hereafter I have no doubt; but at present he is engrossed by a passion (for it seems to me nothing less) which occupies his mind and time, to the detriment, if not the exclusion, of all other studies.

I feel almost ashamed of saying anything about myself, after the two or three scoldings you have sent me of late.  Perhaps while my blue devils found vent in ridiculous verses, they did not much matter; but their having prompted me lately to throw between seven and eight hundred pages (about a year’s work) into the fire, seems to me now rather deplorable.  You perhaps will say that the fire is no bad place for seven or eight hundred pages of my manuscript; but I had spent time and pains on them, and I think they should not have been thrown away in a foolish fit of despondency.  I am at present not very well.  I do not mean that I have any specific illness, but headaches and side-aches, so that I am one moment in a state of feverish excitement and the next nervous and low-spirited; this is not a good account, but a true one.

I have no “new friends,” dearest H——­; perhaps because my dislike to society makes me stupid and disagreeable when I am in it.  I have made one acquaintance, which might perhaps grow to a friendship were it not that distance and its attendant inconveniences have hitherto prevented my becoming more intimate with the lady I refer to.  She is a married woman; her name is Jameson.  She is an Irishwoman, and the authoress of the “Diary of an Ennuyee.”  I like her very much; she is extremely clever; I wish I knew her better.  I have been to one dance and one or two dinners lately, but to tell you the truth, dear H——­, the old people naturally treat me after my years, as a young person, and the young people (perhaps from my self-conceit) seem to me stupid and uninteresting, and so, you see, I do not like society.  Cecilia Siddons is out of town at present, and I have not seen her for some time.  You may have heard that the theatre has gained a lawsuit against Sinclair, the celebrated singer, by a reversal of the former verdict in the case.  We were not even aware that such a process was going on, and when my father came home and said, “We have won our cause,” my mother and myself started up, supposing he meant the chancery suit.  That, unfortunately, is still pending, pending, like the sword of Damocles, over our heads, banishing all security for the present or hope for the future.  The theatre is, I believe, doing very well just now, and we go pretty often to the play, which I like.  I have lately been seeing my father playing Falstaff several times, and I think it is an excellent piece of acting; he gives all the humor without too much coarseness, or charging, and through the whole, according to the fat knight’s own expression, he is “Sir John to all the world,” with a certain courtly deportment which prevents him from degenerating into the mere gross buffoon.  They are in sad want