I should think my acting of the part must have borne much the same proportion to hers.  I was dressed for the trial scene in imitation of the famous picture by Harlow, and of course must have recalled, in the most provoking and absurd manner, the great actress whom I resembled so little and so much.  In truth, I could hardly sustain the weight of velvet and ermine in which I was robed, and to which my small girlish figure was as little adapted as my dramatic powers were to the matronly dignity of the character.  I cannot but think that if I might have dressed the part as Queen Katharine really dressed herself, and been allowed to look as like as I could to the little dark, hard-favored woman Holbein painted, it would have been better than to challenge such a physical as well as dramatic comparison by the imitation of my aunt’s costume in the part.  Englishmen of her day will never believe that Katharine of Arragon could have looked otherwise than Mrs. Siddons did in Shakespeare’s play of “Henry VIII.;” but nothing could in truth be more unlike the historical woman than the tall, large, bare-armed, white-necked, Juno-eyed, ermine-robed ideal of queenship of the English stage.  That quintessence of religious, conscientious bigotry and royal Spanish pride is given, both in the portraits of contemporary painters and in Shakespeare’s delineation of her; the splendid magnificence of my aunt’s person and dress, as delineated in Harlow’s picture, has no affinity whatever to the real woman’s figure, or costume, or character.]

                               GREAT RUSSELL STREET, October 12, 1831. 
     DEAREST H——­,

I received my book and your letter very safely about a week ago, and would have written to say so sooner, but have been much occupied with one thing and another that has prevented me.  So you are beaten, vieilles perukes that you are! not by one or two, but by forty-one; and your bones are all the likelier to ache, and I am not at all sorry.  Think of Brougham going down on his marrow-bones (there can be none in them, though), and adjuring the Lords, con quella voce! e quel viso! to pass the Bill, like good boys, and remember the schoolmaster, who surely, when he is at home, cannot be said to be abroad.  A good coup de theatre is not an easy thing, and requires a good deal of tact and skill.  I cannot help thinking there must have been something grotesque in this performance of Brougham’s, as when Liston turned tragedian and recited Collins’s “Ode to the Passions” in a green coat and top boots.  The excitement, however, was tremendous; the House thronged to suffocation; as many people crammed into impossible space as the angels in the famous Needle-point controversy.  Lady Glengall declares that she sat for four hours on an iron bar.  I think this universal political effervescence has got into my head.  And what will you do now?  You cannot create forty-one Peers; the whole Book of Genesis affords