor, and not unreasonably, seeing that I was born in a palace, with a sapphire ceiling hung with golden lamps, and velvet floors all embroidered with sweet-smelling, lovely-colored flowers, and walls of veined marble and precious, sparkling stones. I almost doubt if any mere royal palace would be good enough for me, or answer my turn. I should like all the people in the world to be as beautiful as angels, and go about crowned with glory and clothed with light (dear me, how very different they are!); but failing all that I should like in the way of enormously beautiful things, I pick up and treasure like a baby all the little broken bits of splendor and sumptuousness, and thank Heaven that their number and gradations are infinite, from the rainbow that the sun spans the heavens with, to the fine, small jewel drawn from the bowels of the earth to glitter on a lady's neck. .. . 

 My dearest H----, I wish I were with you with all my heart, but, as if to diminish my regret by putting the thing still further beyond the region of possibility, I act next Monday the 17th, instead of the 24th. (They say "a miss is as good as a mile;" why does it always seem so much worse, then?) I begin with Belvidera, and have already begun my cares and woes and tribulations about lilac satins and silver tissues, etc. , etc. Young is engaged with us, and plays Pierre, and my father Giaffir, which will be very dreadful for me; I do not know how I shall be able to bear all his wretchedness as well as my own. To be a good politician one ought to have, as it were, only one eye for truth; I do not at all mean to be single-eyed in the good sense of the word, but to be incapable of seeing more than one side of every question: one sees a part so much more strongly when one does not see the whole of a matter, and though a statesman may need a hundred eyes, I maintain that a party politician is the better for having only one. Restricted vision is good for work, too; people who see far and wide can seldom be very hopeful, I should think, and hope is the very essence of working courage. The matter in hand should always, if possible, be the great matter to those who have to carry it through, and though broad brains may be the best for conceiving, narrow ones are, perhaps, the best for working with. 

 Thank you for your quotation from Sir Humphry Davy; it did me good, and even made me better for five minutes; and your Irish letter, which interested me extremely. "Walking the world. " What a sad and touching expression; and how well it describes a broken and desponding spirit! And yet what else are we all doing, in soul if not in body? Is not that solitary, wandering feeling the very essence of our existence here?

 You ask if the interests of the theater and mine are not identical? No, I think not. The management seems to me like our Governments for some time past, to be actuated by mere considerations of temporary expediency; that which serves a momentary purpose is all they consider. But it stands to reason that if they make me play parts in which I must fail, my London popularity must decrease, and with it my provincial profits; and that, of course, is a serious thing. In short, dear H----, where success means bread and butter, failure means dry bread, or none; and I hate the last, I believe, less than the first, though, as I never tried starvation, perhaps dry bread is nicer. .. . 

 The excitement about the Bill is rising instead of subsiding. The shops are all shut, and the people meeting in every direction; the windows of Apsley House have been smashed, and Wellington's statue (the Achilles in the Park) pelted and threatened to be pulled down. They say that Nottingham and Belvoir Castles are burnt down. All this is bad, and bodes, I fear, worse. Good-by, dear. 

 Your affectionate F. A. K. 

 _Thursday, August 22d. _--I read some of "Cibber's Lives. " I should like to read a well-written French life of Alin Chartier, Louis XI. 's ugly secretary, whose mouth Queen Margaret kissed while he was sleeping, "parce qu'elle avait dit de si belles choses. " In the life, or rather the death, of Sackville, he notes his sitting up till eleven at night as a manifest waste of human existence. It is near two in the morning as I am now writing, but people's notions change as to time as well as other things. We don't dine at twelve any more. Macdonald, the sculptor, dined with us; I like him for dear Scotland's sake, and the blessed time I passed there. After the gentlemen came up into the drawing-room, Nourrit, the great French tenor, sang delightfully for us; Adelaide sang and played, and Nourrit made her try a charming duet from the "Dame Blanche, " which I accompanied, and was frightened to death for self and sister. Macdonald wants to make a statue of me in "The Grecian Daughter, " at the moment of veiling the face: he is right. An interval of some time elapsed, in which I did not keep my journal regularly. I had a long visit from my friend Miss S----. The lawsuit about the theater continued, the affairs of the concern becoming more and more involved in difficulties every day; and my father, worried almost to death with anxiety, vexation, and hard work, had a serious illness. 

 _Saturday, November 25th. _--My father was not quite so well this morning. I took Dr. Wilson home in the carriage; he talked a great deal about this horrible burking business (a series of atrocious murders committed by two wretches of the names of Burk and Bishop, for the purpose of obtaining, for the corpses of their victims, the price paid by the Edinburgh surgeons for subjects for dissection; the mode of death inflicted by these men came to be designated by the name of the more hardened murderer as burking). 

 I called at Fozzard's for the boys, and set them down at Angelo's (a famous school for fencing, boxing, and single-stick, where my brothers took lessons in those polite exercises). In the evening, at the theater, dear Charles Young played "The Stranger" for the last time; the house was very full, and I played very ill. After the play Young was enthusiastically called for. I have finished "Tennant's Tour in Greece, " which I rather liked. I have been reading "Bonaparte's Letters to Joséphine;" the vague and doubting spirit which once or twice throws its wavering shadow across his thoughts, startles one in contrast with the habitual tone of the mind, which assuredly _ne doubtait de rien_, especially of what his own power of will could accomplish. The affection he expresses for his wife is sometimes almost poetical from its intensity, in spite of the grossness of his language. He seems to have believed in nothing but volition, and that volition is in itself, perhaps, a mere form of faith. It's a dangerous worship, for the devil in that shape does obey so long and so well before he claims his due; so much is achieved precisely by that belief in what can be achieved; the last round of the ladder, somehow or other, however, always seems to break down at last, and then I doubt if the people who fall from it can all declare, as Holcroft did when he fell from his horse, and, as his surgeon assured him, broke his ribs, that he was positive he had not, because in falling he had exerted the energy of will, and could not therefore have broken his bones. 

 _Sunday, 29th. _--The great good fortune of a good sermon at church. After church Mrs. Jameson, John Mason, and Mr. Loudham called; the latter said he had good news about that fatal theater of ours, for that Mr. Harris seemed to be inclined to come into some accommodation, and so perhaps this cancer of a Chancery suit may stop eating our lives away. Oh dear! I am afraid this is too good news to be true. I went to my father's room and sat by him for a long time, and talked about the horse I had bought for him; and there he lies in his bed, and God knows when he will even be able to walk again. 

 _Monday, 30th. _--I went to rehearsal. It seems that the managers and proprietors (of course not my poor father) had summoned a meeting of all the actors to try and induce them to accept for the present a reduced rate of salary till the theater can be in some measure relieved of its most pressing difficulties. I knew nothing of this, and, finding them all very solemnly assembled in the greenroom, asked them cheerfully why they were all there, which must have struck them strangely enough. I dare say they do not know how little I know, or wish to know, about this disastrous concern. On my return home, I heard that Dr. Watson had seen my father, and requested that Dr. Wilson might be sent for. They fear inflammation of the lungs; he has gone to the very limit of his tether, for had he continued fagging a night or two longer the effects might have been fatal. Poor, poor father!. .. 

 Lady Francis and Mrs. Sullivan called in the afternoon; I was feeling miserable, and exhausted with my rehearsal. In the evening I helped my mother to move all the furniture, which I think is nothing in the world but a restless indication of her anxiety about my father; it is the fourth time since she same back from the country. 

 _Tuesday, December 1st. _-- . .. It seems that in the arrangement, whatever it may be, which has taken place between the actors and the management, Mr. Harley and Mr. Egerton are the only ones who have declined the proposed accommodation. Young has behaved like an angel, offering to play for nothing till Christmas; how kind and liberal he is! Mr. Abbott, Mr. Duraset, Mr. Ward, and all the others, have been as considerate and generous as possible. But the thing is doomed, and will go to the ground, in spite of every effort that can be made to stave the ruin off. 

 I was greeted this morning, when I came down to breakfast, with a question that surprised and amused we very much. "Pray, Fanny, " said John, "did you ever thank Mr. Bacon (one of the editors of the _Times_) for his book (the "Life of Francis I. " which Mr. Bacon had been kind enough to send me); for here is a very abusive critique in to-day's _Times_ of the play last night. " "Well, " thought I, "that's a comical _sequitur_, and a fine estimate of criticism;" but the conclusion was droller still. I had not forgotten to thank the friendly author for his book, nor had he written the article in question; but it seems a young gentleman, much in love with Miss Phillips (a promising and very handsome young actress at Drury Lane), had found pulling me to pieces the easiest way of showing his admiration for her. That is not a very exalted style of criticism either, but it is just as well that one should occasionally know what the praise and blame one receives may be worth. It seems that when it was determined that Miss Sheriff should come out, Mr. Welsh, whose pupil she was, made a great feast, and invited two-and-twenty gentlemen connected with the press to a private hearing of her. .. . In the evening, we all went to hear her, being every way much interested in her success. John and Henry went into the front of the house; my mother, Dr. Moore (the Rev. Dr. Moore, a great friend of my father and mother's), and myself, went up to our own box. The house was crammed, the pit one black, crowded mass. Poor child! I turned as cold as ice as the symphony of "Fair Aurora" (the opera was "Artaxerxes") began, and she came forward with Mr. Wilson. The bravos, the clapping, the noise, the great sound of popular excitement overpowering in all its manifestations; and the contrast between the sense of power conveyed by the acclamations of a great concourse of people, and the weakness of the individual object of that demonstration, gave me the strangest sensation when I remembered my own experience, which I had not seen. When I saw the thousands of eyes of that crowded pitful of men, and heard their stormy acclamations, and then looked at the fragile, helpless, pretty young creature standing before them trembling with terror, and all woman's fear and shame in such an unnatural position, I more than ever marveled how I, or any woman, could ever have ventured on so terrible a trial, or survived the venture. It seemed to me as if the mere gaze of all that multitude must melt the slight figure away like a wreath of vapor in the sun, or shrivel it up like a scrap of silver paper before a blazing fire. It made poor Dr. Moore and myself both cry, but there was a deal more sympathy in my tears than in his; for I had known the dizzy terror of that moment, had felt the ground slide from under my feet and the whole air become a sea of fiery rings before my swimming eyes. Besides my fellow-feeling for her actual agony, I had one for what her after trials may be, and I hoped for her that she might be able to see the truth of all things in the midst of all things false; and then, if she takes pleasure in her gilded toys, she will not have too bitter a heartache when they are broken. She sang well, and soon recovered from her fright, which, even from the first, did not affect her voice. She is rather pretty, but does not walk or move gracefully; she was well dressed, all but her hair, which was dressed in the present frizzy French fashion, and looked ridiculous for Mandane. Her singing was good, of a good style; I do not mean only that she sang "Fly, soft ideas, fly, " and "Monster away!" and "The Soldier Tired, " brilliantly, because they do not test the best singing, but the _soave sostenuto_ of her "If e'er the cruel tyrant love, " and "Let not rage thy bosom firing, " were specimens of the best and most difficult school of singing. They were flowing, smooth, soft, and sweet, without trick or device of mere florid ornamentation, and were as intrinsically good in her execution as they are admirable in that peculiar style of composition. Her shake is not genuine, and some of her rapid descending scales want finish and accuracy; her use of her arms and her gestures were very pretty and graceful, and we were all greatly pleased with her. Braham was magnificently great, in spite of his inches. What a noble artist he is! and with what wonderful vigor he acts through his singing! being no actor at all the moment he stops singing. Wilson sang out of tune; the music is not in his voice, and he was frightened. Miss Cawse was rather a dumpy Artaxerxes, which is an impertinent remark for me to make; she has a beautiful contralto voice. The opera went off brilliantly, and after it the audience called for "God Save the King, " which was performed. Paganini was in the box opposite to us; what a cadaverous-looking creature he is! Came home and saw my father, and gave him the report of Miss Sheriff's success. .. . 

 _Friday, December 2d. _-- . .. I went to see Cecilia Siddons; I thought her looking aged and thin, and Mrs. Wilkinson (Mrs. Siddons's companion for many years previous to her death) looking sad and ill too. They have both lost the one idea of their whole lives. 

 _Saturday, 3d. _-- . .. It seems the doctors recommend my father's going to Brighton. I was urging him to do so this morning. .. . After tea I looked on the map for Rhodez, the scene of that horrible Fualdes tragedy (a murder the commission of which involved some singular and terribly dramatic incidents). I read Daru's "History of Venice" till bedtime. 

 _Sunday, December 4th. _-- . .. My father, for the first time this fortnight, was able to dine with us. After dinner I read the whole trial of Bishop and Williams, and their confession. My mother is reading aloud to us Lord Edward Fitzgerald's Life. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, December 4, 1831. DEAR H----, It is at the sensible hour of a quarter-past twelve at night that I begin this immense sheet of paper, and with the sensible purpose of filling it before I go to bed. .. . What an unsatisfactory invention letter-writing is, to be sure; and yet there is none better for the purpose. When you asked me so affectionately in your letter whether I was going to bed, I concluded naturally that you were writing to me instead of doing so yourself; but I received the letter at half-past nine in the morning, when I was getting ready to ride. This sort of epistolary cross-questions and crooked answers is sometimes droll, but oftener sad: we weep with those who did weep, when they have dried their eyes; and rejoice with those who did rejoice, but the corners of whose mouths are already drawn down for crying, while we fancy we are smiling sympathetically with them. .. . You ask me how the world goes with me, and I can only say round, as I suppose it does with everybody. All goes on precisely as usual with me; my life is exceedingly uniform, and it is seldom that anything occurs to disturb its monotonous routine. My dear father, thank Heaven, is better, but still very weak, and I fear it will be yet some time before he recovers his strength. He came down to dinner to-day for the first time in this fortnight; indeed, it is only since the day before yesterday that he has left his bed; but I trust that this attack will serve him for a long time, and that with rest and quiet he will regain his strength. 

 I am really glad my aunt Kemble is better, though I remember having some not unpleasant ideas as to how, if she were not, you would go to Leamington to nurse her, and so come on and stay with us in London; but I cannot wish it at the price of her prolonged indisposition, poor woman!. .. I am sorry to say my father is pronounced worse to-day; he has a bad side-ache, and they are applying mustard poultices to overcome it. There is some apprehension of a return of fever. This is a real and terrible anxiety, dear H----. The theater, too, is going on very ill, and he is unable to give it any assistance; and for the same reason I can do nothing for it, for all my plays require him, except Isabella and Fazio, and these are worn threadbare. It is all very gloomy; but, however, time doth not stand still, and will some day come to the end of the journey with us. .. . You say Undine reminds you of me. .. . The feeling of an existence more closely allied to the elements of the material universe than even we acknowledge our dust-formed bodies to be, possesses me sometimes almost like a little bit of magnus; bright colors, fleeting lights and shadows, flowers, and above all water, the pure, sparkling, harmonious, powerful element, excite in me a feeling of intimate fellowship, of love, almost greater than any human companionship does. Perhaps, after all, I am only an animated morsel of my palace, this wonderful, beautiful world. Do you not believe in numberless, invisible existences, filling up the vast intermediate distance between God and ourselves, in the lonely and lovely haunts of nature and her more awful and gloomy recesses? It seems as if one must be surrounded by them; I do not mean to the point of merely suggesting the vague "suppose?" _that_, I should think, must visit every mind; but rather like a consciousness, a conviction, amounting almost to certainty, only short of seeing and hearing. How well I remember in that cedar hall at Oatlands, the sort of invisible presence I used to feel pervading the place. It was a large circle of huge cedar trees in a remote part of the grounds; the paths that led to it were wild and tangled; the fairest flower, the foxglove, grew in tall clumps among the foliage of the thickets and shrubberies that divided the lawn into undulating glades of turf all round it; a sheet of water in which there was a rapid current--I am not sure that it was not the river--ran close by, and the whole place used to affect my imagination in the weirdest way, as the habitation of invisible presences of some strange supernatural order. As the evening came on, I used frequently to go there by myself, leaving our gentlemen at table, and my mother and Lady Francis in the drawing-room. How I flew along by the syringa bushes, brushing their white fragrant blossoms down in showers as I ran, till I came to that dark cedar hall, with its circle of giant trees, whose wide-sweeping branches spread, at it were, a halo of darkness all round it! Through the space at the top, like the open dome of some great circular temple, such as the Pantheon of Rome, the violet-colored sky and its starry worlds looked down. Sometimes the pure radiant moon and one fair attendant star would seem to pause above me in the dark framework of the great tree-tops. That place seemed peopled with spirits to me; and while I was there I had the intensest delight in the sort of all but conscious certainty that it was so. Curiously enough, I never remember feeling the slightest nervousness while I was there, but rather an immense excitement in the idea of such invisible companionship; but as soon as I had emerged from the magic circle of the huge black cedar trees, all my fair visions vanished, and, as though under a spell, I felt perfectly possessed with terror, and rushed home again like the wind, fancying I heard following footsteps all the way I went. The moon seemed to swing to and fro in the sky, and every twisted tree and fantastic shadow that lay in my path made me start aside like a shying horse. I could have fancied they made grimaces and gestures at me, like the rocks and roots in Retsch's etchings of the Brocken; and I used to reach the house with cheeks flaming with nervous excitement, and my heart thumping a great deal more with fear than with my wild run home; and then I walked with the utmost external composure of demure propriety into the drawing-room, as who should say, "Thy servant went no whither, " to any inquiry that might be made as to my absence. .. . 

 It seems to me that you would be a poet but for your analyzing, dissecting, inquiring, and doubting mental tendency. Your truth is not a matter of intuition, but of demonstration; and when you get beyond demonstrability, then nothing remains to you but doubt. .. . God bless you, dear!

 I am yours ever affectionately, F. A. K. 

 _Monday, December 5th. _-- . .. My father is worse again to-day. Ohimé! His state is most precarious, and this relapse very alarming. It is dreadful to see him drag himself about, and hear his feeble voice. Oh, my dear, dear Father! Heaven preserve you to us!

 _Tuesday, 6th. _--My father is much worse. How terrible this is!. .. Dall met me on the stairs this morning, and gave me a miserable account of him; he had just been bled, and that had somewhat relieved him. I went and sat with him while my mother drove out in the carriage. I stayed a long while with him, and he seemed a little better. .. . My father's two doctors have returned again, and paid him two visits daily. I read Daru all the evening. 

 _Wednesday, 7th. _-- . .. So I am to play Belvidera on Monday, and Bianca on Wednesday. That will be hard work; Bianca is terrible. 

 _Thursday, 8th. _-- . .. My dear father is beginning to gain strength once more, thank Heaven! I received a letter from Lady Francis about the play (a translation of the French piece of "Henri Trois, " by Lord Francis, the production of which at Covent Garden is being postponed in consequence of my father's illness). Poor people! I am sorry for their disappointment. .. . I devised and tried on a new dress for Bianca; it will be very splendid, but I am afraid I shall look like a metal woman, a golden image. [The dress in question was entirely made of gold tissue; and one evening a man in the pit exclaimed to a friend of mine sitting by him, "Oh! doesn't she look like a splendid gold pheasant?" the possibility of which comparison had not occurred to me, not being a sportsman. ]

 _Friday, 9th. _-- . .. I went with my mother to the theater to hear "Fra Diavolo, " with which, and Miss Sheriff's singing in it, we were delighted. 

 _Saturday, 10th. _-- . .. We had a talk about the fashion of southern countries of serenading, which I am very glad is not an English fashion. Music, as long as I am awake, is a pure and perfect delight to me, but to be wakened out of my sleep by music is to wake in a spasm of nervous terror, shaking from head to foot, and sick at my stomach, with indescribable fear and dismay; certainly no less agreeable effect could possibly be contemplated by the gallantry of a serenading admirer, so I am glad our admirers do not serenade us English girls. This picturesque practice prevails all through the United States, where the dry brilliancy of the climate and skies is favorable to the paying and receiving this melodious homage, and where musical bands, sometimes numbering fifty, are marshaled by personal or political admirers, under the balconies of reigning beauties or would-be-reigning public men. My total ignorance of this prevailing practice in the United States led to a very prosaic demonstration of gratitude on my part toward my first serenaders; for I opened my window and rewarded them with a dollar, which one of the recipients informed me he should always keep, to my no small confusion, not knowing the nature of my gratuitous indulgence, and that, like my Lady Greensleeves in the old English ballad, "My music still to play and sing" would be, while I remained in America, a disinterested demonstration of the devotion of my friends. .. . My poor mother is in the deepest distress about my father. Inflammation of the lungs is dreaded, and he is spitting blood. I felt as if I were turning to stone as I heard it. I came up to my own room and cried most bitterly for a long time. In the afternoon I was allowed to go in and see my father; but I was so overcome that, as I stooped to kiss his hand, I was almost suffocated with suppressed sobs. I did control myself, however, sufficiently to be able to sit by him for a while with tolerable composure. Cecilia and Mrs. Wilkinson called, and were very kind and affectionate to me. They brought news that Harry Siddons had arrived in India and been sent off to Delhi. My brother Henry, poor child, came and lay on the sofa in my room, and we cried together almost through the whole afternoon, in spite of our efforts to comfort each other. My heart dies away when I think of my dear father. .. . I got a very kind and affectionate letter from Lady Francis; she wants us very much to go again to Oatlands. After all, perhaps it would not be so sad there as I think, though it must appear changed enough in some respects, if not in all. Everything is winter now, within and without me; and when I was last there it was summer, in my heart and over all the earth. My cedar palace is there still, and to that I should bring more change than I should find. Poor Undine! how often I think of that true story. When I went to the theater my heart really sickened at my work; my eyes smarted, and my voice was broken, with my whole day's crying. The house seemed good; I played ill, and felt very ill. Lord M---- was in the stage-box, which annoyed me. I hate to have my society acquaintance close to me while I am acting. The play was "Venice Preserved. " After I came home I saw my father, who is a little better; but now Henry is quite unwell, and I am in a high fever--I suppose with all this wretchedness and exertion. 

 _Thursday, 13th. _--My father has passed a quieter night, thank God. I went to Fozzard's riding-school with John, and tried a hot little hunter that they want to persuade Lady Chesterfield to ride--a very pretty creature, but quite too eager for the school. While I was riding Lady Grey came in, very much frightened, upon her horse, which was rather fresh. She took Gazelle, which I was riding, and I rode her horse tame for her. It is very odd that, riding as well as she does, she should be so miserably nervous on horseback. .. . I drove to Mrs. Mayo's, who impressed and affected me very much. Those magnificent eyes of hers are becoming dim; she is growing blind, with eyes like dark suns. I could not help expressing the deep concern I felt for such a calamity. She replied that doubtless it was a trial, but that she saw many others afflicted with dispensations so much heavier than her own, that she was content. To grow blind contentedly is to be very brave and good, and I admired and loved her even more than I did before. When I came home, I went and sat with my father. He has decided that we shall not go to Oatlands, and I am hardly sorry for it. 

 _Friday, 14th. _--Went over my part for to-night. .. . Victoire came with me to the theater instead of Dall, whose whole time is taken up attending on my father. The house was bad, and I thought I acted very ill, though Victoire and John, who was in the front, said I did not. Henry Greville was in the boxes, and to my surprise went from them to the pit, though I ought not to have been surprised, for, for such a fine gentleman, he is a very sensible man. Colonel and Lady C. Cavendish were in the orchestra, and how I did wish them further. I do so wonder, in the middle of my stage despair, what business my drawing-room acquaintances have sitting staring at it. My dress was beautiful. As for the audience, I do not know what ailed them, but they seemed to have agreed together only to applaud at the end of the scenes, so that I got no resting interruptions, and was half dead with fatigue at the end of the play. I read Daru's "Venice" between the scenes, and saw my father for a few minutes after I came home. 

 _Thursday, 15th. _--Had a delightful long letter from H----, who is a poet without the jingle. .. . Another physician is to be called in for my father. Oh, my dear father! Mr. Bartley was with him about this horrible theater business. .. . My mother went in the evening with John to hear Miss Sheriff in Polly. It is her first night in "The Beggar's Opera, " and my father wished to know how it went. I stayed at home with poor Henry, and after tea sat with my father till bedtime. 

 _Friday, 16th. _--Went to the theater at eleven, and rehearsed Isabella in the saloon, the stage being occupied with a rehearsal of the pantomime. When my rehearsal was over, the carriage not being come, I went down to see what they were doing. There was poor Farleigh, nose and all (a worthy, amiable man, and excellent comic character, with a huge excrescence of a nose), _qui se déménait_ like one frantic; huge Mr. Stansbury, with a fiddle in his hand, dancing, singing, prompting, and swearing; the whole _corps de ballet_ attitudinizing in muddy shoes and poke-bonnets, and the columbine, in dirty stockings and a mob-cap, ogling the harlequin in a striped shirt and dusty trousers. What a wrong side to the show the audience will see!

 My father is better, thank God! After dinner sat with poor Henry till time to go to the theater. Played Isabella. House bad. I played well; I always do to an empty house (this was my invariable experience both in my acting and reading performances, and I came to the conclusion that as my spirits were not affected by a small audience, they, on the contrary, were exhilarated by the effect upon my lungs and voice of a comparatively cool and free atmosphere). I read Daru between my scenes; I find it immensely interesting. .. . I read Niccolini's "Giovanni di Procida, " but did not like it very much; I thought it dull and heavy, and not up to the mark of such a very fine subject. 

 _Saturday, 17th. _-- . .. My father, thank God, appears much better. .. . I have christened the pretty mare I have bought "Donna Sol, " in honor of my part in "Hernani. " In the evening I read Daru, and wrote a few lines of "The Star of Seville;" but I hate it, and the whole thing is as dead as ditch-water. 

 _Sunday, 18th. _--To church. .. . After I came home I went and sat with my father. Poor fellow! he is really better; I thank God inexpressibly!

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, December 18. DEAR H----, I have had time to write neither long nor short letters for the last week; Mr. Young's engagement being at an end, I have been called back to my work, and have had to rehearse, and to act, and to be much too busy to write to you until to-day, when I have caught up all my arrears. 

 My father, thank God, is once more recovering, but we have twice been alarmed at such sudden relapses that we hardly dare venture to hope he is really convalescent. Inflammation on the lungs has, it seems, been going on for a considerable time, and though they think now that it has entirely subsided, yet, as the least exertion or exposure may bring it on again, we are watching him like the apples of our eyes. He has not yet left his bed, to which he has now been confined more than a month. .. . 

 The exertion I have been obliged to make when leaving him to go and act, was so full of misery and dread lest I should find him worse, perhaps dead, on my return, that no words can describe what I have suffered at that dreadful theater. Thank God, however, he is now certainly better, out of present danger, and I trust and pray will soon be beyond any danger of a relapse. Anything like Dall's incessant and unwearied care and tenderness you cannot imagine. Night and day she has watched and waited on him, and I think she must have sunk under all the fatigue she has undergone but for the untiring goodness and kindness of heart that has supported her under it all. She is invaluable to us all, and every day adds to her claims upon our love and gratitude. .. . 

 In the passage you quote from Godwin, he seems to think a friend of more use in reproving what is evil in us than I believe is really the case. Do you think our faults and follies can ever be more effectually sifted, analyzed, and condemned by another than by our own conscience? I do not think if one could put one's heart into one's friends' hand that they could detect one defect or evil quality that had not been marked and acknowledged in the depths of one's own consciousness. Do you suppose people shrink more from the censure of others than from self-condemnation? I find it difficult to think so. .. . You appear to me always to wish to submit your faith to a process which invariably breaks your apparatus and leaves you very much dissatisfied, with your faith still a simple element in you, in spite of your endeavors to analyze or decompose it. Are not, after all, our convictions our only steadfastly grounded faith? I do not mean conviction wrought out in the loom of logical argument, where one's understanding must have shuttled backward and forward through every thread a thousand times before the woof is completed, but the spiritual convictions, the intuitions of our souls, that lie upon their surface like direct reflections from heaven, distinct and beautiful enough for reverent contemplation, but a curious search into whose nature would, at any rate temporarily, blur and dissipate and destroy. .. . 

 The sense of power which man cannot control is one thing that makes the sea such a delightful object of contemplation; the huge white main, and deep, tremendous voice of the vast creature over which man's daring and his knowledge give him but such imperfect mastery, suggest images of strength which are full of sublime fascination as one stands on the shore, looking at the vasty deep, and remembers how precarious and uncertain is man's dominion over it, and how God alone rules and governs it. It is impossible not to rejoice in the great sense of its huge power and freedom, even though their manifestations toward men are so often terrible and destructive. .. . Oh yes, indeed, I, like Wallenstein, have faith in the "strong hours, " and hold their influence the more efficacious that we seldom think of resisting it; or, if we do, are seldom successful in the attempt. .. . 

 The theater is going on very ill, but negotiations are pending between the partners, which it is hoped may eventually terminate in some arrangement with the creditors about the property. I have been acting Bianca again; I certainly am not jealous, and cannot imagine being so, any more of my husband than of my friend. I doubt if I have the power of loving which produces jealousy, in spite of which that part tries me dreadfully. I can conceive no torment comparable to that passion, which, however, I think is foreign to my own nature. I am reading Daru's "History of Venice, " and am rather disappointed in the entertainment I expected to derive from it. It is a pretty long undertaking, too. .. . Remember me to all your people; and since you will have it that I am twin-sister to a fountain, remember me to my cousin, the dear little spring in the dell, which I love the more that it sometimes reflects your face and figure, as well as the fairies who dance round it by night. Do you hear that poor Lord Grey is said to be haunted by a vision of Lord Castlereagh's head? It sounds like a temptation of the devil to scare him into cutting his throat. Lord Brougham and the Duke of Wellington seem to me the only two men likely to keep their heads in these times of infinite political perturbation; but the one is made of steel, and the other of india-rubber. 

 Yours, dearest, always, F. A. K. 

 _Monday, 19th. _--Went to Fozzard's, and had a pleasant, gossiping ride with Lady Grey and Miss Cavendish. While I was still riding, the Duchess of Kent and our little queen that is to be came down into the school; I was presented to them at their desire, and thought Princess Victoria a very unaffected, bright-looking girl. Fozzard made me gallop round; I think he is rather proud of showing me off. .. . My father is not so well again to-day. How dreadful these alternations are! I read Daru all the afternoon, and then sang in my own room to amuse Henry, till dinner-time. Colonel Bailey sent me the mare's saddle and bridle, and after dinner the boys put them on a chair for me, and gave me an absurd make-believe ride. 

 _Wednesday, 21st_--Dear Mr. Harness called, and I received him. He tells me that at the theater they want to do his tragedy ("The Wife of Antwerp, " was, I think, the name of the piece) without my father; but this seems to me really sheer madness. The play is a pretty, interesting, well-written piece, and, well propped and sustained, may perhaps succeed for a few nights, but as to throwing the whole weight, or rather weakness of it, upon my shoulders, or any one pair of shoulders, it is folly to think of it. It is not a powerful sort of monologue like "Fazio, " where the interest centres in one person and one passion, and therefore if that character is well sustained the rest can shift for itself. It is no such matter; it is a play of incident and not of character, and must be played by people and not one person. What terrible bad management! But, poor people! what can they do, with my father lying disabled there? If it was not for their complete disregard for their own interest, I should be inclined to quarrel with them for the way in which they are ruining mine; and I sincerely hope, for the sake of everybody concerned, that Mr. Harness will resist this senseless proposition. 

 I went with John in the afternoon to Angerstein's Gallery (M. Angerstein's fine collection of pictures was not then incorporated in the National Gallery, of which it subsequently became so important a portion); there are some new pictures there. Unluckily, we had only an hour to stay, but I brought away a great deal with me for so short a time. Among the additions was a very singular old painting, "The Holy Family, " by one of the earliest masters, whose name I forget, not being familiar with it. I looked long at the glorious Titian, the "Bacchus and Ariadne, " which always reminds me of--

 "Whence come ye, jolly Satyrs, whence come ye? Like to a moving vintage down they came. "

 One of the most famous pictures here is "Our Saviour disputing with the Doctors, " by Leonardo da Vinci. I hardly ever receive pleasure from his pictures; there is a mannerism in all that I have seen that is positively disagreeable to me. How the later artists lost the simple secret of earnest vigor of their predecessors, while gaining in everything that was not that! Grace, finish, refinement, accuracy of drawing, richness of coloring, all that merely tended towards perfection and execution, while the simplicity and single-heartedness of conception died away more and more. All art seems by degrees to outgrow its strength, and certainly in painting the archaic cradle touches one's imagination as neither the graceful youth nor mature manhood do. "Le mieux c'est l'ennemi du bien" in nothing more than the progress of art after a certain period of its development, and when its mere mechanism is best understood, and applied in the most masterly manner. The spirit has tarried behind, and we have to return to seek it among the earlier days, when the genius of man was like a giant, rude, naked, and savage, but vigorous and free--unadorned indeed, but also untrammeled. Only a certain proportion of excellence is allowed to our race, but that is granted; and let us stretch it, expand it, roll and beat it out as we will, it is still but the same square inch made thin to cover a greater surface. For one good we still must yield another; we have no gain that is not loss, no acquisition but surrender, "exchange" which may perhaps be "no robbery, " though quantity does seem a poor substitute for quality in matters of beauty. I wish I had lived in the times when the ore lay in the ingot (and had been one of the few who owned a nugget), instead of in these times of universal gold-leaf, glitter without weight, and shining shallowness of mere surface. Vigor is better than refinement, and to create better than to improve, and to conceive better than to combine. I wonder if the world, or rather the human mind, will ever really grow decrepit, and the fountain of beauty in men's souls run dry to the dregs; or will the manifestations only change, and the eternal spirit reveal itself in other ways?. .. 

 On our way home I had a long and interesting talk with John about the different forms of religious faith into which the gradual development of the human mind has successively expanded; each, of course, being the result of that very development, acting on the original necessity to believe in and worship and obey something higher and better than itself, implanted in our nature. It seems strange that he has a leaning to Roman Catholicism, which I have not. Our Protestant profession appears to me the purest creed--form--that Christianity has yet arrived at; but, I suppose, a less spiritual one, or perhaps I should say external accompaniments, affecting more palpably the senses and imagination, are wholesome and necessary to the cultivation and preservation of the religious sentiment in some minds. Catholicism was the faith of the chivalrous times, of the poetical times, of times when the creative faculty of man poured forth in since unknown abundance masterpieces of every kind of beauty, as manifestations of the pious and devout enthusiasm. Protestantism is undoubtedly the faith of these times; a denying faith, a rejecting creed, a questioning belief, its evil seems essentially to coincide with the worst tendency of the present age, but its good seems to me positive and unconditional, independent of time or circumstance; the best, in that kind, that the believing necessity in our nature has yet attained. Rightly understood and lived up to, the only service of God which is intellectual freedom, as all His service, lived up to, under what creed soever, is moral freedom. And it is in some sort in spite of myself that I say this, for my fancy delights in all the devout and poetical legendary conceptions which the stern hand of reason has stripped from our altars. 

 I found a letter at home from Emily Fitzhugh; she writes me word she has been revising my aunt Siddons's letters; thence an endless discussion as to the nature of genius, what it is. I suppose really nothing but the creative power, and so it remains a question if the greatest actor can properly be said to possess it. Again, how far does the masterly filling out of an inferior conception by a superior execution of it, such as really great actors frequently present, fall short of creative power, properly so called? Is it a thing positive, of individual inherent quality, or comparative, and composed of mere respective quantity? Can its manifestation be partial, and restricted to one faculty, or must it be a pervading influence, permeating the whole mind? Certainly Mrs. Siddons was what we call a great dramatic genius, and off the stage gave not the slightest indication of unusual intellectual capacity of any sort. Kean, the only actor whose performances have ever realized to me my idea of the effect tragic acting ought to produce, acted part of his parts rather than ever a whole character, and a work of genius should at least show unity of conception. My father, whose fulfilling of a particular range of characters is as nearly as possible perfect, wants depth and power, and power seems to me the core, the very marrow, so to speak, of genius; and if it is not genius that gave incomparable majesty and terror to my aunt's Lady Macbeth, and to Kean's Othello incomparable pathos and passion, and to my father's Benedict incomparable spirit and grace, what is it? Mere talent carried beyond a certain point? If so, where does the one begin and the other end? Or is genius a precious, inconvertible, intellectual metal, of which some people have a grain and a half, and some only half a grain?. .. There is dreadful news from Spain, and I fear it is too true. Torrijos has made another attempt. Oh, how thankful we must be that John is returned to us!

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, Monday, December 23. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I owe you many excuses for not having sooner acknowledged your letter, but you may have seen by the papers that we have been bringing out a new piece, and that is always, while it goes on, an engrossing of time and attention paramount to all other claims. It is a play of Lord Francis Leveson's, and I know you will be glad to hear that it has been successful and is likely to prove serviceable to the theater. Another reason, too, for my silence is, that I have been working very hard at "The Star of Seville, " which, I am thankful to say, has at length reached its completion. I have sent it to the theater upon approbation, in the usual routine of business; and am waiting very patiently the decision of the management on its fitness or unfitness for their purposes. 

 I know not whether your party at Teddesley are good thermometers, by which to judge of the state of political feeling here in London, but at this moment the rumor is rife that the Ministry dare not make the new batch of Peers, cannot carry the Bill, and must resign. To whom? is the next question, and it seems a difficult one to answer. One hardly sees, looking round the political ranks, who are to be the men to come forward and take up this tangled skein effectually. I write with rather a sympathetic leaning toward the Tory side of this Reform question, and do not know whether in so doing I am affronting you or not. In any case, I imagine, there can be but one opinion as to the difficulty, and even danger, of the present position of public affairs and public temper with regard to them. 

 Do you not soon think of returning to Town? or are you so well pleased with your present abode as to prolong your visit? London is particularly full, I think, for the time of year, and people are meeting in smaller numbers and a more sociable and agreeable way than they do later in the season. I was at two parties last week, each time, I am ashamed to say, after acting. I can't say that I find society pleasant; it reminds me a good deal of a "Conversation Cards, " the insipid flippancy, of whose questions and answers seems to me to survive in these meetings, miscalled occasionally _conversaziones_. Dancing appears to me rational, and indeed highly intellectual, in comparison with such talk; and that I am as fond of as ever, but that has not begun yet, and I find these _soirées causantes_ drearily unedifying. 

 Talking of stupid parties, your beautiful little picture of me and my various costumes helped away two hours of such intolerably dull people here the other night; I assure you we all voted you devout thanks on the occasion. .. . We are all tolerably well; my father is gradually recovering his strength, and though after such an attack as his has been the progress must of necessity be slow, we are inclined to hope, from that very circumstance, that it will be the more sure. .. . If you do not return soon, perhaps I shall hear from you again; pray recollect that it will give me great pleasure to do so, and that I am very sincerely yours, F. A. K. 

 I dressed my Juliet the last time I acted it, exactly after your little sketch of her. .. . 

 _Thursday. _--Worked at "The Star of Seville. " In the evening the play was "Isabella;" the house very bad. I played very well. The Rajah Ramahun Roy was in the Duke of Devonshire's box, and went into fits of crying, poor man!

 _Friday, 23d. _--It is all too true; John has had a letter from Spain; they have all been taken and shot. I felt frozen when I heard the terrible news. Poor Torrijos! And yet I suppose it is better so: he would only have lived to bitter disappointment, and the despairing conviction that the spirit he appealed to did not animate one human being in his deplorable and degenerate land. A young Englishman, of the name of Boyd, John's sometime friend and companion, was taken and shot with the rest: it choked me to think of his parents, his brothers and sisters. Surely God has been most merciful to us in sparing us such an anguish, and bringing our wanderer home before this day of doom. How I thought of Richard Trench and his people! John did not seem to me to be violently affected, though his first exclamation was one of sharp and bitter pain: I suppose he must, long ere this, have felt that there could be no other end to this utterly hopeless attempt. .. . In the afternoon I called on Mrs. Norton, who is always to me astonishingly beautiful. The baby was asleep, and so I could not see it, but Spencer has grown into a very fine child. 

 _Monday, 26th. _--Went to see how the pantomime did. I did not think it very amusing, but there was an enchanting little girl (Miss Poole) who did Tom Thumb, and whose attitudes in her armor were most of them copied from the antique, and really beautiful. Poor dear, bright little thing!

 My father was in bed when we returned; I went and saw him for a minute, to tell him how the pantomime had succeeded; it ended with some wonderful tight-rope dancing by an exceedingly steady, graceful man; but it turned me perfectly sick, and I hate all those sort of things. 

 _Thursday, 29th. _--After dinner worked at "The Star of Seville. " I really wonder I have the patience to go on with it, it is such heavy trash. After tea my father begged me to sing to him. I am always horribly frightened at singing before my mother; I cannot bear to distress her accurate ear with my unsteady intonation, and the more I think of it, the colder my hands grow and the hotter my face, the huskier my voice and the flatter my notes; I bungle over accompaniments that I have at my fingers' ends, and forget words I know as well as my alphabet; in short, I feel like a wretch, and I sing like a wretch, and I make wretched all my hearers. My mother's own nervous terror when she had to sing on the stage, as a young woman, was excessive, as she has often told me; and her mother repeatedly but vainly endeavored to bribe her with the promise of a guinea if she would sing as well in public any of the songs that she sang perfectly well at home. I sang for some time, and by degrees got more courage, till at last I managed to sing tolerably in tune. My mother says I have more voice than A----. I am sorry to hear her voice has grown thin--that sweet, melodious voice I did so love to listen to; but perhaps it will recover its tone. 

 _Wednesday, 28th. _--My dear, dear father came down to breakfast, looking horribly thin and pale, poor fellow! but, thank God, he was able to come once more among us. I am to act Euphrasia on Monday; how I do hate it! Monday week my father talks of resuming his work again with Mercutio. Dear me! how happy I shall be! once more speaking the love poetry of Juliet after all these "meaner beauties of the night" that I have been executing ever since he has been ill. Juliet did very right to die; she would have become Bianca when once she was Mrs. Romeo Montague. .. . I wrote to Lady Francis about "Katharine of Cleves, " (Lord Francis's translation of "Henri Trois"), who is once more beginning to lift up her head. My father thinks it may be done on Wednesday week. .. . It is now determined that Henry should go into the army, and my mother wants me to besiege Sir John through Lady Macdonald (the general's general) about a commission for him. In the evening, not having to be anybody tragical or heroical, I indulged in my own character, and had a regular game of romps with the boys; my pensive public would not have believed its eyes if it could have seen me with my hair all disheveled, not because of my woes, but because of riotous fun, jumping over chairs and sofas, and dodging behind curtains and under tables to escape from my pursuers. "Is that Miss Kemble?" as poor Mr. Bacon involuntarily exclaimed the first time he saw me. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, December 29, 1831. MY DEAREST H----, You shall not entreat in vain, neither shall you have a short answer because you have an immediate one. .. . I should not have answered you so instantaneously, but that my last account of my dear father was so bad that I cannot delay telling you how much better he is, and how grateful we all are for his restoration to health. He is released from his bed, of which he must be heartily sick, and comes down to breakfast at the usual time: of course he is still weak and low, and wretchedly thin, but we trust a little time will bring back good spirits and good looks, though after such a terrible attack I fear it will be long before his constitution recovers its former strength, if indeed it ever does. He talks of resuming his labors at the theater next Monday week. Oh! my dear H----, what a dreadful season of anxiety this has been! but, thank God, it is past. 

 I had intended that this letter should go to you to-day, but you will forgive the delay of a day in my finishing it when I tell you that I have some hope of its producing a commission for Henry. Sir John Macdonald, at whose house you dined in the summer with my mother, is now adjutant-general, and I know not what besides; and after my mother and myself had expended all our eloquence in winding up my father's mind to resolve upon the army as Henry's profession, she thought the next best thing I could do would be to attack Lady Macdonald and secure the general's interest. They happened to call this afternoon, and your letter, my dear H----, has been left unfinished till past post-time, while I was soliciting this favor, which I have every hope we shall obtain. Lady Macdonald is extremely kind and good-natured, and I am sure will exert herself to serve us, and if this can be accomplished I shall be haunted by one anxiety the less. 

 Henry is too young and too handsome to be doing nothing but lounging about the streets of London, and even if he should be ordered to the Indies, it is something to feel that he is no longer aimless and objectless in life--a mere squanderer of time, without interest, stake, or duty, in this existence. I am sure this news will pacify you, and atone for the day's delay in this letter reaching you. 

