far more impartial than, in moments of disappointment, we are apt to admit, and quite as often procures us unexpected and unthought-of pleasures as defeats those we had proposed for ourselves.  Pazienza!  Dear Dall, who, I see, has produced her invariable impression upon your mind, bids me thank you for the kind things you say of her, at the same time that she says, “though they are undeserved, she is thankful for the affection that dictates them.”  She is excellent.  You bid me tell you of my father, and how his health and spirits continue to struggle against his exertions and anxieties:  tolerably well, thank God!  I sometimes think they have the properties of that palm tree which is said to grow under the pressure of immense weights.  He looks very well, and, except the annoyances of his position in the theater, has rather less cause for depression than for some time past.  Though we have not yet obtained our “decree,” we understand that the Lord Chancellor says openly that we shall get it, so that uncertainty of the issue no longer aggravates the wearisome delays of this unlucky appeal....  I need not tell you what my feeling about acting Queen Katharine is; you, who know how conscious I am of my own deficiencies for such an undertaking, will easily conceive my distress at having such a task assigned me.  Dall, who entirely agrees with me about it, wishes me to remonstrate upon the subject, but that I will not do.  I am in that theater to earn my living by serving its interests, and if I was desired to act Harlequin, for those two purposes, should feel bound to do so.  But I cannot help thinking the management short-sighted.  I think their real interest, as far as I am concerned, which they overlook for some immediate tangible advantage, is not to destroy my popularity by putting me into parts which I must play ill, and not to take from my future career characters which require physical as well as mental maturity, and which would be my natural resources when I no longer become Juliet and her youthful sisters of the drama.  But of course they know their own affairs, and I am not the manager of the theater.  Those who have its direction, I suppose, make the best use they can of their instruments.

[My performance of Queen Katharine was not condemned as an absolute failure only because the public in general didn’t care about it, and the friends and well-wishers of the theater were determined not to consider it one.  But as I myself remember it, it deserved to be called nothing else; it was a school-girl’s performance, tame, feeble, and ineffective, entirely wanting in the weight and dignity indispensable for the part, and must sorely have tried the patience and forbearance of such of my spectators as were fortunate and unfortunate enough to remember my aunt; one of whom, her enthusiastic admirer, and my excellent friend, Mr. Harness, said that seeing me in that dress was like looking at Mrs. Siddons through the diminishing end of an opera-glass: