Thursday, December 18th, 1845. MY DEAREST HAL,

I leave London the day after to-morrow for Southampton. I am full of calls, bills, visits, sorrow, perplexity, and nervous agitation, which all this hurry and bustle increase tenfold; letters to write, too, for the American post is in, and has brought me four from the other side of the water to deal with. In the middle of all this, Mrs. Jameson sends me long letters of Sarah Grant's and Mary Patterson's to read, which prove most distinctly to my mind that she, Mrs. Jameson, wishes to write a memoir of Mrs. Harry Siddons; but do not at all prove so distinctly to my mind that Mrs. Harry Siddons wished a memoir of herself to be written by Mrs. Jameson. So all this I have had to wade through, and shall have to answer, wondering all the while what under the sun it matters what I think about the whole concern, or why people care one straw what people's opinions are about them, or what they do.

My opinion about memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, lives, letters, and books in general indeed, Mrs. Jameson is perfectly familiar with; and therefore her making me go through this voluminous correspondence just now, when she knows how pressed I am for time, seems to me a little unmerciful; but, however, I've done it, that's one comfort.

Then comes dear George Combe, with a long letter, the second this week, upon the subject of Miss C——'s private character, family connections, birth, parentage, reputation, etc., desiring me to answer all manner of questions about her; and I know no more of her than I do of the man in the moon: and all this must likewise be attended to....

About my consulting Wilson (our attached friend and family physician), I did so when I was here before, and I am following the advice he then gave me; but for these physical effects of mental causes, what can be done as long as the causes continue?...

Hayes (my maid) and I are to take the coupe of the diligence wherever we can get it on our route, and so proceed together and alone. I shall pay for the third place, but it is worth while to pay something to be protected from the proximity of some travelling Frenchmen; and paying for this extra place is not a very great extravagance, as the cost of travelling by public conveyance on the Continent is very moderate.

I do not know when Blackwood intends publishing my things. I gave them into Chorley's hands, and Chorley's discretion, and know nothing further about them, but that I believe I shall be paid for them what he calls "tolerably well," and therefore what I shall consider magnificently well, inasmuch as they seem to me worth nothing at all.

I hear of nothing but the change of Ministry, but have been so much engrossed with my own affairs that I have not given much attention to what I have heard upon the subject. I believe Sir Robert Peel will come into some coalition with the Whigs, Lord John Russell, Lord Howick, etc., and this is perhaps the best thing that can happen, because, by all accounts, the Whigs have literally not got a man to head them. But I do not think anything is yet decided upon.

And now, my dear, I must break off, and write to M—— M——, and George Combe about Miss C——'s virtue (why the deuce doesn't he look for it in her skull?), and Mrs. Jameson, and all America.

I breakfasted this morning with Rogers, and dine this evening at the Procters'. What an enviable woman I might appear!—only you know better.

Yours truly, FANNY.

MORTIMER STREET, Friday Night (i.e. Saturday Morning, at 2 o'clock), December 19th, 1845.

No! my dearest Hal, I do not think that to one who believes that life is spiritual education it needs any very painful or difficult investigation of circumstances to perceive, not why such and such special trials are sent to certain individuals, but that all trial is the positive result of or has been incurred by error or sin; and beholding the beautiful face of bitterest adversity, for such is one of its aspects, that all trial is sent to teach us better things than we knew, or than we did, before. There is nothing for which God's mercy appears to me more praiseworthy than the essential essence of improvement, of progress, of growth, which can be expressed from the gall-apple of our sorrows. To each soul of man the needful task is set, the needful discipline administered, and therefore it doesn't seem to me to require much investigation into mere circumstances to accept my own trials. They are appointed to me because they are best for me, and whatever my apparent impatience under them, this is, in deed and truth, my abiding faith....

But it is past two o'clock in the morning. I am almost exhausted with packing and writing. Seven letters lie on my table ready to be sealed, seven more went to the post-office this afternoon; but though I will not sleep till I bid you good-night, I will not write any more than just that now. My fire is out, my room cold, and, being tired with packing, I am getting quite chilled. You must direct to me to the care of Edward Sartoris, Esq., Trinita dei Monti, Rome, and I will answer you, as you know. I will write to you to-morrow, that is to-day, when I get to Bannisters; or perhaps before I start, if I can get up early enough to get half an hour before breakfast.

Good-night. God bless you. I am unutterably sad, and feel as though I were going away from everybody, I know not whither—it is all vague, uncertain, indefinite, all but the sorrow which is inseparable from me, go where I will, a companion I can reckon upon for the rest of my life everywhere. As for the rest, if we did but recollect it, our next minute is always the unknown.

Ever yours, FANNY.

BANNISTERS, Saturday, December 20th, 1845. MY DEAREST HARRIET,

My last words and thoughts were yours last night; but this morning, when I hoped to have written to you again, I found it impossible to do so; so here I am in the room at Bannisters where you and I and Emily were sitting together a few weeks ago,—she on her knees, writing for a fly to take me to the steamer to-night, and I writing to you from this place, where it seems as if you were still sitting beside us. Emily won't let me send you your little square ink-bottle for Queen's heads, but says she will keep it for you, so there I leave it in her hands.

Charles Greville's book (for it is not a pamphlet) is called "The Policy of England to Ireland," or something as nearly like that as possible. My praise of it may occasion you some disappointment, for I am pleased with it more because it is so much better than anything I expected from him than because it is particularly powerful or striking in itself. The subject interests me a good deal, and the book is very agreeably and well written, and in a far better tone than I should have looked for in anything of his.

I have besought Mr. Lowndes to forward my letters to me without any delay, and I have no doubt he will do so....

As for death, well is it with those who quietly reach the fifth act of their lives, with only the usual and inevitable decay and dropping off of all beloved things which time must bring; the sudden catastrophe of adverse circumstance, wrecking a whole existence in the very middle of its course, is a more terrible thing than death.

My dearest Hal, I have no more to say but that "I love you." Emily is talking to me, and I feel as if I ought to talk to her. Give my dear love to dear Dorothy, and believe me

Ever yours, FANNY.

ROME, TRINITA DEI MONTI, Monday, April 20th, 1846.

You ask me what I shall do in the spring, my dear Hal. My present plan is to return to England next December, and remain with my father, if he can have me with him without inconvenience, till the weather is fine enough to admit of my returning without too much wretchedness to America....

When E—— and my father wrote to me to return to England, I had no idea but that I was to have a home with the latter, that he expected and wished me to live with him.... I think now that if his deafness obliges him to give up his public readings, and cuts him off from his club and the society that he likes, he will not be sorry that I should remain with him....

By-the-by, I take your question about my plans for the spring to refer not to this but to next spring, as I suppose you know that I mean to remain with my sister during the coming summer, and that we are going to spend the greater part of it at Frascati, where E—— has taken a charming apartment in a lovely villa belonging to the Borghese.

You will be in England next winter, dear Hal, and I shall come then and stay with you and Dorothy. You have interfered so little with my journal-keeping by your letters that I have been wondering and lamenting that I did not hear from you for the last some time, and was all but wrought up to the desperate pitch of writing to you out of turn, to know what was the matter, when I received your last letter. I do not, however, keep my journal with any sort of regularity; my time is extremely and very irregularly occupied, and I should certainly preserve no record whatever of my impressions but for the very disagreeable conviction that it is my duty to do so, if there is, as I believe there is, the slightest probability of my being able by this means to earn a little money and to avoid drawing upon my father's resources. I have a great contempt for this process, and a greater contempt for the barren balderdash I write: but exchange is no robbery, a thing is worth what it will fetch, and if a bookseller will buy my trash, I will sell it to him; for beggars must, in no case, be choosers....

You say that I have yet told you nothing of my satisfaction in Rome. I wish you had not made your challenge so large. How shall I tell you of my satisfaction in Rome? and at which end of Rome, or my satisfaction, shall I begin? You must remember, in the first place, that its strangeness is not absolutely to me what it is to many English people; the brilliant and enchanting sky is not unlike that with which I have been familiar for some years past in America; the beautiful and (to us Anglo-Saxon islanders) unusual vegetation bears some resemblance to that of the Southern States in winter. Boston, you know, is in the same latitude as Rome, and though the American northern winter is incomparably more severe than that of Italy, the summer heat and the southern semi-tropical vegetation are kindred features in that other world and this. The difference of this winter climate and that of the United States has hitherto been an unfavorable one to me; for I have been extremely unwell ever since I have been here—the sirocco destroys me body and soul while it lasts, and there is a sultry heaviness in the atmosphere that gave me at first perpetual headaches, and still continues to disagree extremely with me. Now, of these abatements of my satisfaction I have told you, but of my satisfaction itself I should find it impossible to tell, but I should think you might form some idea of it, knowing both me and the place where I am.

I have hitherto been more anxious to remain with my sister than to go and see even the sights of Rome. Now, however, that our departure for Frascati must take place in about a month, I get up at seven every morning, and go out before breakfast alone, and in this way I am contriving to do some of my traveller's duty.