[My youngest brother Henry had a passionate desire to be a sailor, andnever exhibited the slightest inclination for any other career. AdmiralLake, who was a very kind friend of my father's and mother's, knowingthis to be the lad's bent, offered, on one occasion, to take charge ofhim, and have him trained for his profession under his own supervision. Such, however, was my mother's horror of the sea, and dread of losingher darling, if she surrendered him to be carried from her to NovaScotia, whither I think Admiral Lake was bound when he offered to takemy brother with him, that she induced my father to decline this mostfriendly and advantageous offer. Henry never after that exhibited theslightest preference for any other profession, and always said, "Theymay put me at a plow-tail if they like. " He went through WestminsterSchool, after a previous training at Bury St. Edmunds, not otherwisethan creditably; but a very modest estimate of his own capacity made himbeg not to be sent to Cambridge, where he said he was sure he shouldonly waste money, and do himself and us no credit. (The bitterdisappointment of my brother John's failure there had made a deepimpression upon him. ) Finally it was decided that he should go into thearmy, and the friendly interest of Sir John Macdonald and the liberalprice Mr. Murray gave me for my play of "Francis I. " enabled me to gethim a commission; it was the time when they were still purchasable. Mypoor mother, unable to refuse her consent to this second favorableopportunity of starting him in life, acquiesced in his military, thoughshe had thwarted his naval, career, and was well content to see herboy-ensign sent over with his troops to Ireland. But from Ireland hisregiment was ordered to the West Indies, and after his departure thithershe never again saw him in her life. ]

 I think it would be a wise thing if I were to go to America and work till I have made 10, 000_l. _, then return to England and go the round of the provinces, and act for a few nights' leave-taking in London. Prudence would then, perhaps, find less difficulty in adjusting my plans for the future. That is what I think would be well for me to do, supposing all things remain as they are and God preserves my health and strength. It will not do to verify all Poitier's lugubrious congratulation to his children in the Vaudeville on their marriage:

 "Ji! Ji! mariez-vous, Mettez-vous dans la misère! Ji! Ji! mariez-vous, Mettez-vous la corde au cou. "

 . .. Jealousy, surely, is a disposition to suspect and take umbrage where there is no cause for suspicion or offense, which, to say the least of it, is very unreasonable; but that a woman should break her heart because her husband does love another woman better than her, seems to me natural enough, and with regard to Bianca, her provocations certainly warranted a very rational amount of misery; and though, had she not been a woman of violent passions and a jealous temperament, she probably would not have taken the means she did of resenting Fazio's treatment of her, it appears to me that nothing but divine assistance and the strongest religious principle could preserve one under such circumstances from despair, madness, suicide, perhaps; hardly, however, the murder of one's husband. But assassinating other people seems a much more common mode of relieving their feelings among Italians than destroying themselves, which is rather a northern way of meeting, I should say of avoiding, difficulties. 

 I have had a holiday this week, and every now and then have written a word or two of "La Estrella;" it will never be done, and when it is it will be the horridest trash that ever was done; but I will let you have the pleasure of reading it, I promise you. On Monday I play that favorite detestation of mine, Euphrasia; the Monday after that my father hopes to be able for Mercutio, and I return to Juliet. By the by, you say Bianca is my best part, and I think my Juliet is better; I am not sure that there is not some kindred in the characters. We are going to bring out a play of Lord Francis', translated from the French, a sort of melodrama in blank verse, in which I have to act a part that I cannot do the least in the world, but of course that doesn't signify. 

["Katharine of Cleves, " translated from the French play of "Henri Troiset sa Cour, " and made the subject of one of Mr. Barham's inimitablycomical poems in the "Ingoldsby Legends. " Mdlle. Mars acted the part ofthe heroine in Paris, and it was one of several semi-tragicalcharacters, in which, at the end of her great theatrical career, shereaped fresh laurels in an entirely new field, and showed the world thatshe might have been one of the best serious, not to say tragic, actresses of the French stage, as well as its one unrivaled femalecomedian. ]

 We have spent a wretched Christmas, as you may suppose; a house with its head sick all but to death, and all its members smitten with the direst anxiety, is not the place for a merry one. God bless you, my dear, and send you years of peace of mind and health of body! this is, I suppose, what we mean when we wish for happiness here, either for ourselves or others. Give my love and kindest good wishes to your people. 

 Have you seen in the papers that poor Torrijos and his little band, consisting of sixty men, several of whom John knew well, have been lured into the interior of Spain, and there taken prisoners and shot? This news has shocked us all dreadfully, especially poor John. You may imagine how grateful we are that he is now among us, instead of having fallen a victim to his chimerical enthusiasm. I hardly know how to deplore the event for Torrijos himself: death has spared him the bitter disappointment of at last being convinced that the people he would have made free are willing slaves, and that the time when Spain is to lift herself up from the dust has not yet come. 

 I went the other day with John to the Angerstein Gallery. .. . The delight I find in a fine painting is one of the greatest and most enduring pleasures I have; my mind retains the impression so long and so very vividly. .. . Good-by, my dearest H----. 

 Ever affectionately yours, F. A. K. 

 _Saturday, 31st. _--After breakfast went to the theater to rehearse "The Grecian Daughter, " and Mr. Ward, for whom the rehearsal was principally given, never came till it was over. Pleasant creature!. .. 

 The day seemed beautifully fine, and my father and mother took, a drive, while Henry and I rode, that my father might see the horse I had bought for him; but it was bitterly cold, and I could not make my mare trot, so she cantered and I froze. Mr. Power was there, on that lovely horse of his. I think the Park will become bad company, it is so full of the player folk. Frederick Byng called, and I like him, so I went and sat with him and my father and mother in the library till time to dress for dinner. After dinner wrote "The Star of Seville. " I have got into conceit with it again, and so poor, dear, unfortunate Dall coming in while I was working at it, I seized hold of her, like the Ancient Mariner of the miserable "Wedding Guest, " and compelled her, in spite of her outcries, to sit down, and then, though she very wisely went fast asleep, I read it to her till tea-time. 

 My mother wished to sit up and see the New Year in, and so we played quadrille till they sat down to supper, which had been ordered for the vigil, and I went fast asleep. At twelve o'clock kisses and good wishes went round, and we were all very merry, in spite of which I once or twice felt a sudden rush of hot tears into my eyes. All the hours of last year are gone, standing at the bar of Heaven, our witnesses or accusers: the evil done, the good left undone, the opportunities vouchsafed and neglected, the warnings given and unheeded, the talents lent and unworthily or not employed, they are gone from us for ever! forever! and we make merry over the flight of Time! O Time! our dearest friend! how is it that we part so carelessly from you, who never can return to us?. .. A New Year. .. . 

 A NEW YEAR, 1832. 

 _January 1st, Sunday. _--When I came down my father wished me a happy New Year, and I am sure we were both thinking of the same thing, and neither of us felt happy. 

 _Thursday 5th. _-- . .. Wrote all the afternoon. Mr. Byng dined with us and stayed till one o'clock, having reduced my mother to silence, and my father to sleep, John to snuff, and Henry and I to playing (_sotto voce_) "What's my thought like?" to keep ourselves from tumbling off the perch. 

 _Monday, 9th. _--Rehearsed "Romeo and Juliet" with all my heart. Oh, light, life, truth, and lovely poetry! I sat on the cold stage, that I might hear them even mumble over their parts as they do. My father seemed to me very weak, and not by any means fit for his work to-night. After dinner went over my part again, and went to the theater at half past five. My new dress was very handsome, though rather burly, in spite of which Dall said it made me look taller, so its rather burliness didn't matter. John Mason played Romeo for the first time; he was beautifully dressed, and looked very well; he acted tolerably well, too. He has a good deal of energy and spirit, but wants feeling and refinement; his voice, unfortunately, is very unpleasant, wiry, harsh, and monotonous; of the last defect he may cure by practice. I came to the side scene just as my father was going on, to hear his reception; it was very great, a perfect thunder of applause; it made the tears start into my eyes. Poor father! They received me with infinite demonstrations of kindness too. I thought I acted very well; I am sure I played the balcony scene well. When the blood keeps rushing up into one's cheeks and neck while one is speaking, I wonder if that ought to be called acting. To be sure, Hamlet's player's face turned pale for Hecuba; so Shakespeare thought acting might make one change color. 

 I cannot get over the _sensibleness_ of Henry Greville, who was in the pit again to-night. Upon my word! he deserves to see good acting. After the play dear William and Mary Harness came home to supper with us, and we all got into a long discussion about Shakespeare's character, John maintaining that his views of life were gloomy and that he must himself have been an unhappy man. I don't believe a bit of it; no one, I suppose, ever thinks this world, and the life we live in it, absolutely pleasant or good, but the poet's ken, which is as an angel's compared with that of other men, must see more good and beauty, as well as more evil and ugliness, than his short-sighted fellows, and the better elements predominating over the worse (as they do, else the world would fall asunder). The man who takes so wide a view as Shakespeare, whatever his judgment of parts, must, upon the whole, pronounce the whole good rather than bad, and rejoice accordingly. I was too tired and sleepy to talk, or even to listen, much. 

 _Wednesday, 11th. _-- . .. Lady Charlotte Greville and General Alaba called. I am always grateful to him for the beautiful copy of Schlegel's "Dramatic Lectures" which he gave me. Lady Charlotte was all curiosity and anxiety about Lord Francis' play. I am afraid the newspapers may not be much inclined to be good-natured about it. I hope he does not care for what may be said of it. In the evening, the boys went to the theater, and I stayed at home, industriously copying "The Star of Seville" till bedtime. 

 _Thursday, 12th. _--To the theater to rehearsal, after which I drove to Hayter's (the painter), taking him my bracelets to copy, and permission to apply to the theater wardrobe for any drapery that may suit his purpose. I saw a likeness of Mrs. Norton he is just finishing; very like her indeed, but not her handsomest look. I think it had a slight, curious resemblance to some of the things that have been done of me. I saw a very clever picture of all the Fitzclarences, either by himself or his brother, George Hayter. The women are very prettily grouped, and look picturesque enough; the modern man's dress is an abominable object, of art or nature, and Lord Munster's costume, holding, as he does, the very middle of the canvas, is monstrous (which I don't mean for a rudeness, but a pun). The Right Reverend Father in God (A. F. ) is laughably like. They have insisted on having a portrait of their mother introduced in the room in which they are sitting, which seems to me better feeling than taste. Their royal father is absent. I worked at "The Star of Seville" till I went to the theater; as I get nearer the end, I get as eager as a race-horse when in sight of the goal. .. . The piece was "The School for Scandal;" the house was very full. I did not play well; I spoke too fast, and perceived it, and could not make myself speak slower--an unpleasant sort of nightmare sensation; besides, I was flat, and dull, and pointless--in short, bad was the sum total. How well Ward plays Joseph Surface! The audience were delightful; I never heard such pleasant shouts of laughter. .. . My father says perhaps they will bring out "The Star of Seville, " which notion sometimes brings back my old girlish desire for "fame. " Every now and then I feel quite proud at the idea of acting in a play of my own at two and twenty, and then I look again at my "good works, " this precious play, and it seems to be no better than "filthy rags. " But perhaps I may do better hereafter. Hereafter! Oh dear! how many things are better than doing even the best in this kind! how many things must be better than real fame! but if one has none of those, fame might, perhaps, be pleasant. No actor's fame, or rather celebrity, or rather notoriety, would satisfy me; that is the shadow of a cloud, the echo of a sound, the memory of a dream, nothing come of nothing. The finest actor is but a good translator of another man's work; he does somebody else's thought into action, but he creates nothing, and that seems to me the test of genius, after all. 

 _Friday. _--At eleven to the theater to rehearse "Katharine of Cleves. " . .. We all went to the theater to see "Rob Roy, " and I was sorry that I did, for it gave me such a home-sick longing for Edinburgh, and the lovely sea-shore out by Cramond, and the sunny coast of Fife. How all my delightful, girlish, solitary rambles came back to me! Why do such pleasant times ever pass? or why do they ever come? The Scotch airs set me crying with all the recollections they awakened. In spite, moreover, of my knowing every plank and pulley, and scene-shifter and carpenter behind those scenes, here was I crying at this Scotch melodrama, feeling my heart puff out my chest for "Rob Roy, " though Mr Ward is, alas! my acquaintance, and I know when he leaves the stage he goes and laughs and takes snuff in the green room. How I did cry at the Coronach and Helen Macgregor, though I know Mrs. Lovell is thinking of her baby, and the chorus-singers of their suppers. How I did long to see Loch Lomond and its broad, deep, calm waters once more, and those lovely green hills, and the fir forests so fragrant in the sun, and that dark mountain well, Loch Long, with its rocky cliffs along whose dizzy edge I used to dream I was running in a whirlwind; the little bays where the sun touched the water as it soaked into cushions of thick, starry moss, and the great tufts of purple heather all vibrating with tawny bees! Beautiful wilderness! how glad I am I have once seen it, and can never forget it; nor the broad, crisping Clyde, with its blossoming bean-fields, its jagged rocks and precipices, its gray cliffs and waving woods, and the mountain streams of clear, bright, fairy water, rushing and rejoicing down between the hills to fling themselves into its bosom; and Dumbarton Castle, with its snowy roses of Stuart memory! How glad I am that I have seen it all, if I should never see it again! And "Rob Roy" brought all this and ever so much more to my mind. If I had been a mountaineer, how I should have loved my land! I wish I had some blood-right to love Scotland as I do. Unfortunately, all these associations did not reconcile me to the cockney-Scotch of our Covent Garden actors, and Mackay's Bailie Nicol Jarvie was not the least tender of my reminiscences. [It was at a public dinner in Edinburgh, at which Walter Scott and Mackay were guests, that, in referring to the admirable impersonation of the Bailie, Scott's habitual caution with regard to the authorship of the Waverley Novels for a moment lost its balance, and in his warm commendation of the great comedian's performances a sentence escaped him which appeared conclusive to many of those present, if they were still in doubt upon the subject, that he was their writer. ] Miss Inveraretie was a cruel Diana, but who would not be?. .. 

 _Saturday, 14th. _--I rode at two with my father. Passed Tyrone Power; what a clever, pleasant man he is; Count d'Orsay joined us; he was riding a most beautiful mare; and then James Macdonald, _cum multus aliis_, and I was quite dead, and almost cross, with cold. .. . After dinner I came up to my room, and set to work like a little galley slave, and by tea-time I had finished my play. "Oh, joy forever! my task is done!" I came down rather tipsy, and proclaimed my achievement. After tea I began copying the last act, but my father desired me to read it to them; so, at about half-past nine, I began. My mother cried much; what a nice woman she is! My father, Dall, and John agreed that it was beautiful, though I believe the two first excellent judges were fast asleep during the latter part of the reading, which was perhaps why they liked it so much. At the end my mother said to me, "I am proud of you, my dear;" and so I have my reward. After a little congratulatory conversation, I came to bed at two o'clock, and slept before my head touched the pillow. So now that is finished, and I am glad it is finished. Is it as good as a second piece of work ought to be? I cannot tell. I think so differently of it at different times that I cannot trust my own judgment. I will begin something else as soon as possible. I wonder why nowadays we make all our tragedies foreign? Romantic, historical, knightly England had people and manners once picturesque and poetical enough to serve her play-writers' turn, though Shakespeare always took his stories, though not his histories, from abroad; but people live tragedies and comedies everywhere and all time. I think by and by I will write an English tragedy. [I little thought then that I should write a play whose miserable story was of my own day, and call it "An English Tragedy. "]

 _Sunday, 15th. _-- . .. In the afternoon hosts of people called; among others Lady Dacre, who stayed a long time, and wants us to go to her on Thursday. Copied "The Star of Seville" all the evening. At ten dear Mr. Harness came in, and stayed till twelve. 

 _Monday, 16th. _--Rehearsed "Katharine of Cleves" at eleven, but as Lord Francis did not come till twelve we had to begin it again, and kept at it until two. The actors seem frightened about it. Mr. Warde quakes about the pinching (an incident in the play taken, I suppose, from Ruthven's proceeding toward Mary Stewart at Lochleven). I am only afraid I cannot do anything with my part; it is a sort of melodramatic, pantomimic part that I have no capacity for. The fact is, that neither in the first nor last scenes are my legs long enough to do justice to this lady. The Douglas woman who barred the door with her arm to save King James's life must have been a strapping lass, as well a heroine in spirit. I am not tall enough for such feats of arms. Copied my play till time to go to the theater. My aunt Victoire came to my dressing-room just as I was going on, and persuaded dear Dall, who has never once seen me act, to go into the front of the house. She came back very soon in a state of great excitement and distress, saying she could not bear it. How odd that seems! Dear old Dall! she cannot bear seeing me make-believe miserable. The house was very good, and I played fairly well. 

 _Tuesday, 17th. _--Went to my mother's room before she was down, with Henry. It is her birthday, and I carried her the black velvet dress I have got for her, with which she seemed much pleased. Went to rehearsal at twelve. Lord and Lady Francis were there, and we acted the whole play, of course, to please them, so that I was half dead at the end of the rehearsal. They want us to go to Lady Charlotte's (Greville) to-morrow. My father said we would if we were all well and _in spirits_ (_i. E. _, if the play was not damped). .. . I wonder how my dear old Newhaven fish-wife does. "Eh! gude gracious, ma'am, it's yer ain sel come back again!" Poor body! I believe I love the very east wind that blows over the streets of Edinburgh. .. . After dinner Mrs. Jameson's beautiful toy-likeness of me helped off the time delightfully till the gentlemen came up, and then helped it off delightfully till everybody went away. What a misfortune it is to have a broken nose, like poor dear Thackeray! He would have been positively handsome, and is positively ugly in consequence of it. John and his friend Venables broke the bridge of Thackeray's nose when they were schoolboys playing together. What a mishap to befall a young lad just beginning life! [I suppose my friend Thackeray's injury was one that did not admit a surgical remedy, but my father, late in life, fell down while skating, and broke the bridge of his nose, and Liston, the eminent surgeon, urged him extremely to let him raise it--"build it again, " as he used to say. My father, however, declined the operation, and not only remained with his handsome nose disfigured, but suffered a much greater inconvenience, which Liston had predicted--very aggravated deafness in old age, from the stopping of the passages in the nose, which helped to transmit sound to the brain. ] After all, I suppose, it does not much signify to a man whether he is ugly or not. Wilkes, who was pre-eminently so, but brilliantly agreeable, used always to say that he was only half an hour behindhand with the handsomest man in England. 

 _Wednesday, 18th. _--Went to the theater to rehearse "Katharine of Cleves;" we were kept at it till half-past two. Drove home through the park. The day was beautiful, but my poor father could not get released from that hateful theater, and went without his ride. .. . I had not felt at all nervous about to-night till the carriage came to the door, and then I turned quite faint and sick with fright. At the theater found Madame le Beau (the forewoman of the great fashionable French milliner, Madame Dévy, by whom all my dresses were made) waiting for me. All was in darkness in my dressing-room; neither Mrs. Mitchell nor Jane were come (my two servants, or dressers, as they are called at the theater). Presently in scuttled the former, puffing, and whimpering apologies, and presently the room was filled with the pleasant incense of eight candles that she lighted, and blew out and relighted, and wondered that we didn't enjoy the operation. Then Jane bounced breathless in, and made our discomfort perfect. I sat speechless, terrified, and disconsolate. My fright was increasing every instant, and by the time I was dressed I shook like an aspen leaf from head to foot, and was as sick as no heart could desire. My dresses were most beautiful, and fitted me to perfection. The house was very fine. My poor dear father, who was as perfect in his part as possible this morning, did not speak three words without prompting; he was so nervous and anxious about the success of the piece that his own part was driven literally out of his head. I never saw anything so curious. To be sure, his illness has shattered him very much, and all the worry he has had this week has not mended matters. However, the play went admirably, and was entirely successful, to assist which result I thought I should have broken a blood-vessel in the last scene, the exertion was so tremendous. My voice was weak with nervousness and excitement, and at last I could hardly utter a word audibly. I almost broke my arm, too, in good earnest, with those horrible iron stanchions. However, it did be over at last, and "all's well that ends well. " I was so tired that I could scarcely stand; my mother came down from her box and seemed much pleased with me. She went to my father's room to see if I might not go home instead of to Lady Charlotte's, but he seemed to think it would please them if we made the effort of going for a few minutes; and so I dressed and set off, and there we found a regular "swarry, " instead of something to eat and drink, and a chair to sit upon in peace and quiet. There was a room full of all the fine folks in London; very few chairs, no peace and quiet, and heaps of acquaintance to talk to. .. . All the London world that is in London. Lord and Lady Francis took their success very composedly. I don't think they would have cared much if the play had failed. Henry Greville seemed to be much more interested for them than they for themselves, and discussed it all for a long time with me. I liked him very much. .. . At long last I got home, and had some supper, but what with fatigue and nervousness, and _it_--_i. E. _, the supper--so late, I had a most wretched night, and kept dreaming I was out in my part and jumping up in bed, and all sorts of agonies. What a life! I don't steal my money, I'm sure. 

 _Thursday, 19th. _-- . .. Henry and I rode in the park, and though the day was detestable, it did me good. As we were walking the horses round by Kensington Gardens, Lord John Russell, peering out of voluminous wrappers, joined us. Certainly that small, sharp-visaged gentleman does not give much outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual power he possesses and wields over this realm of England just now. His bodily presence might almost be described as St. Paul's. This turner inside out and upside down of our body, social and political, this hero of reform, one of the ablest men in England--I suppose in Europe--he rode with us for a long time, and I thought how H---- would have envied me this conversation with her idol. .. . In the evening, at the theater, though I had gone over my part before going there, for the first time in my play-house experience I was _out_ on the stage. I stopped short in the middle of one of my speeches, thinking I had finished it, whereas I had not given Mr. Warde the cue he was to reply to. How disgraceful!. .. After the play, my mother called for us in the carriage, and we went to Lady Dacre's, and had a pleasant party enough. .. . C---- G---- was there, with her mother (the clever and accomplished authoress of several so-called fashionable novels, which had great popularity in their day). Miss G----, now Lady E---- T----, used to be called by us "la Dame Blanche, " on account of the dazzling fairness of her complexion. She was very brilliant and amusing, and I remember her saying to one of her admirers one evening, when her snowy neck and shoulders were shining in all the unveiled beauty of full dress, "Oh, go away, P----, you _tan_ me. " (The gentleman had a shock head of fiery-red hair. )

 _Friday. _-- . .. I am horribly fagged, and after dinner fell fast asleep in my chair. At the theater, in the evening, the house was remarkably good for a "second night, " and the play went off very well. .. . My voice was much better to-night, though it cracked once most awfully in the last scene, from fatigue. .. . I think Lord Francis, or the management, or somebody ought to pay me for the bruises and thumps I get in this new play. One arm is black and blue (besides being broken every night) with bolting the door, and the other grazed to the bone with falling in fits upon the floor on my elbows. This sort of tragic acting is a service of some danger, and I object to it much more than to the stabbing and poisoning of the "Legitimate Drama;" in fact, "I do not mind death, but I cannot bear pinching. "

 _Saturday. _-- . .. Rode in the park with my father. Lord John Russell rode with us for some time, and was very pleasant. He made us laugh by telling us that Sir Robert Inglis (most bigoted of Tory anti-reformers) having fallen asleep on the ministerial benches at the time of the division the other night, they counted him on their side. What good fun! I never saw a man look so wretchedly worn and harassed as Lord John does. They say the ministry must go out, that they dare not make these new peers, and that the Bill will stick fast by the way instead of passing. What frightful trouble there will be!. .. 

 _Sunday, 22d. _-- . .. After church looked over the critiques in the Sunday papers on "Katharine of Cleves. " Some of them were too good-natured, some too ill-natured. The _Spectator_ was exceedingly amusing. 

 By far the best account and criticism of this piece is Mr. Barham's metrical report of it in the "Ingoldsby Legends. " Lord Francis himself used to quote with delight, "She didn't mind death, but she couldn't bear pinching. " . .. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, January 22, 1832. 

 Thank you, my dearest H----, for your last delightful letter, which I should have answered before, but for the production of a new piece at Covent Garden, which has taken up all my time for the last week in rehearsals, and trying on dresses and the innumerable and invariable etceteras of a new play and part. It has been highly successful, and I think is likely to bring money to our treasury, which is _the_ consummation most devoutly to be wished. It is nothing more than an interesting melodrama, with the advantage of being written in gentlemanly (noblemanly?) blank verse instead of turgid prose, and being acted by the principal instead of the secondary members of the company. This will suffice to make you appreciate my satisfaction, when I am complimented upon my acting in it, and you will sympathize with the shout of laughter my father and myself indulged in in the park the other day, when Lord John Russell, who was riding with us, told us that a young lady of his acquaintance had assured him that "Katharine of Cleves" (the name of the piece) was vastly more interesting than any thing Shakespeare had ever written. 

 The report is that there is to be no new creation of peers, and that the Bill will not pass. Certainly poor Lord John looks worried to death. He and Lord Grey have almost the whole weight and responsibility of this most momentous question upon their shoulders, and it must be no trifle to carry. As for the judicious young lady's judgment about "Katharine of Cleves, " it is just this sort of thing that makes me _rub the hands of my mind_ with satisfaction that I have never cared for my profession as my family has done. I think if I had, such folly, or rather stupidity, would have exasperated me too much. Besides, I should have been much less useful to the theater, for I should have lived in an everlasting wrangle with authors, actors, and managers on behalf of the mythological bodies supposed to preside over tragedy and comedy, and I should have killed myself (or perhaps been killed), and that quickly, with ineffectual protests against half the performances before the lamps, which are enough to make the angels weep and laugh--in short, go into hysterics, if they ever come to the play. .. . 

 Do you know you have almost increased my very sufficient tendency to superstition by your presentiment when you last left us that you should never return to this house. There is some talk now of our leaving it. My mother yearns for her favorite suburban haunts, the scene of her courtship, and the spot where most of her happy youthful associations abide, and has half persuaded my father to let this house and take one in a particular row of "cottages of gentility" called Craven Hill. It only consists of twelve houses, in _five_ of which my mother has, at different periods of her life, resided. This is all vague at present; I will let you know if it assumes a more definite shape. Some time will elapse before it is decided on, and more before it is done; and in any case, somehow or other, you must be once more under this roof with us before we leave it. .. . 

 I quite agree with you that such books as Mr. Hope's (on the nature and immortality of the soul, the precise title of which I have forgotten) "may be useless, " and sometimes, indeed, worse. If a person has nothing better to do than count the sea sands or fill the old bottomless tub of the Danaides, they may be excused for devoting their time and wits to such riddles, perhaps. But when the mind has positive, practical work to perform, and time keeps bringing _all the time_ specific duties, or when, as in your case, a predisposition to vague speculation is the intellectual besetting sin, I think _addition_ to such subjects to be avoided. I suppose all human beings have, in some shape or degree, the desire for that knowledge which is still the growth of the forbidden tree of Paradise, and the lust for which inevitably thrusts us against the bars of the material life in which we are consigned; but to give up one's time to writing and reading elaborate theories of a past and future which we may conceive to exist, but of the existence of which it is impossible we should achieve _any_ proof, much less any detailed knowledge, appears to me an unprofitable and unsatisfactory misuse of time and talent. .. . 

 You are mistaken in supposing me familiar with the early history of Poland. I am ashamed to say I know nothing about it, and my zeal for the cause of its people is an ignorant sentiment_alism_--partly, perhaps, mere innate combativeness that longs to strike on the weaker side, and partly, too, resentful indignation at the cold-blooded neutrality observed by all the powers of Europe while that handful of men were making so brave a stand against the Russian giant. 

 That reminds me that Prince Zartoryski, who is in this country just now, came to the play the other night, and was so struck with my father that he sent round to him to say that he desired the honor of his acquaintance, and begged he would do him the favor of dining with him on some appointed day, which seemed to me a very pretty piece of impulsive enthusiasm. I believe Prince Zartoryski is a royal personage, and so above conventionalities. .. . 

 My father is pretty well, though very far from having entirely regained his strength, but he is making gradual progress in that direction. .. . 

 Always affectionately yours, FANNY. 

 _Tuesday, 24th. _-- . .. Read over "The Star of Seville, " as Mr. Bartley (our worthy stage manager) has cut it, with a view to its possible performance. He has cut it with a vengeance--what one may call to the quick. However, I suppose they know their own business (though, by the by, I am not always so sure of that). At any rate, I shall make no resistance, but be silent while I am sheared. .. . 

 I rode in the park with John. My mare was ill, and Mew (the stable-keeper) had sent me one of his horses, a great awkward brute, who, after jolting me well up Oxford Street, no sooner entered the park than he bolted down the drive as fast as legs could carry him, John following afar off. In Rotten Row we were joined by young T----. .. . When I thought the devil was a little worked out of my horse, I raised him to a canter again, whereupon scamper the second--I like a flash of lightning, they after me as well as they could. John would not force my father's horse, but Mr. T----, whose horse was a thoroughbred hunter, managed to keep up with me, but lamed his horse in so doing. We then walked soberly round the park and saw our friends and acquaintances, and, turning down the drive, I determined once more to try my horse's disposition, whereupon off he went again, like a shot, leaving John far behind. I flitted down Rotten Row like Faust on the demon horse, and as I drew up and turned about I heard, "Well, that woman does ride well, " which was all, whoever said it, knew of the matter; whereas, in my mad career, I had passed Fozzard, who shook his head lamentably at John, exclaiming, "Oh, Miss Fanny! Miss Fanny!" After this last satisfactory experiment I made no more, and we cut short our ride on account of my unmanageable steed. .. . 

 We had a dinner party at home, and in the evening additional guests, among them Thackeray, who is very clever and delightful. We had music and singing and pleasant, bright talk, and they departed and left us in great good humor. 

 _Wednesday, 25th. _--Read the "Prometheus Unbound. " How gorgeous it is! I do not think Shelley is read or appreciated now as enthusiastically as he was, even in my recollection, some few years ago. I went over my part, and at half-past five to the theater. The play was "Katharine of Cleves, " the house very good; and, to please Henry Greville, I resumed the gold wreath I had discarded and restored the lines I had omitted. After the play came home and supped, and at eleven went to Lady F----'s. .. . A very fine party; "everybody"--that is in town--was there, and Mrs. Norton looking more magnificent than "everybody. " Old Lady S---- like nothing in the world but the mummy carried round at the Egyptian feasts, with her parchment neck and shoulders bare, and her throat all drawn into strings and cords, hung with a dozen rows of perfect precious stones glittering in the glare of the lights with the constant shaking of her palsied head. [This lady continued to frequent the gayest assemblies in London when she had become so old and infirm that, though still persisting daily in her favorite exercise on horseback, she used to be tied into her saddle in such a manner as to prevent her falling out of it. She had been one of the finest riders in England, but used often, at the time when I knew her, to go to sleep while walking the horse round the park, her groom who rode near her being obliged to call to her "My lady! My lady!" to make the poor old woman open her eyes and see where she was going. At upward of eighty she died an unnatural death. Writing by candle-light on a winter's evening, it is supposed that her cap must have taken fire, for she was burnt to death, and had for her funeral pile part of the noble historical house of Hatfield, which was destroyed by the same accident. ]

 Lord Lansdowne desired to be introduced to me, and talked to me a long time. I thought him very good-natured and a charming talker. Mrs. Bradshaw (Maria Tree) was there, looking beautiful. Our hostess's daughter, Miss F----, is very pretty, but just misses being a beauty; in that case a miss is a great deal worse than a mile. Just as the rooms were beginning to thin, and we were going away, Lord O---- sat down to the piano. I had heard a great deal about his singing, and was rather disappointed; he has a sweet voice and a sweet face, but Henry Greville's bright, sparkling countenance and expressive singing are worth a hundred such mere musical sentimentalities. [Mr. Henry Greville was one of the best amateur singers of the London society of his day. He was the intimate personal friend of Mario, whom I remember he brought to our house, when first he arrived in London, as M. De Candia, before the beginning of his public career, and when, in the very first bloom of youth, his exquisite voice and beautiful face produced in society an effect which only briefly forestalled the admiration of all Europe when he determined to adopt the profession which made him famous as the incomparable tenor of the Italian stage for so many years. ] Then, too, those lads sing songs, the words of which give one the throat-ache with strangled crying, and when they have done you hear the women all round mincing, "Charming!--how nice!--sweet!--what a dear!--darling creature!"

 _Thursday, 26th. _--Murray was most kind and good-natured and liberal about all the arrangements for publishing "Francis I. " and "The Star of Seville. " He will take them both, and defer the publication of the first as long as the managers of Covent Garden wish him to do so. [As there was some talk just then of bringing out "The Star of Seville" at the theater, it was thought better not to forestall its effect by the publication of "Francis I. "]

 At the theater the play was "The School for Scandal. " A---- F---- was there, with young Sheridan; I hope the latter approved of my method of speaking the speeches of his witty great-grandfather. I played well, though the audience was dull and didn't help me. Mary and William Harness supped with us. .. . 

 _Friday, 27th. _--A long discussion after breakfast about the necessity of one's husband being clever. Ma foi je n'en vois pas la nécessité. People don't want to be entertaining each other all day long; _very_ clever men don't grow on every bush, and _middling_ clever men don't amount to anything. I think I should like to have married Sir Humphry Davy. A well-assorted marriage, as the French say, seems to me like a well-arranged duet for four hands; the treble, the woman, has all the brilliant and melodious part, but the whole government of the piece, the harmony, is with the base, which really leads and sustains the whole composition and keeps it steady, and without which the treble for the most part _runs to tune_ merely, and wants depth, dignity, and real musical importance. 

 In the afternoon went to Lady Dacre's. .. . She read me the first act of a little piece she has been writing; while listening to her I was struck as I never had been before with the great beauty of her countenance, and its very varied and striking expression. .. . At home spent my time in reading Shelley. How wonderful and beautiful the "Prometheus" is! The unguessed heavens and earth and sea are so many storehouses from which Shelley brings gorgeous heaps of treasure and piles them up in words like jewels. I read "The Sensitive Plant" and "Rosalind and Helen. " As for the latter--powerful enough, certainly--it gives me bodily aches to read such poetry. 

 What extraordinary proceedings have been going on in the House of Commons! Mr. Percival getting up and quoting the Bible, and Mr. Hunt getting up and answering him by quoting the Bible too. It seems we are to have a general fast--on account of the general national misconduct, I suppose; serve us right. 

 _Sunday, 29th. _--Went into my mother's room before going to church. Henry Greville has sent her Victor Hugo's new book, "Notre Dame de Paris, " but she appears half undetermined whether she will go on reading it or not, it is so painfully exciting. I took Mrs. Montague up in the carriage on my way to church, and after service drove her home, and went up to see Mrs. Procter, and found baby (Adelaide Procter) at dinner. That child looks like a poet's child, and a poet. It has something "doomed" (what the Germans call "fatal") in its appearance--such a preternaturally thoughtful, mournful expression for a little child, such a marked brow over the heavy blue eyes, such a transparent skin, such pale-golden hair. John says the little creature is an elf-child. I think it is the prophecy of a poet. [And so, indeed, it was, as all who know Adelaide Procter's writings will agree--a poet who died too early for the world, though not before she had achieved a poet's fame, and proved herself her father's worthy daughter. ] . .. In the afternoon, I found my mother deep in her French novel, from which she read me two very striking passages--the description of Esmeralda, which was like a fine painting, and extremely beautiful, and the sketch of Quasimodo's life, ending with his riding on the great bell of the cathedral. Very powerful and very insane--a sort of mental nightmare, giving one as much the idea of disorder of intellect as such an image occurring to one in a dream would of a disordered stomach. Harmony, order, the beauty of goodness and the justice of God, are alike ignored in such works. How sad it is for the future as well as for the present!

 _Monday, 30th. _--King Charles' martyrdom gives me a holiday to-night. Excellent martyr! Victor Hugo has set my mother raving. She didn't sleep all night, and says the book is bad in its tendency and shocking in its details; nevertheless, she goes on reading it. .. . 

 _Tuesday, January 31st. _-- . .. Went to Turnerelli's. He is making a bust of me, that will perhaps be like--the man in the moon. Dall was kind enough to read to me Mrs. Jameson's "Christina" while I sat. I like it extremely. After I came home, read Shirley's play of "The Two Sisters. " I didn't like it much. It is neither very interesting, very witty, nor very poetical, and might almost be a modern work for its general want of power and character. The women appear to me a little exaggerated--the one is mad and the other silly. At the theater in the evening the house was very good indeed--the play, "Katharine of Cleves;" but poor Mr. Warde was so ill he could hardly stand. 

 _Wednesday, February 1st. _-- . .. Drove out with Henry in the new carriage. It is very handsome, but by no means as convenient or capacious as our old rumble. Oh, these vanities! How we sacrifice everything to them!

 _Thursday, 2d. _ . .. Rode out with my father. The whole world was abroad in the sunshine, like so many flies. My mother was walking with John and Henry, and Henry Greville. I should like to tell him two words of my mind on the subject of lending "Notre Dame de Paris" about to women. At any rate, we vulgar females are not as much accustomed to mental dram-drinking as his fine-lady friends, and don't stand that sort of thing so well. .. . In the evening we went to the theater to see "The Haunted Tower. " Youth and first impressions are wonderful magicians. (I forget whether the music of this piece was by Storace or Michael Kelly. ) This was an opera which I had heard my father and mother talk of forever. I went full of expectation accordingly, and was entirely disappointed. The meagerness and triteness of the music and piece astonished me. After the full orchestral accompaniments, the richly harmonized concerted pieces and exquisite melodies lavished on us in our modern operas, these simple airs and their choruses and mean finales produce an effect from their poverty of absolute musical starvation. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, January 31, 1832. MY DEAREST H---- G----, You are coming to England, and you will certainly not do so again without coming to us. My father and mother, you know, speak by me when I assure you that a visit from you would give us all the greatest pleasure. .. . Do not come late in the season to us, because at present we do not know whether June or July may take us out of town. .. . With my scheme of going to America, I think I can look the future courageously in the face. It is something to hold one's fortune in one's own hands; if the worst comes to the worst it is but another year's drudgery, and the whereabouts really matters little. .. . We hear that the cholera is in Edinburgh. I cannot help thinking with the deepest anxiety of those I love there, and I imagine with sorrow that beautiful, noble city, those breezy hills, those fresh, sea-weedy shores and coasts breathed upon by that dire pestilence. The city of the winds, where the purifying currents of keen air sweep through every thoroughfare and eddy round every corner--perched up so high upon her rocky throne, she seems to sit in a freer, finer atmosphere than all the world beside! (I appear, in my enthusiastic love for Edinburgh, to have forgotten those Immonderraze, the wynds and closes of the old town. ) I hope the report may not prove true, though from a letter I have received from my cousin Sally (Siddons) the plague is certainly within six miles of them. She writes very rationally about it, and I can scarce forbear superstitiously believing that God's mercy will especially protect those who are among His most devoted and dutiful children. .. . 

 You speak of my love of nature almost as if it were a quality for which I deserve commendation. It is a blessing for which I am most grateful. You who live uninclosed by paved streets and brick walls, who have earth, sea, and sky _à discrétion_ spread round you in all their majestic beauty, cannot imagine how vividly my memory recalls and my mind dwells upon mere strips of greensward, with the shadows of trees lying upon them. The colors of a patch of purple heather, broken banks by roadsides through which sunshine streamed--often mere effects of light and shade--return to me again and again like tunes, and _to shut my eyes and look at them_ is a perfect delight to me. I suppose one is in some way the better as well as the happier for one's sympathy with the fair things of this fair world, which are types of things yet fairer, and emanations from the great Source of all goodness, loveliness, and sublimity. Whether in the moral or material universe, images and ideas of beauty must always be in themselves good. Beauty is one manifestation and form of truth, and the transition seems to me almost inevitable from the contemplation of things that are lovely to one's _senses_ to those which are _lovable_ by one's spirits' higher and finer powers of apprehension. The mind is kept sunny and calm, and free from ill vapors, by the influence of beautiful things; and surely God loves beauty, for from the greatest to the smallest it pervades all His works; and poetry, painting, and sculpture are not as beautiful as the things they reproduce, because of the imperfect nature-of their creator--man; though _his_ works are only good in proportion as he puts his soul--_i. E. _, the Spirit of God--inspiration into them. 

 Your affectionate

 F. A. K. 

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, February 17, 1832. MY DEAREST H----, "Francis I. " will come out on the 1st of March, so your starting on the 25th will do quite well for that; but it is right I should tell you what may possibly deter you from coming. A report prevails that the cholera is approaching London, and though I cannot say that I feel nervous upon the subject, perhaps, under these circumstances, you had rather or better not come. 

 There have been many assertions and contradictions about it, of course, and I know nothing but that such a rumor is prevalent, and if this should cause you or (what is more likely) yours an instant's hesitation, you must give up your visit. I know our disappointment will be mutual and equal, and I am sure you will not inflict it either upon yourself or me without adequate reason, so I will say no more about it. 

 The reason for bringing out "Francis I. " now is that Milman has undertaken to review it in the next _Quarterly_, and Murray wishes the production of the play at the theater to be simultaneous with the publication of the _Review_. 

 My wrath and annoyance upon the subject have subsided, and I have now taken refuge with restored equanimity in my "cannot help it. " Certainly I said and did all I could to hinder it. 

 I do not feel at all nervous about the fate of the play--no English public will damn an attempt of that description, however much it may deserve it; and paradoxical as it may sound, a London audience, composed as it for the most part is of pretty rough, coarse, and hard particles, makes up a most soft-hearted and good-natured whole, and invariably in the instance of a new actor or a new piece--whatever partial private ill will may wish to do--the majority of the spectators is inclined to patience and indulgence. I do not mean that I shall not turn exceedingly sick when I come to set my foot upon the stage that night; but it will only be with a slight increase of the alarm which I undergo with every new part. My poor mother will be the person to be pitied; I wish she would take an opiate and go to bed, instead of to the theater that night. .. . 

 I was at a party last night where I met Lord Hill (then commander of the forces), who had himself presented to me, and who renewed in person the promise he had sent me through Sir John Macdonald (who was adjutant-general), to exert and interest himself to the utmost of his power about Henry's commission. 

 John has finished his Anglo-Saxon book, and Murray has undertaken to publish it for him, offering at the same time to share with him whatever profits may accrue from it. The work is of a nature which cannot give either a quick or considerable return; but the offer, like all Mr. Murray's dealings with me, is very kind and liberal, for a publisher is not easily found any more than readers for such matter. (The book was the Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf. ) He asked me to let him publish "Francis I. , " as it is to be acted, without the fifth act, but this I would not consent to. I have rather an affection for my last scene in the Certoso at Pavia, with the monks singing the "De Profundis" while the battle was going on, and the king being brought in a prisoner and making the response to the psalm--which is all historically true. .. . 

 I must bid you good-by, dear, as I am going to the Angerstein Gallery with the Fitzhughs. .. . 

 Yours ever affectionately, F. A. K. 

 _Saturday, 4th. _--I was obliged to send an excuse to Turnerelli. I could not sit to him this morning, as it is now determined that "Francis I. " is to be brought out, and received official notice that it was to be read in the greenroom to-day. We went to the theater at eleven, and all the actors were there. I felt very uncomfortable and awkward; but, after all, writing a play is not a sin, so I plucked up my courage and sat down with the rest. My father read it beautifully, but even cut as it is, it is of an _unendurable_ length. They were all very kind and civil, and applauded it very much; but I do not love the sound of clapping of hands, and did not feel on this occasion as if I had done the sort of thing that deserves it. .. . 

