narrator, “she is so sweet and charming a creature that any man might fall in love with her notwithstanding.”  To be sure Mr. Thackeray liked you.  How could he help it?  Did not he also like Dr. Holmes?  I hope so.  How glad I should be to see him in England, and how glad I shall be to see Mr. Hawthorne!  He will find all the best judges of English writing admiring him to his heart’s content, warmly and discriminatingly; and a consulship in a bustling town will give him the cheerful reality, the healthy air of every-day life, which is his only want.  Will you tell all these dear friends, especially Mr. and Mrs. W——­, how deeply I feel their affectionate sympathy, and thank Mr. Whittier and Professor Longfellow over and over again for their kind condolence?  Tell Mr. Whittier how much I shall prize his book.  He has an earnest admirer in Buckingham Palace, Marianne Skerrett, known as the Queen’s Miss Skerrett, the lady chiefly about her, and the only one to whom she talks of books.  Miss Skerrett is herself a very clever woman, and holds Mr. Whittier to be not only the greatest, but the one poet of America; which last assertion the poet himself would, I suspect, be the very first to deny.  Your promise of Dr. Parsons’s poem is very delightful to me.  I hold firm to my admiration of those stanzas on Webster.  Nothing written on the Duke came within miles of it, and I have no doubt that the poem on Dante’s bust is equally fine....  Mr. Justice Talfourd has just printed a new tragedy.  He sent it to me from Oxford, not from Reading, where he had passed four days and never gave a copy to any mortal, and told me, in a very affectionate letter which accompanied it, that “it was at present a very private sin, he having only given eight or ten copies in all.”  I suppose that it will be published, for I observe that the “not published” is written, not printed, and that Moxon’s name is on the title-page.  It is called “The Castilian,”—­is on the story of a revolt headed by Don John de Padilla in the early part of Charles the Fifth’s reign, and is more like Ion than either of his other tragedies.  I have just been reading a most interesting little book in manuscript, called “The Heart of Montrose.”  It is a versification in three ballads of a very striking letter in Napier’s “Life and Times of Montrose,” by the young lady who calls herself Mary Maynard.  It is really a little book that ought to make a noise, not too long, full of grace and of interest, and she has adhered to the true story with excellent taste, that story being a very remarkable union of the romantic and the domestic.  I am afraid that my other young poet, ——­, is dying of consumption; those fine spirits often fall in that way.  I have just corrected my book for a cheaper edition.  Mr. Bentley is very urgent for a second series, and I suppose I must try.  I shall get you to write for me to Mr. Hector Bossange when you come, for come you must.  My eyes begin to feel the effects of this long confinement