I walked this morning to the Pantheon, and heard Mass there. On my return home, I went into the Church of the Trinita dei Monti, to hear the French nuns sing their prayers. This afternoon we have been to the Villa Albani, which is ridiculously full of rose-bushes, which are so ridiculously full of roses that, except in a scene in a pantomime, I never saw anything like it. We remained in the garden, and the day was like a warm English April day, in consequence of which we had the loveliest pageant of thick sullen rain and sudden brilliant flashes of sunlight chasing each other all over those exquisite Alban Hills, with our very un-English foreground of terraces, fountains, statues, vases, evergreen garden walls of laurel, myrtle, box, laurestinus, and ridiculous rose-bushes in ridiculous bloom. There never was a more enchanting combination of various beauty than the landscape we looked at and the place from which we looked at it. I brought away some roses and lemon-blossoms: the latter I enclose in this letter, that some of the sweetness I have been enjoying may salute your senses also, and recall these divine scenes to your memory still more vividly. We came home from the Villa Albani in the most tremendous pour of rain, and had hardly taken off our bonnets when the whole sky, from the pines on Monte Maris to the Dome of Santa Maria Maggiore, was bathed all over in beauty and splendor indescribable. If we had only been Claude Lorraine, what a sunset we should have painted!

We have a charming little terrace garden to our house here, in which my "retired leisure" takes perpetual delight....

God bless you, dear.

Ever yours, FANNY.

FRASCATI, Wednesday, May 20th, 1846. MY DEAR HAL,

One would suppose that writing was to the full as disagreeable to you as it is to me, yet you do not profess that it is so, but merely write that you have little to say, as you think, that will interest me. Now, this is, I think, a general fallacy, but I am sure it is an individual one: the sight of your handwriting, representing as it does to me your face, your voice, and, above all, your generous and constant affection, makes the mere superscription of your letters worth a joyful welcome from me; and for any dearth of matter on your part, it lies, I rather think, chiefly in the direction which least affects me, i.e. society gossip, or "news," as it is called (O Lord! such old news as it is), being for ever the same stuff with a mere imperceptible difference in the pattern on it, let it come from what quarter of the civilized globe it will; and which, as far as I have had occasion to observe latterly, forms the chief resource of "polite letter-writers."

Of matters that do interest me, you might surely have plenty to say—your own health and frame of mind; the books you read, and what you think of them; and whatever of special interest to yourself occurs, either at home or abroad. At Ardgillan, you know, I know every inch of your ground, and between the little turret room and the Dell it seems to me many letters might be filled; then the state of politics in England interests me intensely; and the condition of Ireland is surely a most fruitful theme for comment just now....

We are now at Frascati, and in spite of the inexhaustible, immortal interest of Rome, I am rejoicing with my whole nature, moral, mental, and physical, in our removal to the country. The beautiful aspect of this enchanting region, occasionally, by rare accident, recalls the hill country in America that I am so fond of; but this is of a far higher and nobler order of beauty.

The Campagna itself is an ever-present feature of picturesque grandeur in the landscape here, and gives it a character unlike anything anywhere else.

The district of country round Lenox rejoices in a number of small lakes (from one hill-side one sees five), of a few miles in circumference, which, lying in the laps of the hills, with fine wooded slopes sweeping down to their bright basins, give a peculiar charm to the scenery; while here, as you know, the volcanic waters of Albano and Nemi lie so deep in their rocky beds as to be invisible, unless from their very margins.

Of the human picturesqueness of this place and people no American scenery or population have an atom; and isolated, ugly, mean, matter-of-fact farm-houses, or whitewashed, clap-boarded, stiff, staring villages, alike without antiquity to make them venerable or picturesqueness to make them tolerable, are all that there represent the exquisitely grouped and colored masses of building, or solitary specimens of noble time-tinted masonry and architecture, that every half-fortress farmhouse in the plain, or hamlet or convent on the hill-side, present in this paradise of painters.

I must confess to you, however, that the populousness of this landscape is not agreeable to me. Absolute loneliness and the absence of every trace of human existence was such a striking feature of the American scenery that I am fond of, where it was possible in some directions to ride several miles without meeting man or woman or seeing their dwellings, that the impossibility of getting out of sight of human presence or human habitation is sometimes irksome to me here.

It is true that this scenery is often wildly sublime in its character; nevertheless, it is overlooked in almost every direction by villas, monasteries, or villages, and if one escapes from these (as, indeed, I only suppose I may, for I have not yet been able to do so), one stumbles among the ruins and gigantic remains of the great race that has departed, and recollections of men, their works and ways, pursue one everywhere, and surround one with the vestiges of the humanity of bygone centuries.

In the woods of Massachusetts wild-cats panthers, and bears are yet occasionally to be met with, and the absence of the human element, whether present or past, gives a character of unsympathizing savageness to the scenery; while here it has so saturated the very soil with its former existence that where there is nobody there are millions of ghosts, and that, if the sense of solitude is almost precluded, there is an abiding and depressing one of desolate desertion.

The personal danger which I am told attends walking alone about the woods and hills here rather impairs my enjoyment of the lovely country....

How lamentably foolish human beings are in their intercourse with each other, to be sure, whether they love or hate, or whatever they do!...

The epistle of yours that I am now answering I received only this morning, and, owing no one else a previous debt, sat down instantly to discharge my debt to you. Am I honest? am I just? If I am not, show me how I am not; if I am, why, hold your tongue.

The climate of Rome disagreed with me more than any climate of which I have yet had experience. I had a perpetual consciousness of my bilious tendencies, and when the sirocco blew I found it difficult to bear up against that and the permanent causes of depression I always have to struggle against. The air here is undoubtedly freer and purer, but even here we do not escape from that deadly hot wind, that blast, that I should think came straight from hell, it is so laden with despair.

I liked those pretty lasses, the Ladies T——, very much. All young people interest me, and must be wonderfully displeasing if they do not please me. I met them frequently, but they were naturally full of gayety and life and spirits, which I naturally was not. The little society I went into in Rome oppressed me dreadfully with its ponderous vapidity, and beyond exchanging a few words with these bonnie girls, and admiring their sweet pleasant faces, I had nothing to do with them. There was much talk about the chances of a marriage between Lord W—— and Lady M——, but though her father left no stone unturned to accomplish this great blessing for his pretty daughter, the matter seemed extremely doubtful when the season ended and they all went off to Naples.

As for Mrs. H——, if she had chronicled me, I am afraid it would scarcely have been with good words. I met her at a party at Mrs. Bunsen's (whose husband is the son of Arnold's friend).... The young lady impressed me as one of that numerous class of persons who like to look at a man or woman whose name, for any reason, has been in the public mouth, and probably her curiosity was abundantly satisfied by my being brought up and shown to her. She made no particular impression upon me, but I have no doubt that in sorrow, or joy, or any real genuine condition, instead of what is called society, she might perhaps have interested me. It takes uncommon powers of fascination, or what is even rarer, perfect simplicity, to attract attention or arouse sympathy in the dead atmosphere of modern civilized social intercourse. All is so drearily dry, smooth, narrow, and commonplace that the great deeps of life below this stupid stagnant surface are never seen, heard, or thought of.

If your nieces' constancy in following the round of monotonously recurring amusements of a Dublin season amazes me, they would certainly think it much more amazing to pass one's time as I do, wandering about the country alone, dipping one's head and hands into every wayside fountain one comes to, and sitting down by it only to get up again and wander on to the next spring of living water. The symbol is comforting, as well as the element itself, though it is a mere suggestion of the spiritual wells by which one may find rest and refreshment, and pause and ponder on this dusty life's way of ours.

I rejoice the distress in Ireland is less than was anticipated, and am sorry that I cannot sympathize with your nephew's political views [Colonel Taylor was all his life a consistent and fervent Tory].... Politics appear to me, in a free government, to be the especial and proper occupation of a wealthy landowner; and, in such a country as Ireland, I am sure they might furnish a noble field for the exercise of the finest intelligence and the most devoted patriotism, as well as fill the time with occupation of infinite interest, both of business and benevolence. I should like to be a man with such a work....

My sister's little girl is lovely; she runs about, but does not speak yet. God bless you, my dear friend. Give my love to dear Dorothy. If I can, I will come and see you both at Torquay this next winter. I hope to be in England in November.

Ever yours, FANNY.

FRASCATI, Wednesday, July 1st, 1846.

... You know of old that the slightest word of blame from you is worse than hot sealing-wax on my skin to me, and that to my self-justifications there is no end. My dear friend, are mental perplexity and despondency, moral difficulty, spiritual apathy, and a general bitter internal struggle with existence, less real trials, less positive troubles, than the most afflicting circumstances generally so classed? I almost doubt it. It may be more difficult to formulate that species of anguish in words, and it may seem a less positive and substantial grief than some others, but the plagues of the soul are real tortures, and I set few sufferings above them, few difficulties and few pains beyond those that have their source not in the outward dispensation of events, but in the inward conditions of our physical and moral constitutions.

