vast body of good sense, education, and wealth, and efficient to hold the beam even between the scales—­throws itself man by man into one or the other of them, and so only swells the adverse parties on each side.

Parliament meets again in a few days, and then comes the tug of war.  Lord John Russell was at Oatlands while we were there, and as the Francis Egertons and their guests were all anti-Reformers, they led him rather a hard life.  He bore all their attacks with great good humor, however, and with the well-satisfied smile of a man who thinks himself on the right, and knows himself on the safe side, and wisely forbore to reply to their sallies.  Our visit there was delightful.

As the distance is but one and twenty miles, my mother and I posted down in the open carriage.  The only guests we found on our arrival were Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan (she is a daughter of Lady Dacre’s, and a charming person), Lord John Russell, and two of our corps dramatique, Mr. Craven and Captain Shelley, son of Sir John Shelley, a handsome, good-humored, pleasant young gentleman, who acts Charles V. in “Hernani.”  I got up very early the first morning I was there and went down before breakfast to our little old cottage.  In the lane leading to it I met a poor woman who lived near us, and whom we used to employ.  I spoke to her, but she did not know me again.  I wonder if these four years can have changed me so much?  The tiny house had not been inhabited since we lived there....  My aunt Siddons is better, and Cecy very well.

Your affectionate
F. A. K.

[The beautiful domain of Oatlands was only rented at this time by Lord Francis Egerton, who delighted so much in it that he made overtures for the purchase of it.  The house was by no means a good one, though it had been the abode of royalty; but the park was charming, and the whole neighborhood, especially the wooded ranges of St. George’s Hill, extremely wild and picturesque....  Lord Francis Egerton bought St. George’s Hill, at the foot of which he built Hatchford, Lady Ellesmere’s charming dower house and residence after his death, and the house of Oatlands became a country inn, very pleasant to those who had never known it as the house of former friends, and therefore did not meet ghosts in all its rooms and garden walks; and the park was cut up into small villa residences and rascally inclined citizen’s boxes.  Hatchford, the widowed home of Lady Ellesmere and burial-place of her brother, to whose memory she erected there an elaborate mausoleum, has passed out of the family possessions and become the property of strangers.  One son of the house lives on St. George’s Hill, and has his home where I have so often drawn rein while riding with his father and mother to look over the wild, wooded slopes to the smiling landscape stretching in sunny beauty far below us.]