...  Jealousy, surely, is a disposition to suspect and take umbrage where there is no cause for suspicion or offense, which, to say the least of it, is very unreasonable; but that a woman should break her heart because her husband does love another woman better than her, seems to me natural enough, and with regard to Bianca, her provocations certainly warranted a very rational amount of misery; and though, had she not been a woman of violent passions and a jealous temperament, she probably would not have taken the means she did of resenting Fazio’s treatment of her, it appears to me that nothing but divine assistance and the strongest religious principle could preserve one under such circumstances from despair, madness, suicide, perhaps; hardly, however, the murder of one’s husband.  But assassinating other people seems a much more common mode of relieving their feelings among Italians than destroying themselves, which is rather a northern way of meeting, I should say of avoiding, difficulties.

I have had a holiday this week, and every now and then have written a word or two of “La Estrella;” it will never be done, and when it is it will be the horridest trash that ever was done; but I will let you have the pleasure of reading it, I promise you.  On Monday I play that favorite detestation of mine, Euphrasia; the Monday after that my father hopes to be able for Mercutio, and I return to Juliet.  By the by, you say Bianca is my best part, and I think my Juliet is better; I am not sure that there is not some kindred in the characters.  We are going to bring out a play of Lord Francis’, translated from the French, a sort of melodrama in blank verse, in which I have to act a part that I cannot do the least in the world, but of course that doesn’t signify.

["Katharine of Cleves,” translated from the French play of “Henri Trois et sa Cour,” and made the subject of one of Mr. Barham’s inimitably comical poems in the “Ingoldsby Legends.”  Mdlle.  Mars acted the part of the heroine in Paris, and it was one of several semi-tragical characters, in which, at the end of her great theatrical career, she reaped fresh laurels in an entirely new field, and showed the world that she might have been one of the best serious, not to say tragic, actresses of the French stage, as well as its one unrivaled female comedian.]

We have spent a wretched Christmas, as you may suppose; a house with its head sick all but to death, and all its members smitten with the direst anxiety, is not the place for a merry one.  God bless you, my dear, and send you years of peace of mind and health of body! this is, I suppose, what we mean when we wish for happiness here, either for ourselves or others.  Give my love and kindest good wishes to your people.

Have you seen in the papers that poor Torrijos and his little band, consisting of sixty men, several of whom John knew well, have been lured