Comparing one lot with another, does not rather the equality of the general doom of trouble and sorrow, of difficulty and struggle, witness the impartiality with which we are governed and our several fates distributed to us? The self-assured and self-relying strength of my constitution (I mean by that my character as well as the temperament from which it results) knows nothing of the trials that beset yours—doubt, distrust, despondency. I have health, mental and physical activity, and a "mounting spirit" of indomitable enjoyment that buoyantly protects me from sufferings under which others wince and writhe; nevertheless, I have the sufferings proper to my individuality, and I needs must suffer, if it were only that I may be said to live, in the fit and proper sense of the term. Our lots are just; by God they are appointed....

But in spite of abiding sorrow, I have often hours of vivid enjoyment, enjoyment which has nothing to do with happiness, or peace, or hope; momentary flashes, bright gleams of exquisite pleasure, of which the capacity seems indestructible in my nature; and whatever bitterness may lie at my heart's core, it still leaves about it a mobile surface of sensibility, which reflects with a sort of ecstasy every ray of light and every form of beauty.

You certainly do not enjoy as I do, and perhaps therefore you do not suffer as acutely; but we err in nothing more than in our estimate of each other's natures, and might more profitably spend the same amount of consideration upon our own lot, and its capabilities of sorrow or of joy for our own improvement.

Why is it that people do perpetually live below their own pitch? as you very truly described their living. My return to civilized society makes me ponder much upon the causes of the desperate frivolity and dismal inanity which calls itself by that name, and in the midst of which we live and move and have our being. If people did really enjoy and amuse themselves, nothing could be better; because enjoyment and amusement are great goods, and deserve to be labored for sufficiently; but the absence of amusement, of enjoyment, of life, of spirits, of vivacity, of vitality, in the society of the present day, and its so-called diversions, strikes me with astonishment and compassion. For my own part, I hold a good laugh to be inestimable in pleasure and in profit; good nonsense well talked only less admirable than good sense well delivered; and a spirit of fun the next best thing to a serious spirit; and moreover, thank God, they are quite compatible! I think the stupid shallowness of society has some deep causes; one among which is, of course, that by devoting all their energies and all their faculties and all their time to mere amusement, as they have no right to do, people fail of their aim, and are neither well amused nor well occupied, nor well anything else. For if "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," what does the reverse do for him? This passion for cakes and sugar-candy in adult, not to say advanced, life is rather lugubrious; and of course it strikes me forcibly on my return from America, where the absence of a wholesome spirit of recreation is one of the dreariest features of the national existence....

Here the absolute necessity for mere amusement strikes me as a sort of dry-rot in certain portions of the fabric of civilized society, and tends to make it a sapless crumbling mass of appearances—the most ostentatious appearance of all, that of pleasure, being perhaps the hollowest and most unreal.

It takes, I believe, no meaner qualities than intelligence and goodness to enable a person to be thoroughly, heartily, and satisfactorily amused.

Unless you, my dear friend, deprecate our meeting to part again, I have no intention whatever of leaving England without seeing you once more. I cannot imagine doing such a thing, unless in compliance with your wish, or submission to inevitable necessity. I hope to come down to Torquay, to you and Dorothy, for a few days in the winter.

I am amused at your saying that you don't think any one would feel very comfortable living with me, who had not a great love of truth. Catherine Sedgwick once said it was impossible to tell a lie before me with any comfort; and yet I have told my own lies, and certainly sinned, as did not the worthy lady who, being charged with a falsehood, replied unhesitatingly, "Of course, I know it was a lie; I made it! I thought it would do good." Another lady of my acquaintance, speaking of a person we both knew, who was indifferent, to say the least of it, upon the question of veracity, exclaimed, "Oh, but Mrs. C—— is really too bad, for she will tell stories when there isn't the least necessity for it."

A—— was a curious instance of the distortion of a very upright nature; for she is undoubtedly a person of great natural truth and integrity, and yet, under the influence of an unfortunate passion, her pre-eminent virtue suffered total eclipse; and she must have condescended, proud and sincere as she was, to much duplicity and much absolute falsehood. Poor girl!

I think one great argument against wrong-doing of every sort is that it almost invariably, sooner or later, leads to a sacrifice of truth in some way or other; and for that reason a hearty love of truth is a great preservative from sin in general.

Your letters, directed either to Rome or here, to the care of Edward Sartoris, have reached me hitherto safely and punctually....

My sister particularly begs me to tell you that she rides ("a-horseback, you cuckoo!") between twelve and sixteen miles almost every day. I cannot clearly tell whether she has grown thinner or I have grown used to her figure.

The heat is beginning to be very oppressive, and I wish I was in England, for I hate hot weather. The whole range of the Sabine Hills, as I see them from my window here, look baked and parched and misty, in the glare beyond the tawny-colored Campagna. Every flower in the garden has bloomed itself away; the trees loll their heads to the hot gusts of the sirocco, mocking one with the enchanting beckoning gesture of a breeze, while the air is in truth like a blast from an oven or the draught at the mouth of a furnace.

I walk before breakfast, and steep myself in perspiration; and get into the fountain in the garden afterwards, and steep myself in cold water; and by dint of the double process, live in tolerable comfort the rest of the day. And I have no right to complain, for this is temperate to the summer climate of Philadelphia.

Mary and Martha Somerville are paying us a visit of a few days, and I have spent the last two mornings in a vast, princely, empty marble gallery here, teaching them to dance the cachuca; and I wish you could have seen Mrs. Somerville watching our exercises. With her eyeglasses to her eyes, the gentle gentlewoman sat silently contemplating our evolutions, and as we brought them to a conclusion, and stood (not like the Graces) puffing and panting round her, unwilling not to say some kindly word of commendation of our effort, she meekly observed, "It's very pretty, very graceful, very"—a pause—"ladylike." She spoke without any malicious intention whatever, dear lady, but she surely left out the un. Do you not think it is time I should begin to think of growing old? or do your nieces do anything more juvenile than this, with all their ball-going?

God bless you, my dear Harriet. Good-bye.

I am ever, as ever yours, FANNY.

FRASCATI, Wednesday, September 2nd, 1846. MY DEAREST HARRIET,

... I think that the women who have contemplated any equality between the sexes have almost all been unmarried, for while the father disposes of the children whom he maintains, and which thus endows him with the power of supreme torture, what mother's heart is proof against the tightening of that screw? At any rate, what number of women is ever likely to be found so organized or so principled as to resist the pressure of this tremendous power? My sister, in speaking to me the other day of what she would or would not give up to her husband of conscientious conviction of right, wound up by saying, "But sooner than lose my children, there is nothing that I would not do;" and in so speaking she undoubtedly uttered the feeling of the great majority of women....

We suppose my father has gone to Germany, with some intention of giving readings there. He has been on the Continent now upwards of three months, but we never hear anything definite or precise about his engagements from himself; and in his letters he never mentions place, person, or purpose, where he is going, or where likely to be; so that I can form no idea how long I may be deprived of my letters, which are directed to London, to his care.

My dearest Hal, I have kept no journal since I have been abroad but such as could be published verbatim. I have kept no record of my own life; I have long felt that to chronicle it would not assist me in enduring it.... Indeed, since I came to Italy, I should have kept no diary at all, but that my doing so was suggested to me as a possible means of earning something towards my present support, and with that view I have noted what I have seen, much to my own disgust and dissatisfaction; for I feel very strongly my own inability to give any fresh interest to a mere superficial description of things and places seen and known by everybody, and written about by all the world and his wife, for the last hundred years. Nevertheless, I have done it; because I could not possibly neglect any means whatever that were pointed out to me of helping myself, and relieving others from helping me.... I have given up my walk and my dip in the fountain before breakfast. We ride for three or four hours every afternoon, and a walk of two hours in the morning besides seemed to me, upon reflection, a disproportionate allowance of mere physical exercise for a creature endowed with brains as well as arms and legs.... Upon the whole, we have reason to be grateful for the health we have all of us enjoyed. There has been a great deal of violent and dangerous illness among the English residents passing the summer at Frascati and Albano; quite enough indeed, I think, to justify the ill repute of unhealthiness with which the whole of this beautiful region is branded. Our whole family has escaped all serious inconvenience, either from the malaria usual to the place or the unusual heat of the summer; the children especially have been in admirable health and lovely looks, the whole time we have been here....

God bless you, my dearest Hal! I am afraid that it is true that I often appear wanting in charity towards the vices and follies of my fellow-creatures; and yet I really have a great deal more than my outbreaks of vehement denunciation would seem to indicate; and of one thing I am sure, that with regard to any wrong or injury committed against myself, a very short time enables me not only to forgive it, but to perceive all the rational excuses and attenuations that it admits of. I certainly am not conscious of any bitterness of heart towards any one.... I believe it is only in the first perception of evil or sense of injury that I am unmeasured or unreasonable in my expression of condemnation—but you know, my dear, suddenness is the curse of my nature.... But my self-love always springs up against the shadow of blame, and so you need pay no heed to what I say in self-justification. If I am censured justly, I shall accept the reproof inwardly, whatever outward show I may make of defending myself against it; for the grace of humility is even more deficient in me than that of charity, and to submit graciously to what seems to me unjust blame is hitherto a virtue I do not possess at all.

