Your affectionate
F. A. K.

Friday, March 2d.—­I read Shirley’s “Gentleman of Venice,” and did not like it much....  While I was riding in the park with John, Mr. Willett came up to us, and told me, as great good news, that they were out of Chancery, and had obtained an order to have their money out of court.  I thought this indeed good news, and we cantered up the drive in hopes of meeting my mother in the carriage; but she had gone home.  On reaching home, I ran to look for her, but thought she would like better to hear the news from my father.

I told Dall of it, however; and she, who had just seen my father, said that he considered what had happened a most unfortunate thing for him; and so my bright, new joy fell to the ground, and was broken all to pieces.  Upon further explanation, however, it seems that it is an advantage to the other proprietors, though not to him; no part of the recovered money returning to him, because he had borrowed his share of it from Mr. Willett; and the only difference is that he will not have to pay the interest on it any more, and so far it is a small advantage to him.  But it is a great one to them, poor men! and therefore we ought to be glad, and not look only at our own share of the business, though naturally that is the most interesting to us.  I sometimes doubt, after all, if we have really by any means a clear and comprehensive view of the whole state of that concern, receiving our impressions from my father, who naturally looks at it only from the side of his own personal stake in it....  After dinner John read me a letter he had just received from Richard Trench—­a most beautiful letter.  What a fine fellow he is, and what a noble set of young men these friends of my brother’s are!  After tea read Arthur Hallam’s essay on the philosophical writings of Cicero.  It is very excellent; I should like to have marked some of the passages, they are so admirably clear and true; but he has only lent it to me.  His Latin and Greek quotations were rather a trial, but I have no doubt his English is as good as anything he quotes.  Surely England twenty years hence should be in a higher state of moral and intellectual development than it is now:  these young heads seem to me admirably good and strong, and some score years hence these fine spirits will be influencing the national mind and soul of England; and it pleases me much to think so. [Alas! as far as dear Arthur Hallam was concerned, my prophetic confidence was vain.] After finishing Hallam’s essay, I took up “King Lear,” and read the end of that, “and my poor fool is hanged!” O Lord, what an agony!  In reading “Lear,” one of Mr. Harness’s criticisms on my “Star of Seville” recurred to me.  In the scene where Estrella deplores her brother’s death, I have used frequent repetition of the same words and exclamations.  I wrote upon impulse, without deliberation, and simply as my conception of sorrow prompted me, such words as