 At half-past five went to the theater; it was the first night of the opera, and rained besides, both which circumstances thinned our house; but I suspect "Katharine of Cleves" has nearly lived her life. Driving to the theater, my father told me that they had entirely altered the cast of "Francis I. " from what I had appointed, and determined to finish the play with the fourth act. I felt myself get very red, but I didn't speak, though I cannot but think an author has a right to say whether he or she will have certain alterations made in their work. My position is a difficult one, for did I not feel bound to comply with my father's wishes I would have no hand in this experiment. I would forfeit fifty--nay, a hundred--pounds willingly rather than act in this play, which I am convinced ought not to be acted at all. Any other person might do this, but with me it is a question of home duty, instead of a mere matter of business between author, actress, and manager. They couldn't act the play without me, and but for my father I should from the first have refused to act in it at all. I do not think that they manage wisely; it is a mere snatch at a bit of profit by a way of catchpenny venture, to secure which they are running the risk of injuring me more ways than one, and through me their own interests. It seems to me shortsighted policy, but I cannot help myself. After the play came home to supper, and at eleven went to Lady Dacre's. Sidney Smith, Rogers. Conversation sharp. Lots of people that I knew, in spite of which, in consequence, I suppose, of my own state of spirits, I did not enjoy myself. Mrs. Norton was there; she sang "My Arab Steed, " and "Yes, Aunt, " and "Joe Hardy;" the latter I do not think very good. They made me sing; I was horribly frightened. Julian Young was there; his manner and appearance are not very good, but his voice is beautiful and he sang very well. 

 _Sunday, 5th. _-- . .. When I came back from church I found Campbell with my mother, scraping up information about Mrs. Siddons for his and her "life. " I left him with her, and when I came back he was gone, and in his place, as if he had turned into her, sat Mrs. Fitzgerald in a green velvet gown trimmed with sables, which excited my admiration and envy. I should like to have been living in the days and countries where persons, as a mark of favor, took off their dress and threw it on your shoulders. How pleasant it would have been!. .. 

 Just before going to bed I spoke of writing a preface to "Francis I. , " which brought on a discussion with my mother on the subject of that ill-fated piece, in the middle of which my father came in, and I summoned up courage to say something of what I felt about it, and how disagreeable it was to me to act in it, feeling as I did. I do not think I can make them understand that I do not care a straw whether the piece dies and is damned the first night, or is cut up alive the next morning, but that I do care that, in spite of my protestations, it should be acted at all, and should be cut and cast in a manner that I totally disapprove of. 

 _Monday, 6th. _-- . .. On our way to the theater my father told me that the whole cast of "Francis I. " is again turned topsy-turvy. Patience of me! I felt very cross, so I held my tongue. Mr. And Miss Harness came home to supper with us, and had a long talk about "Francis I. , " my annoyance about which culminated, I am ashamed to say, in a fit of crying. 

 _Tuesday, 7th. _--So "Francis I. " is in the bills, I see. .. . 

 _Wednesday, 8th. _-- . .. At eleven "The Provoked Husband" was rehearsed in the saloon, and Mr. Meadows brought Carlo to see me. [Carlo was a splendid Newfoundland dog, which my friend, Mr. Drinkwater Meadows, used to bring to the theater to see me. His solemnity, when he was desired to keep still while the rehearsal was going on, was magnificent, considering the stuff he must have thought it. ] . .. After dinner went to the theater. The house was bad; the play, "The Provoked Husband. " I played ill in spite of my pink gauze gown, which is inestimable and as fresh as ever. After supper dressed and off to Mrs. G----'s, and had a very nice ball. .. . 

 _Friday, 10th. _-- . .. I wrote to H---- to beg her to come to me directly; I wish her so much to be here when my play comes out. Went to the theater at a quarter to six. The house was bad; the play, "Katharine of Cleves. " I acted pretty well, _though_ my dresses are getting shockingly dirty, and in one of the scenes my wreath fell backward, and I was obliged to take it off in the middle of all my epistolary agony; and what was still worse, after my husband had locked me in one room and my wreath in another, it somehow found its way back upon my head for the last scene. At the end of the play, which has now been acted ten nights, some people began hissing the pinching incident. It was always considered the dangerous passage of the piece, but a reasonable public should know that a play must be damned on its first night, or not at all. 

 _Saturday, 11th. _-- . .. A long walk with my mother, and a long talk about Shakespeare, especially about the beauty of his songs. .. . 

 _Tuesday, 14th. _-- . .. Read the family my prologue. My mother did not like it at all; my father said it would do very well. John asked why there need be any prologue to the play, which is precisely what I do not understand. However, I was told to write one and I did, and they may use it or not just as they please. I am determined to say not another word about the whole vexatious business, and so peace be with them. .. . In the evening a charming little dinner-party at Mr. Harness's. The G----s, Arthur K----, Procter (Barry Cornwall), who is delightful, Sir William Millman, and ourselves. .. . Dear Mr. Harness has spoken to Murray about John's book, and has settled it all for him. On my return home, I told John of the book being accepted, at which he was greatly pleased. [The book in question was my brother's history of the Anglo-Saxons, of which Lord Macaulay once spoke to me in terms of the highest enthusiasm, deploring that John had not followed up that line of literature to a much greater extent. ]

 _Wednesday, 15th. _-- . .. My father went to the opening dinner of the Garrick Club. .. . After tea I read Daru, and copied fair a speech I had been writing for an imaginary member of the House of Peers, on the Reform Bill. John Mason called, and they sat down to a rubber, and I came to my own room and read "King Lear. " . .. 

 _Thursday, 16th. _-- . .. While I was at the Fitzhughs' Miss Sturges Bourne came in, and she and Emily had a very interesting conversation about books for the poor. Among other things Emily said that Lady Macdonald had written up to her from the country, to say that she wanted some more books of sentiment, for that by the way in which these were thumbed it was evident that they alone would "go down. " Upon inquiry, I found that these "sentimental" books were religious tracts, highly flavored with terror or pathos, and in one way or another calculated to convey the strongest excitement upon the last subject with which excitement ought to have anything to do. Pious stimulants, devout drams, this is trying to do good, but I think mistaking the way. .. . 

 In the evening we went to Lady Farquhar's; this was a finer party, as it is called, than the last, but not so pleasant. All the world was there. Mrs. Norton the magnificent, and that lovely sister of hers, Mrs. Blackwood (afterwards Lady Dufferin), crowned like Bacchantes with grapes, and looking as beautiful as dreams. Heaps of acquaintance and some friends. .. . 

 _Sunday, 10th. _-- . .. In the evening I read Daru. What fun that riotous old Pope Julius is! Poor Gaston de Foix! It was young to leave life and such well-begun fame. The extracts from Bayard's life enchant me. I am glad to get among my old acquaintance again. Mr. Harness came in rather late and said all manner of kind things about "The Star of Seville, " but I was thinking about his play all the while; it does not seem to me that the management is treating him well. If it does not suit the interests of the theater to bring it out now, he surely should be told so, and not kept in a state of suspense, which cannot be delightful to any author, however little of an egotist he may be. 

 _Monday, 20th. _--Went to Kensington Gravel Pits to see Lady Calcott, and sat with her a long time. That dying woman, sitting in the warm spring sunlight, surrounded with early-blowing hyacinths, the youngest born of the year, was a touching object. She is a charming person, so full of talent and of goodness. She talked with her usual cheerfulness and vivacity. Presently Sir Augustus came down from the painting-room to see me. .. . I could hardly prevent myself from crying, and I am afraid I looked very sad. As I was going away and stooped to kiss her, she sweetly and solemnly bade "God bless me, " and I thought her prayer was nearer to heaven than that of most people. .. . 

 _Tuesday, 21st. _-- . .. After tea dropped John at Mr. Murray's in Albemarle Street, and went on to the theater to see the new opera; our version of "Robert the Devil. " The house was very full. Henry Greville was there, with the Mitfords and Mrs. Bradshaw. What an extraordinary piece, to be sure! I could not help looking at the full house and wondering how so many decent Englishmen and women could sit through such a spectacle. .. . The impression made upon me by the subject of Meyerbeer's celebrated opera appears to have entirely superseded that of the undoubtedly fine music; but I never was able to enjoy the latter because of the former, and the only shape in which I ever enjoyed "Robert the Devil" was in M. Levassor's irresistibly ludicrous account of it in the character of a young Paris _badaud_, who had just come from seeing it at the theater. His version of its horrors was laughable in the extreme, especially when, coming to the episode of the resurrection of the nuns, he contrived to give the most comical effect of a whole crowd--gibbering, glissading women greeting one another with the rapid music of the original scene, to which he adapted the words--

 "Quoi c'est moi c'est toi, Oui c'est toi c'est moi; Comme nous voila bien dégommés. "

 Mendelssohn's opinion of the subjects chosen for operas in his day (even such a story as that of the Sonnambula) was scornful in the extreme. 

 _Friday, 24th. _-- . .. Dined with the Fitzhughs, and after dinner proceeded to the Adelphi, where we went to see "Victorine, " which I liked very much. Mrs. Yates acted admirably the whole of it, but more particularly that part where she is old and in distress and degradation. There was a dreary look of uncomplaining misery about her, an appearance as of habitual want and sorrow and suffering, a heavy, slow, subdued, broken deportment, and a way of speaking that was excellent and was what struck me most in her performance, for the end is sure to be so effective that she shares half her merit there with the situation. Reeve is funny beyond anything; his face is the most humorous mask I ever saw in my life. I think him much more comical than Liston. The carriage was not come at the end of the first piece, so we had to wait through part of "Robert the Devil" (given at last, such was its popularity, at every theater in London). Of course, after our own grand _diablerie_, it did not strike me except as being wonderfully well done, considering the size and means of their little stage. [Yates made a most capital fiend: I should not like a bit to be Mrs Yates after seeing him look that part so perfectly. ]

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, February 24, 1832. DEAREST H----, I have this moment received your letter, and though rather disappointed myself, I am glad you are to see Dorothy as well as we, so that your visit southward is to be two pleasures instead of one. The representation of "Francis I. " is delayed until next Wednesday, 7th March; not on account of cholera, but of scenery and other like theatrical causes of postponement. .. . 

 I am greatly worried and annoyed about my play. The more I see and hear of it the stronger my perception grows of its defects, which, I think, are rendered even more glaring by the curtailments and alterations necessary for its representation; and the whole thing distresses me as much as such a thing can. I send you the cast of the principal characters for the instruction of my Ardgillan friends, by whose interest about it I am much gratified. My father is to be De Bourbon; John Mason, the king; Mr. Warde, the monk; Mr. Bennett, Laval. These are the principal men's parts. I act the queen-mother; Miss Taylor, Margaret de Valois; and Miss Tree, Françoise de Foix. 

 I am reading Cooper's novel of "The Borderers. " It is striking and powerful, and some of it I think very beautiful, especially all that regards poor Ruth, which, I remember, is what struck you so much. I like the book extremely. There is a soft sobriety of color over it all that pleases me, and reminds me of your constant association of religion and the simple labors of an agricultural life. It is wonderful how striking the description of this neutral-tinted existence is, in which life, love, death, and even this wild warfare with the savage tribes, by which these people were surrounded, appear divested of all their natural and usual excitements. Religion alone (and this, of course, was inevitable) is the one imaginative and enthusiastic element in their existence, and that alone becomes the source of vehement feeling and passionate excitement which ought least to admit of fanciful interpretations and exaggerated and morbid sentiment. But the picture is admirably well drawn, and I cannot help sometimes wishing I had lived in those days, and been one of that little colony of sternly simple and fervently devout Christian souls. But I should have been a furious fanatic; I should have "seen visions and dreamed dreams, " and fancied myself a prophetess to a certainty. 

 That luckless concern, in which you are a luckless shareholder (Covent Garden), is going to the dogs faster and faster every day; and, in spite of the Garrick Club and all its noble regenerators of the drama, I think the end of it, and that no distant one, will be utter ruin. They have been bringing out a new grand opera, called "Robert the Devil, " which they hope to derive much profit from, as it is beyond all precedent absurd and horrible (and, as I think, disgusting); but I am almost afraid that it has none of these good qualities in a sufficient degree to make it pay its own enormous cost. I have seen it once, and came home with such a pain in my side and confused chaos in my head that I do not think I shall ever wish to see it again. Write me a line to say when I may look for you. 

 Ever affectionately yours, F. A. K. 

 _Saturday, 25th. _-- . .. Finished Fenimore Cooper's interesting and pathetic novel, "The Borderers. " . .. I came down into the drawing-room with a headache, a sideache, a heartache, and swollen red eyes, and my mother greeted me with the news that the theater was finally ruined, that at Easter it must close, that we must all go different ways, and I probably to America. I was sobered from my imaginary sorrow directly; for it is astonishing what a different effect real and fictitious distress has upon one. I could not answer my mother, but I went to the window and looked up and down the streets that were getting empty and dark and silent, and my heart sank as I thought of leaving my home, my England. .. . After dinner Madame le Beau came to try on my Louisa of Savoy's dress; it is as ugly and unbecoming, but as correct, as possible. .. . 

 _Wednesday, 23d. _--At eleven went to the theater to rehearse "Francis I. " The actors had most of them been civil enough to learn their parts, and were tolerably perfect. Mr. Bennett will play his very well indeed, if he does not increase in energy when he comes to act. Miss Tree, too, I think, will do her part very nicely. John Mason is rather vulgar and 'prentice-like for Francis, that mirror of chivalry. After rehearsal I went to Dévy, to consult about my dress. I have got a picture of the very woman, Louisa of Savoy, queen-mother of France, and, short of absolute hideousness, I will make myself as like her as I can. .. . 

 Arthur Hallam dined with us. I am not sure that I do not like him the best of all John's friends. Besides being so clever, he is so gentle, charming, and winning. At half-past ten went to Mrs. Norton's. My father, who had received a summons from the Court of Chancery, did not come. .. . It was a very fine, and rather dull, party. .. . Mrs. Norton looks as if she were made of precious stones, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires; she is radiant with beauty. And so, in a different way, is that vision of a sister of hers (Georgiana Sheridan, Lady St. Maur, Duchess of Somerset, and Queen of Beauty), with her waxen, round, white arms, and eyes streaming with soft brilliancy, like fountains by moonlight. To look at two such creatures for an hour is enough to make the world brighter for several hours. 

 _Thursday, 24th. _--At eleven went to rehearsal. While we were rehearsing Mr. Bartley came and told me that the play, "Francis I. , " would not be done for a fortnight, and afterward my father told me he did not think it was right, or fitting, or doing me justice to bring out my play without some little attention to scenery, decorations, etc. I entreated him to go to no expense for it, for I am sure it will not repay them. Moreover, they have given their scenery, and finery, and dressing, and decoration, and spectacle in such profusion to "Robert the Devil" that I am sure they cannot afford a heavy outlay upon anything else just now. However, I could not prevail, and probably the real reason for putting off "Francis I. " is the expediency of running the new opera as long as it will draw before bringing out anything else, which, of course, is good policy. .. . 

 _Wednesday, 29th. _--H---- has gone to York. What a disappointment! After all, it's only one more added to the budget. Yet why do I say that? One scores one's losses, and takes no reckoning of one's gains, which is neither right nor fair to one's life. .. . 

 I rode with Henry, and after I got home told my father that his horse was quite well, and would be fit for his use on Saturday. He replied sadly that his horse must be sold, for that from the first, though he had not liked to vex me by saying so, it was an expense he could not conscientiously afford. I had expected this, and certainly, when from day to day a man may be obliged to declare himself insolvent, keeping a horse does seem rather absurd. He then went on to speak about the ruin that is falling upon us; and dismal enough it is to stand under the crumbling fabric we have spent having and living, body, substance, and all but soul, to prop, and see that it must inevitably fall and crush us presently. Yet from my earliest childhood I remember this has been hanging over us. I have heard it foretold, I have known it expected, and there is no reason why it should now take any of us by surprise, or strike us with sudden dismay. Thank God, our means of existence lie within ourselves; while health and strength are vouchsafed to us there is no need to despond. It is very hard and sad to be come so far on in life, or rather so far into age, as my father is, without any hope of support for himself and my mother but toil, and that of the severest kind; but God is merciful. He has hitherto cared for us, as He cares for all His creatures, and He will not forsake us if we do not forsake Him or ourselves. .. . My father and I need scarcely remain without engagements, either in London or the provinces. .. . If our salaries are smaller, so must our expenses be. The house must go, the carriage must go, the horses must go, and yet we may be sufficiently comfortable and very happy--unless, indeed, we have to go to America, and that will be dreadful. .. . We are yet all stout and strong, and we are yet altogether. It is pitiful to see how my father still clings to that theater. Is it because? the art he loves, once had its noblest dwelling there? Is it because his own name and the names of his brother and sister are graven, as it were, on its very stones? Does he think he could not act in a smaller theater? What can, in spite of his interest, make him so loth to leave that ponderous ruin? Even to-day, after summing up all the sorrow and care and toil, and waste of life and fortune which that concern has cost his brother, himself, and all of us, he exclaimed, "Oh, if I had but £10, 000, I could set it all right again, even now!" My mother and I actually stared at this infatuation. If I had twenty, or a hundred thousand pounds, not one farthing would I give to the redeeming of that fatal millstone, which cannot be raised, but will infallibly drag everything tied to it down to the level of its own destruction. The past is past, and for the future we must think and act as speedily as we may. If our salaries are half what they are now we need not starve; and, as long as God keeps us in health of body and mind, nothing need signify, provided we are not obliged to separate and go off to that dreadful America. 

 _Thursday, March 1st. _-- . .. After dinner I read over again Knowles's play, "The Hunchback, " and like it better than ever. What would I not give to have written that play! He cannot agree with Drury Lane about it, and has brought it back to us, and means to act Master Walter himself. I am so very glad. It will be the most striking dramatic exhibition that has been seen since Kean's _début_. I wish "Francis I. " was done, and done with, and that we were rehearsing "The Hunchback. "

 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March 1, 1832. 

 . .. As for any disappointment of mine about anything, dear H----, though some things are by no means light to me, I soon make up my mind to whatever must be, and I think those who do not endure well what cannot be avoided are only less foolish than those who endure what they can avoid. "Francis I. " will not, I think, interfere with your visit to us. Murray wishes it to be postponed till after the publication of the _Quarterly_, which will come out about the 11th or 12th. Lockhart, and not Milman, has reviewed it very favorably, I hear, and Murray expects to sell one edition immediately upon the publication of the article in the _Quarterly_. So that you can stay at Fulford some time yet; and should the play be given before you wish to leave it, I shall not expect you in person, but feel sure that you are with me in spirit; and the next day I will write you word of the result. 

 Dearest H----, I am just now much burdened with anxiety. I will tell you more of this when we meet. Thank God, though not of a sanguine, I am not of a desponding nature; and though I never look forward with any great satisfaction to the future, I seldom find it difficult to accept the present with tolerable equanimity. .. . I spent the evening on Wednesday with Mrs. Jameson. She is just returned to town, and came immediately, thinking you were here, to engage us for the next evening; and as you did not come I went, and spent three hours very pleasantly with her. She knows so much, and I am so very ignorant, that her conversation is delightfully instructive as well as amusing, full of interest and information. Poor woman! she left Tedsley and a very agreeable party to come up to town upon a false alarm of "Francis I. 's" coming out. I think I have told you of the work upon Shakespeare she is engaged with; she has been teaching herself to etch, and has executed some charming designs, with which she means to illustrate it. I have not an idea what our plans for this summer are to be; whether America, or the provinces, or the King's Bench; but I suppose we shall see a little more clearly into the future by the time you come to us; and if we do not, abundantly "sufficient for the day is the evil thereof" with us just now. .. . I have been reading nothing but Daru's "History of Venice" lately. How could you tell me to read that sad story, "The Borderers"! I half killed myself with crying over it, and did not recover from the effect it had upon me for several days. 

 Dearest H----, I am writing nonsense, and with an effort, for I am very low; and so I will leave off. 

 Your affectionate F. A. K. 

 _Friday, March 2d. _--I read Shirley's "Gentleman of Venice, " and did not like it much. .. . While I was riding in the park with John, Mr. Willett came up to us, and told me, as great good news, that they were out of Chancery, and had obtained an order to have their money out of court. I thought this indeed good news, and we cantered up the drive in hopes of meeting my mother in the carriage; but she had gone home. On reaching home, I ran to look for her, but thought she would like better to hear the news from my father. 

 I told Dall of it, however; and she, who had just seen my father, said that he considered what had happened a most unfortunate thing for him; and so my bright, new joy fell to the ground, and was broken all to pieces. Upon further explanation, however, it seems that it is an advantage to the other proprietors, though not to him; no part of the recovered money returning to him, because he had borrowed his share of it from Mr. Willett; and the only difference is that he will not have to pay the interest on it any more, and so far it is a small advantage to him. But it is a great one to them, poor men! and therefore we ought to be glad, and not look only at our own share of the business, though naturally that is the most interesting to us. I sometimes doubt, after all, if we have really by any means a clear and comprehensive view of the whole state of that concern, receiving our impressions from my father, who naturally looks at it only from the side of his own personal stake in it. .. . After dinner John read me a letter he had just received from Richard Trench--a most beautiful letter. What a fine fellow he is, and what a noble set of young men these friends of my brother's are! After tea read Arthur Hallam's essay on the philosophical writings of Cicero. It is very excellent; I should like to have marked some of the passages, they are so admirably clear and true; but he has only lent it to me. His Latin and Greek quotations were rather a trial, but I have no doubt his English is as good as anything he quotes. Surely England twenty years hence should be in a higher state of moral and intellectual development than it is now: these young heads seem to me admirably good and strong, and some score years hence these fine spirits will be influencing the national mind and soul of England; and it pleases me much to think so. [Alas! as far as dear Arthur Hallam was concerned, my prophetic confidence was vain. ] After finishing Hallam's essay, I took up "King Lear, " and read the end of that, "and my poor fool is hanged!" O Lord, what an agony! In reading "Lear, " one of Mr. Harness's criticisms on my "Star of Seville" recurred to me. In the scene where Estrella deplores her brother's death, I have used frequent repetition of the same words and exclamations. I wrote upon impulse, without deliberation, and simply as my conception of sorrow prompted me, such words as grew from my heart and not my understanding. But in reading "King Lear, " the iteration in the expression of deep grief confirms me in the opinion that it is natural to all men, and not peculiar to myself, for Shakespeare has done it. In the scene where Gloster tells Cornwall and Regan of Edgar's supposed wickedness, the wretched old father uses frequent repetition, as, "Oh, madam, my old heart is cracked; it's cracked!" "Oh, lady, lady, shame would have it hid!" "I know not, madam: 'tis too bad, too bad!" and in the last scene, that most piteous and terrible close that story ever had, the poor old king, in his moanings over Cordelia, repeats his words over and over again. I defend my conception, not my execution of it; and true and touching as these repetitions of Shakespeare's are, mine may be "damnable iteration, " and nothing else. Heart-broken sorrow has but few words; utter bereavement is not eloquent; and David, when the darling of his soul was dead, did but cry, "O Absalom, my son, my son! would God I had died for thee, my son!" A vastly different expression of a vastly different grief from that which poured itself out in the sad and noble dirge, "The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!"

 _Saturday, 3d. _--Henry has obtained his commission; one great piece of good fortune amid all the bad, for which God be thanked. [The liberal price given me by Mr. Murray for my play of "Francis I. " enabled me to purchase my brother's commission, which, however, the money would not have obtained without the extremely kind interest exerted in his favor by Lord Hill, then commander, and Sir John Macdonald, adjutant-general of the forces. ]

 _Sunday, 4th. _-- . .. My father is in deplorable spirits, and seems bowed down with care. I believe all that befalls us is right. I know we must bear it; all I pray for is health, strength and courage to bear it well. In the evening the Harnesses drank tea with us. 

 _Monday, 5th. _--Got ready things for the theater, and went over my part. .. . In the afternoon, I hoped to hear the result of the meeting that had been held by the creditors of the theater; but my father had been obliged to leave it before anything was settled, and did not know what had been the termination of the consultation. At the theater the house was not good, neither was my acting. My father acted admirably, to my amazement: for he has been in a most wretched state of depression for the last week, and to-day at dinner his face looked drawn and haggard and absolutely lead-colored. 

 _Tuesday, 6th. _--After breakfast went with Henry and my father to Cox and Greenwood's, the great army agents, to pay for his commission. Oh, what a good job, to be sure! Then to the Horse Guards, to thank dear Sir John Macdonald; then to Stable Yard, to call upon Lord Fitzroy Somerset; and then home, much happier than I had been for a long time. .. . Madame le Beau brought my dress for Louisa of Savoy; it is very handsome, but I look hideous, and as grim as Queen Death in it. However, it is a precise copy of the woman's own picture, and I must comfort myself with that. In the evening we went to a pleasant party at the Basil Montagues', where for an hour I recovered my love of dancing, which has rather forsaken me of late. The Rajah Ramohun Roy had himself introduced to me, and we presently began a delightful nonsense conversation, which lasted a considerable time, and amused me extremely. His appearance is very striking; his picturesque dress and color make him, of course, a remarkable object in a London ball-room; his countenance, beside being very intellectual, has an expression of great sweetness and benignity and his remarks and conversation are in the highest degree interesting, when one remembers what mental energy and moral force and determination he must have exerted to break through all the trammels which have opposed his becoming what he is. I was turning away from him for a few moments, to speak to Mr. Montague, who had begun a very interesting discourse on the analysis of the causes of laughter, when the Rajah recalled my attention to himself by saying, "I am going to quote the Bible to you: you remember that passage, 'The poor ye have always with you, but Me ye have not always. ' Now, Mr. Montague you have always with you, but me you have not always. " So we resumed our conversation together, and kept up a brief interchange of persiflage which made us both laugh very much, and in which he showed a very ready use of English language for a stranger. 

 Mrs. Procter talked to me a great deal about her little Adelaide, who must be a most wonderful creature. The profound and unanswerable questions put to us by these "children of light" confound us with the sense of our own spiritual and mental darkness. I often think of Tieck's lovely and deep-meaning story of "The Elves. " How little we know of the hidden mysterious springs from which these crystal cups are filled, or of the unseen companions that may have strayed with their fellow to the threshold of this earth, and walk with it while it yet retains its purity and innocence; but, as it journeys on, turn back and forsake it, and return to their home, leaving their sister-soul to wander through the world with sin and sorrow for companions. 

 _Wednesday, 7th. _--I sent "The Merchant of Venice" to Ramohun Roy, who, in our conversation last night, expressed a great desire to read it. .. . 

 _Thursday, 8th. _-- . .. In the evening acted Beatrice. The house was very good, which I was delighted to see. The Harnesses supped with us. While we were at supper, the _Quarterly Review_ came from Murray's, and I read the article on "Francis I. " aloud to them. It is very "handsome, " and I should think must satisfy my most unreasonable friends. It more than satisfied me, for it made me out a great deal cleverer than ever I thought I was, or ever, I am afraid, shall be. 

 _Friday, 9th. _--Rehearsed "Francis I. " When I came home found a charming letter and some Indian books, from that most amiable of all the wise men of the East, Ramohun Roy. Mrs. Jameson and Mr. Harness called. 

 _Saturday, 10th. _--Rehearsed "Francis I. " Tried on my dresses for "The Hunchback;" they will be beautiful. The rehearsal was over long before the carriage came for me; so I went into my father's room and read the newspaper, while he and Mr. Bartley discussed the cast of Knowles's play. It seems my father will not act in it. I am sorry for that; it is hardly fair to Knowles, for no one else can do it. My poor father seemed too bewildered to give any answer, or even heed, to anything, and Mr. Bartley went away. My father continued to walk up and down the room for nearly half an hour, without uttering a syllable; and at last flung himself into a chair, and leaned his head and arms on the table. I was horribly frightened, and turned as cold as stone, and for some minutes could not muster up courage enough to speak to him. At last I got up and went to him, and, on my touching his arm, he started up and exclaimed, "Good God, what will become of us all!" I tried to comfort him, and spoke for a long time, but much, I fear, as a blind man speaks of colors. I do not know, and I do not believe any one knows, the real state of terrible involvement in which this miserable concern is wrapped. What I dread most of all is that my father's health will break down. To-day, while he was talking to me, I saw him suddenly put his hand to his side in a way that sent a pang through my heart. He seems utterly prostrated in spirit, and I fear he will brood himself ill. God help us all! I came home with a heavy heart, and got ready my things for the theater, and went over my part. Emily called. .. . She brought me my aunt Siddons's sketches of Constance and Lady Macbeth. They are simply written, and though not analytically deep or powerful, are true, clear, and good, as far as their extent reaches. She thinks Constance more motherly than queenly, and I do not altogether agree with her. I do not think the scene after Arthur is taken prisoner alone establishes my aunt's position; the mother's sorrow there sweeps every other consideration away. It is before that that I think her love for her child is in some measure mixed with the feeling of the sovereign for his heir; a love of power, in fact, embodied in the boy who was to continue the dominion of a race of princes. He was her royal child, and that I do not think she ever forgot till he was, in her imagination, her dead child. She says she could endure his being thrust from all his rights if he had been a less gracious creature, and goes on--

 "But thou art fair, dear boy: and at thy birth Nature and fortune joined to make thee great;"

 and then bursts forth into her furious vituperation of those whose treachery has frustrated his natural claim to greatness. The woman, too, who in the utmost bitterness of disappointment, in the utter helplessness and desolation of betrayal, and the prostration of anguish and despair, calls on the earth, not for a shelter, not for a grave, or for a resting-place, but for a throne, is surely royally ambitious, a queen more than anything else. Mrs. Siddons's conception of Lady Macbeth is very beautiful, and I was particularly struck by her imagination of her outward woman: the deep blue eyes, the fair hair and fair skin of the northern woman (though, by the by, Lady Macbeth is a Highlander--I suppose a Celt; and they are a dark race); the frail feminine form and delicate character of beauty, which, united to that undaunted mettle which her husband pays homage to in her, constituted a complex spell, at once soft and strong, sweet and powerful, and seemed to me a very original idea. My aunt makes a curious suggestion, supported only by her own conviction, for which, however, she demonstrates no grounds, that in the banquet scene Lady Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost at the same time Macbeth does. It is very presumptuous in me to differ from her who has made such a wonderful study of this part, but it seems to me that this would make Lady Macbeth all but superhuman; and in the scene with her husband that precedes the banquet, Macbeth's words to her give me to understand that she is entirely innocent of the knowledge even of his crime. 

 _Monday, 12th. _--Went to the theater to rehearse "Francis I. " Miss Tree and Mr. Bennett will act their parts admirably, I think. .. . When I got home got ready my things for the theater, and went over my part. The play was "Much Ado about Nothing, " and I played as ill as usual. The house was pretty good. 

[Here occurs an interruption of some weeks in my journal. ]

My friend, Miss S----, came and paid me a long visit, during which myplay of "Francis I. " and Knowles's play of "The Hunchback" wereproduced, and it was finally settled that Covent Garden should be let tothe French manager and entrepreneur, Laporte, and that my father andmyself should leave England, and go for two years to America. 

[The success of "Francis I. " was one of entirely indulgent forbearanceon the part of the public. An historical play, written by a girl ofseventeen, and acted in it by the authoress at one and twenty, was, notunnaturally, a subject of some curiosity; and, as such, it filled thehouse for a few nights. Its entire want of real merit, of course, madeit impossible that it should do anything more; and, after a fewrepresentations, it made way for Knowles's delightful play, which had asuccess as great and genuine as it was well deserved, and will not failto be a lasting favorite, alike with audiences and actors. ]

 _Thursday, June 14th. _--A long break in my journal, and what a dismal beginning to it again! At five o'clock H---- started for Ireland. .. . Poor dear Dall cried bitterly at parting from her (my aunt was to accompany me to America, and it was uncertain whether we should see Miss S---- again before we sailed). .. . When I returned, after seeing her off, I went disconsolately to my own room. As I could not sleep, I took up the first book at hand, but it was "Tristram Shandy, " and too horribly discordant with my frame of mind; besides, I don't like it at any time; it seems to me much more coarse even than witty and humorous. 

 _Friday, 15th. _-- . .. Almost at our very door met old Lady Cork, who was coming to see us: We stopped our carriages, and had a bawling conversation through the windows respecting my plans, past, present, and to come, highly edifying, doubtless, to the whole neighborhood, and which ended by her ladyship shrieking out to me that I was "a supernatural creature" in a tone which must have made the mummies and other strange sojourners in the adjacent British Museum jump again. .. . In the evening, at the theater, the play was "The Hunchback, " for Knowles's benefit, and the house was not good, which I do think is a shame. I played well, though Miss Taylor disconcerted me by coming so near me in her second scene that I gave her a real slap in the face, which I was very sorry for, though she deserved it. After the play, Mr. Harness, Mrs. Clarke, and Miss James supped with us; and after supper, I dressed for a ball at the G----s', . .. And much I wondered what call I had to be at a ball, except that the givers of this festival are kind and good friends of ours, and are fond of me, and I of them. But I was not very merry at their ball for all that. We came home at half past two, which is called "very early. " Mr. Bacon was there (editor of the _Times_, who married my cousin, Fanny Twiss), but I had no chance to speak to him, which I was sorry for, as I like his looks, and I liked his books: the first are good, and the latter are clever. I cried all the way home, which is a cheerful way of returning from a ball. 

 _Saturday, 16th. _-- . .. Mrs. Clarke, Miss James, the Messrs. M----, and Alfred Tennyson dined with us. I am always a little disappointed with the exterior of our poet when I look at him, in spite of his eyes, which are very fine; but his head and face, striking and dignified as they are, are almost too ponderous and massive for beauty in so young a man; and every now and then there is a slightly sarcastic expression about his mouth that almost frightens me, in spite of his shy manner and habitual silence. But, after all, it is delightful to see and be with any one that one admires and loves for what he has done, as I do him. Mr. Harness came in the evening. He is excellent, and I am very fond of him. They all went away about twelve. 

 _Monday, 18th. _-- . .. At the theater, in the evening, the house was good, and I played pretty fairly. .. . At supper my father read us his examination before the committee of the House of Commons about this minor theater business. Of course, though every word he says upon the subject is gospel truth, it will only pass for the partial testimony of a person deeply interested in his own monopoly. 

 _Thursday, 21st. _--Called on Mrs. Norton, . .. And on Lady Dacre, to bid her good-by. At the theater, in the evening, the house was good, and I played very well. How sorry I shall be to go away! The actors, too, all seem so sorry to have us go, and it will be so hard to see none of the accustomed faces, to hear none of the familiar voices, while discharging the tasks that are often so irksome to me. John Mason came home after the play and supped with us. 

 _Friday, 22d. _-- . .. In the afternoon I called upon the Sotherbys, to bid them good-by; afterward to the Goldsmiths', on the same cheerless errand. Stopped at dear Miss Cottin's to thank her for the beautiful bracelet she had sent me as a farewell present; and then on to Lady Callcott's, with whom I spent a few solemn moments--solemnity not without sweetness--and I scarcely felt sorrowful when she said, "I shall never see you again. " She is going to what we call heaven, nearer to God (that is, in her own consciousness, nearer to God). .. . 

 In the evening to the theater. I only played pretty well, except the last scene, which was better than the rest. At the end of the play Mr. Bartley made the audience a speech, mentioning our departure, and bespeaking their good will for the new management. The audience called for Knowles, and then clamored for us till we were obliged to go out. They rose to receive us, and waved their hats and handkerchiefs, and shouted farewell to us. It made my heart ache to leave my kind, good, indulgent audience; my friends, as I feel them to be; my countrymen, my English folk, my "very worthy and approved good masters;" and as I thought of the strangers for whom I am now to work in that distant strange country to which we are going, the tears rushed into my eyes, and I hardly knew what I was doing. I scarcely think I even made the conventional courtesy of leave-taking to them, but I snatched my little nosegay of flowers from my sash, and threw it into the pit with handfuls of kisses, as a farewell token of my affection and gratitude. And so my father, who was very much affected, led me off, while the house rang with the cheering of the audience. When we came off my courage gave way utterly, and I cried most bitterly. As my father was taking me to my dressing-room Laporte ran after us, to be introduced to me, to whom I wished success very dolorously from the midst of my tears. He said he ought to cry at our going away more than any one; and perhaps he is right, but we should be better worth his while when we come back, if ever that day comes. I saw numbers of people whom I knew standing behind the scenes to take leave of us. 

 I took an affectionate farewell of poor dear old Rye (the property-man), and Louis, his boy, gave me two beautiful nosegays. It was all wretched, and yet it was a pleasure to feel that those who surrounded and were dependent on us cared for us. I know all the servants and workpeople of the theater were fond of me, and it was sad to say good-by to all these kind, civil, cordial, humble friends; from my good, pretty little maid, who stood sobbing by my dressing-room door, to the grim, wrinkled visage of honest old Rye. .. . 

[That was the last time I ever acted in the Covent Garden my uncle Johnbuilt; where he and my aunt took leave of the stage, and I made my firstentrance upon it. It was soon after altered and enlarged, and turnedinto an opera-house; eventually it was burnt down, and so nothingremains of it. ]

 The Harnesses and their friend Mr. F---- supped with us. Mr. Harness talked all sorts of things to try and cheer me; he labored hard to prove to me that the world was good and happy, but only succeeded in convincing me that he was the one, and deserved to be the other. 

 _Friday, 29th. _--On board the Scotch steamer for Edinburgh. .. . We passed Berwick and Dunbar, and the Douglases' ancient hold Tantallon, and the lines from "Marmion" came to my lips. Poor Walter Scott! he will never sail by this lovely coast again, every bold headland and silver creek of which lives in his song or story. He has given of his own immortality to the earth, which must ere long receive the whole of his mortality. .. . 

 _Saturday, 30th. _--Went to rehearsal. .. . After dinner Mary Anne, my maid, knowing my foible, came in with her arms full of two of the most beautiful children I ever saw in my life. .. . [These beautiful children were the daughters of the Duc de Grammont, and were sharing with their parents the exile of the King of France, Charles X. , who had found in his banishment a royal residence as ruined as his fortunes in the old Scottish palace of Holyrood. Ida de Grammont, the eldest of my angels, fulfilled the promise of her beautiful childhood as the lovely Duchesse de Guyche. ] We spent a pleasant evening at Mrs. Harry Siddons's. Mr. Combe and Macdonald (the sculptor) were there. 

 _Sunday, July 1st. _-- . .. We dined at Mr. Combe's, and had a very pleasant dinner, but unluckily, owing to a stupid servant's mistake, my old friend Mr. McLaren, who had been invited to meet me, did not come. After dinner there was a tremendous discussion about Shakespeare, but I do not think these men knew anything about him. I talked myself into a fever, and ended, with great modesty and propriety, by disabling all their judgments, at which piece of impertinence they naturally laughed very heartily. 

 EDINBURGH, July 1, 1832. DEAREST H----, We left London on Wednesday at eight o'clock. The parting between my mother and Dall (who never met again; my dear aunt died in America, in the second year of our stay there), and myself and my dear little sister, was most bitter. .. . John came down to Greenwich with us, but would not come on board the steamboat. He stood on the shore and I at the ship's side, looking at what I knew was him, though my eyes could distinguish none of his features from the distance. My poor mother stood crying by my side, and bade me send him away. I gave him one signal, which he returned, and then ran up the beach, and was gone!--gone for two years, perhaps more; perhaps gone from me forever in this world!. .. 

 We shall be in Liverpool on Monday morning, the 16th of July, and go to Radley's Hotel, where I hope we shall find you on our arrival. My father is pretty well, in spite of all the late anxieties and annoyances he has had to wade through. In the course of the day preceding our departure from London two arrests were served upon him by creditors of the theater, who, I suppose, think when he is gone the whole concern must collapse and fall to pieces, and I began to think some means would be devised to prevent our leaving England after all. Our parting on Wednesday morning was, as I told you, most miserable. .. . My poor mother was braver than I had expected; but her parting from us, poor thing, is yet to come. 

 I found a letter from Emily Fitzhugh here, inclosing one as an introduction to a lady in New York, who had once been her friend. .. . Edinburgh is lovely and dear, and peace and quiet and repose are always found by me near my dear Mrs. Harry Siddons; but my heart is, oh, so sad!. .. Pray answer this directly. The time is at hand when the quickest "directly" in our correspondence will be three months. 

 Ever your affectionate F. A. K. 

 _Monday, 2d. _--My father and I went to the theater to rehearse "Romeo and Juliet. " In the evening the house was very fair, considering how much the hot weather is against us; but of all the comfortless people to act to, commend me to an Edinburgh audience. Their undemonstrativeness, too, is something more than mere critical difficulty to be pleased; there is a want of kindliness in the cold, discourteous way in which they allow a stranger to appear before them without ever affording him the slightest token of their readiness to accept the efforts made to please them. I felt quite sorry this evening for poor Mr. Didear, to whom not the faintest sign of encouragement was vouchsafed on his first coming on. This is being cold to an unamiable degree, and seems to me both a want of good feeling and good breeding. I acted as well as they would let me. As for poor John Mason, concluding, I suppose, from their frozen silence that he was flat and ineffective, he ranted and roared, and pulled me about in the last scene, till I thought I should have come to pieces in his hands, as the house-maids say of what they break. I was dreadfully exhausted at the end of the play; there is nothing so killing as an ineffectual appeal to sympathy, and, as the Italians know, "ben servire e non gradire" is one of the "tre cose da morire. " . .. 

 _Tuesday, 3d. _--Went to the theater to rehearse. .. . In the evening the house was good, and the play went off very well. I acted well, in spite of my new dresses, which stuck out all round me portentously, and almost filled the little stage. J---- L---- was like a great pink bird, hopping about hither and thither, and stopping to speak, as if it had been well tamed and taught. The audience actually laughed and applauded, and I should think must have gone home very much surprised and exhausted with the unwonted exertion. 

 _Wednesday, 4th. _--Went to the theater to rehearse "Francis I. " After I got home, my mother told me she had determined to leave us on Saturday, and go back to London with Sally Siddons; and I am most thankful for this resolution. .. . How sad it will be in that strange land beyond the sea, among those strange people, to whom we are nothing but strangers! But this is foolish weakness; it must be; and what a world of strength lies in those two little words!. .. At the theater the house was very good, and I played very well. .. . 

 _Thursday, 5th. _--After breakfast went to rehearse "The Gamester. " . .. In the evening the house was not good. My father acted magnificently; I never played this part well, and am now gone off in it, and play it worse than not well; besides, I cannot bully that great, big man, Mr. Didear; it is manifestly absurd. 

 _Friday, 6th. _--To the theater to rehearse "Francis I. " On my return found Mr. Liston and his little girl waiting to ride with me. .. . [This was the beginning of my acquaintance with the celebrated surgeon Liston, who afterward became an intimate friend of ours, and to whose great professional skill my father was repeatedly indebted for relief under a most painful malady. He was a son of Sir Robert Liston, and cousin of the celebrated comedian, between whom and himself, however, there certainly was no family likeness, Liston, the surgeon, being one of the handsomest persons I ever saw. The last time I saw him has left a melancholy impression on my mind of his fine face and noble figure. He had been attending me professionally, but I had ceased to require his care, and had not seen him for some time, when one morning walking, according to my custom in summer, before seven o'clock, as I came to the bridge over the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens, a horseman crossing the bridge stopped by the iron railing, and, jumping off his horse, came toward me. It was Liston, who inquired kindly after my health, and, upon my not answering quite satisfactorily, he said, "Ah! well, you are better than I am. " I laughed incredulously, as I looked at a magnificent figure leaning against the great black horse he rode, and looking like a model of manly vigor and beauty. But in less than a week from that day Liston died of aneurism; and I suppose that when I met him he was well aware of the death which had got him literally by the throat. ]

 _Saturday, 7th. _--Miserable day of parting! of tearing away and wrenching asunder!. .. At eleven we were obliged to go to rehearsal, and when we returned found my mother busy with her packing. .. . When she was gone, I sat down beside my father with a book in my hand, not reading, but listening to his stifled sobbing; and every now and then, in spite of my determination not to do it, looking up to see how far the ship had moved. (Our windows looked over the Forth. ) But the white column of steam was rising steadily from close under Newhaven, and for upward of half an hour continued to do so. I had resolved not to raise my eyes again from my book, when a sudden exclamation from my father made me spring up, and I saw the steamer had left the shore, and was moving fast toward Inchkeith, the dark smoky wake that lingered behind it showing how far it had already gone from us, and warning us how soon it would be beyond the ken of our aching eyes. .. . The carriage was announced, and with a heavy heart and aching head, I drove to the theater. .. . The play was "Francis I. , " for the first time. The house was very fine; I acted abominably, but that was not much to be wondered at. However, I always have acted this part of my own vilely; the language is not natural--mere stilted declamation from first to last, most fatiguing to the chest, and impossible for me to do anything with, as it excites no emotion in me whatever. .. . 