[After my return to England, I resumed the exercise of my theatrical profession; the less distasteful occupation of giving public readings, which I adopted subsequently, was not then open to me. My father was giving readings from Shakespeare, and it was impossible for me to thrust my sickle into a field he was reaping so successfully. I therefore returned to the stage; under what disadvantageously altered circumstances it is needless to say.

A stout, middle-aged, not particularly good-looking woman, such as I then was, is not a very attractive representative of Juliet or Julia; nor had I, in the retirement of nine years of private life, improved by study or experience my talent for acting, such as it was. I had hardly entered the theatre during all those years, and my thoughts had as seldom reverted to anything connected with my former occupation. While losing, therefore, the few personal qualifications (of which the principal one was youth) I ever possessed for the younger heroines of the drama, I had gained none but age as a representative of its weightier female personages—Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine, etc.

Thus, even less well fitted than when first I came out for the work I was again undertaking, I had the additional disadvantage of being an extremely incompetent woman of business; and having now to make my own bargains in the market of public exhibition, I did so with total want of knowledge and experience to guide me in my dealings with the persons from whom I had to seek employment.

I found it difficult to obtain an engagement in London; but Mr. Knowles, of the Manchester Theatre, very liberally offered me such terms as I was thankful to accept; and I there made my first appearance on my return to the stage.

Among the various changes which I had to encounter in doing so, one that might appear trivial enough occasioned me no little annoyance. The inevitable rouge, rendered really indispensable by the ghastly effect of the gaslight illumination of the stage, had always been one of its minor disagreeables to me; but I now found that, in addition to rouged cheeks, my fair theatrical contemporaries—fair though they might be—literally whitewashed their necks, shoulders, arms, and hands; a practice which I found it impossible to adopt; and in spite of my zealous friend Henry Greville's rather indignant expostulation, to the effect that what so beautiful a woman as Madame Grisi condescended to do, for the improvement of her natural charms, was not to be disdained by a person so comparatively ugly, I steadily refused to make a whited sepulchre of that description of myself, and continued to confront the public with my own skin, looking, probably, like a gypsy, or, when in proximity with any feminine coadjutor, like a bronze figure arm-in-arm with a plaster-of-Paris cast.

Before, however, beginning my new existence of professional toil, I stayed a few days at Bannisters, with Mrs. FitzHugh and my dear friend, her daughter Emily.]

BANNISTERS, Tuesday, 13th, 1846.

You say, my dear Hal, that you see Emily and me perpetually, in various positions, holding various conversations. Had you a vision of us this morning, by the comfortable fire in my room, I reading, and she listening to, your letter?...

Thank you, my dear friend, for your flagellatory recipe, which I beg to decline. The sponging with vinegar and water I do practise every morning, and as I persevere in it until my fingers can hardly hold the sponge for cold, and my throat is as crimson as if it were flayed, I hope it will answer the same purpose as lashing myself, which I object to, partly, I suppose, for Sancho Panza's reasons, and partly because of its great resemblance to, not to say identity with, the superstitious practices of the idolatrous and benighted Roman Catholic Church.

The amount of medical advice and assistance which I have received since I have been restored to the affectionate society of my dear Emily and her kind mother is hardly to be told....

I shall not answer your letter seriously: I am convinced it is bad for you. I believe Dorothy never laughs (you know the Devil in "Faust" says the Almighty never does), and I am satisfied that what you are languishing for is a little absurdity, which she cannot by any possibility afford you.

How I wish I was with you! because, though I am no more absurd than that sublime woman Dorothy, I at least know how to take the best advantage, both for you and myself, of the great gifts you possess in that line; and the mutual sweetness and utility of our intercourse is, I am persuaded, principally owing to the judicious use I make of the extraordinary amount of absurdity it has pleased Heaven to vouchsafe you, my most precious friend.

And so you think I shall have plenty of "admiring friends" for my "gay hours" (!!!!), but shall be glad to fall back, in my less delightful ones, upon the devoted affection of—you? (Oh, Harriet, oughtn't you to be ashamed of yourself?)

I have more friends, I humbly and devoutly thank God for them, than almost any one I know; those I depend upon I can count upon the fingers of one hand, and you are the thumb.

In the useless struggle you persist in making to be reasonable (why don't you give it up? I've known you hopelessly at it now forty years or thereabouts), you really make use of very singular and, permit me to say, inappropriate language. After detailing, in a manner that nearly made me cry and laugh with distress for you and disapprobation of you, all your unnecessary agonies of anxiety about me, you suddenly rein yourself up with an extra-reasonable jerk, and say that "the foolish importance you attach to trifles is as great as ever."

Now, my dearest friend, for such you undoubtedly are, allow me to observe that this mode of speaking of me does not appear to me either reasonable or appropriate. From what point of view I can appear a trifle to the most partial and rational of my friends, I am at a loss to conjecture. The parallel seems to me to halt on all its feet. A white, light, sweet, and agreeable article of human consumption bears, I apprehend, extremely small affinity to a dark, heavy, tart, and uneatable female. However, if you find that this, to me, singularly distorted mode of viewing facts assists your hitherto unsuccessful efforts at mental and moral equipoise, I am perfectly willing to be a trifle in your estimation, or indeed anywhere but on your table.

The pretty, pretty plan you devise for our meeting here during Passion week, dear Hal, is a baseless vision. Our friends go up to London the week after next, and I do not know when I shall be able again to stay so far from it.

I have written to Moxon about the publication of my journal, and I received a note from him this morning, intimating his purpose of visiting me here, in the course of to-day, at which I feel rather nervously dismayed.... There is a great quantity of it, and I suppose my return to the stage may perhaps have some effect in increasing its sale.

Emily and I walk every day together, up and down the shrubbery and round the gardens; and innumerable are the ejaculations of "Oh, how I wish dear Hal was with us!" You are our proper complement, the missing side of the triangle, and it is unnatural for us two to be together here without you.

Mrs. FitzHugh is certainly a wonderful old woman, especially in her kindliness and happy, easy cheerfulness....

We drive every day for about an hour in the pony-carriage, and walk again for about half an hour afterwards....

And now, God bless you, my dearest Hal. I long to see you, and am most thankful for all the tender, devoted, anxious affection you bestow on me; I am unspeakably grateful to you. Kiss dear Dorothy for me, and tell her for goodness' sake to exert herself, and either be, or allow you to be, slightly ridiculous, or she will die of perfection, and you of a plethora of absurdity, or ridiculousness rentre—struck in, as the French say.

I forgot to tell you that —— has declined my terms, but offered me others, which I have declined. I have still two other managers, with one of whom I think I may perhaps be able to come to some agreement.

Since writing thus far, I have seen Moxon, who has offered me far more than I expected for my journal before reading it; begging me to let him pay me a portion of it at once, and adding that if, upon perusal of the manuscript, he thinks his profits likely to warrant his giving me more than the sum now named, he should not consider himself justified in not doing so by the fact of his having offered me less.

Good-bye, dearest.

Yours ever, FANNY.

[It is impossible to have been more generous than Mr. Moxon was in this whole transaction. While talking about the dealings of booksellers with authors, he said that he always bore in mind the liberality he had benefited by when, starting in business a poor and obscure publisher, he had been munificently assisted by Rogers, whose timely aid had laid the foundation of his prosperity. "As I was dealt by," he said, "I endeavor to deal by others, and should be glad to inspire them with the grateful regard towards me which I shall always retain for him." Rogers surely did himself more injustice by his tongue than all his enemies put together could have done him; his acts of kindly generosity were almost as frequent as his bitter, biting, cruel words.]

BANNISTERS, Saturday, 16th.

Yes, my dear Hal, I do intend to correct my own proofs (I thought my proofs corrected me)....

I have just returned from a delightful visit of two hours, which our dear friend Emily contrived for me, to ——, the dentist! Not content with cheering and soothing my sadder hours with the number and variety of her medical resources (pills, draughts, doses, potions, lotions, lozenges, etc.), her ever active and considerate affection hit upon this agreeable method of relieving my stay at Bannisters of any possible tedium, and two hours of the darkest, dampest, dreariest winter weather have thus been charmed away through her tender and ingenious solicitude for my enjoyment.

My dear Hal, what you say about laughing with people, as an instead for laughing at them, is, like most things you say, frightful nonsense. And what sort of a laugh, moreover, is it that you offer that unfortunate Dorothy for her feeble participation? Nothing of a healthy, wholesome, vigorous, vital, individual, personal kind; but some pitiful pretence of wit or humor, having for its vague or indefinite object ideal or general, abstract, impersonal, or, so to speak, invisible intangible subjects, wanting all the vivacious pungent stimulus that belongs to real individual absurdity, and the direct ridicule of it, judiciously and dexterously applied; the only efficient—I had almost said legitimate—object of a rational creature's amusement. If Dorothy depends upon you for her entertainment (otherwise than as you involuntarily, unconsciously, naturally, and simply furnish it to me), I pity her; and if you depend upon her for yours, I pity you still more—for I doubt if even I, according to my own system, could extract any from her, she is so painfully unridiculous. You must be deplorably dull together, I am—certain, I was going to say—satisfied; but that's neither kind nor civil, and I heartily wish for both your sakes that I was with you.

