it with a concentrated ferocity that made one’s blood curdle.  He seemed to me to combine the supernatural malice of a fiend with the base reality of the meanest humanity.  His passion is prosaic, but all the more intensely terrible for that very reason.  I am to see him to-morrow in “Richard III.,” and, though I never saw the play before, am afraid I shall be disappointed, because Richard III. is a Plantagenet Prince, and should be a royal villain, and I am afraid Mr. Kean will not have the innate majesty which I think belongs to the part; however, we shall see, and when next I write I will tell you how it impressed me.

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

Yours ever,
FANNY.

16 ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, December, 1827. 
MY DEAREST H——­,

My heart is full of joy, and I write that you may rejoice with me; our dear John has distinguished himself greatly, but lest my words should seem sisterly and exaggerated, I will repeat what Mr. Peacock, his tutor, wrote to my father:  “He has covered himself with glory.  Such an oration as his has not been heard for many years in Cambridge, and it was as tastefully and modestly delivered as it was well written.”  This has made us all very, very happy, and though the first news of it overcame my poor mother, whose nerves are far from firm, she soon recovered, and we are impatiently expecting his return from college.  My play is at present being pruned by my father, and will therefore not occupy my thoughts again till it comes out, which I hope will be at Easter.  I did not write sooner, because I had nothing to say; but now that this joy about my brother has come to me, je te l’envoie.  Since last you heard from me I have seen the great West India Dock and the Thames Tunnel.  Oh, H——­, “que c’est une jolie chose que l’homme!” Annihilated by any one of the elements if singly opposed to its power, he by his genius yet brings their united forces into bondage, and compels obedience from all their manifold combined strength.  We penetrate the earth, we turn the course of rivers, we exalt the valleys and bow down the mountains; and we die and return to our dust, and they remain