 EDINBURGH, July 8, 1832. MY DEAREST H----, I had just left my father at the window that overlooks the Forth, watching my poor mother's ship sailing away to England, when I received your letter; and it is impossible to imagine a sorer, sadder heart than that with which I greeted it. .. . Thank you for the pains you are taking about your picture for me; crammed with occupation as my time is here, I would have done the same for you, but that I think in Lawrence's print you have the best and likest thing you can have of me. .. . I cannot tell you at what hour we shall reach Liverpool, but it will be very early on Monday morning. .. . I am glad you have not deferred sitting for your picture till you came to Liverpool, for it would have encroached much upon our time together. I remember when I returned from abroad, a school-girl, I thought I had forgotten my mother's face. This copy of yours will save me from that nonsensical morbid feeling, and you will surely not forget mine. .. . You bid me, if anything should go ill with me, summon you across the Atlantic. Alas! dear H----, you forget that before a letter from that other world can reach this, more than a month must have elapsed, and the writer may no longer be in either. You say you hope I may return a new being; and I have no doubt my health will be benefited, and my spirits revived by change of external objects; but oh, how dreary it all is now! You bid me cheer my father when my mother shall have left us, without knowing that she is already gone. I make every exertion that duty and affection can prompt; but, you know, it is my nature rather to absorb the sorrow of others than to assist them in throwing it off; and when one's own heart is all but frozen, one knows not where to find warmth to impart to those who are shivering with misery beside one. .. . I have left myself scarcely any room to tell you of my present life. I work very hard, rehearsing every morning and acting every night, and spending the intervening time in long farewell rides round this most beautiful and beloved Edinburgh. Mr. Combe says I am wearing myself out, body and mind; but I am already looking better, and less thin, than when I left London; and besides, I shall presently have a longer rest--holiday I cannot call it--on board ship than I have had for the last three years. We acted "Francis I. " here last night, for the first time; and I am sure that, mingled with the applause, I heard very distinct hissing; whether addressed to the acting, which was some of it execrable, or to the play itself, which I think quite deserving of such a demonstration, I know not. .. . You know my opinion of the piece; and as, with the exception of the two parts of De Bourbon and the Friar, and not excepting my own, it really was vilely acted, hissing did not appear to me an unnatural proceeding, though perhaps, under the circumstances, not altogether a courteous one on the part of the modern Athenians. I tell you this, because what else have I to tell you, but that I am your ever affectionate

 F. A. K. 

 _Tuesday, 10th. _--At half-past twelve rode out with Liston and his daughter, Mr. Murray, and Allen (since Sir William, the celebrated artist, friend, and painter, of Walter Scott and his family). .. . In the evening, at the theater, the house was very full, and I acted very well, though I was so tired that I could hardly stand, and every bone in my body ached with my hard morning's ride. While I was sitting in the greenroom, Mr. Wilson came in, and it warmed my heart to see a Covent Garden face. He tells me Laporte is giving concerts in the poor old playhouse: well, good luck attend him, poor man (though I know it won't, for "there's nae luck about that house, there's nae luck at a'"). Walter Scott has reached Edinburgh, and starts for Abbotsford to-morrow: I am glad he has come back to die in his own country, in his own home, surrounded by the familiar objects his eyes have loved to look upon, and by the hearts of his countrymen, and the prayers, the blessings, the gratitude, and the love they owe him. All Europe will mourn his death; and for years to come every man born on this soil will be proud, for his sake, to call himself a Scotchman. 

 _Wednesday, 11th. _-- . .. At half-past twelve met Mr. Murray, Mr. Allen, and Mr. Byrne. .. . As we started for our ride, and were "cavalcading" leisurely along York Place, that most enchanting old sweetheart of mine, Baron Hume, came out of a house. I rode toward him, and he met me with his usual hearty, kind cordiality, and a world of old-fashioned stately courtesy, ending our conference by devoutly kissing the tip of my little finger, to the infinite edification of my party, upon whose minds I duly impressed the vast superiority of this respectful style of gallantry to the flippant, easy familiarity of the present day. These old beaux beat the young ones hollow in the theory of courtship, and it is only a pity that their time for practice is over. Commend me to this bowing and finger-kissing! it is at any rate more dignified than the nodding, bobbing, and hand-shaking of the present fashion. The be-Madaming, too, has in it something singularly pleasing to my taste; there's a hoop and six yards of brocade in each of its two syllables. .. . At the theater the play was "Francis I. " I acted well, and the play went off very well. Mr. Allen came and sat in the greenroom, telling me all about Constantinople and the Crimea, and the beautiful countries he has seen, and where his memory and his wishes are forever wandering; a rather sad comment upon the perfect vision of content his charming home at Laurieston had suggested to me. 

 _Thursday, 12th. _-- . .. At the theater the play was "The Hunchback. " The house was very good, and I acted very well. Dear Mr. Allen came into the greenroom, and had a long gossip with me. 

 _Friday, 13th. _-- . .. Went with Mr. Combe to the Phrenological Museum, and spent two hours listening to some very interesting details on the anatomy of the brain, which certainly tended to make the science more credible to my ignorance, though the general theory has never appeared to me as impossible and extravagant as some people think it. The insuperable point where I stick fast is a doubt of the practically beneficial result which its general acceptance would produce. I think they overrate the reforming power of their system, though Mr. Combe's account of the numbers who attend his lectures, and of the improvement of their bodily and mental conditions which he has himself witnessed, must, of course, make me feel diffident of my own judgment in the matter. Their own experience can alone test the utility of their system, and whether it does or does not answer their expectations. I thought of Hamlet as I sat on the ground, with my arms and lap full of skulls. It is curious enough to grasp the empty, worthless, unsightly case in which once dwelt the thinking faculty of a man. One of the best specimens of the human skull, it seems, is Raphael's; a cast of whose head I held lovingly in my hands, wishing it had been the very house where once abode that spirit of immortal beauty. [The phrenological authorities were mistaken, it seems, in attributing this skull to Raphael. I believe that it has been ascertained to be that of his friend, the engraver, Marc Antonio. ] At the theater the play was "The Hunchback;" the house very good, and I played very well. 

 _Saturday, 14th. _--My last day in Edinburgh for two years; and who can tell for how many more? At eleven o'clock, Mr. Murray, Mr. Allen, Mr. Byrne, and myself sallied forth on horseback toward the Pentlands, having obtained half an hour's grace off dinner-time, in order to get to Habbies How. We went out by the Links, and up steep rises over a white and dusty road, with a flaring stone dyke on each side, and neither tree nor bush to shelter us from the scorching sunlight till we came to Woodhouseleigh, the haunted walk of a white specter, who, it seems, was fond of the shade, for her favorite promenade was an avenue overarched with the green arms of noble old elm trees; and we blessed the welcome shelter of the Ghost's Haunt. .. . A cloud fell over all our spirits as we rode away from this enchanting spot, and Mr. Murray, pointing to the sprig of heather I had put in my habit, said they would establish an Order of Knighthood, of which the badge should be a heather spray, and they three the members, and I the patroness; that they would meet and drink my health on the 14th of July, and on my birthday, every year till I returned; and a solemn agreement was made by all parties that whenever I did return and summoned my worthies, we should again adjourn together to the glen in the Pentlands. When we reached home, Mr. Allen, who cannot endure a formal parting, shook hands with me and bade me good-by as I dismounted, as if we were to ride again to-morrow. [And I never saw him again. Peace be with him! He was a most amiable and charming companion, and during these days of friendly intimacy, his conversation interested and instructed me, and his poetical feeling of Nature, and placid, unruffled serenity, added much to the pleasure of those delightful rides. ] . .. At the theater the play was "The Provoked Husband, " for my benefit; the house was very fine, and I played pretty well. After it was over, the audience shouted and clamored for my father, who came and said a few words of our sorrow to leave their beautiful city. .. . Mrs. Harry, Lizzie, and I were in my dressing-room, crying in sad silence, and vainly endeavoring to control our emotion. Presently my father came hurriedly in, and folding them both in his arms, just uttered in a broken voice, "Good-by! God bless you!" and I, embracing my dear friends for the last time, followed him out of the room. It is not the time only that must elapse before I can see her again, it is the terrible distance, the slowness and uncertainty of communication; it is that dreadful America. 

 _Thursday, 19th, Liverpool. _-- . .. At eleven went to the theater for rehearsal; it was very slovenly. I wonder what the performance will be? In the evening to the theater; the play was "Francis I. , " and the house was very good, which was almost to be wondered at in this plague-stricken city. [The cholera was raging in Liverpool. ] I was frightened, as I always am at a new part, even in my own play, though glad enough to resign that odious dignity, the queen-mother. [The part of Louisa of Savoy had been given to me when first the piece was brought out at Covent Garden; I was now playing the younger heroine, Françoise de Foix. ] I played pretty well, though there is nothing to be done with the part. She is perfectly uninteresting and ineffective; but it is better for the cast of the play that I should act her instead of Louisa. And when one can have such a specimen of a queen as we had to-night, it would be a thousand pities the audience should be put off with my inferior views of royalty. Such bouncing, frowning, growling, and snarling might have challenged a whole zoological garden full of wild beasts to surpass. It's a comfort to see that it is possible to play that part worse than I did. 

 _Friday, 20th. _--Went to rehearsal. .. . Received a letter from Lizzie, giving me an account of my dear old Newhaven fish-wife, poor body! to whom I had sent a farewell present by her. I received also a long copy of anonymous verses, in which I was rather pathetically remonstrated with for seeking fame and fortune out of my own country. The author is slightly mistaken; neither the love of money nor notoriety would carry me away from England, but the love of my father constrains me. .. . The American Consul and Mr. Arnold called. After dinner I read Combe's "Constitution of Man, " which interested me very much, though it fails to convince me that phrenology can alone bestow this insight into human nature. At the theater "The School for Scandal;" I played pretty well, though the actors were all dreadfully imperfect, and some of them so nervous and quick, and some so nervous and slow, that it was hardly possible to keep pace with them. 

 _Saturday, 21st. _--From Liverpool to Manchester. After all, this Liverpool, with all its important wealth and industry, is a dismal-looking place, a swarming world of dingy red houses and dirty streets. .. . How well I remember the opening of this railway!. .. They have placed a marble tablet in the side of the road to commemorate the spot where poor Huskisson fell; I remembered it by the pools of dark-green water that, as we passed them then, made a dismal impression on me; they looked like stony basins of verdigris. How glad I was to see Chatmoss--that villainous, treacherous, ugly, useless bog--trenched and ditched in process of draining and reclaiming, with the fair, holy, healthy grain waving in bright green patches over the brown peaty soil! Next to moral conversion, and the reclaiming to their noble uses the perverted powers of human nature, there is nothing does one's heart so much good as the sight of waste and barren land reclaimed to the uses and wants of man; to see vegetation clothe the idle space, and the cursed and profitless soil teeming with the means of life and bringing forth abundant produce to requite the toil that fertilized it; to see the wilderness crowned with bounteous increase, and the blessing of God rising from the earth to reward the labor of His creatures. It forcibly reminds one of all that is left undone, and might be done, with that far more precious waste land, those multitudes of our ignorant poor, whose minds and spirits are as dark, as profitless, as barren, as dreary, and as dangerous, as this wild bog was formerly, and who were never ordained to live and die like so many human morasses. .. . In the evening to the theater, which was crammed from the floor to the ceiling; they are a pleasant audience, too, and make a delightful quantity of sympathetic noise. I did not play well, which was a pity and a shame, because they really deserved that one should do so; but my coadjutors were too much for me. 

 _Sunday, 22d, Liverpool. _--I did not think there was such another day in store for me as this. I thought all was past and over, and had forgotten the last drop in the bitter cup. .. . The day was bitter cold, and we were obliged to have a fire. 

 LIVERPOOL, July 22. MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I fear you are either anxious or vexed, or perhaps both, about the arrival of your books, and my non-acknowledgment of them. They reached me in all safety, and but for the many occupations which swallow up my time would have been duly receipted ere this. Thank you very much for them, for they are very elegant outside, and the dedication page, with which I should have been most ungracious to find any fault. The little sketch on that leaf differs from the design you had described to me some time ago, and I felt the full meaning of the difference. I read through your preface all in a breath; there are many parts of it which have often been matters of discussion between us, and I believe you know how cordially I coincide with most of the views expressed in it. The only point in your preliminary chapter on which I do not agree with you is the passage in which you say that humor is, of necessity and in its very essence, vulgar. I differ entirely with you here. I think humor is very often closely allied to poetry; not only a large element in highly poetic minds, which surely refutes your position, but kindred to the highest and deepest order of imagination, and frequently eminently fanciful and graceful in its peculiar manifestations. However, I cannot now make leisure to write about this, but while I read it I scored the passage as one from which I dissented. That, however, of course does not establish its fallacy; but I think, had I time, I could convince you of it. I acted Juliet on Wednesday, and read your analysis of it before doing so. Oh, could you but have seen and heard my Romeo!. .. I am sure it is just as well that an actress on the English stage at the present day should not have too distinct a vision of the beings Shakespeare intended to realize, or she might be induced, like the unfortunate heroine of the song, to "hang herself in her garters. " To be sure there is always my expedient to resort to, of acting to a wooden vase; you know I had one put upon my balcony, in "Romeo and Juliet, " at Covent Garden, to assist Mr. Abbott in drawing forth the expression of my sentiments. I have been reading over Portia to-day; she is still my dream of ladies, my pearl of womanhood. .. . I must close this letter, for I have many more to write to-night, and it is already late. Once more, thank you very much for your book, and believe me, Ever yours very truly, F. A. K. 

 _August 1st. _--Sailed for America. 

The book referred to in this letter was Mrs. Jameson's "Analysis ofShakespeare's Female Characters, " which she very kindly dedicated to me. The etching in the title-page was changed from the one she at firstintended to have put in it, and represented a female figure in anattitude of despondency, sitting by the sea, and watching a ship sailingtoward the setting sun; a design which I know she meant to havereference to my departure. I believe she subsequently changed it againto the one she had first executed, and which was of a less personalsignificance. .. . I exchanged no more letters with my friend Miss S----, who joined me at Liverpool, and remained with me till I sailed forAmerica. .. . "A trip, " as it is now called, to Europe or America, is oneof the commonest of experiences, involving, apparently, so littledanger, difficulty, or delay, that the feelings with which I made myfirst voyage across the Atlantic must seem almost incomprehensible tothe pleasure-seeking or business-absorbed crowds who throng the greatwatery highway between the two continents. 

But when I first went to America, steam had not shortened the passage ofthat formidable barrier between world and world. A month, and not aweek, was the shortest and most favorable voyage that could be lookedfor. Few men, and hardly any women, undertook it as a mere matter ofpleasure or curiosity; and though affairs of importance, of course, drewpeople from one shore to the other, and the stream of emigration hadalready set steadily westward, American and European tourists had notbegun to cross each other by thousands on the high seas in search ofhealth or amusement. 

I was leaving my mother, my brothers and sister, my friends and mycountry, for two years, and could only hear from them at monthlyintervals. I was going to work very hard, in a distasteful vocation, among strangers, from whom I had no right to expect the invariablekindness and indulgence my own people had favored me with. My spiritswere depressed by my father's troubled fortunes, and I had just receivedthe first sharp, smarting strokes in the battle of life; those gashesfrom which poor "unbruised youth, " in its infinite self-compassion, fancies its very life-blood must all pour away; little imagining underwhat gangrened, festering wounds brave life will still hold on its way, and urge to the hopeless end its warfare with unconquerable sorrow. There is nothing more pathetic than the terrified impatience of youthunder its first experience of grief, and its vehement appeal of "Behold, and see if any sorrow be like unto my sorrow!" to the patient adepts insuffering such as it has not yet begun to conceive of. Orlando'sadjuration to the exiled duke in "As You Like It, " and the wise Prince'sreply, seem to me one of the most exquisite illustrations of thecomparative griefs of youth and age. 

 OFF SANDY HOOK, Monday, September 5. MY DEAREST H----, We are within three hours' sail of New York, having greeted the first corner of Long Island (the first land we saw) yesterday morning; but we are becalmed, and the sun shines so bright, and the air is so warm and breathless, that we seem to have every chance of lying here for the next--Heaven knows how long! In point of time, you see, our voyage has been very prosperous, and I am surprised that we have made such good progress, for the weather has been squally, with constant head-winds. I do not think we have had, in all, six days of fair wind, so that we have no reason whatever to complain of our advance, having come thus far in thirty-two days. You bade me write to you by ships passing us, but though we have encountered several bound eastward, we only hailed them without lying to; notwithstanding which, about a fortnight ago, on hearing that a vessel was about to pass us, I wrote you a scrawl, which none but you could have made out (so the fishes won't profit much by it), and a kind fellow-passenger undertook to throw it from our ship to the other as it passed us. She came alongside very rapidly, and though he flung with great force and good aim, the distance was too great, and my poor little missive fell into the black sea within twenty feet of its destination. I could not help crying to think that those words from my heart, that would have gladdened yours, should go down into that cold, inky water. .. . I pray to God that we may return to England, but I am possessed with a dread that I never shall. .. . 

 I have been called away from this letter by one of those little incidents which Heaven in its mercy sends to break the monotony of a sea-voyage. Ever since daybreak this morning an English brig has been standing at a considerable distance behind us. About an hour ago we went on deck to watch the approach of a boat which they were sending off in our direction. The distance was about five miles, and the men had a hard pull in the broiling heat. When they came on board, you should have seen how we all clustered about them. The ship was a merchantman from Bristol, bound to New York; she had been out eleven weeks, her provisions were beginning to run short, and the crew was on allowance. Our captain, who is a gentleman, furnished them with flour, tea, sugar, porter, cold tongue, ham, eggs, etc. , etc. The men remained about half an hour on board, and as they were remanning their boat we saw a whole cargo of eatables carried to it from our steerage passengers. You know that these are always poor people, who are often barely supplied themselves with necessaries for their voyage. The poor are almost invariably kind and compassionate to one another, and Gaffer Gray is half right when he says--

 "The poor man alone, When he hears the poor moan, Of his morsel one morsel will give. "

 They (the men from the brig) gave us news from Halifax, where they had put in. The cholera had been in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York; the latter town was almost deserted, and the people flying in numbers from the others. This was rather bad news to us, who were going thither to find audiences (if possible not few, whether fit or not), but it was awful to such as were going back to their homes and families. I looked at the anxious faces gathered round our informer, and thought how the poor hearts were flying, in terrible anticipation of the worst, to the nests where they had left their dear ones, and eagerly counting every precious head in the homes over which so black a cloud of doom had gathered in their absence. .. . My father, though a bad sailor, and suffering occasionally a good deal, has, upon the whole, borne the voyage well. Poor dear Dall has been the greatest wretch on board; she has been perfectly miserable the whole time. It has made me very unhappy, for she has come away from those she loves very dearly on my account, and I cannot but feel sad to see that most excellent creature now, in what should be the quiet time of her life, leaving home and all its accustomed ways, habits, and comforts, and dear A----, who is her darling, to come wandering to the ends of the earth after me. .. . These distant and prolonged separations seem like foretastes of death. .. . We have seen an American sun, and an American moon, and American stars, and we think they "get up these things better than we do. " We have had several fresh squalls, and one heavy gale; we have shipped sundry seas; we have had rat-hunting and harpooning of porpoises; we have caught several hake and dogfish. 

 NEW YORK, AMERICA, Wednesday, September 5, 1832. 

 Here we really are, and perhaps you, who are not here, will believe it more readily than I who am, and to whom it seems an impossible kind of dream from which I must surely presently wake. We made New York harbor Monday night at sunset, and cast anchor at twelve o'clock off Staten Island, where we lay till yesterday morning at half-past nine, when a steamboat came alongside to take the passengers to shore. A thick fog covered the shores, and the rain poured in torrents; but had the weather been more favorable, I should have seen nothing of our approach to the city, for I was crying bitterly. The town, as we drove through it from the landing, struck me as foreign in its appearance--continental, I mean; trees are mixed very prettily with the houses, which are painted of various colors, and have green blinds on the outside, giving an idea of coolness and shade. 

 The sunshine is glorious, and the air soft and temperate; our hotel is pleasantly situated, and our rooms are gay and large. The town, as I see it from our windows, reminds me a little of Paris. Yesterday evening the trees and lighted shop-windows and brilliant moonlight were like a suggestion of the Boulevards; it is very gay, and rather like a fair. 

 The cholera has been very bad, but it is subsiding, and the people are returning to town. We shall begin our work in about ten days. I have not told you half I could say, but foolscap will contain no more. God bless you, dear!

 Affectionately yours, F. A. K. 

The foreboding with which I left my own country was justified by theevent. My dear aunt died, and I married, in America; and neither of usever had a home again in England. 

 NEW YORK, September 16, 1832. MY DEAREST H----, What shall I say to you? First of all, pray don't forget me, don't be altered when I see you again, don't die before I come back, don't die if I never come back. .. . You cannot imagine how strange the comparisons people here are perpetually making between this wonderful sapling of theirs and our old oak seem to me. .. . My father, thank God, is wonderfully improved in health, looks, and spirits; the fine, clear, warm (hot it should be called) atmosphere agrees with him, and the release from the cares and anxieties of that troublesome estate of his in St. Giles' will, I am sure, be of the greatest service to him. He begins his work to-morrow night with Hamlet, and on Tuesday I act Bianca. It is thought expedient that we should act singly the two first nights, and then make a "constellation. " Dall is in despair because I am to be discovered instead of coming on (a thing actors deprecate, because they do not receive their salvo of entrance applause), and also because I am not seen at first in what she thinks a becoming dress. For my part, I am rather glad of this decision, for besides Bianca's being one of my best parts, the play, as the faculty have mangled it, is such a complete monologue that I am less at the mercy of my coadjutors than in any other piece I play in. .. . 

 Dall is very well, very hot, and very mosquito-bitten. The heat seems to me almost intolerable, though it is here considered mild autumn weather: the mornings and evenings are, it is true, generally freshened with a cool delicious air, which is at this moment blowing all my pens and paper away, and compensating us for our midday's broiling. I do nothing but drink iced lemonade, and eat peaches and sliced melon, in spite of the cholera. 

 Baths are a much cheaper and commoner luxury (necessary) in the hotels here than with us; a great satisfaction to me, who hope in heaven, if I ever get there, to have plenty of water to wash in, and, of course, it will all be soft rainwater there. What a blessing! On board ship we were not stinted in that respect, but had as much water as we desired for external as well as internal purposes. 

 There are no water-pipes or cisterns in this city such as we have, but men go about as they do in Paris, with huge water-butts, supplying each house daily; for although a broad river (so called) runs on each side of this water-walled city, the one--the East River--is merely an arm of the sea; and the Hudson receives the salt tide-water, and is rendered brackish and unfit for washing or cooking purposes far beyond the city. There are fine springs, and a full fresh-water stream, at a distance of some miles; but the municipality is not very rich, and is economical and careful of the public money, and many improvements which might have been expected to have been effected here long ago are halting in their advance, leaving New York ill paved, ill lighted, and indifferently supplied with a good many necessaries and luxuries of modern civilization. 

[This was fifty-six years ago. Times are altered since this letter waswritten. New York is neither ill paved nor ill lighted; the municipalityis rich, but neither economical, careful, nor honest, in dealing withthe public moneys. The rapid spread of superficial civilization andaccumulation of easily-got wealth, together with incessant communicationwith Europe, have made of the great cities of the New World, centres ofan imperfect but extreme luxury, vying with, and in some respects goingbeyond, all that London or Paris presents for the indulgence of tastespampered by the oldest civilization of Europe. 

One day, after the Croton water had been brought into New York, I wassitting with the venerable Chancellor Kent at the window of his house inUnion Square, and, pointing to the fountain that sprang up in the midstof the inclosure, he said, "When I was a boy, much more than half acentury ago, I used to go to the Croton water, and paddle, and fish, andbathe, and swim, and loiter my time away in the summer days. I cannot goout there any more for any of these pleasant purposes, but the Crotonwater has come here to me. " What a ballad Schiller or Goethe would havemade of that! That morning visit to Chancellor Kent has left that prettypicture in my mind, and the recollection of his last words as he shookhands with me: "Ay, madam, the secret of life is always to haveexcitement enough, and never too much. " But he did not give me thesecret of that secret. ]

 There are, on an average, half a dozen fires in various parts of the town every night--I mean houses on fire. The sons of all the gentlemen here are volunteer engineers and firemen, and great is the delight they take in tearing up and down the streets, accompanied by red lights, speaking trumpets, and a rushing, roaring escort of running amateur extinguishers, who make night hideous with their bawling and bellowing. This evening as I was observing that we had had no fire to-day, Dall said the weather was so hot, she thought they must have left off fires for the season. 

 Speaking of carriages and the devices on the panels of them here, which appear to be rather fancy pieces than heraldic bearings, my father said, "I wonder what they do for arms. " "Use legs, " said Dall immediately, not at all bethinking herself how ancient a device on the shield of the Island of Man the three legs were, or knowing how much more ancient on the coins of Crotona, I think, or some other of the Magna Grecian colonies. 

 The hours which prevail here are those of our shop-keeping population; they rise and go to business very early, dine at three, which indeed is considered late, take tea at five, and supper at nine, which seems to us very primitive. .. . The women here are, generally speaking, very pretty little creatures, with a great deal of freshness and brilliancy; they dress in the extreme of the French fashion, and, I suppose from some unfavorable influence of the climate, they lose their beauty prematurely--they become full-blown very early, and their bloom is extremely evanescent; they fade almost suddenly. .. . There seems to be a great deal of consumption here. The climate is as capricious as ours, with this additional disadvantage, that the extremes of heat and cold are much more intense, and the transitions much more violent, the temperature varying occasionally as much as thirty degrees in the twenty-four hours. I have just left off writing for five minutes to watch the lightning, which is dancing in a fiery ring all round the horizon--summer lightning, no thunder, although the flashes are strong and vivid. .. . 

 We have had such a tremendous storm--really gorgeous, grand, and awful; lightning that stretched from side to side of the sky, making a blaze like daylight for several seconds at a time. The mere reflection of it on the ground was more than the eye could endure; great forked ribbons of fire darting into the very bosom of the city and its crowded dwellings, or zigzagging through the air to an accompaniment of short, sharp, crackling thunder, succeeded by endless, deep, full-toned rolls that made the whole air shake and vibrate with the heavy concussion; pelting and pouring rain, a perfect tornado of wind. Heaven and earth are all, while I write, one livid, violet-colored flame, and the thunder resounds through the wild frenzy of the elements like the voice of "the Ruler of the spirits. " My eyes ache with the incessant glare, and I must close my letter, for it is past eleven o'clock, and I have to rehearse to-morrow morning. .. . I have seen Mr. Wallack since our arrival, whom I never saw in England, either on or off the stage. I went the other night to see him in one of his favorite pieces, "The Rent-Day, " which made me cry dreadfully, but chiefly, I believe, because, when they are ruined, he asks his wife if she will go with him to America. You see I am taking to play-going in my old age. The theater is very pretty, of the best possible dimensions for me, and tolerably good for the voice. We leave this place for Philadelphia on the 10th of October, and remain there a fortnight, and then go on to Boston. .. . 

 Last Thursday we crossed the Hudson in one of the steamers constantly plying between the opposite shores and New York, and took a delightful walk along the New Jersey shore to a place called Hoboken, famous once as a dueling-ground, now the favorite resort of a pacific society of _bon vivants_, who meet once a week to eat turtle, or, as it is expressed on their cards of invitation, for "spoon exercise. " The distance from our landing-point to the place where these meetings are held is about five miles, a charming walk through a strip of forest-ground, which crowns the banks of the river, gradually rising to a considerable height above it. We were delighted with the vivid, various, and strange foliage of the trees, the magnificent river, broad and blue as a lake, with its high and richly wooded shore, and the sparkling, glittering town opposite. We looked down to the Narrows, the defile through which the waters of this noble estuary reach the Atlantic, and between whose rocky walls two or three ships stood out against the brilliant sky. The ebbing tide plashed on the rocks far below us, and the warm grass through which we walked was alive with grasshoppers, whose scarlet wings, suddenly unfolded when they flew, made me take them for some strange species of butterfly. It was all indescribably bright and joyous-looking, and the air of a transparent clearness that was one of the most striking characteristics of the whole scene, and one of the most delightful. .. . [In discussing the relative merits of England and America, Dr. Channing once said to me, "The earth is yours, but the heavens are ours;" and I quite agree with him. I have never seen a sky comparable, for splendor of color or translucent purity, to that of the Northern States. ]

 I have been reading your favorite book, "Salmonia. " . .. I am rather surprised at your liking it so very much, because, though the descriptions are beautiful, and the natural history interesting, and the philosophical and moral reflections scattered through it delightful, yet there is so much that is purely technical about fishing and its processes, and addressed only to the hook-and-line fraternity, that I should not have thought it calculated to charm you so greatly. However, you may have some associations connected with it; liking is a very complex and many-motived thing. .. . 

 We went through the fish and fruit markets the other day; unfortunately it was rather late in the morning, and of course the glory of the market was over, but yet there remained enough to enchant us, with their abundant plenteousness of good things. The fruit-market was beautiful; fruit-baskets half as high as I am, placed in rows of a dozen, filled with peaches, and painted of a bright vermilion color, which throws a ruddy becoming tint over the downy fruit. It looked like something in the "Arabian Nights;" heaps, literally heaps of melons, apples, pears, and wild grapes, in the greatest profusion. I was enchanted with the beautiful forms, bright colors, and fragrant smell, but I saw no flowers, and I have seen hardly any since I have been here, which is rather a grief to me. .. . 

 Americans are the most extravagant people in the world, and flowers are among them objects of the most lavish expenditure. The prices paid for nosegays, wreaths, baskets, and devices of every sort of hot-house plants, are incredible to any reasonable mind. At parties and balls ladies are laden with costly nosegays which will not even survive the evening's fatigue of carrying them. Dinner and luncheon parties are adorned, not only with masses of exquisite bloom as table ornaments, but by every lady's plate a magnificent nosegay of hot-house flowers is placed; and I knew a lady who, wishing to adorn her ballroom with rather more than usual floral magnificence, had it hung round with garlands of white camellias and myosotis. 

 At the theater enormously expensive nosegays and huge baskets of forced flowers are handed to the favorite performers from the front of the house, till the ceremony becomes embarrassing, and almost ridiculous for the object of the demonstration. The churches at certain festivals are hung with draperies of costly hot-house flowers; the communion-tables heaped with them. Weddings, of course, are natural occasions for that species of ornament, but in America funerals are as flowery as marriage-feasts; and I have seen there in mid-winter, with the thermometer at fifteen degrees below zero, large crosses, and hearts, and wreaths, made entirely of rosebuds and lilies of the valley, as part of the solemnities of a burial service; and a young girl who died in the flowerless season was not only shrouded in blossoms, but as her coffin was carried to the bosom of the wintry earth, a white pall of the finest material was thrown over it, with a great cross of double forced violets, almost the length of the coffin, laid on it. I have had as many as a dozen huge baskets of camellias, violets, orange-flower, and tuberose, at one time, in my room; perishable tokens of anonymous public and private favor, the cost of which used to fill me with dismay: and on one occasion a table of magnificent hot-house flowers was sent to me, of such dimensions that both sides of the street door had to be opened to admit it. When I have deplored the inordinate amount of money lavished upon that which could only impart pleasure for so brief a time, I have been answered, but not converted from my feeling of disapprobation and regret, that the gardeners profited by this wild extravagance. In New York I have known a guinea paid for a gentleman's button-hole rosebud, and three guineas for half a dozen sprays of lily of the valley. 

 Good-by, my dearest H----. I pray for you morning and night. Is not that thinking of you, and loving you as best I can?

 Your affectionate F. A. K. 

 DEAREST H----, . .. We are all pretty well, but all but devoured by multitudinous and multivarious beasts of prey--birds, I suppose they are: mosquitoes, ants, and flies, by day; and flies, fleas, and worse, by night. The plagues of Egypt were a joke to it. We spend our lives in murdering hecatombs of creeping and jumping things, and vehemently slapping our own faces with intent to kill the flying ones that incessantly buzz about one. It is rather a deplorable existence, and reminds me of one of the most unpleasant circles in Dante's "Hell, " which I don't think could have been much worse. My father began his work on Monday last with Hamlet. Dall and I went into a private box to see him; he acted admirably, and looked wonderfully young and handsome. The house was crammed, and the audience, we were assured, was enthusiastic beyond all precedent. 

 On Tuesday I came out in Bianca; I was rather glad they had appointed that part for my first, because it is one of my best; but had not the genius of theatrical management made such a mere monologue of the play as it has, I verily believe I should have been "swamped" by my helpmate. My Fazio was an unhappy man who played Romeo once with me in London, and failed utterly: moreover, he had studied this part in a hurry, it seems, and did not know three words of it, and was, besides, too frightened to profit by my prompting. The only thing that seemed to occur to him was to go down on his knees, which he did every five minutes. Once when I was on mine, he dropped down suddenly exactly opposite to me, and there we were, looking for all the world like one of those pious conjugal _vis-à-vis_ that adorn antique tombs in our cathedrals. It really was exceedingly absurd. But I looked and acted well, and the play was very successful. .. . I was not nervous for my first night, till my unhappy partner made me so. My dislike to the stage would really render me indifferent to my own success, but that I am working for my livelihood; my bread depends upon success, and that is a realistic, if not an artistic, view of the case, of which I acknowledge the importance. .. . 

 Absolute and uncompromising vulgarity is really not very objectionable; it is rather refreshing, indeed, for it is simple, and, in that respect, rare. Vulgarity allied to pretension and the affectation of fine manners is the only real vulgarity, and is an intolerable thing. The plain rusticity, or even coarseness, of what are called the lower classes, is infinitely preferable to the assumption of _gentility_ of those a little above them in the social scale. The artisan, or day-laborer, or common workman, is apt to be a gentleman, compared with a certain well-to-do small shopkeeper. .. . 

 On Thursday, when I went to rehearse "Romeo and Juliet, " I found that the unfortunate Mr. Keppel was, by general desire, taken out of Romeo, which my father was therefore called upon, for the first time, to act with me. I was vexed at this every way. I was sorry for the poor player, whose part, of course, was money to him; and sorry for my father, who has the greatest objection to playing Romeo, for which his age, of course, disqualifies him, however much his excellent acting may tend to make one forget it; and I was sorry for the public, who lost his admirable Mercutio, which I do not think they were compensated for by his taking the other part. .. . 

 The steward of our ship, a black--a very intelligent, obliging, respectable servant--came here the other morning to ask my father for an order, at the same time adding that it must be for the gallery, as people of color were not allowed to go into any other part of the theater. Qu'en dis-tu? The prejudice against these unfortunate people is, of course, incomprehensible to us. On board ship, after giving that same man some trouble, Dall poured him out a glass of wine, when we were having our dinner, whereupon the captain looked at her with utter amazement, and I thought some little contempt, and said, "Ah! one can tell by that that you are not an American;" which sort of thing makes one feel rather glad that one is not. 

[This was in 1832, when slavery literally governed the United States. In1874, when the Civil War had washed out slavery with the blood of freemen, the prejudice engendered by it governed them still to the followingdegree. Going to the theater in Philadelphia one night, I desired myservant, a perfectly respectable and decorous colored man, to go intothe house and see the performance. This, however, he did not succeed indoing, being informed at all the entrance doors that persons of colorwere not admitted to any part of the theater. At this same time, morethan half the State legislature of South Carolina were blacks. Moreover, at this same time, colored children were not received into the publicschools of Philadelphia, though colored citizens were eligible, and insome cases acted as members of the board of management of these veryschools. I talked of this outrageous inconsistent prejudice with some ofmy friends; among others, the editor of a popular paper. They were allloud in their condemnation of the state of things, but strongly ofopinion that to move at all in the matter would be highly inopportuneand injudicious. Time, they said, would settle all these questions; and, without doubt, it will. Charles Sumner, who thought Time could afford tohave his elbow jogged about them, had just gone to his grave, leaving, unfortunately, incomplete his bill of rights in behalf of the coloredcitizens of the United States. 

My servant was a citizen of the United States, having a vote, when hewas turned from the theater door as a person of color; and negroes hadbeen elected as Members of Congress at that very time. Strangely enough, Philadelphia, once the seat of enthusiastic and self-devoted Quakerabolitionism, the home of that noble and admirable woman, Lucretia Mott, who stood heroically in its vanguard, is now one of the strongholds ofthe most illiberal prejudice against the blacks. ]

 On Friday we acted "The School for Scandal. " Our houses have been very fine indeed, in spite of the intolerable heat of the weather. .. . My ill-starred Fazio of Thursday night is making a terrible stir in the papers, appealing to the public, and writing long letters about his having merely studied the part to accommodate me. "Hard case--unjust partiality--superior influence, " etc. , etc. --in short, an attempt at a little cabal, the effect of which is that he has obtained leave to appear again to-morrow night in Jaffier to my Belvidera. The poor man is under a strong mental delusion, he cannot act in the least; however, we shall see what he will do with "Venice Preserved. " . .. 

 Yesterday evening we dined with some English people who are staying in this hotel, and met Dr. Wainwright, rector of the most "fashionable" church in New York; a very agreeable, good, and clever man, who expressed great delight at having an opportunity of meeting us in private, as his congregation are so strait-laced that he can neither call upon us nor invite us to his house, much less set his foot in the theater. The probable consequence of any of these enormities, it seems, would be deserted pews next Sunday, and perhaps eventually the forced resignation of his cure of souls. This is rather narrow minded, I think, for this free and enlightened country. Think of my mother's dear old friend, Dr. Hughes, and Milman, and Harness, and Dyce, and all our excellent reverend friends and intimate acquaintance. .. . 

 To-morrow we act "Venice Preserved, " on Tuesday "Much Ado about Nothing, " Wednesday is a holiday, on Thursday, for my benefit, "The Stranger, " and on Friday "The Hunchback. " On the 10th of next month we act in Philadelphia, where we shall remain for a fortnight, and then return here for a fortnight, after which we go on to Boston. God bless you, dear! It is past twelve at night, and I have a ten-o'clock rehearsal to-morrow morning. 

 Ever your affectionate F. A. K. 

 PART OF LETTER TO MRS. JAMESON. 

 NEW YORK, September 30, 1832. 

 I am not sure that, upon the whole, our acting is not rather too quiet--tame, I suppose they would call it--for our present public. Ranting and raving in tragedy, and shrieks of unmeaning laughter in comedy, are not, you know, precisely our style, and I am afraid our audiences here may think us flat. I was informed by a friend of mine who heard the remark, that one gentleman observed to another, after seeing my father in "Venice Preserved, " "Lord bless you! it's nothing to Cooper's acting--nothing! Why, I've seen the perspiration roll down his face like water when he played Pierre! You didn't see Mr. Kemble put himself to half such pains!" Which reminds me of the Frenchwoman's commendation to her neighbor of a performance of Dupré, the great Paris tenor of his day: "Ah! ce pauvre cher M. Dupré! ce brave homme! quel mal il se donne pour chanter cela! Regardez donc, madame, il est tout en sueur!" But this order of criticism, of course, may be met with anywhere; and the stamp-and-stare-and-start-and-scream-school has had its admirers all the world over since the days of Hamlet the Dane. 

 I have not seen much of either places or people yet. .. . This city is picturesque and foreign-looking; trees are much intermixed with the houses, among them a great many fine willows, and these, together with the various colors of the houses, and the irregularity of the streets and buildings, form constantly "little bits" that would gladden the eye of a painter. The sky here is beautiful; I find in it what you have seen in Italy, and I only in Angerstein's Gallery, the orange sunsets of Claude Lorraine. 

 We leave New York for Philadelphia after next week, and shall remain there three weeks. 

 I have read and noted much of your pretty book. There are one or two points which shall "serve for sweet discourses" in our time to come. I find great satisfaction in our discussions, for though I may not often confess to being convinced by your arguments in our differences (does any one ever do so?), I derive so much information from them, that they are as profitable as pleasant to me. Are you going to be busy with your pen soon again? Write me how the world is going on yonder, and believe me ever truly yours, F. A. K. 

 NEW YORK, September 30, 1832. 

 DEAREST H----, . .. Perhaps, as you say, it is morbid to dwell as I do upon the unreality of acting, because its tangible reality makes its appearance duly every morning with the "returns" of the preceding night; but I am not sure that it is morbid to consider wants exaggerated and necessities unreal which render insufficient earnings that would be ample for any one's real need. A livelihood, of course, we could make in England. .. . You speak of all the various strange things I am to see, and the amount of knowledge I shall involuntarily acquire, by this residence in America; but you know I am what Dr. Johnson would have considered disgracefully "incurious, " and the lazy intellectual indifference which induced me to live in London by the very spring of the fountain of knowledge without so much as stooping my lips to it, prevails with me here. 

[Our house in Great Russell Street, which was the last at the corner ofMontague Place, adjoined the British Museum, and has since been takeninto, or removed for (I don't know which), the new buildings of thatinstitution. Our friend Panizzi, the learned librarian, lived in thehouse that stood where ours, formerly my uncle's, did. While we werestill living there, however, I was allowed a privileged entrance at alltimes to the library, and am ashamed to think how seldom I availedmyself of so great a favor. ]

 Then, too, my profession occupies nearly the whole of my time; I have rehearsals every day, and act four times a week; my journalizing takes up a good deal of my leisure. Walking in the heat we still have here fatigues me and hurts my feet very much, especially when I have to stand at the theater all the evening. Although I have been here a month, I have seen but little either of places or people; the latter, you know, I nowhere affect, and my distaste for the society of strangers must, of course, interfere with my deriving information from them. Still, as you say, I must inevitably see and learn much that is new to me, and I take pleasure in the hope that when I return to you I shall be less distressingly ignorant than you must often have found me. .. . 

 I am very sorry my brother Henry and his men are going to be sent upon so odious an errand as tithe-collecting must be in Ireland. I trust in God he may meet with no mischief while fulfilling his duty; I should be both to think of that comely-looking young thing bruised or broken, maimed or murdered. I hardly think your savage Irishers would have the heart to hurt him, he looks so like, what indeed he is, a mere boy; but then, to be sure, his errand is not one to recommend him to their mercy. 

 I have read Bryant's poetry, and like it very much. The general spirit of it is admirable; it is all wholesome poetry, and some of it is very beautiful. 

 I am going to get Graham's "History of the United States, " and Smith's "History of Virginia, " to beguile my journey to Philadelphia with. I can't fancy a savage woman marrying a civilized man. .. . I suppose love might bring harmony out of the discords of natures so dissimilar, but I think if I had been a wild she-American, I should not have been tamed by one of the invading race, my hunters. Pocahontas thought differently. .. . 

 Are you acquainted with any of Daniel Webster's speeches? They are very fine, eloquent, and powerful; and one that he delivered upon the commemoration of the landing of the English exiles at Plymouth, in many parts, magnificent. I was profoundly affected by it when my father read it to us on board ship. .. . 

 Bad as your mice, of which you complain so bitterly, may be, they are civilized Christian creatures compared with the heathen swarms with which we wage war incessantly here. Every evening, as soon as the sun sets, clouds of mosquitoes begin their war-dance round us; their sting is most venomous, and as my patience is not even skin-deep, I tear myself like a maniac, and then, instead of oil, pour aromatic vinegar into my wounds, and a very pretty species of torture is produced by that means, I assure you. Besides these winged devils, we have swarms of flies, which also bite and sting, with a venomous rancor of which I should have thought their frivolity incapable. Besides these, every cupboard and drawer in our rooms is full of moths. Besides these, we have an army of cantankerous fleas quartered upon us. Besides these, we have one particular closet where we keep--our bugs, and where for the most part, I am truly thankful to say, they keep themselves. Besides these, we have two or three ants' nests in our bedroom, and everything we look upon seems but a moving mass of these red, long-legged, but always exemplary insects. These fellow-creatures make one's life not worth much having, and I do nothing all day long but sing the famous entomological chorus in "Faust;" and if this goes on much longer, I feel as if I should take to buzzing. Do you know that it is hard upon three o'clock in the morning? I must leave off and go to bed, for I rehearse Constance to-morrow at eleven, and act her to-morrow night. On Friday I act Bizarre in "The Inconstant, " and think I shall find it great fun. .. . God bless you, dearest H----. 

 Ever your affectionate F. A. K. 

