I can hardly sit down when standing, or rise from my chair without assistance, walk quite double, and am lifted up stairs step by step by my man-servant.  I thought, two years ago, I could walk fifteen or sixteen miles a day!  O, I was too proud of my activity!  I am sure we are smitten in our vanities.  However, you will bring the summer, which is, they say, to do me good; and even if that should fail, it will do me some good to see you, that is quite certain.  Thank you for telling me about the Galignani, and about the kind American reception of my book; some one sent me a New York paper (the Tribune, I think), full of kindness, and I do assure you that to be so heartily greeted by my kinsmen across the Atlantic is very precious to me.  From the first American has there come nothing but good-will.  However, the general kindness here has taken me quite by surprise.  The only fault found was with the title, which, as you know, was no doing of mine; and the number of private letters, books, verses, (commendatory verses, as the old poets have it), and tributes of all sorts, and from all manner of persons, that I receive every day is something quite astonishing.

Our great portrait-painter, John Lucas, certainly the first painter of female portraits now alive, has been down here to take a portrait for engraving.  He has been most successful.  It is looking better, I suppose, than I ever do look; but not better than under certain circumstances—­listening to a favorite friend, for example—­I perhaps might look.  The picture is to go to-morrow into the engraver’s hands, and I hope the print will be completed before your departure; also they are engraving, or are about to engrave, a miniature taken of me when I was a little girl between three and four years old.  They are to be placed side by side, the young child and the old withered woman, ——­ a skull and cross-bones could hardly be a more significant memento mori!  I have lost my near neighbor and most accomplished friend, Sir Henry Russell, and many other friends, for Death has been very busy this winter, and Mr. Ware is gone!  He had sent me his “Zenobia,” “from the author,” and for that very reason, I suppose, some one had stolen it; but I had replaced both that and the letters from Rome, and sent them to Mr. Kingsley as models for his “Hypatia.”  He has them still.  He had never heard of them till I named them to him.  They seem to me very fine and classical, just like the best translations from some great Latin writer.  And I have been most struck with Edgar Poe, who has been republished, prose and poetry, in a shilling volume called “Readable Books.”  What a deplorable history it was!—­I mean his own,—­the most unredeemed vice that I have met with in the annals of genius.  But he was a very remarkable writer, and must have a niche if I write again; so must your two poets, Stoddard and Taylor.  I am very sorry you missed Mrs. Trollope; she is a most remarkable woman,