I am not sure that that visit may not be accomplished yet; for my reappearance on the stage does not seem likely to take place so very immediately but that I might perhaps contrive to run down to you for a short time. But, indeed, all my concerns are like so many pennies tossed up in the air for "heads or tails," and I cannot tell how they will fall, or what results I may arrive at.

I have been asked to go down to Manchester, to act, and if I have any great difficulty or delay to encounter in finding an engagement in London, I shall probably do so.... The step I am about to take is so painful to me that all petty annoyances and minor vexations lose their poignancy in the contemplation of it (a quelque chose—a bien des choses malheur est bon), and having at length made up my mind to it, smaller repugnancies connected with it have ceased to affect me with any acuteness....

Moxon cannot publish my Italian journal immediately, because the whole of the American edition must be ready to go to press before he brings it out here. I suppose it will come out some time after Easter. Emily told you of his first offer for it, and of his gallant mode of making it. He is surely a pearl and a pattern of publishers.

Kiss that facetious "Virgin Martyr" for me. Such a laugh as you two are likely to get up together! I declare it brings the tears to my eyes to think of it.

I rejoice in your account of H—— W——. It must be a blessing to every one belonging to him to see him do well such a duty as that of an Irish proprietor, in these most miserable times.

I have at present nothing further to impart to you but the newest news, that I am

Ever yours, FANNY.

[The last sentence of this letter refers to the failure of the potato-crop, and the consequent terrible famine that desolated Ireland.]

10, PARK PLACE, ST. JAMES'S, February 1st, 1847.

I feel almost certain, my dear Hal, that it will be better for me to be alone when I come out at Manchester than to have you with me, even if in all other respects it were expedient you should be there. My strength is much impaired, my nerves terribly shattered, and to see reflected in eyes that I love that pity for me which I shall feel only too keenly for myself, on the first night of my return to the stage, might, I fear, completely break down my courage. I am glad for this reason that I am to come out at Manchester, where I know nobody, and not in London, where, although I might not distinguish them, I should know that not a few who cared for me, and were sorry for me, were among my spectators. I am now so little able to resist the slightest appeal to my feelings that, at the play (to which I have been twice lately), the mere sound of human voices simulating distress has shaken and affected me to a strange degree, and this in pieces of a common and uninteresting description. A mere exclamation of pain or sorrow makes me shudder from head to foot. Judge how ill prepared I am to fulfil the task I am about to undertake....

This, however, is one of the most painful aspects of my work. It has a more encouraging one. It is an immense thing for me to be still able to work at all, and keep myself from helpless dependence upon any one.... The occupation, the mere business of the business, will, I am persuaded, be good rather than bad for me; for though one may be strong against sorrow, sorrow and inactivity combined are too much for any strength. Such a burden might not kill one, but destroy one's vitality to a degree just short of, and therefore worse than, death—crush, instead of killing and releasing one....

I was reading over "The Hunchback" last night, and could not go through the scenes between Julia and Clifford, when he assumes the character of Lord Rochdale's secretary, without an agony of crying. I do not see how I am ever to act it again intelligibly, but I suppose when I must do it I shall. Things that have to be done are done, somehow or other.

God bless you, my dear Hal.

I am ever yours, FANNY.

One word to Dorothy.

Now, my beloved and best Dorothy, haven't you enough to do with that most troublesome soul, Harriet, without being my "good angel" too? [Miss W—— often went by the name of Harriet's "good angel."] I have never seen mine; but if I have one, I should think he or she must be a sort of spiritual heavenly steam-engine, a three-hundred angel-power, in order effectually to take care of me.

My dearest Hal, I have missed the dear nuisance of your letters so dreadfully these few days past, that I began seriously to meditate writing to you to know if I had offended you in any way. As for how I fare in this cold weather, the weather is nothing to me, and I used not to mind cold at all, but rather to like it; but my flesh is forsaking my bones at such a rate that I am beginning to shiver for want of covering, and I think to be reduced to a skeleton—a live one, I mean—while the thermometer is as low as it is will be very uncomfortable.

The satisfaction I had in my visit to my brother was that of seeing a person for whom I have a very warm affection, and, in some respects, a very sincere admiration. I believe, too, it was a comfort to poor John to see me and receive the expressions of my love and sympathy.... For his warm heart, his truthfulness and great simplicity of character, his worldly poverty, his great intellectual wealth, but, above all, for that he is my brother, I love him. He and his children are living in a poor small cottage, on a wild corner of common near Cassiobury. How I thought of our old—no, our young days, driving along past "The Grove" and the Cassiobury Park paling. My brother's present home is certainly not an extravagant residence, and though, of course, sufficient for absolute necessary comfort (how much comfort is necessary?), is nothing more.... John has advertised in the Times for a pupil to prepare for college, and should he be able to obtain one, it would, of course, materially assist him. In the mean time he is working with infinite ardor and industry upon an important work, the "History of the English Law." A friend of his, whom I met there, who is, I think, a competent judge, which, of course, I am not, of any such matter, assured me that the work was one of great erudition and research, but at the same time so dry and difficult, and therefore little likely to be popular, that it would not be easy to persuade any publisher to undertake it. He, Mr. B——, carried the first volume, which is complete, to town with him, to show it to persons capable of appreciating it, and endeavor to get it a little known, so as to procure an offer for its publication. Poor John! his perseverance in the studies he loves is very great, his devotion to them very deep, and if he could only live upon his means with his beloved mistress, Learning, I should think he had made a noble and honorable choice, however bitterly disappointed my father may feel at his not choosing to follow more lucrative pursuits.

I am going to act in Dublin. I have neither time nor space for more.

God bless you.

Ever yours, FANNY.

10, PARK PLACE, Friday, 12th, 1847.

Direct to me at Manchester, "Theatre Royal," my dear Hal, that is all; or, indeed, I should prefer your directing to the Albion Hotel, that same house where you and I were so charmed by the sunlight on the carpet.

You say I do not know the value of letters. I think I do, for if I had not the very highest value for them I should long ago have given way to my detestation of writing, and put an end to my innumerable correspondences. Your letters have more than once been snatched up by me, and pressed to my lips; so have my sister's.... I hate writing, it is true, but am content to pay that price for the intercourse of my friends; and though I may not love letters as you do, I do think I have a reasonable appreciation of their value.

I share in your feeling, dearest Harriet, about my being in Dublin while you are absent from it. I do not know that it seems to me "wrong," but it certainly does seem as unnatural as that there should be a theatre open in Dublin at all at this time, when famine and such dire distress are prevailing in parts of the country.

I am troubled, too, at the uncertainty of how and when we are to meet; and the reason why these various considerations do not, perhaps, engross so much of my thoughts as they do of yours is because I have so many immediate and necessarily absorbing claims upon my attention.

I incline with you, however, to think that I shall not go to Dublin. I have not heard again from the manager, and I begin to hope that he has thought better of his invitation to me. As my work is a matter of necessity, I could not, of course, refuse an engagement in Dublin; but it does seem monstrous that there should be people willing to pay for theatrical entertainments there at this time.

If I do not go I shall lose an opportunity of seeing my brother Henry, which I am looking forward to with great pleasure—the only pleasure in the whole expedition, since you will not be there, which will indeed seem most strange and very inappropriate.

Harriet, you certainly have a passion for writing, for in your last you have repeated every word I said about my brother John, just as if you had invented it yourself. You are like Ariel, very; and I am like Prospero, very ("Dull thing! I said so"); or, no, I am like Falstaff, to be sure, and you like Prince Hal, with "damnable iteration." ...

Various of my London men friends threaten coming down to Manchester during my engagement there; Charles and Henry Greville, Chorley, and even Moxon, who declared, if my play was brought out, he must be in the pit the first night to see it. [This was my play called "An English Tragedy," which there was some talk of bringing out at Manchester.] I dare say the courage of all of them will give out before this bitter cold, and I shall not be sorry if it does, for I want no sympathizers to make me pitiful over myself.

I am tolerably well just now, and really believe that when once I am fairly out of the fangs of the dressmakers I shall gather strength rapidly.

The crudest fact in my fate at present is that I have actually not been able to get all my things made here, and am taking the materials for my Juliet and Queen Katharine dresses to be made up at Manchester; and this is horrid, because, but for this, my off evenings would have really been seasons of rest and quiet. However, it is of no use lamenting over any one detail of such a whole as this business....

Give my love to dear Dorothy. She is half my good angel, by her own voluntary assumption of the character....

Do not be troubled overmuch for or about me, my dearest friend; but commend me, as I do you and myself, to God, and believe me

Ever yours, FANNY.