 MANSION HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA, October 10, 1832. DEAREST H----, Do not let the date of this make any alteration in your way of addressing your letters, which must still be "Park Theater, New York;" for before this reaches you we shall probably have returned thither; but I date particularly that you may follow us with your mind's legs, and know where to find us. My dearest H----, in spite of an often heavy heart, and my distaste for my present surroundings, I have reason to be most grateful, and I trust I am so, for the benefits which we have already derived from a visit to this far world beyond the sea. The first and greatest of these is the wonderful improvement in my dear father's health. He looks full ten years younger than when last you saw him, and besides enjoying better spirits from the absence of the many cares and anxieties and vexations that weighed upon him daily in England, he says that he is conscious since he came away of a great increase of absolute muscular strength and vigor; and when he said this, I felt that my share of the unpleasant duty of coming hither was already amply repaid. .. . We have finished our first engagement at New York, which was for twelve nights, and have every reason to be satisfied with our financial, as well as professional, success. Living here is not as cheap as we had been led to expect, but our earnings are very considerable, and as we labor for these, it is matter of rejoicing that we labor so satisfactorily. 

 Dall is very well, except the nuisance of a bad cold. I am very well, without exception. The only unpleasant effect I feel from this climate is a constant tendency to slight relaxation of the throat, but this is nothing more than a trifling inconvenience, very endurable, and which probably a little more seasoning will remove. .. . I tell you of our health first, for at our distance from each other that is the matter of greatest moment and anxiety. .. . 

 I must tell you of our future arrangements; and, to begin like an Irishwoman, we arrived here on Monday. My father acts to-night for the first time, Hamlet; and I make my first appearance to-morrow in "Fazio. " We shall act here for three weeks, and then return to New York for a month; after which we shall proceed to Boston, whence look to receive volumes from me about Webster, and Channing, and our friends and fellow-passengers, the H----s, who reside there. 

 I like this place better than New York; it has an air of greater age. It has altogether a rather dull, sober, mellow hue, which is more agreeable than the glaring newness of New York. There are one or two fine public buildings, and the quantity of clean, cool-looking white marble which they use both for their public edifices and for the doorsteps of the private houses has a simple and sumptuous appearance, which is pleasant. It is electioneering time, and all last night the streets resounded with cheers and shouts, and shone with bonfires. The present President, Jackson, appears to be far from popular here, and though his own partisans are determined, of course, to re-elect him if possible, a violent struggle is likely to take place; and here already his opponent, Henry Clay, who is the leader of the aristocratic party in the United States, is said to have obtained the superiority over him. 

 I have got Graham's and Smith's "Histories, " and though my time for reading is anything but abundant, yet every night and morning I do contrive, while brushing the outside of my head, to cram something into the inside of it. 

 I cannot bear to give up any advantage which I once possessed, and therefore struggle to keep up, in some degree, my music and Italian. These, together with rehearsing every morning, and acting four times a week, besides my journal, which I very seldom neglect, make up a good deal of daily occupation. Then, one must sacrifice a certain amount of time to the conventional waste of society, receiving and returning visits, etc. .. . I like what I have read of Graham very much; the matter is very interesting, and the spirit in which it is treated; and I am deeply in love with Captain John Smith, and wonder greatly at Pocahontas marrying anybody else. I suppose, however, the savage was not without excuse; for Mary Stuart, who knew something of these matters, says, with a rather satirical glance at her cousin of England, "En ces sortes de choses, la plus sage de nous toutes n'est qu'un peu moins sotte que les autres. "

 I have been to my first rehearsal here to-day; the theater is small, but pretty enough. The public has high pretensions to considerable critical judgment and literary and dramatic taste, and scouts the idea of being led by the opinion of New York. .. . It is rather tiresome that fools are cut upon the same pattern all the world over. What is the profit of traveling? Oh dear! I think my Fazio has got St. Vitus's dance!. .. 

 Yesterday I tried some horses, which were rather terrible quadrupeds. They were not ill-bred cattle to look at, and I should think of a race that, with care and attention, might be brought to considerable perfection; but they are never properly broken for the saddle. The Americans who have spoken to me about riding say that they do not like a horse to have what we consider proper paces, but prefer a shambling sort of half-trot, half-canter, which they judiciously call a rack, and which is the ugliest pace to behold, and the most difficult to endure, possible. They never use a curb, but ride their horses upon the snaffle entirely, dragging it as tight as they can, and having the appearance of holding on for dear life by it; so that the horse, in addition to the awkward gait I have described, throws his head up, and pokes his nose out, and with open jaws "devours the road" before him. .. . 

 I acted here last night for the first time. Dall and my father say that I received my reception very ungraciously. I am sure I am very sorry, I did not mean to do so, but I really had not the heart or the face to smile and look as pleased and pleasant as I can at a parcel of strangers. .. . I was not well, or in spirits, and laboring under a severe cold, which I acquired on board the steamboat that brought down the Delaware. .. . Neither the Raritan nor the Delaware struck me in any way except by their great width. These vast streams naturally suggest the mighty resources which a country so watered presents to the commercial enterprise of its inhabitants. The breadth of these great rivers dwarfs their shores and makes their banks appear flat and uninteresting, though the large lake-like basins into which they occasionally expand are grand from the mere extent and volume of the sweeping mass of waters. 

 The colors of the autumnal foliage are rich and beautiful beyond imagination--crimson and gold, like a regal mantle, instead of the sad russet cloak of our fading woods. I think, beautiful as this is, that its gorgeousness takes away from the sweet solemnity that makes the fall of the year pre-eminently the season of thoughtful contemplation. Our autumn at home is mellow and harmonious, though sometimes melancholy; but the brilliancy of this decay strikes one sometimes with a sudden sadness, as if the whole world were dying of consumption, with these glittering gleams and hectic flushes, a mere deception of disease and death. .. . Good-by, my dearest H----

 PHILADELPHIA, October 14, 1832. DEAREST H----, "Boston is a Yankee town, and so is Philadelphy;" considering which, I assure you I find the latter quite a civilized place. The above quotation is from "Yankee-doodle, " the National Anthem of the Americans, which I will sing to you some day when I am within hearing. 

 We have just returned from church. Dall and I being too late this morning for the service, which begins at half-past ten, sallied forth in search of salvation this afternoon, and after wandering about a little, entered a fine-looking church, which we found was a Presbyterian place of worship. .. . The preaching to-day was extemporaneous, and extremely feeble and commonplace, occasionally reminding me of your eloquent friend at Skerries. .. . I shall try, on my return to New York, to settle to some work in earnest, as I hope there that we shall repeat the plays we have already acted, and so need no rehearsals. .. . To-morrow I act Juliet to my father's Romeo; he does it still most beautifully. .. . In spite of his acting it with his own child (which puts a manifest absurdity on the very face of it), the perfection of his art makes it more youthful, graceful, ardent, and lover-like--a better Romeo, in short, than the youngest pretender to it nowadays. It is certainly simple truth when he says, "I am the youngest of that name, for lack of a better, " when the nurse asks for young Romeo. 

 Wednesday we act "The School for Scandal, " and Friday "Venice Preserved. " So there's your play-bill. .. . 

 At this moment a great political excitement pervades the country; it is the time of the Presidential Election, and the most vehement efforts are being made by the Democratic party to maintain the present President, General Jackson, in his post. The majority, I believe, is in his favor, though we are told that the "better classes" (whatever that may mean where no distinctions of class exist) embrace the cause of his opponent, Henry Clay. 

 It seems curious, if it is true, as we have been assured, that in this one State of Pennsylvania, eight thousand persons out of fifty who have the right of voting were all who in this last election exercised it; so that the much-vaunted privilege of universal suffrage does not seem to be highly prized where it is possessed. 

 From all the opinions that I hear expressed upon the subject, it does not seem as though the system of election prevalent here works much better, or is much freer from abuses, than the well-vilified one which England has just been reforming. Bribery and corruption are familiar here as elsewhere, to those who have, and those who wish to have, power; and I have not yet heard a single American speak of our Radical reformers without uplifted hands at what they consider their folly in not "letting well alone, " or, as they say, in substituting one set of abuses for another, as they declare we shall do if we adopt their vote by ballot system. 

 I have now written you a philosophical, moral, and political letter, and beg you will score up my attempt to write rationally against the loads of gibberish I have from time to time discoursed to you. Good bless you, dearest H----! Three thousand miles away, I am still

 Always your affectionate F. A. K. 

 PHILADELPHIA, October 22, 1832. DEAR H----, My first news is deplorable, and I beg you will lament over it accordingly. I eat little, drink less, rehearse six mornings and act five nights a week; in spite of all which, and riding a heavy-going, jolting, shambling, hard-pulling horse, I have grown so fat that I really cannot perceive that there is any shape in particular about me. Grotesque things sometimes are melancholy too, and it is so with me, for I am both. .. . 

 My father and Dall are very well; at this moment he is busy saying, and she hearing him say, the part of Fazio, which he is to act with me to-morrow night. I dread it dreadfully; acting anything painful with him always tries my nerves extremely. 

 Bianca is a part of terrible excitement in itself, without the addition of having to act it to his Fazio. I cannot get rid of his being he, and it agonizes me really to see his sham agony; however, "'tis my vocation, Hal. " It is very well that our audiences should look at us as mere puppets, for could they sometimes see the real feelings of those for whose false miseries their sympathies are excited, I believe sufficiently in their humanity to think they would kindly give us leave to leave off and go home. Ours is a very strange trade, and I am sorry to say that every day increases my distaste for it. .. . I do not think that during my father's life I shall ever leave the stage; it is very selfish to feel regret at this, I know, but it sometimes seems to me rather dreary to look along my future years, and think that they will be devoted to labor that I dislike and despise. .. . For many years--ever since I entered upon my first girlhood, indeed--a quiet, lonely life upon a small independence has been the aim of my desires and my notion of happiness. Italy and the south of France formerly constantly solicited my imagination, as offering pleasant places wherein to build a solitary nest. .. . And now a cottage near Edinburgh, with an income of two hundred a year, seems to me the most desirable of earthly possessions; but, though this is certainly not a very wild vision of wealth or magnificence, I fear it is quite as little within my reach as southern palaces, or villas on the Mediterranean. 

 My father has hitherto been able to lay by nothing, and my assistance is absolutely necessary to him, . .. And as long as I can in any way serve my father's interests by remaining in my profession I shall do so, and must naturally look forward to a prolonged period of my present exertions. It is useless pondering upon this, but I have been led to do so lately from a letter which my father received from Mr. Bartley, the stage manager of Covent Garden, the other day, which contained the plan of a new theatrical speculation, in which he is most anxious to engage us. I know not how my father feels upon this subject. .. . I, however, am well determined that neither Mr. L----'s opinion, nor that of the whole world besides, should induce me to own the value of a truss of straw in any theater. My father's whole life has been given over to trouble and anxiety in consequence of his proprietorship and involvement in that ruinous concern, Covent Garden; and now, when his remaining health and strength will no more than serve to lay up the means of subsistence when health and strength are gone, the idea of his loading himself with such a burden of bitterness as the proprietorship of a new theater makes me perfectly miserable. For my own part, I am determined to own neither part nor lot in any such venture: I will lend or give anything that I may earn to it, and I will act, at half the price I might get elsewhere, for it, if my father wishes me to do so; but not a demonstrable cent per cent profit should induce me to run such a risk of cursing the day that I was born, as to become owner of a theater. I write you all this (and I have written more than enough about it) because it has been lately a subject of much anxious meditation to me. The matter is at present without settled form or plan, but the proposal of such a scheme has caused me deep regret and anxiety. .. . I am going to act to-morrow in "The Hunchback;" Thursday, Mrs. Beverley; Friday, Lady Townley; Saturday, Juliet; Monday, Julia again; and Tuesday, Bizarre in "The Inconstant;" which ends our engagement here. This is pretty hard work, is it not? besides always one, and sometimes two rehearsals of a morning. 

 We begin our second engagement in New York on the 7th of November. Don't forget that the 27th of that month is my birthday, and that if you neglect to drink my health, I shall probably die, for want of your good wishes to keep me alive. 

 We act in Boston on the 3d of December; "further than that the deponent sayeth not. "

 I told you in my last letter that Philadelphia was the cleanest place in the world. The country along the banks of the Schuylkill (one of the rivers on which it stands; the other is the Delaware) is wild and beautiful, and the glory of the autumn woods what an eye that hath not seen can by no manner of means conceive. I have for the last week had my room full of the most delicious flowers that could only be seen with us at midsummer, and here, in these last days of autumn, they are as abundant and fragrant, and the sun is as intensely hot and brilliant, as it should be, but never is, with us, in the month of July. .. . 

 Dall went into a Quaker's shop here the other day, when, after waiting upon her with the utmost attention and kindness, the master of the shop said, "And how doth Fanny? I was in hopes she might have wanted something; we should have great pleasure in attending upon her. " Was not that nice? So to-day I went thither, and bought myself a lovely sober-colored gown. This place, as you know, is the headquarters of Quakerdom, and all the enchanting nosegays come from "a Philadelphia friend, " the latter word dashed under, as if to indicate a member of the religious fraternity always called by that kindly title here. .. . 

 I think my father has some idea of bringing out "The Star of Seville" here, and if he does I shall break my heart that it was not brought out first in England. Emily always reproaches me with want of patriotism. I have more than helps to make me cheerful here, and leaving England--not home, and not you, but England, England--for two years, seems to me now ridiculous, and fabulous, and preposterous, and disastrous. 

 I have finished my first volume of Graham, and I have finished this letter. God bless you!

 Ever your affectionate F. A. K. 

 PHILADELPHIA, November 2, 1832. DEAREST H----, I received your fifth letter to-day, and one from Dorothy, and one from Emily Fitzhugh. .. . My last letter to you was a sad one, and sad in a fashion that does not often occur to me. I was troubled and anxious about my professional labor and its results, and that may be called a small sadness compared with some other with which I have lately become familiar. Of course none of these anxieties have been removed, for some time must elapse before I can know on what plan my father determines with regard to Mr. Bartley's proposal about this new theater. It does not affect me personally, because I am thoroughly determined to take no part in any speculation of the kind; but the possibility of my father entering into any such scheme is care enough to "kill a cat, " and make a kitten miserable besides. .. . In all matters, but especially in matters of business, I hold frankness, straightforwardness, and decision as conducive to success, as consonant with right feeling; but I think men are much more cowardly than women, and believe a great deal more in policy, temporizing, and expediency than we do. "Managing" is supposed to be a feminine tendency; it has no place in my composition; perhaps I might be the better for a little of it--but only perhaps, and only a little. .. . This letter, as you will perceive by its date, was begun on the banks of the Delaware; here we are, however, once more in New York. It is Monday evening, the 5th of November, and you are firing squibs and burning manikins _en action de grâces_ that the Houses of Parliament were not blown up by the Roman Catholics, instead of living to be reformed by the Whigs, and (peradventure) blowing up the nation. 

 The Presidential Election is going on here, and creates immense excitement. General Jackson, they say, will certainly be re-elected. 

 Our last fortnight in Philadelphia has been one of incessant and very hard work, rehearsing every morning and acting every night. I rejoiced heartily when our engagement drew to a close, for I was fairly worn out, and money bought with health is bought too dear, I think. .. . I have taken some very pleasant rides during our stay in Philadelphia; the horses are none of them properly broken for riding, which makes it a pleasure of no small fatigue to ride them for three or four hours. Luckily, I do not object to severe exercise, and the weather and the country were both charming. .. . 

 I am glad you have been re-reading the "Tempest. " . .. What exquisite pleasure that fine creation has given me! I like it better than any of the other plays; it is less "of the earth, earthy" than any of the others; for though the "Midsummer Night's Dream" is in some sort, as it were, its companion, the mortal element in the latter poem is far less noble and lovely than in the "Tempest. " Prospero and Miranda, the dwellers on the enchanted island, are statelier and fairer than any of the human wanderers in the mazes of the Athenian wood. There is a deep and indescribable melancholy to me in the "Tempest" that mingles throughout with its beauty, and lends a special charm to it. I so often contemplate in fancy that island, lost in the unknown seas, just in the hour of its renewed solitude, after the departure of its "human mortal" dwellers and visitors, when Prospero and his companions had bade farewell to it, when Caliban was grunting and grubbing and groveling in his favorite cave again, when Ariel was hovering like a humming-bird over the flower draperies of the woods, where the footprints of men were still stamped on the wet sand of the shining shore, but their voices silent and their forms vanished, and utter solitude, and a strange dream of the past, filling the haunts where human life, its sin and sorrow, and joy and hope, and love and hate, had breathed and palpitated, and were now forever gone. The notion of that desert once, but now deserted, paradise, whose flowers had looked up at Miranda, whose skies had shed wisdom on Prospero, always seems to me full of melancholy. The girl's sweet voice singing no more in the sunny, still noon, the grave, tender converse of the father and child charming no more the solemn eventide, the forsaken island dwells in my imagination as at once desecrated and hallowed by its mortal sojourners; no longer savage quite, and never to be civilized; the supernatural element disturbed, the human element withdrawn; a sad, beautiful place, stranger than any other in the world. Perhaps the sea went over it; it has never been found since Shakespeare landed on it. I love that poem beyond words. .. . 

 I shall ruin you in postage; if there is any chance of that, keep Mrs. Norton's five guineas to pay for my American epistles. 

 Ever your affectionate F. A. K. 

 DEAREST H----, I have received your letter, acknowledging my first to you. .. . As for letters, they are like everything else we experience here, sources of to the full as much suffering as satisfaction. Who has not felt their whole blood run backward at sight of one of these folded fate-bearers? I declare, breaking an envelope always has something of the character of pulling a shower-bath string over one's own head; I wonder anybody ever has the courage to do it. .. . 

 Your dread of our finding New York quite a desert would have been literally fulfilled had we reached it a fortnight sooner; but the dreadful malady, the cholera, had taken its departure, and though private bereavements and general stagnation of business rendered the season a very unfavorable one for our experiment, yet, upon the whole, we have every reason to be well satisfied with the result of it, and think we did well not to postpone the beginning of our campaign. .. . The first serious experiences of our youth seem to me like the breaking asunder of some curious, beautiful, and mystical pattern or device. .. . All our lives long we are more or less intent on replacing the bright scattered fragments in their original shape: most of us die with the bits still scattered round us--that is to say, such of the bits as have not been ground into powder, or soiled and defaced beyond recognition, in the life-process. The few very wise find and place them in a coherent form at last, but it is quite another curious, beautiful, and mystical device or pattern from the original one. 

 The deaths of the young Napoleon, the Duke of Reichstadt, and Walter Scott have excited universal interest here, naturally of a very dissimilar kind. One's heart burns to think of that young eagle falling like a weakly winter flower, or a faded, sickly girl, into his untimely grave. .. . There was nothing for him but death. If he had been anything, it could only have been a wild spark of the mad meteor from which he sprang; and as Heaven in its wisdom forbade that, I think it much of its mercy that it extinguished him early and utterly, and did not leave him to flare and flicker and burn himself out with foul gunpowder smoke, and smell of dead men slain in battle, in the middle of the smoldering ashes of his father's European empire. 

 My admiration and respect for Walter Scott are unbounded, and were I the noblest, richest, and charmingest man in the world, I would lay myself at Anne Scott's feet out of sheer love and veneration for her father. .. . 

 You ask me if I wrote anything on board ship? Nothing but odds and ends of doggerel. Since I have been here I have written some verses on the beautiful American autumn, which have been published with commendation. I am thinking of writing a prose story, if ever again I can get two minutes and a half of leisure. .. . Your entreaties for minute details of our life make me sad, for how little of what we do, be, or suffer can be conveyed to you in this miserable scrap of paper!. .. Our dinner-hour is three when we are actors, five when we are ladies and gentlemen. The food we get here in New York is very indifferent. It was excellent in quality in Philadelphia, but wherever we have been there is a want of niceness and refinement in the cooking and serving everything that is very disagreeable. .. . 

 Thursday, Nov. 27th. This is my birthday--in England always one of the gloomiest days of this gloomy month; here my windows are all open, and the warm sun streaming in as it might on the finest of early September days with us. I am to-day three-and-twenty. Where is my life gone to? As the child said, "Where does the light go when the candle is out?" . .. Since last I wrote to you I have been forty miles up the Hudson, and seen such noble waters and beautiful hills, such glory of color and magnificent breadth in the grand river and its autumn woods, as I cannot describe. 

 This is our last night but one of acting here. We play "The Hunchback" on Saturday, and on Monday go back to Philadelphia for three weeks; thence to Baltimore and Washington, and then return here. I must go now and rehearse Katharine and Petruchio. 

 I have just finished Graham's "History, " and am beginning John Smith. By the by, a gentleman here is writing a play, in which I am to act Pocahontas and my father Captain Smith. Come out and see it, won't you? Good-by, dear. Think always of your affectionate

 F. A. K. 

 December 9, 1832. MY DEAREST H----, I received yours of October 16th yesterday. .. . You are not healthily natured enough to be inconstant. Yours is one of those morbid organizations for whom the present never does its wholesome, proper office of superseding the past, and your thoughts and feelings, your whole inner life, in short, is always out of perspective, because your background is forever your foreground, and with you, half the time, nothing is but what is not; not in consequence of looking forward, like Macbeth, but the reverse. .. . I am delighted that you are going to Scotland to know my dear Mrs. Harry Siddons. 

 Before this letter reaches you, however, you will have returned to your castle, and your visit to Edinburgh will be over. .. . Mercy on me! what disputations you and Mr. Combe will have had--on matters physiological, psychological, phrenological, and philosophical! My brains ache to imagine them. .. . Spurzheim, you know, is dead lately in Boston. It is a matter of regret to me not to have seen him, and his death will be a grief to the Combes, who venerate him highly. .. . Making trial of people is running a foolish risk, and they who get disappointment by it reap the most probable result from such experiments. I am quite willing to trust my friends; God forbid I should ever try them!. .. 

 We have not yet been to Boston, and therefore I myself know nothing of Channing, and cannot answer your questions about him. All that I hear inclines me to like as well as respect him. His gentleness and kindness, his weak health, brought on by over-study, his perfect simplicity and unaffectedness--these are the usual details that follow any mention of him, and accord with the impression his writings produced upon me; but of his theological treatises I know nothing. 

 I am glad anything so universal as the blessed sunshine reminds you of me, because my remembrance must be present with you almost daily. The lights of heaven shine more glowingly here than through the misty veils that curtain our islands. The moon and stars are wonderfully bright, and there is an intensity, an earnestness, and a translucent purity in the sky here that delights me. .. . Four months are already gone out of the two years we are to pass out of England. Dear England! My heart dwells with affectionate pride upon the beauty and greatness and goodness of my own country--that wonderful little land, that mere morsel of earth as it seems on the map--so full of power, of wealth, of intellectual vigor and moral worth!. .. 

 I found Graham a little too much of a Republican for me, though his "History" seemed to me upon the whole good and very impartial. I am now half way through Smith's "Virginia, " which pleases me by its quaint old-world style. I am myself much inclined to be in love with Captain Smith. A man who fights three Turks and carries their heads on his shield is to me an admirable man. .. . 

 I answer the propositions in your letters in regular rotation as they come; and so, with regard to the peaches, those that I have tasted on this side of the Atlantic I should say were not comparable to fine hothouse peaches in England and fine French espalier peaches; but then the peach trees here are standard trees, and there are whole orchards of them. Their chief merit, therefore, is their abundance, and some of that abundance is certainly fit for nothing but to feed pigs withal. [It is by no means a luxury to be despised, however, to have, in the American fashion, on a hot summer's day, a deep plate presented to you full of peaches, cut up like apples for a pie, that have been standing in ice, and are then snowed over with sugar and frozen cream. ]

 We are now in Philadelphia, whence we go to Baltimore, Washington, and Charleston. The Southern States are at this moment in a state of violent excitement, which seems almost to threaten a dissolution of the Union. The tariff question is the point of disagreement; and as the interests of the North and South are in direct opposition on this subject, there is no foretelling the end. 

 Our success is very great, and we have every reason to be satisfied with and grateful for it. Our houses are full, and eke our pockets, and we have hitherto managed to live in tolerable privacy and very tolerable discomfort. But I believe the western part of the country has yet to teach us the extent of inconvenience to which travelers in America are sometimes liable. God bless you, dearest H----. 

 I am, ever yours affectionately, F. A. K. 

 My father and I took a moonlight walk the other night, from ten o'clock till half-past twelve, during which we neither of us uttered six words. 

 BALTIMORE, January 2, 1833. MY DEAREST H----, You are the first to whom I date this new year. .. . I told you in one of my letters to keep the five guineas Mrs. Norton has paid you for my scribblements to pay the postage of my letters--do so. .. . 

 We arrived in this place on Monday, at half-past four, having left Philadelphia at six in the morning. We have just terminated a second engagement there very successfully. If the roads and carriages are bad, and the land-traveling altogether detestable, the speed, facility, and convenience of the steamboats, by which one may really be conveyed from one end to another of this world of vast waters, are very admirable. Vast waters indeed they are! We came down the Delaware on Monday, and (open your Irish eyes!) sometimes it was six, sometimes thirteen miles wide, and never narrower than three or four miles at any part of it that we saw. So wide an expanse of fresh running water is in itself a fine object. We crossed the narrow neck of land between the Delaware and the Chesapeake on a railroad with one of Stephenson's engines. .. . 

 The railroad was full of knots and dots, and jolting and jumping and bumping and thumping places. The carriages we were in held twelve people very uncomfortably. Baltimore itself, as far as I have seen it, strikes me as a large, rambling, red-brick village on the outskirts of one of our manufacturing towns, Birmingham or Manchester. It covers an immense extent of ground, but there are great gaps and vacancies in the middle of the streets, patches of gravely ground, parcels of meadow land, and large vacant spaces--which will all, no doubt, be covered with buildings in good time, for it is growing daily and hourly--but which at present give it an untidy, unfinished, straggling appearance. 

 While my father and I were exploring about together yesterday, we came to a print-shop, whose window exhibited an engraving of Reynolds's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, and Lawrence's picture of my uncle John in Hamlet. We stopped before them, and my father looked with a good deal of emotion at these beautiful representations of his beautiful kindred, and it was a sort of sad surprise to meet them in this other world where we are wandering, aliens and strangers. 

 This is the newest-looking place we have yet visited, the youngest in appearance in this young world; and I have experienced to-day a disagreeable instance of its immature civilization, or at any rate its small proficiency in the elegancies of life. I wanted to ride, but although a horse was to be found, no such thing as a side-saddle could be procured at any livery-stable or saddler's in the town, so I have been obliged to give up my projected exercise. 

 I have been to my first rehearsal here this morning, and wretched enough all things were. I act for the first time to-morrow night Bianca, which they have everywhere chosen for my opening part; and it is a good one for that purpose, as I generally act and look well in it, and it is the sort of play that all sorts of people can comprehend. There is a foreign--I mean continental--custom here, which is pleasant. They have a _table d'hôte_ dinner at two o'clock, and while it is going on a very tolerable band plays all manner of Italian airs and German waltzes, and as there is a fine long corridor into which my room-door opens, with a window at each end, I have a very agreeable promenade, and take my exercise to this musical accompaniment. .. . 

 I have at this moment on my table a lovely nosegay--roses, geraniums, rare heaths, and perfect white camellias. Our windows are all wide open; the heat is intense, and the air that comes in at them like a sirocco. It is unusual weather for the season even here, and very unwholesome. 

 In a week's time we are going on to Washington, where we shall find dear Washington Irving, whom I think I shall embrace, for England's sake as well as his own. We have letters to the President, to whom we are to be presented, and to his rival, Henry Clay, and to Daniel Webster, whom I care more to know than either of the others. 

 After a short stay in Washington we return here, and then back to Philadelphia and New York, till the 20th of February, after which we sail for Charleston. There has been, and still exists at present, a very considerable degree of political alarm and excitement in this country, owing to the threat of the South Carolinians to secede from the Union if the tariff is not annulled, and the country is in hourly expectation of being involved in a civil war. However, the prevailing opinion among the wise seems to be that the Northern States will be obliged to give up the tariff, as the only means of preserving the Union; and if matters come to a peaceable settlement, we shall proceed in February to Charleston; if not, South Carolina will have other things to think of besides plays and play-actors. The summer we shall probably spend in Canada; the winter perhaps in Jamaica, to which place we have received a most pressing invitation from Lord Mulgrave. The end of the ensuing spring will, I trust in God, see us embarked once more for England. .. . 

 We are earning money very fast, and though I think we work too incessantly and too hard, yet, as every night we do not act is a certain loss of so much out of my father's pocket, I do not like to make many objections to it, although I think it is really not unlikely to be detrimental to his own health and strength. .. . 

 I spent yesterday evening with some very pleasant people here, who are like old-fashioned English folk, the Catons, Lady Wellesley's father and mother. They are just now in deep mourning for Mrs. Caton's father, the venerable Mr. Carroll, who was upward of ninety-five years old when he died, and was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. I saw a lovely picture by Lawrence of the eldest of the three beautiful sisters, the daughters of Mrs. Caton, who have all married Englishmen of rank. [The Marchioness of Wellesley, the Duchess of Leeds, and Lady Stafford. The fashion of marrying in England seems to be traditional in this family. Miss McTavish, niece of these ladies, married Mr. Charles Howard, son of the Earl of Carlisle. ]

 The Baltimore women are celebrated for their beauty, and I think they are the prettiest creatures I have ever seen as far as their faces go; but they are short and thin, and have no figures at all, either in height or breadth, and pinch their waists and feet most cruelly, which certainly, considering how small they are by nature, is a work of supererogation, and does not tend to produce in them a state of grace. .. . We act every night this week, and as we are obliged to rehearse every morning, of course I have no time for any occupations but my strictly professional ones. I do not approve of this quantity of hard work for either my father or myself, but I do not like to make any further protest upon the subject. .. . 

 Good-by, dearest H----. I am ever your affectionate F. A. K. 

 TO MRS. JAMESON. 

 BALTIMORE, January 11, 1833. 

 Thank you across the sea, dear Mrs. Jameson, for your letter of the 1st of November. I had been wondering, but the day before it reached me, whether you had ever received one I wrote to you on my first arrival in New York, or whether you were accusing me of neglect, ingratitude, forgetfulness, and all the turpitudes that the delay of a letter sometimes causes folk to give other folk credit for. My occupations are incessant, or rather, I should say, my occupation, for to my sorrow I have but one. 'Tis not with me now as in the fortunate days when, after six rehearsals, a piece ran, as the saying is, twenty nights, leaving me all the mornings and three evenings in the week at my own disposal. Here we rush from place to place, at each place have to drill a new set of actors, and every night to act a different play; so that my days are passed in dawdling about cold, dark stages, with blundering actors who have not even had the conscience to study the words of their parts, all the morning. All the afternoon I pin up ribbons and feathers and flowers, and sort out theatrical adornments, and all the evening I enchant audiences, prompt my fellow-mimes, and wish it had pleased Heaven to make me a cabbage in a corner of a Christian kitchen-garden in--well, say Hertfordshire, or any other county of England; I am not particular as to the precise spot. .. . Whenever I can I get on horseback; it is the only pleasure I have in this world; for my dancing days are drawing to a close. But I mean to ride as long as I have a hand to hold a rein, or a leg to put over a pommel. By the by, I ought to beg your pardon for the last sentence; I ought to have said a foot to put into a stirrup; for if you are not ashamed of having legs you ought to be--at least, we are in this country, and never mention, or give the slightest token of having such things, except by wearing very short petticoats, which we don't consider objectionable. .. . I am glad you have furbished up and completed your little room, because it is a sign you mean to stay where you are, and I like to know where to find you in my imagination. .. . I have just seen dear Washington Irving, and it required all my sense of decent decorum to prevent my throwing my arms round his neck, he looked so like a bit of home, England. 

 You will be glad to hear that we are thriving, in body and estate. We are all well, and our work is very successful. The people flock to see us, and nothing can exceed the kindness which we meet with everywhere and from everybody. .. . I read nothing whatever since I am in this blessed land. The only books I have accomplished getting through have been Graham's "History of North America, " Knickerbocker's "History of New York, " which nearly killed me with laughing; "Contarini Fleming, " which is very affected and very clever; sundry cantos of Dante, sundry plays of Shakespeare, sundry American poems [which are very good], and old Captain John Smith's quaint "History of Virginia. " As fast as I gather my wits together for any steady occupation, I am whisked off to some new place, and do not recover from one journey before I have to take another. The roads here shake one's body, soul, thoughts, opinions, and principles all to pieces; I assure you they are wicked roads. 

 Our theater, Covent Garden, is, we understand, going to the dogs. I cannot help it any more, that is certain, and feel about that as about all things that have had their day--it must go. Taglioni is like a dream, and you must not abuse Mademoiselle Mars to me. I never saw her but twice--in "L'Ecole des Vieillards" and "Valérie"--and I thought her perfection in both. .. . If I do not leave off, you will be blind for the next fortnight with reading this crossed letter. I wish you success most heartily in all you undertake, and am truly and faithfully yours, FANNY KEMBLE. 

[Washington Irving was intimately acquainted with my father and mother, and a most kind and condescending friend to me. He often told me thatwhen first he went to England, long before authorship or celebrity haddawned upon him, he was a member of a New York commercial house, onwhose affairs he was sent to Europe. It was when he was a mere obscureyoung man of business in London that he had been introduced to mymother, whose cordial kindness to him in his foreign isolation seemed tohave made a profound impression on him; for when I knew him, in the daysof his great literary celebrity and social success, he often referred toit with the warmest expressions of gratitude. I think, of all thedistinguished persons I have known, he was one of the least affected bythe adulation and admiration of society. He remained quite unchanged byhis extreme social popularity. Simple, unaffected, unconstrained, genial, kindly, and good, he seemed so entirely to forget his owncelebrity, that one almost forgot it too in talking to him. I rememberhis coming, the day after my first appearance at Covent Garden, to seeus, and congratulated my parents on the success of that terribleexperiment. I, who was always delighted to see him, ran to fetch thepretty new watch I had received from my father the night before, anddisplayed its beauties with an eager desire for his admiration of them. He took it and slowly turned it about, commending its fine workmanshipand pretty enamel and jewelry; then putting it to his ear, with a mostmischievous look of affected surprise, he exclaimed, as one does to achild's watch, "Why, it goes, I declare!"

To my great regret and loss, I saw Mademoiselle Mars only in two parts, when, in the autumn of her beauty and powers, she played a shortengagement in London. The grace, the charm, the loveliness, which sheretained far into middle age, were, even in their decline, enough tojustify all that her admirers said of her early incomparablefascination. Her figure had grown large and her face become round, andlost their fine outline and proportion; but the exquisite taste of herdress and graceful dignity of her deportment, and sweet radiance of herexpressive countenance, were still indescribably charming; and thevoice, unrivaled in its fresh melodious brilliancy, and the pure andperfect enunciation, were unimpaired, and sounded like the clear liquidutterance of a young girl of sixteen. Her Celimène and her Elmire Inever had the good fortune to see, but can imagine, from her performanceof the heroine in Casimir de la Vigne's capital play of "L'Ecole desVieillards, " how well she must have deserved her unrivaled reputation inthose parts. 

It is remarkable that one of the most striking points in Madame d'Orvalwas suggested by herself to the author. De la Vigne, according to thefrequent usage of French authors, was reading his piece to the greatactress, upon whom its success was mainly to depend, and when he came tothe scene where the offended but unjustly suspicious husband recounts tohis wife the details of his duel with the young duke whose attentions toher had excited his jealousy, and that when, full of the tenderestanxiety for his safety, she flies to meet him, and is repulsed by thebitter irony of his speech, beginning, "Rassurez-vous, madame, le ducn'est point blessé, " Mademoiselle Mars, having listened in silence tillthe end of D'Orval's speech, exclaimed, "Mais, quoi! je ne dis rien, elle ne dit rien!" De la Vigne, who had made the young woman listen inspeechless anguish to the bitter and unjust reproach conveyed by herhusband's first words and his subsequent account of the duel, said, insome surprise at Mademoiselle Mars' suggestion, "Mais quoi encore--quepeut-elle dire? que voudriez-vous qu'elle dise?" "Ah, quelquechose!"cried Mademoiselle Mars, clasping her hands in the imagined distress ofthe situation; "rien--deuxmots seulement. 'Ah, monsieur!' quand il dit, 'Rassurez-vous, madame, le duc n'est point blessé. '" "Eh bien! dites, dites comme cela, " cried De la Vigne, amazed at all the expression theexquisite voice and face had given to the two words. And so the scenewas altered, and the long recital of D'Orval was broken by thereproachful "Ah, monsieur!" of his wife, and seldom has the utterance ofsuch an insignificant exclamation affected those who heard it so keenly. For myself, I never can forget the sudden, burning blush that spreadtingling to my shoulders at all the shame and mortification and anguishconveyed in the pathetic protest of that "Ah, monsieur!" of MademoiselleMars. 

Dr. Gueneau de Mussy, who knew her well, and used to see her veryfrequently in her later years of retirement from the stage, told me thathe had often heard her read, among other things, the whole play of "LeTartuffe, " and that the coarse flippancy of the honest-hearted Dorinne, and the stupid stolidity of the dupe Orgon, and the vulgar, gross, sensual hypocrisy of the Tartuffe, were all rendered by her with thesame incomparable truth and effect as her own famous part of the heroineof the piece, Elmire. On one of the very last occasions of her appearingbefore her own Parisian audience, when she had passed the limit at whichit was possible for a woman of her advanced age to assume the appearanceof youth, the part she was playing requiring that she should exclaim "Jesuis jeune! je suis jolie!" a loud, solitary hiss protested against theassertion with bitter significance. After an instant's consternation, which held both the actors and audience silent, she added, with theexquisite grace and dignity which survived the youth and beauty to whichshe could no longer even pretend, "Je suis Mademoiselle Mars!" and thewhole house broke out in acclamations, and rang with the applause due towhat the incomparable artiste still was and the memory of all that shehad been. ]

 NEW YORK, February 21, 1833. 

 It is a long time since I have written to you, my dearest H----. .. . My work is incessant, . .. And there is no end to the breathless hurry of occupation we pass our days in. Here is already a break since I began this letter, for we are now in Philadelphia, on our way to Washington, and it is Thursday, the 3d of March. .. . It has been matter of serious regret to me that I have not, from the very first day of my becoming a worker for wages, looked more into the details of my earnings and spendings. I have felt this particularly lately from circumstances relative to V----'s position, which is a very sad one, from which I have been very anxious to relieve her. .. . All I know at present is, that since we have been here in America our earnings have already been sufficient to enable us to live in tolerably decent comfort on the Continent. .. . Do you know, dearest H----, that it is not impossible that I may never return to England to reside there. See it again, I will, please God to grant me life and eyes, but the state of my father's property in Covent Garden is such that it seems more than likely that he may never be able to return to England without risking the little which these last toilsome years will have enabled him to earn for the support of his own and my mother's old age. He will be compelled, in all likelihood, to settle and die abroad, as my uncle John did, by the liabilities of that ruinous possession of theirs, the first theater of London. When first my father communicated this chance to me, and expressed his determination, should the affairs of the theater remain in their present situation, to buy a small farm in Normandy, and go and live there, my heart sank terribly. This was very different from my girlish dream of a life of lonely independence among the Alps, or by the Mediterranean; and the idea of living entirely out of England seems to me now very sad for all of us. .. . However, there are earth and skies out of England. What does Imogen say?--

 "I prithee think, there's livers out of Britain;"

 and if God vouchsafe me my faculties, and I can bid farewell to this life of distasteful toil, I have visions of studies and pursuits which I think might make existence very happy in a farm in Normandy, though such might not have been my own choice. .. . What special inquiries did you wish me to make about General Washington? I was, when at Washington, within fifteen miles of Mount Vernon, his home and burying-place, but could not make time to go thither. I have one of his autograph letters, and if there be any indication of character in handwriting--which I hope to goodness there is not--it certainly exists in his, for a firmer, clearer, and fairer hand I never saw--an excellent, honest handwriting. His likeness confronts one at every corner here; not only at every street corner, where he lends his countenance to the frequenters of drinking-houses, but over every chimney-piece in every sitting-room. He is like the frogs of the old Egyptian plague, except that they were in the king's chamber, where he was too good a Republican ever to have been. 

 I am amused at your summing up your account of the restless and perturbed state of poor Ireland by saying, "After all, I believe America is the land of peace and quiet. " It seems to me, who am here, that everything at this moment threatens change and disintegration in this country. It is impossible to imagine more menacing elements of discord and disunion than those which exist in the opposite and antagonistic interests of its southern and northern provinces, and the anomalous mixture of aristocratic feeling and democratic institutions. .. . God bless you, my dear H----. I will write to you soon again; if possible, before the breathing-time this snow-storm is giving us is over. 

 Ever affectionately yours, F. A. K. 

 NEW YORK, April 3, 1833. MY DEAREST H----, . .. I am working very hard, what with rehearsing, acting, studying new parts, devising new dresses, and attending--which, of course, I am obliged also to do--to the claims of the society in which we are living, and my time is so full that I barely contrive to fulfill all my duties and answer all the claims made upon me. .. . The spring is in the sky, and in the air her soft smile and sweet breath are gladdening the world; but the process of vegetation is much later in beginning, and much more rapid in its operations when they do begin here, than with us. Though the last three days have been as hot as our midsummer weather, the trees are yet leafless and budless--as dry and unpromising-looking as they were in mid-winter; and, indeed, the transition from winter to summer is almost instantaneous here. The spring does not stand coaxing and beckoning the shy summer to the woods and fields as in our country, but while winter yet seems lord of the ascendant, and his white robes are still covering land and water, suddenly the summer looks down upon the earth from the cloudless sky, and, as by magic, the ice melts, the snow evaporates, the trees are clothed with green, the woods are full of flowers, and the whole world breaks out into a hallelujah of warmth, beauty, and blossoming like mid-July in our deliberate climate. This again lasts, as it were, but a day; the sun presently becomes so powerful that the world withers away under the intense heat, the flowers and shrubs fade, and instead of screening and refreshing the earth, are themselves scorched and parched with the glaring fierceness of the sky; the ground cracks, the watercourses dry up, the rivers shrink in their beds, and every human creature that can flies from the lowlands and the cities to go up into the north or to the mountains to find breath, shelter, and refreshment from the sultry curse. Then comes the autumn, and that is most glorious; not soft and sad as ours, but to the very threshold of winter bright, warm, lovely, and gorgeous. Two seasons remain to our earthly year, remembrances, I think, of Paradise; the spring in Italy, and autumn in America. .. . 

 You ask me how I "fit in" to my American audiences? Why, very kindly indeed. At first they seemed to me rather cold, and I felt this more with regard to my father than myself, but I think they have grown to like us; I certainly have grown to like them, and their applause satisfies me amply. .. . I heard yesterday of one of Sir Thomas Lawrence's prints of me which was carried by a peddler beyond the Alleghany Mountains [the Alleghany Mountains then were further than the Rocky Mountains are now from the Atlantic seaboard], and bought at an egregious price by a young engineer, who with fifteen others went out there upon some railroad construction business, were bidding for it at auction in that wilderness, where they themselves were gazed at, as prodigies of strange civilization, by the half-savage inhabitants of the region. That touched and pleased me very much. .. . We are going to act here till the 12th of this month, when we go to Boston, where we shall remain for a month; after which we return here for a week, and then proceed to Philadelphia by the 1st of June, where we intend closing our professional labors for the summer. Thence we shall probably go to Niagara and the Canadas. My father has talked of spending a little quiet time in Rhode Island, where the weather is cool and we might recruit a little; but there does not seem much certainty about our plans at present. In the autumn we shall begin our progress toward New Orleans, where we shall probably winter, and act our way back here by the spring, when I hope and trust we shall return to England. .. . The book of Harriet Martineau's which you bade me read is delightful. I have not quite finished it yet, for I have scarcely any time at all for reading; for want of the habit of thinking and reading on such subjects I find the political economy a little stiff now and then, though the clearness and simplicity with which it is treated in this story are admirable. I did not know that I was supposed to be the original of Letitia. .. . God bless you, my dearest H----. 

 I am ever your most affectionate, F. A. K. 

"For Each and for All" was, I think, the name of the volume taken fromMiss Martineau's admirable series of political economy tales, which myfriend, Miss S----, sent me. The heroine of the story is a youngactress, and Miss Martineau once told me that she had derived someslight suggestion of the character from me. 

