of their fathers.  Did you get my last unworthy letter?  I hope you did.  It would at all events show that there was on my part no intentional neglect, that I certainly had written in reply to the last letter that I received, although doubtless a letter had been lost on one side or the other.  I live so entirely in the quiet country that I have little to tell you that can be interesting.  Two things indeed, not generally known, I may mention:  that Stanfield Hall, the scene of the horrible murder of which you have doubtless read, was the actual birthplace of Amy Robsart,—­of whose tragic end, by the way, there is at last an authentic account, both in the new edition of Pepys and the first volume of the “Romance of the Peerage”; and that a friend of mine saw the other day in the window of a London bookseller a copy of Hume, ticketed “An Excellent Introduction to Macaulay.”  The great man was much amused at this practical compliment, as well he might be.  I have been reading the autobiographies of Lamartine and Chateaubriand, as well as Raphael, which, although not avowed, is of course and most certainly a continuation of “Les Confiances.”  What strange beings these Frenchmen are!  Here is M. de Lamartine at sixty, poet, orator, historian, and statesman, writing the stories of two ladies—­one of them married—­who died for love of him!  Think if Mr. Macaulay should announce himself as a lady-killer, and put the details not merely into a book, but into a feuilleton!

The Brownings are living quite quietly at Florence, seeing, I suspect, more Americans than English.  Mrs. Trollope has lost her only remaining daughter; arrived in England only time enough to see her die.

    Adieu, dear Mr. Fields; say everything for me to Mr. and Mrs.
    Ticknor, and Mr. and Mrs. Norton.  How much I should like to see you!

    Ever faithfully yours, M.R.M.

    (February, 1850.)

You will have thought me either dead or dying, my dear Mr. Fields, for ungrateful I hope you could not think me to such a friend as yourself, but in truth I have been in too much trouble and anxiety to write.  This is the story:  I live alone, and my servants become, as they are in France, and ought, I think, always to be, really and truly part of my family.  A most sensible young woman, my own maid, who waits upon me and walks out with me, (we have another to do the drudgery of our cottage,) has a little fatherless boy who is the pet of the house.  I wonder whether you saw him during the glimpse we had of you!  He is a fair-haired child of six years old, singularly quick in intellect, and as bright in mind and heart and temper as a fountain in the sun.  He is at school in Reading, and, the small-pox raging there like a pestilence, they sent him home to us to be out of the way.  The very next week my man-servant was seized with it, after vaccination of course.  Our medical friend advised me to send him away,