10, PARK PLACE, Saturday Evening. MY DEAR HAL,

I never did, and I never shall, offer anything I write to anybody. If my friends ask me for anything I write, I will get it for them, just as I would anything else they ask me to get or to do for them; but I have no idea of volunteering such a bestowal upon anybody. Emily asked me for a copy of my "Year of Consolation," and I have promised her one, and I will certainly give you one if you wish for it. As for accounting, by any process of reasoning of mine, for your desire to have my book, I am quite unable to do so.

My love for my friends would never make me wish to read their books, unless I thought their book likely to be worth reading. Now, I cannot assume this with regard to my own, especially as I don't believe it.

Our friends' characters, their love for us, and ours for them, is the stuff of which our adhesion is made; and unless I had a genius for a friend, I should care little for any other mental exhibitions from those I loved than those their daily intercourse afforded me. In personal intercourse, unless a person is a genius, you really get that which is best intellectually, as well as every other way, from your friend. Even in the case of a great genius, I should think his daily intercourse likely to be more valuable in an intellectual point of view than his best works; but then, of such a mind one would naturally wish to possess all and every product that one could obtain. If I thought myself a genius, I might offer you my books unasked—perhaps.

I shall be at the Albion at Manchester, and if you wish to hear from me, you will do well to write to me there....

I have had a most terrible day of fatigue and worry, breaking my back with packing my things, and my heart with paying my bills.

Dear Henry Greville goes to within fifty miles of Manchester with me to-morrow, and stays at a friend's house, whence he and Alfred Potocki purpose coming on for the play on Tuesday evening. After all, I am not sorry he is coming; his regard for me is not of a sort to make me dread the weakening effect of his sympathy, and it will be comfortable to know that among that strange audience I have just such a kind well-wisher as he is, to keep up whatever courage I have.

Perhaps you may yet see me in Dublin, for the manager wishes me to renew my engagement after the first six nights; and, of course, if he pays me my terms, I shall be glad to remain there as long as he likes.

Give my dear love to dear Dorothy. I am thoroughly worn out, and feel quite unwell; and oh, how cold it will be in that railroad carriage to-morrow!

God bless you, dear.

Ever yours, FANNY.

ALBION HOTEL, MANCHESTER, Monday, 15th. MY DEAR HAL,

I cannot tell you exactly all why I dislike writing letters, because my dislike is made up of so many elements. One reason is that the limits of a letter do not permit of one's saying satisfactorily what one has to say upon any subject. I think frequently that my letters must be highly unsatisfactory because of my tendency to discussion, which makes them more like imperfect essays than letters, the chief charm and use of which is to tell of daily events, interests, and occurrences; how one is, what one does, where one goes, etc. Now, while I fear my letters must be unsatisfactory to my friends because they seldom contain details of this sort, they are still more so to me, because I have neither room nor time in them to say anything about anything as I wish to say it. Then, I have an indescribable impatience of the mere mechanical process.

You say that I talk, though I do not write, willingly to my friends, but whenever I get upon any subject that interests me, with anybody whom I am not afraid of wearying, I talk till I have said all I have to say; and though I never spoke about anything that I cared for without afterwards perceiving that I had left unsaid many important things upon the subject while I spoke, I spoke all that came into my mind at the time. In writing this is never the case, and fast as my pen flies, it seems to me to stick to the paper; while in speaking, what with my voice, my face, and my whole body, I manage to convey an immensity of matter (stuff, you know, I mean) in an incredibly short time. Impatience of all my limitations, therefore, is one cause of my dislike to letter-writing.

You say that I do not object to conversation, though I do to correspondence: and it is quite true that I sometimes have great pleasure in talking; but if I had to talk, even upon the subjects that interest me most, as much as I have to write in the discharge of my daily correspondence, I should die of exhaustion, and fancy, too, that I was guilty of a reprehensible waste of time. That I am doing what gives my friends pleasure, and is but their due, alone prevents my thinking my letter-writing a waste of time. As therefore it is not to me, as to you, a pleasurable occupation in itself, I do not think it can be compared with "reading Shakespeare, Schiller," or indeed any book worth reading. The exercise of justice towards, and consideration for, others is a form of virtue, and therefore letter-writing is, in some cases, a good employment of time.

I have a desire for mental culture, only equalled by my sense of my profound ignorance, and the feeling of how little knowledge is attained, even by scholars leading the most active and assiduously studious existences.

My delight in my own superficial miscellaneous reading is not so much for the information I retain (for I forget, or at least seem to do so, much of what I read), as for the sense of mental activity produced at the time, by reading; and though I forget much, something doubtless remains, upon the whole.

Knowledge, upon any subject, is an enchanting curiosity to me; fine writing on elevated subjects is a source of the liveliest pleasure to me; in all kinds of good poetry I find exquisite enjoyment; and not having a particle of satisfaction in letter-writing for its own sake, I cannot admit any parallel between reading and writing (whatever I might think of arithmetic). I have sometimes fancied, too, that but for the amount of letter-writing I perform, I might (perhaps) write carefully and satisfactorily something that might (perhaps) be worth reading, something that might (perhaps) in some degree approach my standard of a tolerably good literary production—some novel or play, some work of imagination—and that my much letter-writing is against this; but I dare say this is a mistaken notion, and that I should never, under any circumstances, write anything worth anything.

I have always desired much to cultivate the accomplishment of drawing; it is an admirable sedative—a soothing, absorbing, and satisfactory pursuit; but I have never found time to follow it up steadily, though snatching at it now and then according as opportunity favored me. I give but little time to my music now (though some every day, because I will not let go anything I have once possessed); for I shall never be a proficient in it, and I already have as much of it at my command as answers my need of it as a recreation. Any of these occupations is more agreeable to me than letter-writing; so is needlework, so is walking out, so is—almost anything else I could do. Now, as Shylock says, "Are you answered yet?"

I should be sorry my brother Henry went to the trouble or expense of coming over to Manchester or Liverpool to see me, as there is every probability of my being in Dublin early in March, where I shall act till the 22nd, and perhaps longer.

I have the privilege of sitting with an engraving of Lord Wilton, in his peer's robes, hung opposite to me—enough surely for any reasonable woman's happiness....

God bless you, dear; give my love to dear Dorothy. I rejoice for her that the cold is gone.

Ever yours, FANNY.

My kind friend Henry Greville, and that very charming young Alfred Potocki, brother of the Austrian Ambassadress, Madame de Dietrichstein, and a great friend of Henry's, came down with me half way, yesterday; they stopped at a friend's house about fifty miles from Manchester, and come up to-morrow to see the play, so that I shall have the comfort of people that I like, and not the trial of people that I love, near me on that occasion.

I am not very nervous about my plunge; the only thing that I dread is the noise (noise of any sort being what my nerves can no longer endure at all) which I am afraid may greet me. I wish I could avoid my "reception," as it is called, because any loud sound shakes me now from head to foot; this is the one thing that I do dread—I have gained some self-possession and strength in these past years, and I hope my acting itself, as well as my comfort in acting, may benefit by my increased self-command. Poor Hayes (my maid) says that the peace of being alone with me, after our late lodging, is like having left Hell; we shall see what she says to-morrow night at the theatre,—poor thing. Farewell.

ALBION HOTEL, MANCHESTER, Wednesday, 17th. MY DEAR LADY DACRE,

I acted Julia in "The Hunchback" last night (the first time for thirteen years); got up this morning with a dreadful cough and sore throat, the effect of over-exertion and exposure; went to rehearsal after breakfast, rehearsed Lady Macbeth and Juliana in "The Honeymoon" (a dancing part!); have written to three managers, from whom I have received "proposals;" have despatched accounts of myself to my father and sundry of my friends; have corrected forty pages of proof of my Italian journal; have prepared all my dresses for to-morrow; have received sundry visits (among others, that of a doctor, whom I was obliged to send for), and have wished that I had not had so much to do.

I am so far satisfied with my last night's experiment, that I think it has proved that my strength will serve to go through this sort of labor for a couple of years; and I hope during that time, by moving from one place to another, that my attraction may hold out sufficiently to enable me to secure the small capital upon which I can contrive to live independently.

The theatre here is beautiful; the company very fair; the plays are well and carefully got up. The audience were most exceedingly kind and cordial to me, and I think I have every reason to be thankful, and grateful, and more than satisfied. The manager wants me to renew my engagement, which is a sign, I suppose, that he is satisfied too.

With affectionate respects to my lord, believe me, my dear Lady Dacre,

Ever yours, FANNY.

MANCHESTER, Thursday, 18th.

I cannot tell how many books have been written by geniuses, dear Hal, and therefore, being unable to answer the first question in your letter, pass on to the next.

The people that I have to deal with here seem to me very much like all other people everywhere else. The proprietor and manager of the theatre is an active, enterprising, intelligent man, who knows the value of liberality, and that generosity is sometimes the most remunerative as well as amiable and popular line of action. He is a shrewd man of business, a little rough in his manner, but kindly and good-natured withal, and extremely civil and considerate to me. He is anxious that I should renew my engagement, and I shall be very willing to do so, on my return from Dublin.