 NEW YORK, Friday, April 10, 1833. MY DEAREST H----, . .. On Monday last I acted Lady Macbeth; on Tuesday, Lady Townley; on Wednesday, Belvidera; and last night, Portia, and Mary Copp in "Charles II. " This is pretty hard work. To-morrow we start for Boston, which we shall reach on Sunday, and Monday our work begins there. .. . I think four nights a week as much as either my father or myself ought to work, and as much as we really can work profitably, the rest being money taken from our capital--_i. E. _, our health. But in Boston we shall act for three weeks or a month every night but the Saturdays. [The days when four or five performances a week were considered a sufficient exertion for popular actors or singers are far enough in the past, and now there seems to be no limit to the capacity of such artists for earning money by the exercise of their talents. Five and six performances a week are the normal number now expected from great European stars, or rather those which great European stars expect to give and to be paid for. Their health is one invariable sacrifice to this over-work, and their artistic excellence a still more grievous one. It has been asked why artists invariably return to Europe comparatively coarse and vulgar in the style of their performances, and the result is attributed to the want of refined taste and critical judgment of the American audiences--in my opinion very unjustly, for if want of knowledge and nice perception in the public induces carelessness and indifference in performers, the grasping greed of gain and incessant over-exertion, mental and physical, for the sake of satisfying it, is a far more certain cause of artistic deterioration. During Madame Ristori's last visit to America, I went to see a morning performance of "Elizabeta d'Inglterra" by her. Arriving at the theater half an hour before the time announced for the performance, I found notices affixed to the entrances, stating that the beginning was unavoidably delayed by Madame Ristori's non-arrival. The crowd of expectant spectators occupied their seats and bore this prolonged postponement with American--_i. E. _, unrivaled--patience, good-temper, and civility. We were encouraged by two or three pieces of information from some official personage, who from the stage assured us that the moment Madame Ristori arrived (she was coming by railroad from Baltimore) the play should begin. Then came a telegram, she was coming; then an announcement, she was come; and driving from the terminus straight to the theater, tired and harassed herself with the delay, she dressed herself and appeared before her audience, went through a part of extraordinary length and difficulty and exertion--almost, indeed, a monologue--including the intolerable fatigue and hurry of four or five entire changes of costume, and as the curtain dropped rushed off to disrobe and catch a train to New York, where she was to act the next morning, if not the evening, of that same day. I had seen Madame Ristori in this part in England, and was shocked at the great difference in the merit of her performance. Every particle of careful elaboration and fine detail of workmanship was gone; the business of the piece was hurried through, with reference, of course, only to the time in which it could be achieved; and of Madame Ristori's once fine delineation of the character, which, when I first saw it, atoned for the little merit of the piece itself, nothing remained but the broad claptrap points in the several principal situations, made coarse, and not nearly even as striking, by the absence of due preparation and working up to them, the careless rendering of everything else, and the slurring over of the finer minutiæ and more delicate indications of the whole character. It was a very sad spectacle to me. ]

 Besides your letter, the poor old _Pacific_ (the ship that brought us to America) brought me something else to-day. While Washington Irving was sitting with me, a message came from the mate of the _Pacific_ with a large box of mould for me. I had it brought in, and asking Irving if he knew what it was, "A bit of the old soil, " said he; and that it was. .. . Washington Irving was sure to have guessed right as to my treasure, and I was not ashamed to greet it with tears before him. .. . He is so sensible, sound, and straightforward in his way of seeing everything, and at the same time so full of hopefulness, so simple, unaffected, true, and good, that it is a privilege to converse with him, for which one is the wiser, the happier and the better. .. . 

 Here is Monday, April 15th, Boston, my dear H----. We arrived here yesterday evening, and in the course of this morning I have already received fourteen visitors, all of whom I shall have to go and waste my time with in return for their kind waste of theirs upon me. .. . To-morrow I begin my work with "Fazio" and go to a party afterward. .. . 

 Tuesday, 16th. 

 . .. This morning I have been to rehearsal, and out shopping, and received crowds of strangers who come and call upon us. .. . To-night I make my first appearance here in "Fazio, " and we hear the theater will be crammed, and I am going to a party after that dreadful play; not by way of delight, but of duty, and a severe one it will be. To-morrow I act Mrs. Haller, Thursday Lady Teazle, and Friday Bianca again; Saturday is a blessed holiday. .. . I have finished Smith's "Virginia, " which I found rather tiresome toward the end. I have finished Harriet Martineau's political-economy story, which I liked exceedingly. I am reading a small volume of Brewster's on "Natural Magic, " which entertains me very much; but I am dreadfully cramped for time, and my poor mind goes like a half-tended garden, which every now and then makes me feel sad. 

 You would have been pleased, dear H----, if you had heard Washington Irving's answer to me the other day when, in talking with him of my profession and my distaste for it, I complained of the little leisure it left me for study and improving myself, for reading, writing, and the occupations that were congenial to me. "Well, " he said, "you are living, you are seeing men and things, you are seeing the world, you are acquiring materials and heaping together observations and experience and wisdom, and by and by, when with fame you have acquired independence and retire from these labors, you will begin another and a brighter course with matured powers. I know of no one whose life has such a promise in it as yours. " Oh! H----, I almost felt hopeful while he spoke so to me. .. . 

[Alas! my kind friend was no prophet. Not many months after, sitting byhim at a dinner-party in New York, he said to me, "So I hear you areengaged to be married, and you are going to settle in this country. Well, you will be told that this country is like your own, and thatliving in it is like living in England: but do not believe it; it is nosuch thing, it is nothing of the sort; which need not prevent your beingvery happy here if you make the best of things as you find them. Aboveall, whatever you do, don't become a creaking door. " "What's that?"asked I, laughing. He then told me that his friend Leslie, the painter, who was, I believe, like his contemporary and charming rival artist, Gilbert Stewart Newton, an American by birth, had married anEnglishwoman, whom he had brought out to America, "but who, " saidIrving, "worried and tormented his and her own life out with ceaselesscomplaints and comparisons, and was such a nuisance that I used to callher 'the creaking door. '"]

 Good-by, and God bless you, dearest H----. 

 I am affectionately yours, FANNY KEMBLE. 

 BOSTON, Sunday, April 21, 1833. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, There lies in my desk, and has lain, I am ashamed to say, for a long time now, an unanswered letter of yours, which smites my conscience every time I open that useful receptacle (desk, not conscience), where it has, I am sorry to say, many companions in its own predicament. My time is like running water, and the quickest, but the rapids of Niagara, that ever ran, I think; and every hour, as it flies away, is filled with so much that must be done, letting alone so much that I would wish to do, that I am fairly out of breath, and feel as if I were flying myself in a whirling high wind, and if ever I stop for a moment, shan't be surprised to find that I have gone crazy. I think I should like to spend a few days entirely alone in a dark room, secluded from every sight and sound, for my senses are almost worn out, and my sense exhausted, with looking, hearing, feeling, going, doing, being, and suffering. Our work is incessant; we never remain a month in any one place, and we are scarce off our knees from putting things into drawers than we are down on them again to take them out and put them all back into trunks. My health has not suffered hitherto from this constant exertion, but I am occasionally oppressed with the dreadful unquietness of our life, and long for a few moments' rest of body and of mind. 

 This is our first visit to this place, and I am enchanted with it. As a town, it bears more resemblance to an English city than any we have yet seen; the houses are built more in our own fashion, and there is a beautiful walk called the Common, the features of which strongly resemble the view over the Green Park just by Constitution Hill. The people here take more kindly to us than they have done even elsewhere, and it is delightful to act to audiences who appear so pleasantly pleased with us. .. . 

 Only think! a book was sent to me from Philadelphia the other day which proved to be the "Diary of an Ennuyée. " I have no idea who it came from, or who made so good a guess at that old predilection of mine. I fell to forthwith--for that book has always had a most powerful charm for me--and read, and read on, though I have read it many a time through before, and though I had been acting Bianca, and my supper was on my plate before me. 

 I heard the other day mention of another work of yours, since the Shakespeare book. If you are not weary of writing to me, with such long intervals between your question and my reply, tell me something of this new work in your next letter. 

 Our plans for the summer are yet unsettled. .. . I was much disappointed on arriving here to find that Dr. Channing has left Boston for the South. His health is completely broken, and the bleak and bitter east wind that blows perpetually here is a formidable enemy to life, even in stronger frames than his. .. . 

 The hotel in which we are lodging here is immediately opposite the box-office, and it is a matter of some agreeable edification to me to see the crowds gathering round the doors for hours before they open, and then rushing in, to the imminent peril of life and limb, pushing and pommeling and belaboring one another like madmen. Some of the lower class of purchasers, inspired by the thrifty desire for gain said to be a New England characteristic, sell these tickets, which they buy at the box-office price, at an enormous advance, and smear their clothes with treacle and sugar and other abominations, to secure, from the fear of their contact of all decently-clad competitors, freer access to the box-keeper. To prevent, if possible, these malpractices, and secure, to ourselves and the managers of the theater any such surplus profit as may be honestly come by, the proprietors have determined to put the boxes up to auction and sell the tickets to the highest bidders. It was rather barbarous of me, I think, upon reflection, to stand at the window while all this riot was going on, laughing at the fun; for not a wretch found his way in that did not come out rubbing his back or his elbow, or showing some grievous damage done to his garments. The opposite window of my room looks out upon a churchyard and a burial-ground; the reflections suggested by the contrast between the two prospects are not otherwise than edifying. .. . Good-by; God bless you!

 I am ever yours, most truly, FANNY KEMBLE. 

 NEW YORK, Friday, May 24, 1833. MY DEAREST H----, I received your last letter, dated the 22d March, a week ago, when I was in Boston, which we have left, after a stay of five weeks, to return here, where we arrived a few days ago. .. . 

 Boston is one of the pleasantest towns imaginable. It is built upon three hills, which give it a singular, picturesque appearance, and I suppose suggested the name of Tremonte Street, and the Tremonte Hotel, which we inhabited. The houses are many of them of fine granite, and have an air of wealth and solidity unlike anything we have seen elsewhere in this country. Many of the streets are planted with trees, chiefly fine horse-chestnuts, which were in full leaf and blossom when we came away, and which harmonize beautifully with the gray color and solid handsome style of the houses. They have a fine piece of ground, like a park, in one part of the town, which, together with the houses round it, reminded me a good deal of the Green Park and the walk at the back of Arlington Street. 

[The addition of the new part of Boston, stretching beyond the Commonand the public Gardens, has added immensely to the beauty of the city, and the variety of the buildings and alternate views at the end of thevistas of the fine streets, looking toward Dorchester Heights, and thoseending in the blue waters of the bay and Charles River, not unfrequentlyreminded me both of Florence and Venice, under a sky as rich, and morepellucid, than that of Italy. ]

 The country all round the neighborhood of Boston is charming. The rides I took in every direction were lovely, and during the last fortnight of our stay nothing could exceed the exquisite brightness of the spring weather. The apple trees were all in bloom, the lilacs in flower, and everything as sweet, fresh, and enchanting as possible. .. . How I wish you could have seen the glorious Hudson with me the other day, now that the woods on its banks are dark with the shade of their thick and varied foliage! How you would have rejoiced in the beautiful and noble river scenery! This is "a brave new world, " more ways than one, and we are every way bound to like it, for our labor has been most amply rewarded in its most important result, money; and the universal kindness which has everywhere met us ever since we first came to this country ought to repay us even for the pain and sorrow of leaving England. We are to remain here about ten days longer, and then proceed to Philadelphia, where we shall stay a fortnight, and then we start for cool and Canada, taking the Hudson, Trenton Falls, and Niagara on our way; act in Montreal and Quebec for a short time, and then adjourn, I hope, to Newport in Rhode Island, to rest and recruit till we begin our autumnal work. .. . And now I have done grumbling at "the state of life into which it has pleased God to call me. " My dear H----, I began this letter yesterday, and am this moment returned from a long visit to Dr. Channing. .. . The outward man of the eloquent preacher and teacher is rather insignificant, and produces no impression at first sight of unusual intellectual supremacy; and though his eyes and forehead are fine, they did not seem to me to do justice to the mind expressed in his writings; for though Shakespeare says, "There is no art to read the mind's construction in the face, "

 I think the mental qualities are more often detected there than the moral ones. He is short and slight in figure, and looks, as indeed he is, extremely delicate, an habitual invalid; his eyes, which are gray, are well and deeply set, and the brow and forehead fine, though not, perhaps, as striking as I had expected. The rest of the face has no peculiar character, and is rather plain. 

 He talked to me a great deal about the stage, acting, the dramatic art; and, professing to know nothing about it, maintained some theories which proved he did not, indeed, know much. As far as knowledge of the stage and acting goes, of course this was not surprising, his studies, observation, and experience certainly not having lain in that direction; indeed, if they had, he might not have shown more comprehension of the subject. Sir Thomas Lawrence is the only unprofessional person I ever heard speak upon it whose critical opinion and judgment seemed to me worth anything; but it appeared to me that, in the course of the discussion, some of Dr. Channing's opinions (with all respect be it spoken) betrayed an ignorance of human nature itself, upon which, after all, dramatic literature and dramatic representation are founded. He asked me if at the present day, and in our present state of civilization, such a character as Juliet could be imagined possible; so that I believe I was a little disappointed, in spite of his greatness, his goodness, and my reverence and admiration for him. 

 I went to call on him with a Miss Sedgwick, a person of considerable literary reputation here, and whose name and books you may perhaps have heard of. One of them, "Hope Leslie, " is, I think, known in England. Though she is a good deal older than myself, I have formed a great friendship with her; she is excellent, as well as very clever and charming. She knows Dr. Channing intimately, and is a member of his church. .. . 

 It is now Monday morning, dear H----, and I am presently going to set off to the races. American races! only think of that! I who never saw but one in my own country, and was totally uninterested by it! But I am going chiefly to please a nice little woman who is just married, and whose husband has several horses that are to run, so perhaps I shall find these more exciting than I did the races I attended at home. They are very little supported or resorted to here; the religious and respectable part of the community disapprove of them. There is a general prejudice against them, and they are even preached against; so that they are entirely in the hands of a few gentlemen of fortune, who keep them up, partly for their amusement, and partly with a view to the improvement of the breed of horses in this country. The running is said to be very good, the show is nothing. .. . However, I am going, and therefore you may look hereafter to hear--what you shall hear now--because I'm just come back, and am happy to inform you that my friend's husband's horse won the race. The stake was only £2000--no very great matter--but still enough to make the result interesting, if not important; though I think the hazard we ran of our lives at starting was the most exciting part of the day. 

 The racecourse is on Long Island, and, to reach it, one crosses the arm of the sea that divides that strip of land from New York in a steam ferryboat. All these transports were so thronged to-day with carriages, horses, and a self-governed, enlightened, and very free people, that in all my life I never saw anything so frightful as the confusion of the embarking and disembarking. .. . 

 Dr. Channing was talking to me the other day of Harriet Martineau's writings, and has sent me "Ella of Garvelock, " recommending it highly as an interesting story, though he does not seem to think Miss Martineau's principles of political economy sufficiently sound to make her works as useful upon that subject, or to do all the good which she herself evidently hopes to produce by these tales. .. . 

 God bless you, dear friend! I am ever most truly yours, F. A. K. 

 NEW YORK, Sunday, June 24, 1833. 

 Great was my surprise, dear Mrs. Jameson, to find accompanying your letter of April 9th a card of Mr. Jameson's. My father called upon him almost immediately, but had not the good fortune to find him at home, and I presume he is now gone on to Canada, whither we are ourselves proceeding, and where we may very possibly meet him. Our spring engagements are all over, and we are now going away from the hot weather to Niagara, into which, if all tales be true, I expect to fall headlong, with sheer surprise and admiration; after which I shall accompany my father to Montreal and Quebec, where we shall resume our professional labors. .. . 

 I am very sorry you have been ill. You do not speak of your eyes, from which I argue that you were not painfully conscious of the existence of those valuable luminaries at the time you wrote. .. . 

 The accounts, public and private, that we receive of the state of England are not encouraging, and the trouble seems such as neither Tory, Whig, nor even Radical, can cure. You talk of bringing out a colony to this country; bring out half of England, and those who starve at home will have to eat, and to spare, here. How I do wish our poor laboring people could be made to know how easily they might exchange their condition for a better one!

 I wish you could have heard what my father was reading to us this morning out of Stewart's "North America;" not Utopian dreams of some imaginary land of plenty and fertility, but sober statements of authentic fact, telling of the existence of unnumbered leagues of the richest soil that ever rewarded human industry an hundredfold; wide tracts of lovely wilderness, covered with luxuriant pasture, and adorned profusely with the most beautiful wild flowers; great forests of giant timber, and endless rolling prairies of virgin earth, untouched by ax or plow; a world of unrivaled beauty and fertility, untenanted and empty, waiting to receive the over-brimming populations of the crowded lands of Europe, and to repay their labor with every species of abundance. It is strange how slow those old-world, weary, working folk have hitherto been to avail themselves of God's provision for them here. .. . You tell me you are working hard, but you do not say at what. Innumerable are the questions I have been asked about you, and a Philadelphian gentleman, a very intelligent and clever person, who is a large bookseller and publisher here, bade me tell you that you and your works were as much esteemed and delighted in in America as in your own country. He was so enthusiastic about you that I think he would willingly go over to England for the sole purpose of making your acquaintance. 

[It is a pity that the American law on the subject of copyright shouldhave rendered Mr. Carey's admiration of my friend and her works sobarren of any useful result to her. Any tolerably just equivalent forthe republication of her books in America would have added materially tothe hardly earned gains of her laborious literary life. ]

 I am already half moulded into my new circumstances and surroundings; and though England will always be home to my heart, it may be that this country will become my abiding-place; but if you come out to Canada we shall meet on this side of the Atlantic instead of the other. .. . 

 Believe me ever yours truly, F. A. K. 

 TO MISS FITZHUGH. 

 MONTREAL, July 24, 1833. MY DEAREST EMILY, Within the last fortnight we have progressed, as we say in this country, over about nine hundred and fifty miles of land and water. We have gone up the Hudson, seen Trenton, the most beautiful, and Niagara, the most awful, of waterfalls. As for Niagara, words cannot describe it, nor can any imagination, I think, suggest even an approximate idea of its terrible loveliness. I feel half crazy whenever I think of it. I went three times under the sheet of water; once I had a guide as far as the entrance, and twice I went under entirely alone. If you fancy the sea pouring down from the moon, you still have no idea of this glorious huge heap of tumbling waters. It is worth crossing the Atlantic to see it. .. . As I stood upon the brink of the abyss when I first saw it, the impulse to jump down seemed all but an irresistible necessity, and but for the strong arm that held mine fast I think I might very well have taken the same direction as the huge green glassy mountain of water that was pouring itself headlong into--what no eye can penetrate. It literally seemed as if everything was going down there, and one must go along with everything. The chasm into which the cataract falls is hidden by dense masses of snowy foam and spray, rising in an everlasting creation of cloud up into the sky, and vailing the frantic fury of the caldron below, where the waves churn and tread each other underfoot in the rocky abyss that receives them, in darkness which the sun's rays cannot penetrate nor the strongest wind for a moment disperse; a mystery, of which its thousand voices reveal nothing. It is nonsense writing about it--seeing and hearing are certainly, in this case, the only reasons for believing. I think it would be delightful to pass one's life by this wonderful creature's side, and quite pleasant to die and be buried in its bosom. .. . 

 We left that wonderful place a few days ago, steamed across Lake Ontario, came down the rapids of the St. Lawrence in an open boat, sang the Canadian boat song, and are now safe and sound, only half roasted, in his Majesty's dominions. Of all that we have seen, Niagara is, of course, the old object beyond all others, but we were delighted with the softness and beauty of a great deal of the scenery that we saw in traversing the State of New York--one of twenty States, not the largest of the twenty, but large enough to hold England in its lap. 

 The rapids of the St. Lawrence, though, I believe, really rather dangerous to descend, have so little appearance of peril that I derived none of the excitement I had expected, and which a little danger always produces, from going through them. Instead of shooting down long sheets of rushing water, which was what I expected, we were tossed and tumbled and shaken up and down, in the midst of a dozen conflicting currents and eddies, which break the whole surface of the river into short pitching waves, and dance about in frantic white whirligigs, like the circles of the bad nuns' ghosts, in Meyerbeer's devilish Opera. .. . 

 Good-by, my dearest Emily. I am always affectionately yours, F. A. K. 

 STEAMBOAT ST. PATRICK, ON THE ST. LAWRENCE, August 17, 1833. MY DEAREST H----, There is lying in my desk an unfinished letter to you, begun about a week ago, which is pausing for want of an opportunity to go on with it; but here I am, a prisoner in a steamboat, destined to pass the next four and twenty hours on the broad bosom of the St. Lawrence, and what can I do better than begin a fresh chapter to you, leaving the one already begun to be finished on my next holiday. My holidays, indeed, are far from leisure time, for when I have nothing to do I have all the more to see; so that I am as busy and more weary than if I were working much harder. 

 We have been staying for the last fortnight in Quebec, and are now on our way back to Montreal, where we shall act a night or two, and then return to the United States, to New York and Boston. .. . The greater part of these poems of Tennyson's which you have sent me we read together. The greater part of them are very beautiful. He seems to me to possess in a higher degree than any English poet, except, perhaps, Keats, the power of writing pictures. "The Miller's Daughter, " "The Lady of Shalott, " and even the shorter poems, "Mariana, " "Eleänore, " are full of exquisite form and color; if he had but the mechanical knowledge of the art, I am convinced he would have been a great painter. There are but one or two things in the volume which I don't like. "The little room with the two little white sofas, " I hate, though I can fancy perfectly well both the room and his feeling about it; but that sort of thing does not make good poetry, and lends itself temptingly to the making of good burlesque. 

 I have much to tell you, for in the last two months I have seen marvelous much. I have seen Niagara. I wish you had been there to see it with me. However, Niagara will not cease falling; and you may, perhaps, at some future time, visit this country. You must not expect any description of Niagara from me, because it is quite unspeakable, and, moreover, if it were not, it would still be quite unimaginable. The circumstances under which I saw it I can tell you, but of the great cataract itself, what can be told except that it is water?

 I confess the sight of it reminded me, with additional admiration, of Sir Charles Bagot's daring denial of its existence; having failed to make his pilgrimage thither during his stay in the United States, he declared on his return to England that he had never been able to find it, that he didn't believe there was any such thing, and that it was nothing but a bragging boast of the Americans. 

 At Albany, our first resting-place from New York, we had been joined by Mr. Trelawney, who had been introduced to me in New York, and turned out to be the well-known friend of Byron and Shelley, and author of "The Adventures of a Younger Son, " which is, indeed, said to be the story of his own life. 

[His wild career of sea-adventure with De Ruyter, who was supposed tohave left him at his death all his share of the results of theirsemi-buccaneering exploits, his friendship and fellowship with Byron andShelley, the funeral obsequies he bestowed upon the latter on the shoreof the Gulf of Spezzia, his companionship in the mountains of Greecewith the patriot chief Odysseus, and his marriage to that chief'ssister, are all circumstances given with more or less detail in hisbook, which was Englished for him by Mary Shelley, the poet's widow, whowas much attached to him; Trelawney himself being quite incapable of anyliterary effort which required a knowledge of common spelling. .. . He wasstrikingly handsome when first I knew him, with a countenance habituallyserene, and occasionally sweet in its expression, but sometimes savagewith the fierceness of a wild beast. His speech and movements were slowand indolently gentle, his voice very low and musical, and his utterancedeliberate and rather hesitating; he was very tall, and powerfully made, and altogether looked like the hero of a wild life of adventure, such ashis had been. I hear he is still alive, a very wonderful-looking oldman, who sat to Millais for his picture, exhibited in 1874, of the "OldSea-Captain. "]

 We all liked him so well that my father invited him to join our party, and travel with us to Niagara, whither he was bound as well as ourselves. He had seen it before, and though almost all the wonders of the world are familiar to him, he said it was the only one that he cared much to see again. 

 We reached Queenstown on the Niagara River, below the falls, at about twelve o'clock, and had three more miles to drive to reach them. The day was serenely bright and warm, without a cloud in the sky, or a shade in the earth, or a breath in the air. We were in an open carriage, and I felt almost nervously oppressed with the expectation of what we were presently to see. We stopped the carriage occasionally to listen for the giant's roaring, but the sound did not reach us until, within three miles over the thick woods which skirted the river, we saw a vapory silver cloud rising into the blue sky. It was the spray, the breath of the toiling waters ascending to heaven. When we reached what is called the Niagara House, a large tavern by the roadside, I sprang out of the carriage and ran through the house, down flights of steps cut in the rock, and along a path skirted with low thickets, through the boughs of which I saw the rapids running a race with me, as it seemed, and hardly faster than I did. Then there was a broad, flashing sea of furious foam, a deafening rush and roar, through which I heard Mr. Trelawney, who was following me, shout, "Go on, go on; don't stop!" I reached an open floor of broad, flat rock, over which the water was pouring. Trelawney seized me by the arm, and all but carried me to the very brink; my feet were in the water and on the edge of the precipice, and then I looked down. I could not speak, and I could hardly breathe; I felt as if I had an iron band across my breast. I watched the green, glassy, swollen heaps go plunging down, down, down; each mountainous mass of water, as it reached the dreadful brink, recoiling, as in horror, from the abyss; and after rearing backward in helpless terror, as it were, hurling itself down to be shattered in the inevitable doom over which eternal clouds of foam and spray spread an impenetrable curtain. The mysterious chasm, with its uproar of voices, seemed like the watery mouth of hell. I looked and listened till the wild excitement of the scene took such possession of me that, but for the strong arm that held me back, I really think I should have let myself slide down into the gulf. It was long before I could utter, and as I began to draw my breath I could only gasp out, "O God! O God!" No words can describe either the scene itself, or its effect upon me. 

 We staid three days at Niagara, the greater part of which I spent by the water, under the water, on the water, and more than half in the water. Wherever foot could stand I stood, and wherever foot could go I went. I crept, clung, hung, and waded; I lay upon the rocks, upon the very edge of the boiling caldron, and I stood alone under the huge arch over which the water pours with the whole mass of it, thundering over my rocky ceiling, and falling down before me like an immeasurable curtain, the noonday sun looking like a pale spot, a white wafer, through the dense thickness. Drenched through, and almost blown from my slippery footing by the whirling gusts that rush under the fall, with my feet naked for better safety, grasping the shale broken from the precipice against which I pressed myself, my delight was so intense that I really could hardly bear to come away. 

 The rock over which the rapids run is already scooped and hollowed out to a great extent by the action of the water; the edge of the precipice, too, is constantly crumbling and breaking off under the spurn of its downward leap. At the very brink the rock is not much more than two feet thick, and when I stood under it and thought of the enormous mass of water rushing over and pouring from it, it did not seem at all improbable that at any moment the roof might give way, the rock break off fifteen or twenty feet, and the whole huge cataract, retreating back, leave a still wider basin for its floods to pour themselves into. You must come and see it before you die, dear H----. 

 After our short stay at Niagara, we came down Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence to Montreal and Quebec. Before I leave off speaking of that wonderful cataract, I must tell you that the impression of awe and terror it produced at first upon me completely wore away, and as I became familiar with it, its dazzling brightness, its soothing voice, its gliding motion, its soft, thick, furry beds of foam, its vails and draperies of floating light, and gleaming, wavering diadems of vivid colors, made it to me the perfection of loveliness and the mere magnificence of beauty. It was certainly not the "familiarity" that "breeds contempt, " but more akin to the "perfect love" which "casteth out fear;" and I began at last to understand Mr. Trelawney's saying that the only impression it produced on him was that of perfect repose; but perhaps it takes Niagara to mesmerize him. 

[The first time I attempted to go under the cataract of Niagara I had acompanion with me, and one of the local guides, who undertook to pilotus safely. On reaching the edge of the sheet of water, however, weencountered a blast of wind so violent that we were almost beaten backby it. The spray was driven against us like a furious hailstorm, and itwas impossible to open our eyes or draw our breath, and we were obligedto relinquish the expedition. The next morning, going down to the fallsalone, I was seduced by the comparative quietness and calm, the absenceof wind or atmospheric disturbance, to approach gradually the entranceto the cave behind the water, and finding no such difficulty as on theprevious day, crept on, step by step, beneath the sheet, till I reachedthe impassable jutting forward of the rock where it meets the full bodyof the cataract. My first success emboldened, me to two subsequentvisits, the small eels being the only unpleasant incident I encountered. The narrow path I followed was a mere ledge of shale and brokenparticles of the rock, which is so frayable and crumbling, either in itsown nature, or from the constant action of the water, that as I passedalong and pressed myself close against it, I broke off in my hands theportions of it that I grasped. ]

 A few miles below the falls is a place called the whirlpool, which, in its own kind, is almost as fine as the fall itself. The river makes an abrupt angle in its course, when it is shut in by very high and rocky cliffs--walls, in fact--almost inaccessible from below. Black fir trees are anchored here and there in their cracks and fissures, and hang over the dismal pool below, most of them scathed and contorted by the fires or the blasts of heaven. The water itself is of a strange color, not transparent, but a pale blue-green, like a discolored turquoise, or a stream of verdigris, streaked with long veins and angry swirls of white, as if the angry creature couldn't get out of that hole, and was foaming at the mouth; for, before pursuing its course, the river churns round and round in the sullen, savage, dark basin it has worn for itself, and then, as if it had suddenly found an outlet, rushes on its foaming, furious way down to Ontario. We had ridden there and alighted from our horses, and sat on the brink for some time. It was the most dismal place I ever beheld, and seemed to me to grow horribler every moment I looked at it: drowning in that deep, dark, wicked-looking whirlpool would be hideous, compared to being dashed to death amid the dazzling spray and triumphant thunder of Niagara. 

[There are but three places I have ever visited that produced upon methe appalling impression of being accursed, and empty of the presence ofthe God of nature, the Divine Creator, the All-loving Father: thiswhirlpool of Niagara, that fiery, sulphurous, vile-smelling wound in theearth's bosom, the crater of Vesuvius, and the upper part of the Mer deGlace at Chamouni. These places impressed me with horror, and theimpression is always renewed in my mind when I remember them:God-forsaken is what they looked to me. ]

 I do not believe this whirlpool is at all as generally visited as the falls, and perhaps it might not impress everybody as it did me. 

 Quebec, where we have been staying, is beautiful. A fortress is always delightful to me; my destructiveness rejoices in guns and drums, and all the circumstance of glorious war. The place itself, too, is so fiercely picturesque--such crags, such dizzy, hanging heights, such perpendicular rocky walls, down to the very water's edge, and such a broad, bright bay. The scenery all round Quebec is beautiful, and we went to visit two fine waterfalls in the neighborhood, but of course to us just now there is but one waterfall in the world. .. . God bless you, dear!

 Ever affectionately yours, F. A. K. 

 TO MRS. JAMESON. 

 NEW YORK, Tuesday, October 15, 1833. 

 You are wandering, dear Mrs. Jameson, in the land of romance, the birthplace of wild traditions, the stronghold of chivalrous legends, the spell-land of witchcraft, the especial haunt and home of goblin, specter, sprite, and gnome; all the beautiful and fanciful creations of the poetical imagination of the Middle Ages. You are, I suppose, in Germany; intellectually speaking, almost the antipodes of America. Germany is now the country to which my imagination wanders oftener than to any other. Italy was my wishing land eight years ago, but many things have dimmed that southern vision to my fancy, and the cloudier skies, wilder associations, and more solemn spirit of Germany attract me more now than the sunny ruin-land. .. . 

 I shall not return to England, not even to visit it now--certainly never to make my home there again. "The place that knew me will know me no more, " and you will never again have the satisfaction of coming to me after a first night's new part to say all manner of kind things about it to me. My feelings about the stage you know full well, and will rejoice with me that there is a prospect of my leaving it before its pernicious excitements had been rendered necessary to me by habit. Yet when I think of my "farewell night, " I cannot help wishing it might have taken place in London, before my own people, who received my first efforts so kindly, and where I stood in the very footprints, as it were, of my kindred. .. . Thank you for your long and entertaining letter, and for the copy of the second edition of "Shakespeare's Women. " You cannot think how extremely popular you are in this country. A lady assured me the other day, that when you went to heaven, which you certainly would, Shakespeare would meet you and kiss you for having understood, and made others understand, him so well. If ever you do come to this side of that deep, dividing ditch, which you speak of as not an improbable event, you will find as much admiration waiting for you here as you can have left behind; whether it is equally valuable, it is for you to judge. .. . I have seen Niagara since last I wrote to you, and it was in a balcony almost overhanging it that I saw your husband, and that he gave me long accounts of your literary plans. 

 Dear Mrs. Jameson, this is a short and stupid letter, but I have been working awfully hard, and have not been well for the past month, and am not capable of much exertion. It is quite a novelty to me, and not an agreeable one, to feel myself weak, and worn out, and good for nothing. Good-by; write to me from some of your halting-places, and believe me ever yours truly, F. A. K. 

 I noted the altered frontispiece of my little book. 

 BOSTON, April 16, 1834. DEAR MRS. JAMESON, I received a kind and interesting letter from you, dated "Munich, " some time past, and lately another from London, telling me of the alarm you experienced with regard to your father's health, and your sudden return from Germany, which I regretted very much, for selfish as well as sympathetic motives. You were not only enjoying yourself there, but were gathering materials for the enjoyment of others; and I am as loath to lose the benefit of your labors as sorry that your pleasant holiday was thus interrupted. 

 It is now probable, unless the Atlantic should like me better going than it did coming, and that it should take me to its bosom, that I may be in London in July, when I hope I shall find you there. .. . I am coming back to England, after all, and shall, I think, remain on the stage another year. .. . 

 I received, a few days ago, a letter from dear H----, in which she mentioned that you had an intention of writing a memoir or biographical sketch of "the Kemble family, " in which, if I understood her right, you thought of introducing the notice which you wrote for Hayter's drawings of me in Juliet. She said that you wished to know whether I had any objection or dislike to your doing so, and I answered directly to yourself, "None in the world. " I had but one fault to find with that notice of me, that it was far too full of praise; I thought it so sincerely. But, without wishing to enter into any discussion about my merits or your partiality, I can only repeat that you are free to write of me what you will, and as you will; but, for your own sake, I wish you to remember that praise is, to the majority of readers, a much more vapid thing than censure, and that if you could admire me less and criticise me more, I am sure, as the housemaids say, you would give more satisfaction. However, keep your conscience by you; praise or blame, it is none of my business. Talking of that same Juliet, I received a letter from Hayter the other day which gave me some pain. He tells me that he has all those sketches on his hands, and asks me if I am inclined to take them of him. I fear his applying to me, at such a distance, on this subject, is a sign that he is not prosperous or doing well. He is an amiable, clever little man, and I shall feel very sorry if my surmise proves true. My father wishes to have the collection, and I shall write to tell him so forthwith. 

 It is no slight illustration to me of the ephemeral nature of the popularity which I enjoyed, to think that those drawings, which, as works of art, were singularly elegant and graceful, should go a-begging for a purchaser. Verily "all is vanity!"

[My friend, Lord Ellesmere, purchased the series of drawings Mr. Haytermade from my performance of Juliet; and on my last visit to LadyEllesmere at Hatchford, she pointed them out to me round a small hallthat led to her private sitting-room, over the writing-table of whichhung a miniature of me copied from a drawing of Mrs. Jameson's by thatcharming and clever woman, Miss Emily Eden. ]

 You will be sorry for me and for many when I tell you that our good, dear friend Dall is dangerously ill. I am writing at this moment by her bed. .. . This is the only trial of the kind I have ever undergone; God has hitherto been pleased to spare all those whom I love, and to grant them the enjoyment of strength and health. This is my first lonely watching by a sick-bed, and I feel deeply the sadness and awfulness of the office. .. . Now that I am beginning to know what care and sorrow really are, I look back upon my past life and see what reason I have to be thankful for the few and light trials with which I have been visited. My poor dear aunt's illness is giving us a professional respite, for which my faculties, physical and mental, are very grateful. They needed it sorely; I was almost worn out with work, and latterly with anxiety and bitter distress. 

 We terminated our last engagement here on Friday last, when the phlegmatic Bostonians seemed almost beside themselves with excitement and enthusiasm: they shouted at us, they cheered us, they crowned me with roses. Conceive, if you can, the shocking contrast between all this and the silent sick-room, to which I went straight from the stage. .. . 

 Surely, our profession involves more intolerable discords between the real human beings who exercise it and their unreal vocation, than any in the world!. .. In returning to England, two advantages, which I shall value much, will be obtained: a fortnight's rest during the passage, and, I hope, not quite such hard work when I resume my labors. .. . As for the hollowness and heartlessness of the world, by which one means really the people that one has to do with in it, I cannot say that I trouble my mind much about it. In their relations with me I commit every one to their own conscience; if they deal ill by me, they deal worse by themselves. .. . I hope you may be in London when we reach it. Farewell. 

 I am ever yours truly, FANNY KEMBLE. 

 NEW YORK, Thursday, April 24, 1834. MY DEAR H----, This will be but a short letter, the first short one you will have received from me since we parted. Dear Dall has gone from us. She is dead; she died in my arms, and I closed her eyes. .. . I cannot attempt to speak of this now, I will give you all details in my next letter. It has been a dreadful shock, though it was not unexpected; but there is no preparation for the sense of desolation which oppresses me, and which is beyond words. .. . I wrote you a long letter a few days ago, which will perhaps have led you to anticipate this. We shall probably be in England on the 10th of July. .. . The sole care of my father, who is deeply afflicted, and charge of everything, devolves entirely on me now. .. . We left Boston on Tuesday. .. . I act here to-night for the first time since I lost that dear and devoted friend, who was ever near at hand to think of everything for me, to care for me in every way. I have almost cried my eyes out daily for the last three months; but that is over now. I am working again, and go about my work feeling stunned and bewildered. .. . 

 I saw Dr. Channing on Monday; he has just lost a dear and intimate connection. With what absolute faith he spoke of her! Gone! to the Author of all good. That which was good must return to Him. It is true, and I believe it, and know it; but at first I was lost. .. . God bless you, dear H----. We shall meet erelong, and in the midst of great sorrow that will be a great joy to

 Yours ever affectionately, F. A. K. 

 We have buried dear Dall in a lonely, lovely place in Mount Orban's Cemetery, where ---- and I used to go and sit together last spring, in the early time of our intimacy. I wished her to lie there, for life and love and youth and death have their trysting-place at the grave. 

 * * * * *

My aunt died in consequence of an injury to the spine, received by theoverturning of our carriage in our summer tour to Niagara. 

 * * * * *

I was married in Philadelphia on the 7th of June, 1834, to Mr. PierceButler, of that city. 

THE END. 

INDEX. 

Aberdeen, Lord, Lawrence's picture of, 217. 

Abbot, Mr. , his failure as _Romeo_, 197, 199; a tumble, 243; helping Covent Garden, 464. 

Abbotsford, appearance after Scott's death, 264, 265. 

"Abbot, The, " 402. 

Abeken, 339. 

Aberdeen, Lord, 326. 

Abingdon, Mrs. , 258. 

"Adam Blair, " 444. 

Addlestone, 105, 418, 420. 

_Adorni_, in "The Maid of Honor, " 391. 

_Age, The_, 170; its editor thrashed by Charles Kemble, 310. 

Alaba, General, 486. 

Alfieri, 66. 

Algeciras, 293. 

Allen, Sir William, 526, 527, 529. 

Allison, 142. 

Alvanley, Lord, contrasted with Stephenson, 456. 

Amelia, Princess, presents a necklace to Mrs. Charles Kemble, 449. 

America, incident of Fanny Kemble's last public reading in, 223, 277; talking of going to, 425; what it was _not_, 426; Fanny Kemble's thoughts of, 483; climate of, 535; landing at New York, 535; flies and mosquitoes, 541; horse-racing in, 577. 

"Andromaque, " 68, 419. 

Angerstein's Gallery, 475, 484. 

"_Anglaises pour rire, Les_, " 66. 

"Anna Bolena, " 428, 444. 

Anglo-Saxons, John Kemble's history of, 505. 

Anson, Colonel, 302. 

"Antonio, " 351. 

Antonio, Countess St. , 101, 338. 

Antonio, Marc, 528. 

Apsley House, windows smashed, 461. 

Ardgillan, 111, 133, 240, 253, 273, 289, 290, 318, 329, 348, 363, 457. 

Ariel, Goethe compared with, 338. 

Arkwright, Mrs. Robert, 29; Robert, 22. 

Arnold, Mr. , 336; speeches on theatre patents, 339. 

Art, a few words on, 476. 

"Artaxerxes, " Miss Sheriff's _début_ in, 464. 

Artist Life in England, 5. 

Arundel, House of, 265. 

Ashburton, Lord and Lady, 302. 

Ashley, Wm. , Earl of Shaftesbury, married to Miss Bailey, 357. 

Augustine, 426. 

Augustin's Gallery, 442. 

Austen, Jane, 103; her novels, 441. 

Assisi, Francis de, 426. 

Aston Hall, 278. 

Aston, Clinton, 298. 

Bacon, Mr. , 88, 125; his abusive critique in the _Times_ of Fanny Kemble's acting, 464, 481; Editor of the _Times_, 519. 

Bagot, Sir Charles, denial of the existence of Magara, 582. 

Bailie, 488. 

Baillie, "Count Basil, " 342. 

Baillie, Miss Joanna, writes the part of "Jane de Montfort" especiallyfor Mrs. Siddons, 349. 

Ballantyne, Scott's notes to, 260; his unfavorable criticisms of Fanny Kemble, 262, 265. 

Baltimore, appearance of, 560; beauty of its women, 562. 

Balzac, "Scenes of Parisian Life, " 72, 93. 

Bannisters, 271, 451, 454. 

Barham, his comical poem on "Henri Trois, " 484; critique of "Katharine of Cleves, " 493. 

Baring, Mr. And Lady Harriet, 302. 

Bartley, timidity about success of "The Hunchback, " 377; hearing Knowles read "The Hunchback, " 390; plan for a new theatrical speculation in Covent Garden, 553; "cutting" "The Star of Seville" for the Stage, 495. 

Barton, 293, 326. 

Bath, 256, 416. 

Batthyany, Count, 299, 302; Countess, 302. 

Bayard, 506. 

Bayley, Miss, marriage to Earl of Shaftesbury, 357. 

_Beatrice_, 336, 341, 344, 516. 

Beauclerc, the young ladies, chaperoned by Duchess of St. Albans, 392. 

Beaufort, drives the coach, 330. 

Beau, Madame le, 491. 

Becher, Lady, (see O'Neill, Miss), anecdotes of, 194. 

Becher, Sir (William Wrixon), married to Miss O'Neill, 195. 

Bedford, Duke of, 347. 

Beechey, Sir William, 393. 

"Beggar's Opera, The, " Miss Sheriff in, 471. 

Bellamy, Mrs. , rivalry with Garrick, 452. 

Bellini, 100. 

_Belvidera_, first dress for, 208; Fanny Kemble's dislike of the part, 236; her second part, 235, 336; in London, 460, 469. 

Belvoir Castle burned, 46. 

Belzoni, Madame, 37. 

_Benedict_, 426. 

Bennett, as _Laval_, 508; in "Francis I. , " 509. 

Bentham, Jeremy, 122; his philanthropy, 137; John Kemble's admiration for, 180. 

Beowulf, 503. 

Berquin, Juvenile dramas, 2. 

Berry, the Misses, 106. 

Bessborough, 47. 

Biagio's Preface to Dante, 448. 

Biagioli, 58. 

_Bianca_, 325, 332, 523; Mrs. Kemble's opinion of Fanny Kemble in, 333, 386, 414, 469, 474, 483; Fanny Kemble's best part, 483; her first play in New York, 536. 

Birmingham, 278. 

Bishop, the murderer, 462. 

Bishop, his opera "Cortex, " 86. 

Blackheath, 251. 

Blackshaw, Mrs. , 37. 

Blackwood, Mrs. , 47, 173. 

Blaise Castle, 426. 

Blangini, 59. 

Boaden, his life of Sarah Siddons, 128. 

"Bonaparte, " the play, 366. 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 364; melodrama on his life, 399; at St. Helena, Fanny Kemble's verses on, 441; letters to Joséphine, 462. 

