in a mesmeric sleep can taste the sourness of the vinegar on another person’s palate, I am ready to go the whole length of the transmigration of senses.  But after all, except from hearing so much, I am as ignorant as you are, in my own experience.  One of my sisters was thrown into a sort of swoon, and could not open her eyelids, though she heard what passed, once or twice or thrice; and she might have been a prophetess by this time, perhaps, if, partly from her own feeling on the subject, and partly from mine, she had not determined never to try the experiment again.  It is hideous and detestable to my imagination; as I confessed to you, it makes my blood run backwards; and if I were you, I would not (with the nervous weakness you speak of) throw myself into the way of it, I really would not.  Think of a female friend of mine begging me to give her a lock of my hair, or rather begging my sister to ‘get it for her,’ that she might send it to a celebrated prophet of mesmerism in Paris, to have an oracle concerning me.  Did you ever, since the days of the witches, hear a more ghastly proposition?  It shook me so with horror, I had scarcely voice to say ‘no,’ hough I did say it very emphatically at last, I assure you.  A lock of my hair for a Parisian prophet?  Why, if I had yielded, I should have felt the steps of pale spirits treading as thick as snow all over my sofa and bed, by day and night, and pulling a corresponding lock of hair on my head at awful intervals. I, who was born with a double set of nerves, which are always out of order; the most excitable person in the world, and nearly the most superstitious.  I should have been scarcely sane at the end of a fortnight, I believe of myself!  Do you remember the little spirit in gold shoe-buckles, who was a familiar of Heinrich Stilling’s?  Well, I should have had a French one to match the German, with Balzac’s superfine boot-polish in place of the buckles, as surely as I lie here a mortal woman.

I congratulate you (amid all cares and anxieties) upon the view of Naples in the distance, but chiefly on your own happy and just estimate of your selected position in life.  It does appear to me wonderfully and mournfully wrong, when men of letters, as it is too much the fashion for them to do, take to dishonoring their profession by fruitless bewailings and gnashings of teeth; when, all the time, it must be their own fault if it is not the noblest in the world.  Miss Mitford treats me as a blind witness in this case; because I have seen nothing of the literary world, or any other sort of world, and yet cry against her ‘pen and ink’ cry.  It is the cry I least like to hear from her lips, of all others; and it is unworthy of them altogether.  On the lips of a woman of letters, it sounds like jealousy (which it cannot be with her), as on the lips of a woman of the world, like ingratitude.  Madame Girardin’s ‘Ecole des Journalistes’ deserved Jules Janin’s reproof of it; and there