My stage-manager is a brother of James Wallack, well bred, and pleasant to deal with, and also very kind and courteous to me. Everybody in the theatre is civil and good to me, and I am heartily grateful to them all. As for my good host and hostess of the Albion, they really look after me in the most devoted and affectionate manner, so that I am quite of my poor maid's opinion, that this is a paradise of peace and comfort compared with Mrs. ——'s lodging-house.

My dressing-room at the theatre is wretched in point of size and situation, being not much larger than this sheet of paper, and up a sort of steep ladder staircase: in other respects, it is tidy enough, and infinitely better than the dark barrack-room you remember me dressing in when I was in Manchester years ago, when I was a girl—alas! I don't mean a pun! It is not the same theatre, but a new one, built by the Mr. Knowles who engaged me to act here, and one of the prettiest, brightest, and most elegant playhouses I ever saw; admirable for the voice, and of a most judicious size and shape. Unfortunately, a large hotel has been built immediately adjoining it (I suspect by the same person, who is a great speculator, and apt, I should think, to have many, if not too many, irons in the fire), and the space that should have been appropriated to the accommodation of the actors, behind the scenes in the theatre, has been sacrificed to the adjoining building, which is a pity.

If I were to tell you the names of the people who act with me, you would be none the wiser. The company is a very fair one indeed, and might be an excellent one, if they were not all too great geniuses either to learn or to rehearse their parts. The French do not put the flimsiest vaudeville upon the stage without rehearsing it for three months; here, however, and everywhere else in England, people play such parts as Macbeth with no more than three rehearsals; and I am going to act this evening in the "Honeymoon," with a gentleman who, filling the principal part in the piece, has not thought fit to attend at the rehearsal; so that though I was there, I may say in fact that I have had no rehearsal of it,—which is businesslike and pleasant.

Oh, my dear Hal, I strive to judge of my position as reasonably as I can! I do hope that in spite of the loss of youth, of person, and feeling (which latter communicates itself even to acting), I may be able to fill some parts better than I did formerly. I have no longer any nervousness to contend with—only a sense of the duty I owe to my employers and spectators, to take the utmost pains, and do my work as well as I possibly can for them.

My physical power of voice and delivery is not diminished, which is good for tragedy; my self-possession is increased, which ought to be good for comedy; and I do trust I may succeed, at least sufficiently to be able, by going from one place to another, and returning to America when I have worn out my public favor here—say, in two years,—to make what will enable me to live independently, though probably upon very small means.

I write this after my first night's performance, and I trust my views are not unreasonable. How I wondered at myself, as I stood at the side scene the other night, without any quickening of the pulse or beating of the heart—thanks to the far other experiences I have gone through, which have left me small sensibility for stage apprehensions; and yet I could hardly have believed it possible that I should have been as little nervous as I was. When I went on, however, I had to encounter the only thing I had dreaded; and the loud burst of public welcome (suggestive of how many associations, and what a contrast!) shocked me from head to foot, and tried my nerves to a degree that affected my performance unfavorably through several scenes.

But this was my first appearance after thirteen years of absence from the stage; and, of course, no second emotion of the kind awaits me. The exertion and exposure of the performance gave me a violent cold and sore throat, and I have been obliged to send for a doctor. I had two rehearsals yesterday, which did not mend matters, but I have bolstered myself up pro tem., and what with inhaling hot water and swathing my throat in cold, and lozenges and gargles, etc., I hope to fight through without breaking down.... I have heard from Catherine Sedgwick, who says that it is a long time since she heard from you or Emily. She adds: "I shall be very glad to hear from them again. In your absence, I had nothing to give interest to my letters to them, and I have not written; and they, naturally, had no sufficient motive to write to me, so that I have been in complete ignorance about them. Harriet S—— I reckon among my friends for both worlds."

God bless you, my dear Hal. Give dear Dorothy my love.

Ever yours, FANNY.

MANCHESTER, Tuesday, 23d.

A thousand thanks, my dear Lady Dacre, for all your kind inquiries about, and sympathy in, my concerns. I am going on prosperously. The theatre is quite full when I play, in spite of the very bad weather, and I think my employer can afford to pay me, without grudging, my nightly salary.

I think you are right in saying I am my own best critic; my mother being gone, I believe I really am so.

I have played, since I last wrote to you, Juliana, in the "Honeymoon," a rather pretty, foolish part, which I act accordingly; Lady Macbeth, which I never could, and cannot, and never shall can act; and Juliet, which, I suppose, I play neither better nor worse than formerly, but which, naturally, I am no longer personally fit to represent.

I am not very well, for the returning to such labor as this after thirteen years' disuse of it, and at thirty-seven years of age, is a severe physical trial, and has, of course, exhausted me very much. Nothing more, however, ails me than fatigue, and I have no doubt that a few more nights' "hard use" will enable me to stand steady under my new load of heavy circumstance.

You have asked me for newspaper reports, and I send them to you. You know my feeling about such things, but that is nothing to the purpose; if you can care for such praise or dispraise of me, it is no less than my duty to furnish you with it, at your request, if I can. You know I never read critiques, favorable or unfavorable, myself; so I do not even know what I send you.

Good-bye. Remember me respectfully and affectionately to Lord Dacre, and believe me ever

Yours truly, FANNY.

MANCHESTER, Thursday, 25th. DEAR HAL,

Mr. H. F. Chorley I believe to be a great friend of mine, and an uncommonly honest man, but I may be mistaken in both points. Your inquiry about my health I cannot answer very triumphantly. I am not well, and my feet and ankles swell so before I have stood five minutes on the stage, that the prolonged standing in shoes, which, though originally loose for me, become absolute instruments of torture, like those infamous "boots" of martyrizing memory, is a terrible physical ordeal for either a tragic or comic heroine—who had need indeed be something of a real one to endure it.

Some of this trouble is due to general debility, and some to the long-unaccustomed effort of so much standing, and will, I trust, gradually subside as I grow stronger and more used to my work....

I acted Juliet last night, and I am very weary to-day, but thankful to have my most arduous part well over.

Give my love to dear Dorothy. I am very sorry to hear of her being so unwell, for I know how anxious you must be about her. Thank her for her kind words to me....

God bless you, my dear,

I am ever as ever yours, FANNY.

MANCHESTER, Friday, 26th. DEAR HAL,

My throat has given me no more trouble since my first night's acting. I have a pertinacious cough, and a tremendous cold in my head, which are nuisances; but I am free from irritation in the throat, and have found hitherto, in my performances, my voice stronger, instead of weaker, than it was.... I am better than I was last week, and have no doubt I shall acquire strength as I go on, as my first start in this dismal work did not quite break me down.

The people here have shown me the most extreme kindness and hospitality, and I have had invitations to dine out every day this week that I have not acted.

My brother Henry has come over from Dublin, to spend a couple of days with me, and his visit has been an immense pleasure and comfort to me.

My time, thank God, is so incessantly occupied with all kinds of business—writing letters to managers, acquaintances, and friends; rehearsing, acting, looking after my dresses, correcting proof-sheets, and receiving visits—that I have no leisure but what I spend in sleep.

Henry has promised to mount me on a horse of his, when I get to Dublin; and I am sure that my favorite exercise will be of the greatest benefit to me.

The actors here are not more inattentive than they generally are, everywhere, to their business; their carelessness and want of conscience about it is nothing new to me, and all my bygone professional experience had fully prepared me for it. The company here is a better one than I shall probably find anywhere, even in London; and I have the advantage of having to do with a very civil, considerate, and obliging stage-manager.

I have made, at present, no further engagement for acting here. I shall spend Passion-week at Sutton Park with the Arkwrights, who have written to beg me to do so, and whose vicinity to this place makes that arrangement every way best for me, as in Easter-week I am to act in Manchester again, for the benefit of the above-mentioned courteous stage-manager. From the 12th to the 17th of April, I act at Bath and Bristol; and after that I think it is probable I shall act for a short time in London,—but this is uncertain.

Your questions, for which you apologize, are particularly agreeable to me, as, in spite of the ready invention and fluent utterance on which you compliment me, I am always charmed to have the subject of my letters suggested to me by the questions of my friends.

As my engagement in Dublin, like all the engagements I make, is a nightly one, if it does not answer to the manager I shall of course immediately put an end to it. I am secured from loss by payment after each performance but should never think of taking what I do not bring to my employer.

Mr. Calcraft writes me that he is sanguine about the engagement, in spite of the public distress, and wants me to leave three nights open after the 22d for the extension of it. We shall see.

God bless you, dear Hal. Give my affectionate love to Dorothy. I am most happy to hear she is better. The kindness of the Manchester people has filled my room with flowers, my "good angels," about which I am becoming every day more superstitious, for I am never four-and-twenty hours in a place that some do not make their appearance, to cheer and comfort me. Farewell.

Ever yours, FANNY.