Bonheur, Rosa, 345. 

"Borderers, The, " 508, 509, 513. 

Bordogni, 276. 

Boston, enthusiasm at Fanny Kemble's farewell engagement, 588. 

Bouilland, Mr. , experiments on Brains, 418. 

Boulogne, Fanny Kemble at school at, 26; farewell to, 31. 

Bourbon, the Younger of the Orleans branch, 277. 

Boyd, 293, 479. 

Bradshaw, Mrs. (Maria Tree), in "Hernani" at Bridgewater House, 376; in _Clari and Mary Copp_, 396, 497. 

Braham, 97; sings "Tom Tug, " 395. 

Brain, anatomy of the, 528. 

Brand, Mr. , 346. 

Brandon, 286. 

Bridgewater House, 374; "Hernani" at, 376; first rehearsal of "Hernani" at, 396. 

Brighton, 256, 324, 325, 327, 466. 

Bristol, 416; market at, 424; Abbey church, 425; unprosperous business, 428; trouble at theatre, 432. 

British Canada, 346. 

Brougham, Lord, in Charles Kemble's suit, 88, 142, 332; his mother, 344, 459; a man of steel, 474. 

Browning, Robert, 126; compared with Shelley, 384; "Blot on the Scutcheon" and Pippa Passes, _ib. _

Brunet, in "_Les Anglaises pour Rire_, " 66. 

Bruno, 426. 

Brunswick, Caroline of, Princess of Wales, 251. 

Brunswick, Duke of, at Brunswick House, 422. 

Brunton, manager of theatre at Bristol, in trouble, 431; his benefit, 433; effort by Charles Kemble's Company to help him, 433; in prison, 434. 

Brunton, Miss (Lady Craven), 292. 

Bryant, William Cullen, poetry of, 545. 

Buckingham Gate, see Jones Street, 168, 267. 

Buckinghamshire, 277, 297, 304, 305. 

Budna, 302. 

Burney, Dr. , 327. 

Burk, the murderer, 462. 

Burns, Robert, 80, 161; adversely criticised, 335. 

Bury St. Edmunds, 108; Henry Kemble at, 482. 

Butler, Lady Eleanor, 345. 

Butler, Pierce, marriage to Fanny Kemble, June 7, 1834, 590. 

Byng, Frederick, 485; a long call, 485. 

Byron, Lord, 104, 110, 165; "Cain, " 165, 333; "Manfred, " 165, 333; peculiar combination of vices and virtues, 166; pernicious influence on the young, 167, 270; play of "Werner, " 308; Mrs. John Kemble's impressions of, 330; "Don Juan, " 333; "Lucifer, " 333; "Childe Harold, " 333; Sundry opinions on, 333; his works compared with Hope's "Anastasius, " 337. 

Byron, Lady, her influence on Mrs. Jameson, 129; her appearance, 130; deprecates the publication of a new edition of Byron's works, 167. 

Calcott, Lady, 506. 

Calcutta, Henry Kemble, Collector of the Port of, 323. 

Calderon, 293. 

_Caliban_, 338. 

_Calista_, in "The Fair Penitent, " 318; a failure, 318, 323, 325. 

Cambridge, Duchess of, 303. 

Camden Place, 13. 

"Camiola, " Fanny Kemble in, 255, 257, 367, 385, 388, 391. 

Campbell, his life of Sarah Siddons, 128; life of Lawrence, 239; the poet, 242; "Pleasures of Hope, " 358; application to Mrs. Fitzhugh for Mrs. Siddons' letters, 451; life of Mrs. Sarah Siddons, 504. 

Candia, M. De, see Mario, 497. 

Canizzaro, Duchess of, 101. 

Canning, Lawrence's picture of, 217. 

Carey, admiration for Mrs. Jameson's works, 579. 

Carlisle, Lord, 418. 

Carlo, 505. 

Carlyle, his article in _Edinburgh Review_, 80; biography of Sterling, 185. 

Cartwright, Mr. , 320; a pleasant evening at his house, 395. 

Cassiobury Park, 90, 305, 397, 400. 

Castlereagh, Lord Grey, haunted by a vision of, 474. 

Catalani, her last public appearance, 162; her last appearance, 163. 

Catons, The, Lady Wellesley's father and mother, 562. 

Catskills, 103. 

Cavaliers, Ancient _vs. _ Modern, 527. 

Cavendish, Miss, on the _stay-at-home_ sensation, 393. 

Cavendish, Col. And Lady, 471. 

Cawse, Miss, in "Artaxerxes, " 465. 

Célimène, 258. 

Cenci, Beatrice, 302. 

Chambers, the Brothers, 161; "Vestiges of Creation, " _ib. _

Channing, Essay on Milton, 337; view of man's nature, 362; his adversaries, 433; on the relative merits of England and America, 539, 559; appearance of, 576; theatrical opinions, 576; opinion of Miss Martineau's writings, 578; infinite faith in a dead friend's happiness, 589. 

Chantrey, 345; Sir Francis, his design of vase presented to Charles Kemble, 354. 

"Characters of Shakespeare's Women, " Mrs. Jameson's book on, 275. 

_Charles de Bourbon_, Kemble as, 508. 

Charles X. , 276. 

Charles I. , his resting-place at Edge Hill, 278. 

Charles II. , 308. 

Charles, King, martyrdom of, 499. 

Charles X. , King of France, 522. 

Charlotte, Queen, 449. 

Chateaubriand, 166. 

Chartier, Alin, 462. 

Chatmoss, 279; drained and healthy, 530. 

Cherubino, 391. 

Chester, 277. 

Chesterfield, Countess of, 302; as an equestrian, 471. 

Cholera, in Edinburgh, 500; in London, 502; in Liverpool, 529; in Boston, 534; in Philadelphia, _ib. _; in Baltimore, _ib. _; in New York, _ib. _

"Cibber's Lives, " 462. 

Clairon, 8; Garrick's opinion of, 446. 

Clanwilliam, Lord, Lawrence's picture of, 422. 

Clarendon, Lord, puts Horace Twiss in Parliament, 87; the Grove, 90, 102; influence in getting Horace Twiss into Parliament, 335. 

_Clari_, Mrs. Bradshaw in, 396. 

Class Prejudice to Actors, 65. 

Clay, Henry, 549; Fanny Kemble's Letters of Introduction to, 561. 

Cleopatra, Queen, as a dramatic writer, 447. 

Clifford, Lord de, 426. 

Clint, picture of Cecilia Siddons, 405. 

Clive, Mrs. Archer, 153. 

Cobb, Mrs. And Miss, 211. 

Cobbe, Miss, her theory on the future existence of animals, 321. 

Cobbett, article on in the _Examiner_, 435. 

Cockrell, 9. 

Coleridge, 124. 

Collins' "Ode to the Passions, " Liston reciting, 460. 

Colnaghi, 243. 

Combe, Cecilia, 151. 

Combe, George, "the Apostle of Phrenology, " 151; author of "Constitution of Man, " _ib. _

Combe, Andrew, 151; works upon physiology, hygiene, and education of children, 154; combing, 155; his age, 157; his anecdote of Scott's "feudal insanity, " 265, 316, 412; on climbing, 420; lectures in the Phrenological Museum, 527; "Constitution of Man, " 530. 

Communion service, 401. 

_Constance_ selected for Fanny Kemble's benefit, 359; success of, 361, 417; Mrs. Siddons' sketch of, 517. 

"Constitution of Man, " 151, 530. 

Contat, Mlle. , 258. 

Cooper, Fenimore, "The Borderers, " 508, 509; compared with Charles Kemble in "Venice Preserved, " 544. 

Cornwall, Barry, 124, 345, 353. 

Cork, Lady, 254, 289, 372; vivacity at an advanced age, 379; curious arrangement of her drawing-room, _ib. _; "Ancient Cork, " _ib. _; "Memory, " _ib. _; idea of heaven, _ib. _; propensity for taking that which was not hers, 381, 389; little parties of, 391; a noisy conversation, 519. 

"Corrombona, Vittoria, Duchess of Bracciano, " 353. 

Cottin, Madame, 332. 

Coutts, Mr. , his fortune, 391. 

Coutts, Miss Burdett, recipient of all Mr. Coutts' fortune, 392. 

Covent Garden Chambers, 17, 25. 

Covent Garden Theatre, Charles Kemble's partnership in, 35, 36; Weber at, 37; Charles Kemble's liabilities in, 107; a woman wanted, 123; Covent Garden to be sold at auction, 186; Theatre patent assailed, 339; cutting down salaries, 463; ruined at last, 509; farewell to, 520; turned into an opera house, 521; burned down, _ib. _

Crabbe, as an unpoetical poet, 385. 

Cramer, 321. 

Craven Hill, 31, 32. 

Craven, Lady, 292. 

Craven, Mr. , in "Hernani, " at Bridgewater House, 376; in "Hernani, " 396, 399, 404. 

Croly, 390. 

Croton water in New York, 537. 

Cromwell, marks of his cannon at Edge Hill, 278. 

Cumberland, Duke and Duchess of, at Bridgewater House, 422. 

Cunard, Samuel, 176. 

Cunarosa, 101. 

Dacre, Lord, 11, 348, 357. 

Dacre, Lady, 341, 344; her accomplishments, 345; her play of "Isaure, " 382; her play "Wednesday Morning, " 390, 393: in trouble about "Wednesday Morning, " 394; objections to language in "The Star of Seville, " 423, 498, 504. 

Dall, Aunt (see Kemble, Adelaide). 

Dance, Miss, 35. 

Dante, "The Intellect of Love, " 391; "Devils boiled in pitch, " 437; Biagio's Preface to, 448. 

"Darnley, " 370. 

Daru's "History of Venice, " 466, 471, 506, 513. 

Davenport, Mrs. , the _Nurse_ in "Romeo and Juliet, " 219, 305. 

Davy, Sir Humphry, 461, 498. 

Dawkins, Major, 362; desire for a good picture of Fanny Kemble, 366. 

Dawson, Miss, 316. 

Dawson, Rt. Hon. George, 316. 

Day, Mr. , picture of an Italian Madonna, 442. 

De Camp, Captain, goes to England, 2; death, 6. 

De Camp, Adelaide, 257; dislike to seeing Fanny Kemble act, 490; death, 589; burial in Mount Orban's Cemetery, 590. 

De Camp, Marie Theresa (see Kemble, Mrs. Charles). 

De Camp, Victoire, 24; governess at Blackheath, 251. 

Delane, 88. 

"De Montfort, " 349. 

Derby, Lord, incident with Miss Farren in "School for Scandal, " 452. 

"Der Freyschütz, " 94, 99. 

Descuillier, Madame, 51, 445. 

_Desdemona_, Mme. Pasta in, 428. 

Dessauer, 245. 

"Destiny, " 389. 

Deterioration, Artistic, 570. 

Devonshire, Duke of, 22. 

Devonshire House, 361. 

Dévy, Madame, 491. 

"Diary of an Ennuyée, " 123. 

"Dick, " picture of Fanny Kemble, 113, 131. 

Dickens, 167. 

Didear, Mr. , unkind reception in Edinburgh, 323. 

"Dionysius, " 239. 

Donkin, Lord Mayor, 398. 

"Donna Sol, " 472. 

Donne, Wm. , 183. 

Dorchester, start for, 449; arrival at, _ib_. 

Dorval, Madame, 65. 

Dover, 250. 

Dramatic writers, women as, 446. 

Drury Lane Theatre, 173; patents assailed, 339, 376. 

Dublin, 254; Fanny Kemble at, 270; incident before leaving for London, 272; her departure from, 273. 

"Duchess of Pagliano, " 353. 

_Duchess of Guise_, 420. 

Dufferin, Lady, 173, 175. 

Du Lac, Sir Launcelot, 327. 

Dumesnil, Garrick's opinion of in _Phoebe Rodogund_ and _Hermione_, 446. 

Dunbarton, 267. 

Dupré, 545. 

Duraset, Mr. , generosity in helping Covent Garden, 464. 

Dyce, Rev. Alexander, 255. 

Eckermann, 338. 

Edge Hill, Charles I. 's resting-place at, 278. 

_Edinburgh Review_, 142. 

Edinburgh, 144, 257, 259; coldness of its audiences, 261, 290, Fanny Kemble's last days in, 528; cholera in, 500. 

Edinburgh Castle, regalia of Scotland in, 261. 

"Education of the People, The, " 388. 

Edward I. , 277, 297. 

Egerton, Lord Francis, see Ellesmere. 

Egerton, Lady Blanche, 270. 

Egerton, Mr. , declining the proposed accommodation at Covent Garden, 464. 

Eldon, Lord, Chancellor in Charles Kemble's suit, 88. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 255, 316. 

Elizabeth, Princess, at Bridgewater House, 422. 

Ellesmere, Earl and Countess of, 77, 82, 270; Fanny Kemble's first friendship with, 374; his epilogue to "Hernani, " 412; Hayter's picture of Fanny Kemble for, 412; her high esteem for Lord Carlisle, 418; translation of "Henri Trois, " 420; taking Mr. St. Aubin's part in "Hernani, " 421; purchases Hayter's drawings of Fanny Kemble in _Juliet_, 588. 

Ellis, letter from Lord Macaulay to, 344. 

England, Queen of, 233. 

England, King of, not particularly brilliant, 456. 

Essex, Countess of, 21. 

Essex, Earl of, 2, 90, 104, 397. 

Essex, Lady, 21; befriending a street-singer, 435. 

_Estrella_, in "The Star of Seville, " 514. 

_Euphrasia_, Mrs. Siddons and Fanny Kemble as, 236, 238, 322, 480, 483. 

_Evander_, John Kemble as, 239. 

Evans, 17. 

Everett, Edward, about sermons in general, 433. 

Evolena, Mount, 84. 

_Examiner, The_, 435. 

Exeter, start for, 448; arrival at, _ib_. 

"Exquisites, The, " 395. 

Extravagance of the Americans in flowers, 540. 

Faith, Religious, 476. 

Falkland, Lady, anecdote of her picture at Royal Academy, 393. 

Farleigh, a comic actor, 472. 

Farquhar's, Lady, party at, 506. 

Fauldes tragedy, 466. 

"Faust, " 138, 339. 

Farren, Miss, 258, 301; awkward incident with Lord Derby, 452. 

Faudier, Madame, 26, 30. 

"Fazio, " 323, 325, 331; Fanny Kemble's first appearance in, in America, 572. 

Fechter as _Hamlet_, 25; his "get up" of _Othello_, 191; "Bel Demonio, " 353. 

Fénelon, 426. 

Ferguson, Sir Adam, 260, 261, 262. 

Ferrier, Miss, author of "Marriage" and "Inheritance, " 260; "Destiny, " 389. 

"Fine People, " 455. 

Fires in New York, 537. 

Fitzgerald, Edward, 183. 

Fitzgerald, Mrs. , 342, 504. 

Fitzhugh, Emily, 362, 365, 451; emotion at meeting Charles Kemble at Plymouth, 451; Mrs. Siddons' letters, 477. 

Fitzhugh, Mrs. , 82. 

Fitzpatricks, The, Hayter's picture of, 487. 

Flaxman, 109. 

Flore, Mlle. , 26. 

Flowers, American extravagance in, 540. 

Foix, Gaston de, 506. 

Forbes, 108. 

Ford's "White Devil, " 353. 

Forest, M. De la, his accounts of Malibran, 203. 

Forrester, Annie, Isabel, and Cecil, 302. 

Forster, Johann Georg, 347. 

Foscolo, Ugo, 345. 

Foster, 91, 397, 400. 

Foster, Mrs. , 276. 

Fouqué, La Motte, 80. 

Fozzard, Capt. , 232, 389; riding-school, 471. 

"Fra Diavolo, " Miss Sheriff in, 469. 

France, thoughts of living in the south of, 392. 

"Francis I. , " correcting the metre, 341, 350, 355, 357, 396; sold to Wm. Murray for £4000, 482; its publication, 497; Murray's desire to publish without last scene, 503; its effect when read in the greenroom of Covent Garden Theatre, 503; the cast altered, 503; preface to, 504; cast upset the second time, 504; prologue, 505; postponed for a fortnight, 510; its popularity due to the indulgence and curiosity of London audiences, 518; played for first time, 525, 526. 

Francis, Lord, his play "Henri Trois" postponed, 469. 

_Françoise de Foix_, Fanny Kemble as, 529. 

French Revolution of 1830, the, 276. 

Fry, Mrs. , her visits to Newgate, 413. 

Gainsborough, his painting of Mrs. Siddons, 162. 

Gall, his philosophy of phrenology, 151. 

"Gamester, The, " 269, 427, 440; at Plymouth, 446; at Southampton, 454; Charles Kemble in, 524. 

Garcia, Marie (see Malibran), as an artist, actress and singer, 203; the sisters Malibran and Pauline Viardot, their accomplishments, 206. 

Garrick, his costume in "Macbeth, " 190; opinion of Clairon and Dumesnil, 446; rivalry with Mrs. Bellamy, 452. 

Genius, what is it? 477. 

Genlis, Madame de, 2. 

George IV. , anecdote of his picture at Royal Academy, 393; at the Weymouth Theatre, 449. 

Gerard street, 33. 

Ghosts, something about, 133. 

"Giovanni di Procida, " 472. 

Giardano, 442. 

Gibraltar, 326, 336. 

Gibson, 302. 

"Gilbert Gurney, " 170. 

Glasgow, the audiences at, 267. 

"Glenarvon, " 46. 

Glengall, Lady, 460. 

Gloucester, Duchess of, 413. 

Gloucester, Duke and Duchess of, 422. 

Godwin, 473. 

Goethe, 80; "Tasso, " 139, 166, 169, 351, 178; his self-experimentalizing in "The Sorrows of Werther, " 337; "Faust" and "Wilhelm Meister, " 339; his nature, 338; partiality in delineating character, 338. 

Gonsalvi, Cardinal, 270. 

Gower, Lord Francis Leveson, 300. 

Grahame, Lady, 173. 

Grammont, Duc de, his two children, 522. 

Grammont, Ida de, Duchesse de Guyche, 522. 

Grande Place, 27. 

Granville, Dr. , 344. 

Great Russell Street, 267. 

"Grecian Daughter, " Ward in, 243, 484. 

Gregory, Wm. , 158. 

Grey, Earl, 347. 

Greville, Charles, statement about Miss Tree in his "Memoirs, " 201. 

Greville, Lady Charlotte, 418, 419, 486; a "Swarry" at her house, 491. 

Greville, Henry, 396, 471, 496; as an amateur singer, 497; his sensibilities, 486. 

Grey, Lady, as an equestrian, 471. 

Grey, Lord, haunted by a vision of Lord Castlereagh, 474; responsibility in Reform Bill matters, 494. 

Grimani, the sisters, 251. 

Grimani, Bellini, 251. 

Grimani, Julia, 251. 

Grosvenor, Lady Octavia, 270. 

Grote, Mrs. , 277. 

Guilford, his seat at Wroxton Abbey, 388. 

Guinevre, 327. 

Guirani, 24. 

Guyce, Duchesse de, 522

Guy's Cliff, 106. 

Gwynn, Nell, 308. 

Hallam, Arthur, 183; essay on the philosophical writings of Cicero, 514; death of, 185. 

Hamilton, Wm. , 271. 

Hamilton, Sir Ralph, and Lady, 405. 

Hamlet, his feigned (?) madness, 327; and Hecuba, 486. 

Handel, 95, 97. 

Harris, 107. 

Harness, Rev. Wm. , 235; opinions of "The Cenci, " 334; discussion of one of Hope's theories, 337, 342; biography, 349, 363, 415, 459; "The Wife of Antwerp, " 475; play delayed at Covent Garden, 506; criticism of "Star of Seville, " 514. 

Harness, Mary, 486, 498. 

Hare, Julius, biography of Sterling, 185. 

"Harlequin and Davy Jones, " 320. 

Harlow, 327; picture of Mrs. Siddons in "Queen Katharine, " 459. 

Harris, Charles Kemble shaking hands with, 414. 

Harris, Mr. , inclined to come to some accommodation with CharlesKemble, 463. 

Hatchford, Fanny Kemble and Lady Ellesmere at, 375. 

Hatfield House, "Isaure" acted at, 382, 394; old lady burned to death in, 497. 

Hathaway, Anne, 182. 

Hatherton, Lady, 216. 

"Haunted Tower, The, " 500. 

Haydon's "Bonaparte at St. Helena, " Fanny Kemble's verses on, 441. 

Hayter, George, 487. 

Hayter, John, his sketches of Fanny Kemble as _Juliet_, 128, 235; portrait of Henry Kemble, 197; picture of Fanny Kemble for Lord Ellesmere, 412;his portraits of Mrs. Norton and the Fitzpatricks, 487; wishes to sell his sketches of Fanny Kemble in _Juliet_, 588. 

Havley, Mr. , declining the proposed accommodation at Covent Garden, 464. 

Hazlitt, 124. 

Heath Farm, 90, 109, 251, 303. 

Heaton, 277; Charles Kemble invited to, 291, 295, 297; evenings at, 300. 

_Hecuba_ and _Hamlet_, 486. 

Heidelberg, 284, 294. 

Hemans, Mrs. , 297, 358. 

"Henri Trois, " 420, 469; production at Covent Garden postponed, 469; Lord Leveson's translation of, 484. 

"Henry VIII. , " Mrs. Siddons in, 459. 

Herodias' Daughter, 264. 

"Hernani, " 365, 374: dresses for, 395; at Bridgewater House, 396, 399; rehearsing at Oatlands, 404; dress-rehearsal for, at Bridgewater House, 405; a third representation, 413. 

Hertfordshire, see Heath Farm. 

Highflyer, The, 330. 

Hindoo Theatre, 178. 

Hill, Lord, influence to get Henry Kemble his commission, 502. 

"History of Venice, " 466. 

Hoffman, 29. 

Hogarth, 258; pictures by, 422. 

Hogg, 142. 

Holbein's painting of "Queen Katharine, " 459. 

Holland, Lord, 177. 

Holland, Lady, death of, 177. 

"Holy Family, The, " 475. 

Honiton, Vale of, 449. 

Hook, Theodore, anecdotes of, 170, 172. 

Horner, 142. 

Horsley, 395. 

Hope, Mr. , his residence near Scott's, 265; his theory respecting the destiny of the human soul, 337; "On the Nature and Immortality of the Soul, " 494; death of, 337. 

Hopwood Hall, 277, 297. 

Hosmer, Miss, 302. 

Howick, Lord, 347. 

Huber, Madame, 347. 

Hughes, Dr. , witnessing _Juliet_, 199. 

Hugo, Victor, 116; "Hernani, " 374; "Notre Dame de Paris, " 498. 

Human soul, destiny of, 337. 

Hume, Baron, 161; his manner to ladies, 527. 

Hummel, 321, 395. 

"Hunchback, The, " 376; entire success of, 378; contrasted with "Romeo and Juliet, " 378, 385, 390, 412, 512, 517, 558. 

Hunt, Leigh, 383. 

Hunt, Mr. , quoting the Bible in the House of Commons, 498. 

Huskisson, Mr. , death on Stephenson's new railroad, 298; news of his death at Manchester, 304, 344; death-place marked by a tablet, 530. 

Ilfracombe, a trip to, 434. 

"Imogen, " 243. 

Inchbald, Mrs. , amusing anecdotes of, 212. 

"Inconstant, The, " Fanny Kemble as _Bizarre_ in, 547. 

"Inez de Castro, " 323, 342, 354. 

Inglis, Sir Robert, incident of, 493. 

Inverarity, Miss, engaged at the Dublin Theatre, 399, 400, 488. 

"Invincibles, The, " 383. 

Ireland, 254. 

Irving, Washington, 560, 564, 572; the "creaking door, " 573; _Isabella_, Fanny Kemble as, 253, 414; at Plymouth, 445, 472, 479;

"Isaure, " 382. 

Jacobite, A, 261. 

Jackson, Andrew, Fanny Kemble's letters of introduction to, 561; unpopularity in 1832, 549. 

_Jaffir_, Charles Kemble in, 336. 

James I. , 255. 

James, King, saving of his life by the "Douglas woman, " 490. 

James Street, 114, 168. 

Jameson, Mr. Robert, 128. 

Jameson, Mrs. , 123, 124; acquaintance with Lady Byron, 127; public lectures, 130; protests against _Juliet's_ costume, 189; selection of _Juliet's_ costume, 191; _avant propos_ of Fanny Kemble in _Juliet_, 234; notice of Fanny Kemble in _Juliet_, 235; letter from Fanny Kemble at Glasgow, 259; drawing of the rooms at James street, 266; her troubles, 266; water-color sketches, 268; book on Shakespeare's female characters, 359, 513, 531; threatens to write a play, 394; Christina, 499; biographical sketch of the Kemble family, 587. 

Jawbone, the Kemble, 345. 

Jealousy, a few words about, 474, 483. 

Jeffrey, 142, 261. 

Jephson, Dr. , 106. 

"Jew of Aragon, The, " 305. 

Jig Dancing, 269. 

_John Bull, The_, 170. 

John the Baptist, 264. 

Jones, Sir William, 178. 

Jordan, Mrs. , 327; her natural son by William IV. , 228. 

Journal, 1831, 390. 

_Julia_, in "The Hunchback, " 377, 385. 

_Juliana_, 437. 

_Juliet_, chosen for Author's first appearance, 187; her costume for first appearance in, 188; Lawrence and Hayter's sketches of Fanny Kemble in, 234; Fanny Kemble's opinion of, 438. 

Julius, Pope, 506. 

"Katharine, Queen, " 457, 458. 

"Katharine of Cleves, " Lord Francis Leveson's translation of"Henri Trois, " 481, 484, 489, 490; first acting of the play, 491; critiques upon, 493; "more interesting than any thing of Shakespeare's, " 94, 496, 499; its popularity waning, 503; awkward incident while playing, 505. 

Kant, 346. 

Keats compared to Tennyson, 581. 

Kean at the English Theatre in Paris, 115, 118; in "Merchant of Venice, " 119; Shakesperean revivals, 191; non-acceptance of a part in "The Hunchback, " 376, 429; in _Othello_, _Shylock_, and _Sir Giles Overreach_, 430, 440; effect of his acting, 477; _Othello_, 478. 

Kemble, Adelaide, 17; "Aunt Dall, " 18, 23; nurses Fanny Kemble through sickness, 132, 277, 297. 

Kemble, Charles, 36, 112, 114; at the English Theatre at Paris, 115; success in Paris, 117; in _Falstaff_, 123; property almost gone, 135; in Edinburgh, 138; arrested the first time, 168; as _Mercutio_, 193; acting in "The Gamester, " 204; embraced by Mme. Malibran, 204; renewal of intercourse with Lawrence, 217; incident in Dublin, 288; invitation to Heaton, 291; thrashing the Editor of the _Age_ newspaper, 310; acting _Jaffir_ to Fanny Kemble's _Belvidera_, 336; involved in six lawsuits, 336; speech about theatre patents, 339; in "The Hunchback, " 377; as _Sir Thomas Clifford_ in "The Hunchback, " 378; overcome with laughter on the stage, 387; forgetting a Duchess, 414; shaking hands with his legal opponent Harris, 414; intention of going to America, 427; opinion of Kean, 429; mistake in rendering _Shylock_, 430; money seized at benefit in Bristol for Manager Brunton's debts, 431, 440; acting at Plymouth in "The Gamester, " 446; enthusiasm over him at Plymouth, 446; his surprising speech, _ib. _; his health under great trials, 458; as _Giaffir_, 461; serious illness, 462; recovery, 466; relapse, 467; still worse, 469; again recovering, 472; compared with Kean, 477; as _Benedict_, 478; recovery, 481; breaks his nose while skating, 490; an unfortunate compromise at Covent Garden, 513; bowed down with care and trouble, 515; refusing to act in "The Hunchback, " 517; examination before the House of Commons, 520; twice arrested, 522; farewell at Covent Garden, 529; his estate in St. Giles', 536; beginning in New York with _Hamlet_, 536; his _Romeo_ and _Mercutio_ compared, 542; compared to Cooper in "Venice Preserved, " 544; likely to have to die abroad, 567. 

Kemble, Mrs. Charles (Maria Therese de Camp), 2, 3, 4, 6, 65, 98, 109, 112, 118; at Drury Lane, 173; opinion of a stage costume, 190; her failing health, 193; returns to the stage after an absence of twenty years, 219; her interest in Fanny Kemble's _Juliet_, 225, 267; arrival of in Manchester, 277; delicacy, 294; physical organization, 311; effect of reading Moore's "Life of Byron, " 330; rage at a picture of her husband, 345; compared to Mrs. John Kemble, 358; ill health, 371; great pathetic and comic powers, 386; "Francis I. " dedicated to, 399; moving the furniture, 464; her horror of the sea, 482. 

Kemble, Frances Anne, born 1809, 8; Newman Street, _ib. _; Westbourne Green, _ib. _; childish freaks, 10; at school at Mrs. Twiss' at Cambridge Place, 13; punning from Shakespeare, 16; return to London at Covent Garden Chambers, 17; picture then said to be mine, 17; question as to my being born there, 17; anecdote with Talma, 25; went to school in France, 26; early pranks, 26; childhood petulance, 27; taken to an execution, 27; childhood terrors, 29; daily excursions, 30; yearly distribution of prizes, 30; residence at Craven Hill, 31; leaves Boulogne, 31; lodging in Gerard Street, 33, 34; visit from Uncle Kemble, 34; about Scott, Milton and Shakespeare, 36; first visit to Lausanne, 36; musical education, 37; contemplating suicide, 43; goes to Paris, 44; at school in the Rue d'Angoulême, 44; meets Lord Melbourne, 47; goes to hear Mr. César Malan, 49; impressions of Drs. Channing, Dewey, Bellows, Furness, Follen, Wm. And Henry Ware, Frederick Maurice, Dean Stanley, Martineau and Robertson, 49; school life at Mrs. Rowden's, 54; schoolmates, _ib. _; a companion's funeral, 55; reading Byron on the sly, 57; my music and dancing masters, 58; passion for dancing, 63; private theatricals, 67; first indications of dramatic talent, 70; a new home in the Champs Elysées, 70; an old-fashioned wedding, 72; home from school, 74; cottage at Weybridge, 75; passion for fishing, 78; taken with smallpox, 82; harness for gracefulness, 85; a robbery, 89; trip to Hertfordshire, 90; first meeting with H---- S----, 91; "Der Freyschütz, " 94; presentation to Mendelssohn, 96; spoken of to the Queen, 96; return to Heath Farm, 101; Trenton Falls, 102; love for books, 103; our house at Bayswater, 106; letters from Bayswater, 107; offered £200 for first play, 114; the play of "Francis I. " finished, 16; thoughts of a comedy, 118; sees "Merchant of Venice" for first time, 119; visits West India Docks and Thames Tunnel, 120; MSS. In the fire, 122; thoughts of going on the stage, 123; read "Diary of an Ennuyée" for first time, 124; Longing for Italy, 124; acquaintance with Mr. And Mrs. Montagu, 129; picture by "Dick, " "There's plenty of it, Fan, " 131; ill of measles, 131; desire to say something _from_ myself, 131; ghosts, 132; convalescence, 132; considering a means of livelihood, 135; about marrying, 136; going on the stage, 137; projected works, 138; _first ball_, 140; admiration for Mrs. Henry Siddons, 143; love for Edinburgh, 145; a touching incident, 147; a Scotch Venus, 149; raspberry tarts, 152; sitting to Lawrence Macdonald for bust, 152; "Grecian Daughters, " 152; an old-fashioned house, 156; a partisan of Charles Edward, 156; an unlucky speech, 156; great esteem for Dr. Combe, 155; intimacy with Harry Siddons, 157; incident of Scottish regalia, 157; at Mr. Combe's house, 158; listens to Chambers Brothers' story of poverty, 161; a jolly face for a tragic actress, 162; Mons Meg and Madame Catalani, 162; observance of Sunday, 163; a natural _turn_ for religion, 164; give up Byron's poetry, 165; a new tragedy, "Fiesco, " 168; return to London, 168; religious zeal, 170; singing with Moore, 173; begins a visit to England in 1841, 175; meeting Sir Samuel Cunard, 176; through London in 1845, on way to Italy, 176; renewal of intercourse with Mrs. Norton, 177; talks about the Hindoo Theatre, 178; plans for helping my father, 179; goes to Scotland, 180; destroying H. 's letters, 181; German abandoned, 181; a few words about Shakespeare, 182; admiration for young Tennyson's poems, 184; the theatre to be sold, 186; life rather sad, 186; "brought out" as _Juliet_, 188; a badly dressed _Juliet_, 189; preparations for first appearance, 189; my opinion of _Portia_, 187 preparing for a _début_, 191; a constant admirer, 197; awkward incident with Mr. Abbot, 199; "Jove, Fanny, you are a lift!" 200; interest in Malibran, 203; acting as _Mrs. Beverley_ in "The Gamester" in Manchester, 204; a strange scene between my father and Madame Malibran, 204 a little advice from Malibran, 204; resemblance to Madame Malibran, 205; translate De Musset's lament for Malibran, 206; restore the ending to "Romeo and Juliet, " 207; danger of falling in love with Lawrence, 209; sitting for portrait to Lawrence, 209; a sudden glimpse of Satan, 214; first copy of "Paradise Lost, " 215; a deplorable act of honesty, 217; preparing for _début_, 218; ideas of beauty, 218; _début_ in "Romeo and Juliet, " 220; first watch, 221; impression of moral danger, 222; a disappointed "puffer, " 223; popularity in America, 224; incident of last public reading in America, 224; tenth edition of "Francis I. , " 225; income during first professional years, 226; first salary at Covent Garden, thirty guineas weekly, 226; acquaintances behind the scenes, 227; dancing with a queer clergyman, 229; a cold ride from Boston, 231; riding lessons, 232; portrait by Lawrence and sketches by Hayter, 234; likeness to Mrs. Sarah Siddons, 235; appearance in "Grecian Daughter, " 236; mourning for Lawrence, 237; dress as _Euphrasia_, 238; "Shetland pony, " 240; altering last scene of "Grecian Daughter, " 241; annoyance of being stared at, 242; a tumble in the "Grecian Daughter, " 243; a summer tour, 244; in "The Gamester, " 245; stage nervousness, 245; first appearance as _Portia_, 247; fright as _Portia_, 249; happiness of reading Shakespeare, 249; love for dancing, 252; delight in _Portia's_ costume, 252; acting _Isabella_ at John Kemble's benefit, 253; compared with Mrs. Siddons and Miss O'Neill, 234; farewell to London, 256; as _Mrs. Haller_, 254; impressions of Bath, 257; audiences not so friendly out of London, 258; fortnight at Edinburgh, 259; at Glasgow, _ib. _; criticism at Glasgow, 260; breakfasting with Sir Walter Scott, 260: anecdote of Scottish regalia, 261; incident with Scott, 262; Scott's mental triumph over outward circumstances, 263; visit to Abbotsford, 264; scenes and incidents at Abbotsford, 264; visiting Lochs Lomond and Long, 266; audiences at Glasgow, 267; new home at Great Russell street, 268; some portraits, _ib. _; dinner at Lady Morgan's, 269; life at Bannisters, 271; at Ardgillan Castle, 273; about governesses, 275; about the French Revolution of 1830, 276; a good audience at Dublin, 276; a medley of visits, 278; experimental trip on Stephenson's new railroad, 278; a ride with Stephenson, 279; description of a locomotive, 281; a new sensation, 283; an idea of religion, 285; a warm reception in Dublin, 288; repugnance to work, 298; a distressing letter from John Kemble, 293; a West Indian yarn, 295; at Birmingham, 295; an exhilarating ride, 298; Lord Huskisson's death, 298; evenings at Heaton, 300; the guests at Heaton, 302; to Liverpool for the opening of the new railroad, 303; "The Jew of Aragon, " 305; "The Jew of Aragon" and "Griselda, " 306; failure of "The Jew of Aragon, " 307; consenting to go with Tom Taylor and Charles Reade to see "The King's Wager" for first time, 308; thoughts of publishing the plays and verses, 309; the editor of the _Age_ thrashed, 310; on drawing and painting, 311; about managing children, 312; the _Age_ newspaper, 314; playing "The Provoked Husband, " 315; failure of "The Fair Penitent, " 318; working on and getting published "The Star of Seville, " 319; dinner at Mr. Cartwright's, 321; Christmas-eve at Mrs. Siddons', 322; public opinion about acting with her father, 323; _Bianca_ in "Fazio, " 323; _Juliet_, _Calista_, _Mrs. Haller_, and _Lady Townley_, 323; a run around Brighton, 328; advantage of Mrs. Siddons and Miss O'Neill in their tragic partners, 336; the Chancery case again, 331; a few words about Byron, 331; about children's letters, 332; more about Byron, 333; "Cenci, " 334; "Fazio, " _Mrs. Beverley_ and _Belvidera_, 334; Burns, 335; acting _Belvidera_, 336; learning the part of _Beatrice_ in one hour, 336; Goethe, 338; discussion as to destiny of human soul, 337; reading Channing's Essay on Milton, 337; Goethe's love for Madame Kestner, 337; the journal, 340; "Francis I. , " 341; a pleasant party, 342; a little sculpture, 343; the Reform Bill, 344; the Kemble jawbone, 345; production of "Francis I. " an annoyance, 350; the "White Devil, " 353; benefit at Covent Garden, 356; playing _Lady Macbeth_, 357; playing _Belvidera_, 357; _Constance_, for a benefit, 359; success in _Constance_, 360; portrait by Mr. Pickersgill, 362; "Chiedo sostegno, " 365; Pickersgill, Lawrence, and Turnerelli, 365; about _Portia_ and _Camiola_, 369; in want of a chapter on, 371; first friendship with Earl and Countess of Ellesmere, 374; about management, 373; on gestures, 373; a new friendship begun at Bridgewater House, 374; opinions as to success of "The Hunchback, " 376; in _Mariana_, 377; opinion of "The Hunchback, " 378; contrasting Shakespeare's _Juliet_ with Knowles' _Julia_, 379; all about Lady Cork, 379; about "Old Plays, " 385; Mrs. Charles Kemble's help in leading parts, 386; developing a gift for comedy, 386; embarrassing situations when acting with Mr. Kemble, 387; Massinger's plays compared with some others, 389; Destiny, _ib. _; "Star of Seville, " _ib. _; compared with Lady Salisbury, 394; finishing "The Star of Seville, " 395; first appearance as _Lady Teazle_, 395; desire to see Weybridge again, 396; correcting proof on "Francis I. , " 396; "Reform, " 398; dedicating "Francis I. " to Mrs. Charles Kemble, 399; the communion service, 401; off for Oatlands, and talks by the way, 402; dress rehearsal for "Hernani, " 405; Hayter's picture for Lord Ellesmere, 412; visit to Newgate, 413; death of Mrs. Siddons, 416; a summer's arrangements, 416; "Une Facete, " 417; a royal audience, 422; about marriage, 423; talk about dislike to the stage, 432; a street-singing project, 436; sombre thoughts about marriage, 437; opinion of _Juliet_, 438; at Exeter, 439; getting fortune told, 440; love for Weybridge, 441; verses on Bonaparte at St. Helena, 441; slippery lodgings, 444; "King John, " Mrs. Siddons in, 446; women as dramatic writers, 446; a disagreeable sail, 447; "fine people" and "not fine people, " 455; failure in _Queen Katharine_, 459; love for splendor, 460; "Bonaparte's letters to Joséphine, " 462; cutting down salaries, 463; a few words about letter-writing, 466; terrible suspense about Charles Kemble and the theatre, 467; _Bianca_ as a "golden pheasant, " 469; anxiety about Charles Kemble, 470; ill from worrying over Charles Kemble, 470; a serenading incident in the United States, 470; the wrong side of a show, 472; at Angerstein's Picture Gallery, 475; presented to the Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria, 475; timorousness when singing, 480; Charles Kemble's recovery, 481; thoughts of America, 482; "La Estrella, " 483; "Katharine of Cleves, " 484; awkward predicament at first acting in "Katharine of Cleves, " 491; "out" for first time in a part, 492; about the nature and immortality of the soul, 495; an ugly horse, 496; well-assorted marriages, 498; love of nature, 501; Kemble's publication of his Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, 502; bad management of "Francis I. , " 503; feeling about "Francis I. , " 504; as the queen-mother in "Francis I. , " 508; sober thoughts for the future, 511; purchasing Henry's commission from receipts of "Francis I. , " copyright, 515; H---- S---- off for Ireland, 519; farewell to Covent Garden, 520; off for Edinburgh, June 29, 1832, 521; off for America, 522; beginning of acquaintance with Liston the surgeon, 524; acting in "Francis I, " first time, 525; Lawrence's the best picture made of Fanny Kemble, 535; ancient _vs. _ modern cavaliers, 527; last day in Edinburgh for two years, 528; from Liverpool to Manchester, 530; first sight of New York, 533; beginning work in New York with _Bianca_, 536; getting fat, 552; success in America, 560; picture of Fanny Kemble taken to Alleghany Mountains, 569; "fitting" American audiences, 569; playing "Fazio" the first time in America, 572; engaged to be married, 573; seeing Niagara, 580; thoughts of returning to England, 587; Mrs. Jameson's biography of the Kemble family, 588; Aunt Dall's illness, 588; enthusiastic farewell in Boston, 588; marriage to Pierce Butler, June 7, 1834, 590. 

Kemble, Henry, 17, 18, 108, 111; his beauty, 140; plans for his provision, 179; trying the part of _Romeo_, 196; return to Paris, 243; commission in the army, 244, 248; schooling at Westminster over, 267; taken to Heidelberg, 284, 294, 297, 305, 357; ill, 470; passion for the sea, 481; to go into the army, 481; dislike to going to Cambridge, 482; receives commission in the army, 515; appointed tithe-collector in Ireland, 546. 

Kemble, Fanny (see Arkwright, Mrs. ). 

Kemble, John, 34, 81, 108, 109, 111, 113, 118; high honors, 119, 122, 137, 177; determines to enter the church, 179; leaves Cambridge without a degree, 183; Lawrence's admiration for, 207; intention of going into the church, 235; return from Germany, 243; his degree at Cambridge, _ib. _; takes his degree, 248; his wild scheme of aiding Spain, 293; safe and well, 304; in Spain, 314, 326; gone to Gibraltar, 326; alive and well, 334; prospects on arrival in England, _ib. _; rumor of imprisonment in Madrid, 336, 356; prospects, 363, 364; conflicting reports of, 387; determination not to leave Spain, 395; return from Spain, 405; home from Spain, 405; translation of a German song, 438; a sad letter from Spain, 479; helping Venables to break Thackeray's nose, 490; history of the Anglo-Saxons, 505. 

Kemble, John Philip, misfortunes as manager of Covent Garden Theatre, 35; from Lausanne to London, 34; return to Switzerland, 36; monument at Westminster Abbey, 60, 109; as _Rolla_ in "Pizarro, " 174; Lawrence's picture of, 217; as _Beverley_, 243; benefit, 253; his home in Great Russell street, 267. 

Kemble, Mrs. John, 90, 94, 104; compared with Mrs. Charles Kemble, 358; illness of, 467. 

Keely, Peter, in "Romeo and Juliet, " 219. 

Kelly, Mrs. Charles, 98. 

Kemble, John Mitchell, 17. 

Kemble, Philip, 8. 

Kemble, Mrs. Roger, 1, 2. 

Kemble, Stephen, 19. 

Kemble, Mrs. Stephen, 180. 

Kenilworth, 108. 

Kensington Gravel Pits, 506. 

Kent, Duchess of, 233; condescension of, 475. 

Kent, Chancellor, on Croton water, 537. 

Kelly, Michael, 500. 

Keppel, Mr. , superseded by Charles Kemble in _Romeo_, 542. 

Kerr, Lord Mark, 270. 

Kestner, Madame, Goethe and, 337. 

Kinglake, 126. 

"King Lear, " reiteration of expressions of grief, 514. 

King, Lord, Earl of Lovelace, 404. 

Kitchen, Dr. , 7. 

Knowles, Sheridan, 366; his plays, "The Hunchback" and "Virginius, " 376; "The Wife, " 377; reading "The Hunchback" to Mr. And Mrs. Charles Kemble and Mr. Bartley, 390; as _Master Walter_, 512. 

