too ostentatious.  Escutcheons and silver coronals everywhere.  Lord Lovelace’s taste that, and not Lady Byron’s, which is perfectly simple.  You know that she was buried in the same vault with her father, whose coffin and the box containing his heart were in perfect preservation.  Scott’s only grandson, too, is just dead of sheer debauchery.  Strange!  As if one generation paid in vice and folly for the genius of the past.  By the way, are you not charmed at the Emperor’s marriage?  To restore to princes honest love and healthy preference, instead of the conventional intermarriages which have brought epilepsy and idiotism and madness into half the royal families of Christendom!  And then the beauty of that speech, with its fine appeals to the best sympathies of our common nature!  I am proud of him.  What a sad, sad catastrophe was that of young Pierce!  I won’t call his father general, and I hope he will leave it off.  With us it is a real offence to give any man a higher rank than belongs to him,—­to say captain, for instance, to a lieutenant,—­and that is one of our usages which it would be well to copy.  But we have follies enough, God knows; that duchess address, with all its tuft-hunting signatures, is a thing to make Englishwomen ashamed.  Well, they caught it deservedly in an address from American women, written probably by some very clever American man.  No, I have not seen Longfellow’s lines on the Duke.  One gets sick of the very name.  Henry is exceedingly fond of his little sister.  I remember that when he first saw the snow fall in large flakes, he would have it that it was a shower of white feathers.  Love to all my dear friends, the W——­s, Mrs. Sparks, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Hawthorne.  Ever, dearest friend, most affectionately yours,

    M.R.M.

    (1st March, 1853.)

    The numbers for the election of President of France in favor of
    Louis Napoleon were for against 7119791 1119

    Look through the back of this against the candle, or the fire, or
    any light.

My Very Dear Friend:  Having a note to send to Mrs. Sparks, who has sent me, or rather whose husband has sent me, two answers to Lord Mahon, which, coming through a country bookseller, have, I suspect, been some months on the way, I cannot help sending it enclosed to you, that I may have a chat with you en passant,—­the last, I hope, before your arrival.  If you have not seen the above curious instance of figures forming into a word, and that word into a prophecy, I think it will amuse you, and I want besides to tell you some of the on-dits about the Empress.  A Mr. Huddlestone, the head of one of our great Catholic houses, is in despair at the marriage.  He had been desperately in love with her for two years in Spain,—­had followed her to Paris,—­was called back to England by his father’s illness, and was on the point of crossing the Channel, after that father’s death, to lay himself and L30,000 or L40,000 a year at