BIRMINGHAM, Sunday, 28th. MY DEAR LADY DACRE,

I played last night for the last time in Manchester. The house was immensely full, and when I went on the stage after the piece, so loud and long and cordial were they in their kind demonstrations of good-will to me that, what with the exhaustion of a whole day's packing (which I have to do for myself, my maid being utterly incompetent) and the getting through my part, the whole thing was too much for me, and I turned quite faint, and all but fell down on the stage. But I am not a fainting woman, and so only went into violent hysterics as soon as I was carried to my dressing-room. So much for that "pride" which you speak of as likely to prevent my shedding tears when encountering the kind acclamations of a multitude of my "fellow-creatures;" the most trying to the nerves of all demonstrations, except, perhaps, its howl of execration.

I came to this place to-day, and feel indescribably cheerless and lonely in my strange inn. The room at Manchester was the home of a fortnight, but this feels most disconsolately unfamiliar. Moreover, I only act here one night, Tuesday, and then go to Liverpool, where the master of the Adelphi Hotel, where I shall stay, is a person to whom I have been known for many years, in whose house I have been with my children, and where I shall feel less friendlessly forlorn than I do here.

I shall remain there about a week, and then go to Dublin, where I expect to stay about a fortnight, and where I shall find my youngest brother—a circumstance of infinite consolation and comfort to me. Passion-week I spend at Sutton Park with the Arkwrights; after that go to Bath and Bristol, and then to London, where I have now an engagement for a month at the Princess's Theatre.

You have now the map of my proceedings for the next six weeks, after which I hope I shall see you in London. I direct this to Chesterfield Street, as you say you shall be back there on Thursday. I have been kept constantly supplied with the loveliest flowers all the time of my stay in Manchester, by one kind person or another, which has greatly helped to keep up my courage and spirits.

Pray give my respects to Lord Dacre.

I am ever, my dear Lady Dacre, Yours truly, FANNY.

ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, Thursday, March 4th, 1847. MY DEAR HAL,

I do not go to Bath, but to Manchester, on the 25th and 27th, and perhaps on the Monday of Passion-week; but this is not certain. If not on that Monday, then early in Easter-week; and Passion-week I shall spend with Mrs. Arkwright at Sutton.

On Thursday in Easter-week, April 8th, I must be in London, as I act there for two nights gratuitously for your poor starving fellow-countrymen, for whom an amateur performance is being got up.

On April 15th I go down to Bath, and act there on the 17th, and my engagement at the Princess's Theatre does not begin till the 26th of that month. This is the plan of my campaign as far as it is laid out; should any change occur in it, I will let you know as soon as I know of it myself.

And so your plan for my taking the air, my dear, was to get into a close fly. I confess that would not have occurred to my ingenuity, or I should think to that of any but an Irish humorist. I don't feel sure that there mayn't be a pun hidden somewhere in your proposition. The damp, indeed, I might have taken, to the greatest perfection, for there did stand a whole row of vehicles before my very windows at Manchester which were being saturated through and through with the rain that fell upon them all day long, and must have adapted them admirably for the purposes of a healthful drive for an invalid suffering from sore throat and a heavy cold.

I have nothing to say to your impertinent remarks on my zigzag progress to my various engagements, neither any observation to make about Emily's information upon the subject of my white cashmere gown.

I am perfectly persuaded that, as a considerable amount of food goes into one's stomach, the use of which is merely to produce necessary distension of all the organs, channels, receptacles, machinery, etc., in short; so a considerable amount of words proceeds out of our mouths, the use of which is merely to keep our lungs aired and our speaking organs in exercise; and for that purpose the follies, and foibles, and even faults of our friends are excellent material, provided no bitterness mixes in the process; from which, as I feel myself very safe between you and Emily, I abandon myself absolutely to you both; and as I believe scribbling (apparently unnecessary) is as necessary to the health of both of you as the apparently superfluous food and words which people swallow and utter, I am quite content you should fill up your paper with the mad eccentricity of the order of my engagements, the rotation of my gowns, and the dripping street-cabs in which I refuse to take the air for the benefit of my health....

I do not know who the amateurs are who are to act for the starving Irish with me in London. Forster, the editor of the Examiner, I hear, is one; Henry Greville, who, indeed, is the getter-up of the whole thing, another; but for the rest I do not know.

Your people are what are commonly called a generous people; and that, I suppose, is why they don't mind begging. I think it takes an immensity of generosity to beg.

Only think of Mr. Radley, here at the Adelphi, expressing his surprise, when he saw me, that you were not with me! Was not that really quite touching and nice of him?

My cousin, Charles Mason, is here.... His amiable temper and gentle manner made him a favorite with my poor mother, and I like to see him on that account....

How sorry I shall be for both you and Dorothy when your pleasant time at Torquay is over! especially for you, who will have to see misery and sometimes hear nonsense. I mean when you go back to Ireland; not, of course, while you are with me....

ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, Sunday, 7th.

I have minded what you said (as when didn't I?), and am swallowing ipecacuanha lozenges by the gross. It drives me almost crazy that you should be compelled to make your plans so dependent upon mine, which are so dependent upon the uncertain wills and arrangements of so many people.

The manager of the Princess's Theatre, where I am engaged to act in London, will not allow me to act for the proposed charity at the St. James's Theatre. I offered to give up the engagement with him rather than break my promise to the amateurs and disappoint all their plans; but he will not let me off my engagement to him, and will not permit me to appear anywhere else before that takes place. I think he is injuring himself by balking a pet plan of amusement in which all manner of fine folks, lady patronesses, and the Queen herself, had been induced to interest themselves; and I think his preventing my acting for this charity will injure him much more than my appearance on this occasion, before my coming out at his theatre, could have done. But, of course, he must be the judge of his own interest; and, at any rate, having entered into an engagement with him, I cannot render myself liable to squabbles, and perhaps a lawsuit with him, about it. All these petty worries and annoyances torment and confuse me a good deal. I have a very poor brain for business, and there is something in the ignoble vulgarity and coarseness of manner that I occasionally encounter that increases my inaptitude by the sort of dismay and disgust with which it fills me. If the person who has hired me does not relent about these charity representations, I shall be obliged to give them up, and then I shall act in Manchester at that time, instead of on the 25th and 27th of March, which had been before intended, but which I now think I should give to two representations in Chester on my way back from Dublin. All this, you see, is still in a state of most vexatious uncertainty, and I can give you no satisfaction about it, having been able to obtain none myself....

Perhaps, dearest Hal, I ought not to have asked you the precise meaning of what you wrote about dear little H——[her nephew, a charming child, who died in early boyhood], but, every now and then, those expressions which have become almost meaningless in the mouths of the great majority of those who use them strike me very much when used by thinking people.

Unless death produces in us an immediate accession of goodness (which, I think, in those who have labored faithfully to be good here, and are therefore prepared and ready for more goodness, it may), I cannot conceive that it should produce greater nearness to God.

Place, time, life, death, earth, heaven, are divisions and distinctions that we make, like the imaginary lines we trace upon the surface of the globe. But goodness, surely, is nearness to God, and only goodness; and though I suppose those good servants of His who have striven to do His will while in this life are positively nearer to Him after death, I think it is because, in laying down the sins of infirmity that inevitably lodge in their mortal bodies, they really are thus much better after death.

I do not think this is the case with those who have not striven after excellence, which a young child can hardly be supposed to have done; because if there is one thing I believe in, it is that there is work to do for every soul called into conscious existence.... If Dorothy were to die, I should believe she had gone nearer to God. His care and love for us is, I verily believe, the nearest of all things to us; but I think our conscious nearness to Him depends upon how we do His will—i.e. how we strive to do it.

I do not speak of Christ in this discussion, because, you know, I think it was God's will, but man's nature, that He came to show us, and to teach; and this part of the subject would involve me in more than I have space to write: but we will speak of this hereafter.

Is it not strange that Charles Greville and you should both be writing to me just now upon this same subject, of life after death?

I have been walking to-day and yesterday in the Botanical Garden here.... The place is full of the saddest and tenderest recollections to me; it is full, too, of innumerable witnesses of God's mercy and wisdom; plants and flowers from every climate, and the annual resurrection of the earth is already begun among them. I am very unwell to-day, but I was well yesterday, and this seems to be now the sort of life-tenure I may expect:—so be it.

God bless you, dear.

I am ever yours, FANNY.

DEAR DOROTHY,

I send you a kiss, which Hal will give you for me.

MORRISON'S HOTEL, DUBLIN, March 14th, 1847. MY DEAR HAL,

I think you must have begun to think that I never meant to write to you again; for it is seldom that three unanswered letters of yours are allowed to accumulate in my writing-book; but since I left Liverpool, I have really not had leisure to write....

The houses at Liverpool were crammed, but here last night there was a very indifferent one, partly, they say, owing to the fact that the Lord Lieutenant bespeaks the play for to-morrow night; but I should think it much more rational to account for it by the deplorable condition to which the famine has reduced the country, which ought to affect the minds of those whose bodies do not suffer with something like a sympathetic seriousness, inimical to public diversions....