Lablache, 205. 

"La Chronique de Charles Neuf, " 422. 

"La Dame Blanche, " 492. 

"La Estrella, " Fanny Kemble's new play, 483. 

Lady Byron, her general appearance, 130; deprecates the publication of a new edition of Byron's works, 167. 

Lady Glengall, 460. 

_Lady Macbeth_, 357, 359; Fanny Kemble to act in, 417. 

_Lady Teazle_, 385; costume for, 364; Fanny Kemble's first appearance in, 390, 395; her fears of failure in, 394. 

_Lady Townley_, 257, 258, 289, 322, 323, 325; compared with _Lady Teazle_, 399. 

Lake, Admiral, offers to take charge of Henry Kemble, 482. 

Lamartine, 116. 

Lamb, Charles, 124. 

Lamb, Lady Caroline, 45, 46. 

Lamb, William (see Melbourne). 

Lamb's "Dramatic specimens, " 385. 

Lancashire, 278. 

Lansdowne, 106. 

Lansdowne, Lord, 175. 

Lansdowne House, 177. 

Lansdowne, gives Mr. Harness position in Land Office, 349; admiration for Mrs. Sarah Siddons, _ib. _

Lansdowne, 497. 

Lane, Mr. , 240. 

Laporte, lessee of Covent Garden from Charles Kemble, 518; giving concerts in Covent Garden, 527. 

Lausanne, 34, 90. 

Latour, 37. 

Lawrence, Sir Thomas, friendly relations between and Mrs. Charles Kemblerestored, 207; admiration for Mrs. Siddons, _ib. _; engagement broken in favor of her younger sister, _ib. _; engaged to Miss Sarah Siddons, 207; his interest in authors, 208; criticisms of Fanny Kemble's acting, 209; "Lawrence is dead, " _ib. _; anecdotes of, 210, 215; painting of Satan, 214; beautiful drawing-room, _ib. _; merit as a painter, 216; pictures of Canning, Lord Aberdeen, and Mr. John Kemble, 217; his want of conscience, _ib. _; print of his portrait of Fanny Kemble, 234; his criticisms of Fanny Kemble, 237, 239, 320, 327; lawsuits about theatre patents, 339; Pickersgill care not to copy, 365; Duke of Wellington's bitter pill to, 393; a dangerous companion, 402; opinion of a Madonna, 242; picture of Fanny Kemble, the best, 525; his opinion on theatrical matters, 577. 

Lea, girls' school at, 251. 

Leach, Sir John, 88. 

Leamington, 106, 180. 

Lee, the Misses, adaptation of the "Canterbury Tales" to "Father andSon, " 308. 

Lennox, Lord William, 98. 

Leopold, Prince, at Bridgewater House, 422. 

Le Sage's novels, 422. 

Le Texier, 2, 30. 

Levassor, ludicrous account of "Robert the Devil, " 507. 

Leveson, Lord Francis, his new piece, 478; translation of "Henri Trois, " 481; entertainment at Bridgewater House, 365. 

Lindley, Miss, 173. 

Liston, 7, 20, 21; reciting Collins' "Ode to the Passions, " 460; compared to Reeve, 508. 

Liston, the surgeon, beginning of Fanny Kemble's acquaintance with, 524; death, _ib. _

Liverpool, 277; railway between and Manchester, 278. 

Llangollen, 345. 

Loch Long, 267. 

Locomotives, the first, 280. 

Lockhart, reviews "Francis I. " instead of Millman, 512. 

Lomond, Loch, 266. 

London, cholera in, 502 farewell to, 522. 

Londonderry, Lord, 398. 

Lope de Vega, sketch of the life and works of, 319. 

Loudham, his hopes of fixing the Chancery suit of Charles Kemble, 463. 

Louis Philippe, 276. 

Louis XI. , his ugly secretary Alin Chartier, 462. 

Louis, at Covent Garden Theatre, 521. 

Lucifer, Byron's fancy for the character of, 331. 

Lyndhurst, Lord, 88. 

Lyttleton, Lord ("The Wicked"), 33. 

Macaulay, Lord, letter to Mr. Ellis, 344; enthusiasm over John Kemble's book on history of the Anglo-Saxons, 505. 

"Macbeth" contrast with the "Tempest", 292. 

Macdonald, Sir John, 171, 244, 486, 502. 

Macdonald (sculptor), desiring to make a statue of Fanny Kemble, 236, 462; his collection of sculpture, 343. 

Macdonald, Lady, "Sir John's General, " 344, 481. 

Macdonald, James, 489. 

Macdonald, Lawrence, 152. 

Macdonald, Julia, 244. 

Mackay, 442, 488. 

Macready, at the English theatre in Paris, 115; his opinion of Fanny Kemble, 189; Shakespearean revivals, 191; his fine acting in "Werner, " 308; success in "The Fatal Dowry, " 318; in "Rienzi, " 354; in "Virginius, " 376; prophecy come true, 390. 

Madrid, John Kemble a prisoner at, 336. 

Maida, Scott's hound, 263. 

"Maid of Honor, The, " success of, 364, 367, 385, 391. 

Malibran, Mme. , letters to her husband, 203; overcome by Charles Kemble's acting, 204; _début_ and death in England, 205; her professional popularity, 205; Alfred de Musset's lament for, 205, 206; her envy of Sontag, in "Romeo and Juliet, " 201. 

Malahide, Lord Talbot de, 346. 

Malebranche, 441. 

Malkin, Arthur, 84. 

Malkin, Benjamin, 84. 

Malkin, Charles, 84. 

Malkin, Dr. And Mrs. , 82, 110. 

Malkin, Frederick, 84. 

Malkins, the, 183. 

"Malvolio, thou art sick of conceit, " 435. 

Manchester, the Kembles in "The Gamester, " 204, 277; railway between and Liverpool, 278, 284, 291, 303. 

Maple, Durham, the vicar of, 229. 

Marc Antonio, cast of his skull mistaken for Raphael's, 528. 

Marcet, Mrs. , 332, 341. 

_Mariana_, Fanny Kemble as, 377. 

Mario (M. De Candee), intimate friend of Henry Greville, 497. 

Marriage, sombre thoughts about, 436. 

Marriage, talk about, 423. 

Mars, Mlle. , 90, 258, 420; in the heroine of "Henri Trois, " 484, 564, 565. 

"Marseillaise, " Mme. Rachel's rendering of, 436. 

Martineau's, Harriet, "Each and All, " 570; Channing's opinion of her writings, 578. 

_Mary Copp_, Mrs. Bradshaw in, 396. 

"Mary Stuart, " 267, 284; reasons for not playing, 370, 549. 

Maurice, Frederick, 183. 

Mason, "Self-Knowledge, " 169; in _Romeo_, 200; son of Charles Kemble's sister, 259; first appearance as _Romeo_, 421; discussion about Kean, 429; speech to the Bristol audience about helping Brunton in his troubles, 433; the King in "Francis I. , " 508, 510. 

Mason, Miss, 263. 

Massinger, "Maid of Honor, " 255, 257; "Fatal Dowry, " 318; "Maid of Honor" proposed for Fanny Kemble's "benefit, " 358; plays compared with some others, 389. 

_Master Walter_, character in "The Hunchback, " 377. 

Mathews, Charles, 39, 170. 

"Mathilde, " 332. 

Matterhorn, 85. 

Matuscenitz, 299. 

Mayow, Mrs. , 322. 

Maxwell, 157; anecdote of one of that family, 261. 

Mayo, Mrs. , a brave woman, 471. 

Mazzochetti, 26. 

McLaren, Duncan, 158. 

Meadows, Mr. Drinkwater, 505. 

"Medea, " 400. 

Megrin, St. , 420. 

Melbourne, Lord (William Lamb), 45, 46, 47, 347, 357. 

"Merchant of Venice, " 248. 

Mellon, Miss (see St. Albans, Duchess of). 

Mendelssohn, 96, 507. 

"Merchant of Venice, " 119, 351. 

_Mercutio_, 483; Charles Kemble in, after his sickness, 480

Mersey, the, its ancient wanderings, 282. 

Meteoric lights, 145. 

Meyerbeer's "Robert the Devil, " 507. 

Mill, John S. , 122; John Kemble's admiration for, 180. 

Millais' picture of Trelawney as the "Old Sea Captain, " 582. 

Milnes, Richard M. , 183. 

Milman, Mrs. , 184. 

Milman's "Fazio, " 323, 331; his pleasure at Fanny Kemble's rendering of _Bianca_ in "Fazio, " 334, 341, 390; to review "Francis I. " in _Quarterly Review_, simultaneously with its appearance on the stage, 502. 

Milton, 36, 273; compared with Byron, 331; Channing's essay on, 337; Mrs. Siddons' admiration for, 416. 

_Miranda_, 252, 269. 

Mitchell, charge of all Fanny Kemble's readings in America, 224. 

Mitford, Mary Russell, 45; "Inez de Castro, " 323; negotiations with management of Covent Garden about "Inez de Castro, " 354; "Our Village, " 416. 

Molière, 258. 

Monceaux Parc, 63. 

Monckton Miss (Lady Cork), 379. 

Monk's Grove, 418. 

Mons Meg, a famous old gun, 162. 

Monson, 90. 

Monson, Lady, 397, 400. 

Montagu, Mr. And Mrs. , 124. 

Montagu, Mrs. , "Our Lady of Bitterness, " 126; crediting others with her wise and witty sayings, 127, 178, 353, 401. 

Montagu Place, 267. 

Monte Rosa, 85. 

Montpensier, Mlle, de, 113. 

Moore, Mrs. Thomas, 159. 

Moore, Tom, 173; "Life of Byron, " 330, 415. 

Morne Mountains, 273. 

Moral Training, 165. 

Morgan, Lady, Irish jig, 269; French Revolution, 276. 

Moscheles, 321, 395. 

Mott, Lucretia, 543. 

Mount Vernon, 567. 

Mozart's "Nozze, " 159. 

_Mrs. Beverley_, 245, 246, 290. 

_Mrs. Haller_, Fanny Kemble in, 315; her success in, 317, 323, 325; dress of, 327. 

_Mrs. Oakley_, costume for, 364, 385. 

"Much Ado about Nothing, " 518. 

Mulgrave, Lord, 562. 

Murphy, Mrs. Jameson's father, 127; "Grecian Daughter, " 236, 238. 

Murray, Lord, 142. 

Murray, Wm. , 142; joint proprietor of Edinburgh Theatre, 142, 159; his generous price for "Francis I. , " 244, 309; publishes Fanny Kemble's poems and plays, 314, 324, 332, 334; £4000 for "Francis I. , " 355, 482; publishing "The Star of Seville, " and "Francis I. , " 497; publishes John Kemble's Anglo-Saxon book, 502. 

Musset, Alfred de, "lament for Malibran, " 205, 206. 

Music, modern and ancient, 500. 

Mussy, Dr. Gueneau de, 566. 

Naples, King of, 271; talk of, 421. 

"Napoleon, " 364. 

Napoleon, Louis, 63. 

Napoleon, Duke of Reichstadt, death of, 557. 

Nature, love of, 501. 

Negroes, prejudice against, 542. 

Netherlands, revolt in, 294. 

Neukomm, 321, 395. 

Newgate, Fanny Kemble's visit to, 413; Mrs. Fry's visits to, _ib. _

Newman Street, 8. 

Newton, "Cardiphonia, " 169. 

Newton, Stewart, anecdotes of, Royal Academy, 393. 

Newton, Gilbert Stewart, "Creaking Door, " 573. 

New Year, 1832, 485. 

New York, first sight of, 533; compared with Paris, 535; fires in, 537; water in, 537, 540. 

Niagara, Falls of, 579, 581. 

Nightingale, Florence, 127. 

Nilsson, Mlle. , 202. 

Nöel, Sir Gerard, 372. 

Norton, Mrs. , 47. 

Norton, George, 174. 

Norton, Mrs. , anecdote with Hook, 171, 175, 345, 357, 414, 480; Hayter's picture, 487, 496, 504, 510. 

Normandy, Lord, 176. 

"Notre Dame de Paris, " 498; "bad in tendency and shocking in detail, " 499. 

Notter, Mr. , 372. 

Nottingham Castle, 461. 

Nourrit, 462. 

Nugent, Lady, 216. 

Oatlands, 81, 396, 402, 403, 421, 467, 470. 

"Oberon, " 94, 99. 

"Old Plays" compared with "The Gamester, " and "Grecian Daughter, " 385. 

O'Neill, Miss, 84, 195; appearance, 196; in "Evadne, or the Statue, " and "The Apostate, " 312; Fanny Kemble compared with, 234. 

Otway's "Venice Preserved, " 235. 

Ottley and Saunders, 319. 

Owen, the philanthropist, 316. 

Paganini, 416, 434, 466. 

Panizzi, 267, 546. 

"Paradise Lost, " 59. 

Paris, 276. 

Parliament, 421. 

Pasta, Mme. , 428, 441; Pasta's _Medea_, 400; _Anna Bolena_, 444. 

Pasta's daughter, 181. 

Paton, Miss, 97, 98, 437. 

Patti, Adalina, 163. 

"Paul Clifford, " 286. 

Peaches, in America, 559. 

Peacock, Mr. , 110, 119. 

"Pedro the Cruel, " 354. 

"Peerage and Peasantry, Tales of the, " 348. 

Percival, Mr. , in House of Commons, 498. 

Peterborough, Earl of, marriage to Anastasia Robinson, 437. 

Petrarch's sonnets, 346. 

"Philaster, " 385. 

Philippe, Mons. , 64, 65. 

Phillips, Miss, 464. 

Phrenological Museum, 527. 

Pickersgill, portrait of Fanny Kemble, 362; portrait of Charles Kemble in _Macbeth_, 366; picture "Medora, " 390. 

Planché, 95. 

Plague, the, 308. 

Plessis, Mlle. , 258. 

Plymouth, 416, 443, 444; farewell to, 44

Plymouth Rock, 426. 

Poitier, 66; in the "Vaudeville, " 483. 

Poland, discussion between Charles Kemble and Kean, 440; early history of, 495. 

Poles, the, 359. 

_Polly_, Miss Sheriff as, 471. 

Ponsonby, Miss, 345. 

Poole, Miss, as _Tom Thumb_, 480. 

_Portia_, 187; Fanny Kemble's first appearance as, 247, 248; character of, 248; costumes of, 249, 336, 352; compared with _Camiola_, 367, 397, 414; at Bristol, 431, 532. 

Portland, 450. 

Portmore Park, 388. 

Portsmouth, 451. 

Power, Mr. , 485. 

Power, Tyrone, 489. 

Princes Street, incident with Scott on, 262. 

Procter, Adelaide, her "doomed" appearance, 499; reading description of Esmeralda and sketch of Quasimodo's life, 499, 516. 

Procter, Bryan Waller (Barry Cornwall), marriage to Anne Skeeper, 353; "White Devil, " 353. 

Proctor, 124, 342. 

Proctor, Mrs. , her habit of crediting others with her wisesayings, 127, 401. 

Proctor, Emily, 401. 

"Prometheus unbound, " 496. 

_Prospero_, 252, 338. 

"Provoked Husband, The, " 315, 328, 504; at Southampton, 453; at Fanny Kemble's benefit, 529. 

Pickersgill, 365. 

Queen, the, at Bridgewater House, 422. 

"Quentin Durward, " 444. 

_Quarterly Review_, its critique of "Francis I. , " 516. 

Rachel, Mlle. , her performance of _Camille_, 191; Jules Janin's first notice of her, 436. 

Racine, 307, 410. 

Radley, Mr. , of the Adelphi, 303. 

Railroads in England, 443; between Liverpool and Manchester, 278. 

Ramahun Roy, the Rajah, 178, 479; general appearance, 515. 

Raphael, his skull, 528. 

Reade, Charles, "The King's Wager, " 308. 

Redcliffe Church, 433. 

Reeve compared with Liston, 508. 

Reform Bill, 344, 394, 459, 460, 478. 

Regalia, Scottish, incident of, 157. 

Reichardt, or Reis, 100. 

Religious faith, 476. 

Retsch's illustrations of "Hamlet, " 373; disinclination for illustrating "Romeo and Juliet, " _ib. _; illustrations of "Faust, " 374. 

Revolution of 1830, the, 276. 

Revolution, Spanish, 335, 336, 356, 359, 478, 479, 484. 

Rhodez, scene of the Fauldes Tragedy, 466. 

"Richard III. , " 119. 

Richter, 80. 

"Rienzi, " 354. 

Rigby, Mr. , 4. 

Rio, M. , 73. 

Ristori, 571. 

Rivens, Lady, 4. 

"Robert the Devil" at Covent Garden, 507; M. Levassor's ludicrous account of, 507, 509. 

Robertson, Frederick, 168. 

Robinson, Anastasia, marriage to Earl of Peterborough, 437. 

"Rob Roy, " 488. 

Rogers, 379, 504

"Roman de la Rose. " 357. 

"Romeo and Juliet, " 257, 342, 414; at Bristol, 424, 443; at Weymouth, 449; at Southampton, 452, 485; John Mason's first appearance in, 486, 523; in New York, 542. 

Romilly, Mrs. Edward, 342. 

Romillys, the, 183. 

Rossini, 100. 

Roxelane, 68. 

Rowden, Mrs. , 45, 47, 67. 

Russell, Earl, 347, 404; appearance of, 492; incident of Sir Robert Inglis, 493; responsibility in Reform Bill, 494. 

"Rush-bearing, " a, 296. 

Ruthven, his proceeding toward Mary Stuart, 489. 

Rutland, Duke of, 22. 

Rye, 521. 

Sackville, 462. 

"Sacrament, " preparation, 403. 

"Sakuntalà, " 178. 

De Sales, Francis, 426. 

Salisbury, Lady, in "Isaure, " 382; "Wednesday Morning" at Hatfield House, 394. 

Salmon, 89. 

"Salmonia, " 539. 

Sandwich, Earl of, 124. 

Saunders and Ottley, 319. 

Savoy, Louisa of, 509. 

Schiller, 169; "Mary Stuart, " 312. "School for Scandal, " incident of Miss Farren and Lord Derby in, 452; at Southampton, 454, 487, 498; in New York, 543. 

Schlegel's "Dramatic Lectures, " 486

Scotland, regalia of, 261. 

_Scotsman, The_, 158. 

Scott, Anne, 260. 

Scott, Walter, 3, 36, 58, 87, 108, 142, 157; "Border Minstrelsy, " 160, 166; criticisms on Fanny Kemble's acting, 260; anecdote of Scottish regalia, 261; opinion of Fanny Kemble as compared with Mrs. Siddons, 262; incident at Abbotsford, 263, 444; caution in regard to _Waverley Novels_, 488, 521, 527; death, 557. 

Scottish Regalia, incident of, 157. 

Scribe's "_Les premières Amours_, " 419. 

Searle, Miss, 87. 

Sedgwick's, Miss, "Hope Leslie, " 577. 

Semiramis, Queen, as a dramatic writer, 447. 

Sentiment, books of, 506. 

Serenading, 470. 

Sévigné, Madame de, 277, 320. 

Shakespeare, Plays at Paris, 115, 169, 182; _Portia_, 187; "Romeo and Juliet, " the ending restored, 207; claim of his plays to perfect representation, 220; his plays compared with "Grecian Daughter, " 238, 247, 255, 260; compared with Goethe, 338; "Romeo and Juliet, " 342; treatment of passion of hatred, 351, 389; _knowing_ and _knowing about_ him, 396; Mrs. Siddons' admiration for, 416, 486; discussion about, 522; beauty of his songs, 505; reiteration of expressions of grief, 514; Mrs. Jameson's book on his female characters, issued, 531. 

Shannon, Rev. Win. , 164. 

Sharp "conversation, " 504. 

Sheil, "Evadne, or the Statue, " and "The Apostate, " 312. 

Shelley, 166; his passion for fire-gazing, 325, 334; the Cenci; translation of Calderon's "El Magico Prodigioso;" "Faust, " 384; "Prometheus Unbound, " 496, 498; "The Sensitive Plant, " and "Rosalind and Helen, " 498; "The Two Sisters, " 499. 

Shelley, Capt. , in "Hernani", 404. 

Sheriff, Miss, her _début_, 464; in "Artaxerxes, " 465;in "Fra Diavolo, " 469; in "Polly, " 471. 

Sheridan, Caroline, 174, 178. 

Sheridan, Chas. , 173; manager of Drury Lane, 174, 175, 399, 498. 

Sheridan, Georgiana, 173, 510. 

Sheridan, Mrs. (Miss Callender), 173. 

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 173. 

Shirley's "Gentleman of Venice, " 513. 

_Shylock_, 351; analysis of the character, 430. 

Siddons, Cecilia, 91, 94, 108, 123, 180, 239, 323, 400; picture by Clint, 405; plans after her mother's death, 416, 466. 

Siddons, Elizabeth, 291. 

Siddons, "Lizzy, " 119. 

Siddons, "Sally and Lizzy, " 342. 

Siddons, George, 158, 323; Mrs. George, 158

Siddons, Harriet, 323. 

Siddons, Henry, management of the Edinburgh Theatre, 142; death, _ib. _; arrival in India and departure for Delhi, 119, 470. 

Siddons, Mrs. Henry, 140, 141, 143, 158, 164, 180, 193, 259, 261, 286, 291, 305, 359, 364. 

Siddons. Maria, 17, engaged to Sir Thomas Lawrence, 207; death, _ib. _

Siddons, Sarah, 17, 91; in _Louisa of Savoy_, 117, 129; painting by Gainsborough, 162; in _Elvira_, 174; costume in the "Grecian Daughter, " 190; as _Hamlet_, 200; Lawrence's admiration for, 207; wishes to be carried to her grave by Lawrence, 211; indifference, 223; Fanny Kemble compared with, 234; in _Euphrasia_, 236; shocked at Lawrence's death, 237, 239; Edinburgh audiences, 261: repeating _Lady Macbeth_ to an enthusiastic audience, 262; opinion of, 262; dearest friend, 270; in _Mrs. Haller_ and "The Fair Penitent, " 318; Christmas eve at her house, 322, 337; advantage over Fanny Kemble, 336, 345; Lord Lansdowne's admiration for, 349, 396; failing health, 399; Milton and Shakespeare, 416; her death, 416; her abuse of Austria in "King John, " 446; her letters, 452; _Queen Katharine_, 459; her letters revised by Emily Fitzhugh, 477; _Lady Macbeth_, 478; "sketches" of _Constance_ and _Lady Macbeth_, 517. 

Siddons, Mrs. Scott-, 158. 

Shaw, 60. 

Sismondi, 83. 

Sinclair, 123. 

Skeeper, Anne, marriage to Barry Cornwall, 353. 

Skerries, 273, 329. 

Slavery in America, 543. 

Smart, Sir George, 95, 100, 395. 

Smiles, his biography of Stephenson, 279. 

Smith's "National Scottish Songs, " 160. 

Smith, Bobus, 347. 

Smith, James, 86. 

Smith, Sidney, 142, 173, 347, 504

Smithson, Miss, 115. 

Solomon, 166. 

Somerset, Duchess of, 173, 510. 

"Sonnambula, " 507. 

Sontag, appearance with Malibran in "Romeo and Juliet, " 201, 202. 

Sotheby ("the poet"), 350; "Darnley, " 370; comments on Fanny Kemble's beauty, 370. 

Southampton, 271, 416, 451. 

Spain, 293. 

Spaniards, John Kemble delivered to the, 336. 

Spanish expedition, 326. 

Spanish revolution, 335, 336, 356, 359, 478; Torrijos and his friends shot, 479. 

Spedding, James, 183. 

Spenser, poetry of, 358. 

Spurzheim, his philosophy of phrenology, 151; death in Boston, 558. 

Stafford, 92, 113, 297. 

St. Albans, Duke of, marriage, 392. 

St. Albans, Duchess of, Miss Mellon and Mrs. Coutts, 391. 

St. Anne's Hill, 418. 

St. Aubin, Mr. , in "Hernani" at Bridgewater House, 376, 396, 421. 

Stansbury, Mr. , 472. 

"Star of Seville, " 319, 389; finished, 395; unbecoming language of, 423, 435, 445, 472, 478, 479. 480; reading it to the family, 489; "cut" for the stage, 495; publication, 497, 514; brought out first in New York, 554. 

Stein, Madame von, Goethe's letters to, 339

Stephens (see Essex, Countess of). 

Stephenson, Geo. , first experiment at a railway, 278; characteristics, 279, 298, 455; contrasted with Lord Alvanley, 456. 

Sterling, John, 183; daily promise, 185, 293; marriage, 326; in Spanish expedition, _ib. _

Sterky, Mr. , 321. 

Stewart, Charles Edward (the Pretender), relics of, 156. 

Stewart, Mary, 489. 

St. Lawrence, Rapids of the, 380. 

St. Maur, Lady (nee Georgiana Sheriden). 

St. Paul's, Lawrence's burial in, 240. 

"Stranger, The, " 315, 327; at Plymouth, 445; Charles Young in, 462. 

St. Sidwell's church, 440. 

Storace, 500. 

Stukely, 440, 446. 

Singer, a diminutive, 453. 

Sullivan, Mrs. , 341, 348; Rev. Fred. , 348. 

Sully, his picture of Fanny Kemble as _Beatrice_, 367. 

Sumner, Charles, 543. 

Switzerland, 277. 

Taglioni, 400, 564. 

Talbot, Colonel, 346. 

Tales of a chaperon, 348. 

Talma, 25, 65. 

"Tasso, " 351

Taylor, Jeremy, 104. 

Taylor, Tom, "The King's Wager, " 308. 

Taylor, Miss, as _Helen_ in the "Hunchback, " 378, 519; as _Margaret de Valois_ in "Francis I. , " 508; in "The Hunchback, " 519. 

"Tempest, The, " 269, 555. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 167; his brothers, 483; first poems, 184; "The May Queen, " "OEnone, " and the "Miller's Daughter, " 185, 294; an unpromising exterior, 519; poems of, 581. 

Terry, 142. 

Thackeray, W. M. , 126, 167, 183; broken nose, 490, 496. 

Thackeray, Dr. , 393. 

Thames Tunnel, 120. 

Theatre Français, 258. 

Theatre patents, 339. 

Therëse Heyne (Madame Huber), 347. 

Thorwaldsen, 343. 

Tieck, 29, 80, 353; "The Elves, " 516. 

Titian's Venuses, and "Venus and Adonis, " 271; Bacchus and Ariadne, 475. 

Tiverton, the member for, 270. 

_Tom Thumb_, Miss Poole as, 480. 

Torrijos, General, 293, 326, 356. 

Tree, Miss Ellen, as _Romeo_, 200. 

Tree, Miss (Mrs. Bradshaw), 497; as _Françoise de Foix_, in "Francis I. , " 508. 

Trelawney, Mr. , 436; author of "Adventures of a Younger Son, " 582. 

Trench, Richard, 183, 293; return from Spain, 356; share in Spanish exhibition, 376; shot in Spain, 479, 514. 

Trenton Falls, 103. 

"Tristram Shandy, " 519. 

Trueba, Don Telesforo de, "The Exquisites, " 395, 405. 

Turnerelli, his bust of Fanny Kemble, 365, 499

Tweed, Scott's residence on the, 265. 

Twiss, Horace, 86, 87, 170, 236, 331; put into Parliament by Lord Clarendon, 335; aspect at defeat of Reform Bill, 344; speech on Reform Bill, 344, 387. 

Twiss, Horace's father, 107. 

Twiss, John, 15. 

Twiss, Miss, 158. 

Twiss, Mrs. , 256; the Misses, 130. 

"Vivian Grey, " 122. 

Vinci, Leonardo da, 476. 

_Victorine_, 507. 

Victoria, Princess, 475. 

Viardot, Mme. , 205. 

Vestris, Madame, 383. 

"Vestiges of Creation, " 161. 

"Venice, Gentleman of, " 513. 

"Venice, History of. " 474, 513. 

"Venice Preserved, " 425, 433, 444; at Weymouth, 451, 470. 

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 399. 

"Valeria, " 436. 

Wade, his plays "The Jew of Aragon" and "Griselda, " 306; self-control, 307. 

Wainwright, Dr. , 544. 

Waldegrave, Lord, 417. 

Wales, Prince of, 3. 

Wales, Princess of, 251. 

Wallack, J. W. , 539. 

Wallenstein, 474. 

Walpole, Horace, 303, 414. 

Ward, 366, 484; _Joseph Surface_, 487; in "Katharine of Cleves, " 489; as _Fazio_, 323; as _The Monk_ in "Francis I. , " 508. 

Warwick Castle, 106. 

Warwick, Lord, 90. 

Washington, George, 567. 

Water in New York, 537. 

Watson, Dr. , 463. 

Weber, Baron Carl Maria von, "Der Freyschütz, " 94; "Oberon, " 95; "Always my music, but never myself, " 96; appearance and manner, 97; impatience with Braham and Miss Paton, 97; Huon's opening song, 98; death, 100. 

Webster, Daniel, speeches of, 547; letters of introduction to, 561. 

"Wednesday Morning, " 390, 393, 394. 

Wellington, Duke of, 101, 124, 244; at opening of new railroad, 284, 299, 304; bitter pill to Lawrence, 393, 460; threatening to pull down his statue, 461, 474. 

Welsh, Mr. , Miss Sheriff's instructor, 464. 

West Indies, 483. 

West India Dock, 120. 

Westmacott, editor of the _Age_, thrashed by Charles Kemble, 310, 314. 

Westminster Abbey, John Kemble's monument, 65, 240. 

Westminster, Henry Kemble's education at, 108, 110, 267, 482. 

Westminster Committee, The, 278. 

Weybridge, 75, 79, 81, 111, 388, 396, 399, 442. 

Weymouth, 449. 

Wieland, 80, 95. 

Willet, 108. 

William IV. , 95, 96. 

Wharncliffe, Earl of (see Wortley, James, 349). 

"White Devil, The, " 353. 

Whitelock, Mrs. , 15, 105, 106, 355, 418, 420. 

"Wife of Antwerp, The, " 475. 

"Wilhelm Meister, " 339. 

Wilkes, 490. 

Wilkinson, Mrs. , 466. 

Willett, Mr. , 513. 

William IV. , his natural son by Mrs. Jordan, 227, 390; ignorance of art, 393. 

Wilmot, Mr. , 348. 

Wilson, Dr. , 462, 463. 

Wilson, 142, 178; in "Artaxerxes, " 465. 

Winckelmann, his work on classical art, 217. 

Wood, Mr. , 98. 

Worcester (see Beaufort, Duke of). 

Wordsworth, 166. 

Worsley, 270. 

Worsley Hall, 375. 

Wortley, James, 342, 349. 

Wraxall, 104. 

Wray, Miss. 124. 

Wroxton Abbey, 388. 

Yates, Mr. , as a friend, 508. 

Yates, Mrs. , in "Victorine, " 507. 

York, Archbishop of, 230. 

York, Duchess of, 403. 

York, Duke of, 77, 85. 

Young, Charles, anecdotes of, 10; accomplishments and disposition, 11; death at Brighton, 12, 115, 117, 118, 181; in "Rienzi, " 354; at Bridgewater House, 421; as _Pierre_, 461; in "The Stranger, " 462; helping Covent Garden, 464, 472. 

Young, Rev. Julian, 40, 251, 504. 

Zanga, 351. 

Zermatt, Mount. 84. 

[Transcriber's note:

The following names were changed in the index for consistency with thetext:Alleghany was AlleghenyBelzoni BelziniBiagioli BiagoliDer Freyschütz Der FreyschutzFlore, Mlle. Floré, Mlle. Foscolo, Ugo Foscolo, UgaNourit NourittPickersgill PuckersgillRoxolane RoxolaineSakuntalà SakuntalaSonnambula SomnambulaTherëse Heyne Therese HeyneWinckelmann Winckelman

César Malan Cesar Malan (under Kemble, Frances Anne)Joséphine Josephine (Bonaparte's letters to, under Kemble, Frances Anne)Françoise de Foix Francoise de Foix (under Tree, Miss)]

_PUBLISHED BY HENRY HOLT & CO. _

KEMBLE'S (FRANCES ANN) RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD. Large 12mo. With Portrait. $2. 50. 

 "The book is so charming, so entertaining, so stamped with the impress of a strong, remarkable, various nature, that we feel almost tormented in being treated to a view only of the youthful phases of character. Like most of the novels that we read, or don't read, this volume is the history of a young lady's entrance into life. Mrs. Kemble's young lady is a very brilliant and charming one, and our only complaint is that we part company with her too soon. .. . What we have here, however, is excellent reading. .. . She is naturally a writer; she has a style of her own which is full of those felicities of expression that indicate the literary sense. "--_Nation_. 

 * * * * *

THE AMATEUR SERIES. 12mo, blue cloth. 

English Actors from Shakespeare to Macready. By HENRY BARTON BAKER. Two vols. $3. 50

 "Mr. Baker's business is with the adventures and the art of our principal players; and he rarely, if ever, departs from his well-considered plan to discuss the literature of the theatre. His anecdotes have all an authentic look, and their genuineness is, for the most part, not to be doubted. The book is extremely rich in good stories, which are invariably well told. "--_Pall Mall Gazette_. 

Moscheles' (Ignatz) Recent Music and Musicians, as described in hisDiaries and Correspondence. Selected by his wife, and adapted from theoriginal German, by A. D. COLERIDGE, $2. 00. 

 "Full of pleasant gossip. The diary and letters between them contain notices and criticisms on almost every musical celebrity of the last half century. "--_Pall Mall Gazette_. 

Chorley's (H. F. ) Recent Art and Society, as described in hisAutobiography and Memoirs. Compiled from the Edition of Henry G. Hewlett, by C. H. Jones. $2. 00. 

Wagner's (R. ) Art Life and Theories. Selected from his Writings, andtranslated by EDWARD L. BURLINGAME. With a preface, a catalogue ofWagner's published works, and drawings of the Bayreuth Opera House. $2. 00. 

 "Mr. Burlingame has performed a most useful task with great tact and taste. The difficulty of rendering Wagner into intelligible English is almost insuperable, but he has overcome it, and has given us a book which will not only be interesting to all lovers of music, but entertaining, at least in some of its chapters, to the general reader. "--_N. Y. Tribune_. 

Thornbury's (Walter) Life of J. M. W. Turner, R. A. Founded on Lettersand Papers furnished by his friends and fellow-academicians. Withillustrations, fac-similed in colors, from Turner's original drawings. $2. 75. 

 "The author has told fully and fearlessly the story of Turner's life as far as he could learn it, and has filled his pages with anecdotes which illustrate the painter's character and habits, and his book is, therefore, one of great interest. "--_N. Y. Evening Post_. 

Lewes (George Henry) on Actors and the Art of Acting. $1. 50. 

 "It is valuable, first, as the record of the impressions produced upon a mind of singular sensibility by many actors of renown, and lastly, indeed chiefly, because it formulates and reiterates sound opinions upon the little-understood principles of the art of acting. .. . Perhaps the best work in English on the actor's art. "--_Nation_. 

Berlioz' Autobiography and Musical Grotesques. $2. 00

_PUBLISHED BY HENRY HOLT & CO. _

ALBEMARLE'S (GEORGE THOMAS EARL OF) FIFTY YEARS OF MY LIFE. With aPortrait by JEENS. Large 12mo. $2. 50. 

 "Lord Albemarle has done wisely to publish his Recollections, for there are few men who have had the opportunities of seeing so much of life and character as he has, and still fewer who at an advanced age could write an Autobiography in which we have opinions without twaddle, gossip without malice, and stories not marred in the telling. "--_London Academy_. 

HOUGHTON'S (LORD) MONOGRAPHS, PERSONAL AND SOCIAL. With Portraits of WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, CHARLES BULLER, HARRIET LADYASHBURTON, and SULEIMAN PASHA. 12mo. $2. 00. 

 "An extremely agreeable volume. .. . He writes so as to adorn everything which he touches, "--_London Athenæum_. 

 "He has something new to tell of every one of his subjects. His book is a choice olio of fine fruits. "--_London Saturday Review_. 

JOHNSON'S (ROSSITER) COLLECTIONS OF POEMS. 

SINGLE FAMOUS POEMS. Collected and Edited by ROSSITER JOHNSON. Square12mo, gilt. $2. 00. 

 A pretty volume fit for presentation, made up of celebrated English poems that have hitherto been printed only in periodicals and other fugitive places, or are in only such works as are not generally at hand. 

 The lover of poetry who is trying to find some English poem that he can get no trace of except from vague memory, would be quite apt to meet it in this volume. 

PLAY-DAY POEMS. Collected and Edited by ROSSITER JOHNSON. 16mo. (Leisure Hour Series. ) $1. 00. 

 This volume contains the best of the humorous poetry published since Parton's collection in 1856, and also many of the old favorites. 

 "Singularly free from anything to offend the taste, or to injure the health by unsuccessful attempts to produce a laugh. You are not obliged to throw away a multitude of worthless, or mediocre specimens, before you light upon a poem which you can truly enjoy. "--_N. Y. Tribune_. 

 "The most complete and judicious collection of humorous poetry ever seen in this country. "--_Chicago Journal_. 

 "The collection is a capital one, and will be of peculiar value to professional and amateur readers. "--_Boston Transcript_. 

SAINTE-BEUVE'S (C. A. ) ENGLISH PORTRAITS. Selected and Translated fromthe "Causeries du Lundi. " With an Introductory Chapter on Sainte-Beuve'sLife and Writings. 12mo. $2. 00. 

 CONTENTS:--Sainte-Beuve's Life--His Writings--General Comments--Mary Queen of Scots--Lord Chesterfield--Benjamin Franklin--Edward Gibbon--William Cowper--English Literature by H. Taine--Pope as a Poet. 

 "Probably no one who in our days has written criticism had a surer power to perceive and discover what is true and beautiful. He makes us admire more the authors we admired before, and gives new reasons for our admiration. It is a charming volume, and one that may be made a companion, in the confident assurance that the better we know it the better we shall enjoy it. "--_Boston Advertiser_. 

_PUBLISHED BY HENRY HOLT & CO. _

WALLACE'S (D. MACKENZIE) RUSSIA. With two maps. 8vo. $4. 00. 

 "One of the stoutest and most honest pieces of work produced in our time, and the man who has produced it . .. Even if he never does anything more, will not have lived in vain. "--_Fortnightly Review_. 

 "Excellent and interesting . .. Worthy of the highest praise . .. Not a piece of clever book-making, but the result of a large amount of serious study and thorough research. .. . We commend his book as a very valuable account of a very interesting people. "--_Nation_

 "The book is excellent from first to last, whether we regard its livelier or its more serious portions. "--_London Athenæum_. 

BAKER'S (JAMES) TURKEY. 8vo, with two maps. $4. 00

 "His work, like Mr. Wallace's, is in many parts a revelation, as it has had no predecessor, which was so founded upon personal observation, and at the same time so full of that sort of detailed information about the habits, the customs, the character, and the life of the people who form its subject, which constitutes the best possible explanation of history and of current events. .. . Invaluable to the student, profound or superficial, of Turkish affairs. "--_N. Y. Evening Post_. 

BRASSEY'S (MRS. ) AROUND THE WORLD IN THE YACHT "SUNBEAM. " Our Home onthe Ocean for Eleven Months. With Chart and Illustrations. 8vo. 

 The history of this leisurely and luxurious cruise of the Brassey family and a few friends, in their own yacht, is given in such easy and familiar style as to make the reader feel almost one of the party. 

 "We close her book with a wish that, as Alexander sighed for other worlds to conquer, so there were other worlds for the 'Sunbeam' to circumnavigate. "--_Literary World_. 

 "It is altogether unlike all other books of travel. .. . We can but faintly indicate what the reader may look for in this unrivalled book. "--_London Spectator_. 

CREASY'S (SIR EDWARD S. ) HISTORY OF THE OTTOMAN TURKS. From theBeginning of their Empire to the Present Time. Large 12mo. $2. 50. 

 "It presents a vivid and well-connected account of the six centuries of Turkish growth, conquest, and decline, interwoven with summary views of institutions, national characteristics, and causes of success and failure. It embodies also the results of the studies of a large number of earlier and later writers, and throughout evinces research, independence of judgment, and candor. "--_Nation_. 

GROHMAN'S (W. A. BAILLIE) GADDINGS WITH A PRIMITIVE PEOPLE. Being aSeries of Sketches of Tyrolese Life and Customs, 16mo. (Leisure HourSeries. ) $1. 00. 

 "He has a bright, easy style, and, indeed, most of his adventures are so extraordinary as almost to verge on the brink of the incredible. We can recommend the book as singularly readable from the first chapter to the last. "--_Saturday Review_. 

 "This is a book such as the public seldom has the opportunity of reading; such, indeed, as a necessarily rare combination of circumstances can alone produce. His volume will indeed amply repay perusal. "--_London Spectator_. 

McCOAN'S (J. C. ) EGYPT AS IT IS. With a map taken from the most recentsurvey. 8vo. $3. 75. 

 "We can recommend 'Egypt as It Is' to our readers as supplying a want which is most felt--a detailed and a truthful and able account of the country as it is in its moral, material, and economical aspect "--_London Athenæum_. 

_PUBLISHED BY HENRY HOLT & CO. _

GAUTIER'S (THEOPHILE) WORKS. 

A WINTER IN RUSSIA. Translated from the French by M. M. RIPLEY. 12mo. $1. 75. 

 "The book is a charming one, and nothing approaching it in merit has been written on the outward face of things in Russia. "--_Nation_. 

 "We do not remember when we have taken up a more fascinating book. "--_Boston Gazette_. 

CONSTANTINOPLE. Translated from the French by Robert Howe Gould, M. A. 12mo. $1. 75. 

 "It is never too late in the day to reproduce the sparkling descriptions and acute reflections of so brilliant a master of style as the present author. "--_N. Y. Tribune_. 

JONES' (C. H. ) AFRICA: the History of Exploration and Adventure asgiven in the leading authorities from Herodotus to Livingstone. By C. H. Jones. With Map and Illustrations. 8vo. $5. 00. 

 "A cyclopædia of African exploration, and a useful substitute in the library for the whole list of costly original works on that subject. "--_Boston Advertiser_. 

 "This volume contains the quintessence of a whole library. .. . What makes it peculiarly valuable is its combination of so much material which is inaccessible to the general reader. The excellent map, showing the routes of the leading explorers, and the numerous illustrations increase the value and interest of the book. "--_Boston Globe_. 

MORELET'S (ARTHUR) TRAVELS IN CENTRAL AMERICA. Including Accounts ofsome Regions Unexplored since the Conquest. Introduction and Notes byE. GEO. SQUIER. Post 8vo. Illus. $2. 00. 

 "One of the most interesting books of travel we have read for a long time. .. . His descriptions are evidently truthful, as he seems penetrated with true scientific spirit. "--_Nation_. 

PUMPELLY'S (R. ) AMERICA AND ASIA. Notes of a Five Years' JourneyAround the World, and of Residence in Arizona, Japan and China. ByRAPHAEL PUMPELLY, Professor in Harvard University, and sometime Mining Engineer in the employ of the Chinese and JapaneseGovernments. With maps, woodcuts, and lithographic facsimiles ofJapanese color-printing. Fine edition, royal 8vo, tinted paper, giltside, $5. 00. Cheap edition, post 8vo, plain, $2. 50. 

 "One of the most interesting books of travel we have ever read. .. . We have great admiration of the book, and feel great respect for the author for his intelligence, humanity, manliness, and philosophic spirit, which are conspicuous throughout his writings. "--_Nation_. 

 "Crowded with entertainment and instruction. A careful reading of it will give more real acquaintance with both the physical geography and the ethnology of the northern temperate regions of both hemispheres than perhaps any other book in existence. "--_N. Y. Evening Post_. 

STILLMAN'S (W. J. ) CRETAN INSURRECTION OF 1866-7-8. By W. J. STILLMAN, late U. S. Consul in Crete. 12mo. $1. 50. 

WHIST (SHORT WHIST). Edited by J. L. Baldwin. The Standard adopted by theLondon Clubs. And a Treatise on the Game, by J. C. 18mo, appropriatelydecorated, $1. 00. 

 "Having been for thirty-six years a player and lover of the game, we commend the book to a beginner desirous of playing well. "--_Boston Commonwealth_.