of a woman at both the theatres.  I’ve half a mind to give Covent Garden one.  Don’t be surprised.  I have something to say to you on this subject, but have not room for it in this letter.  My father is just now acting in the north of England.  We expect him back in a fortnight.  God bless you, dear H——.

                             Yours ever,
          
                                                     FANNY.

The vehement passion of political interest which absorbed my brother at this time was in truth affecting the whole of English society almost as passionately.  In a letter written in 1827, the Duke of Wellington, after speaking of the strong partisan sentiment which was agitating the country, added, “The ladies and all the youth are with us;” that is, with the Tory party, which, under his leadership, was still an active power of obstruction to the imminent changes to which both he and his party were presently to succumb.  His ministry was a period of the stormiest excitement in the political world, and the importance of the questions at issue—­Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform—­powerfully affected men’s minds in the ranks of life least allied to the governing class.  Even in a home so obscure and so devoted to other pursuits and interests as ours, the spirit of the times made its way, and our own peculiar occupations became less interesting to us than the intense national importance of the public questions which were beginning to convulse the country from end to end.  About this time I met with a book which produced a great and not altogether favorable effect upon my mind (the blame resting entirely with me, I think, and not with what I read).  I had become moody and fantastical for want of solid wholesome mental occupation, and the excess of imaginative stimulus in my life, and was possessed with a wild desire for an existence of lonely independence, which seemed to my exaggerated notions the only one fitted to the intellectual development in which alone I conceived happiness to consist.  Mrs. Jameson’s “Diary of an Ennuyee,” which I now read for the first time, added to this desire for isolation and independence such a passionate longing to go to Italy, that my brain was literally filled with chimerical projects of settling in the south of Europe, and there leading a solitary life of literary labor, which, together with the fame I hoped to achieve by it, seemed to me the only worthy purpose of existence.  While under the immediate spell of her fascinating book, it was of course very delightful to me to make Mrs. Jameson’s acquaintance, which I did at the house of our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Basil Montagu.  They were the friends of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Proctor (Barry Cornwall, who married Mrs. Montagu’s daughter), and were themselves individually as remarkable, if not as celebrated, as many of their more famous friends.  Basil Montagu was the son of the Earl of Sandwich and the beautiful Miss Wray, whose German