it seems to me it must be its own perpetual stimulus and reward.  Is not Miranda’s exclamation, “O brave new world, that has such people in it!” on the first sight of the company of villainous men who ruined her and her father, with the royal old magician’s comment, “’Tis new to thee!” exquisitely pathetic?  I must go to my work; ’tis “The Gamester” to-night; I wish it were over.  Good-by, my dear Mrs. Jameson.  Thank you for your kind letters; I value them very much, and am your affectionate

F. KEMBLE.

P.S.—­I am very happy here, in the society of an admirable person who is as good as she is highly gifted,—­a rare union,—­and who, moreover, loves me well, which adds much, in my opinion, to her other merits.  I mean my friend Miss S——.

My only reminiscence connected with this dinner at Lady Morgan’s is of her kind and comical zeal to show me an Irish jig, performed secundum artem, when she found that I had never seen her national dance.  She jumped up, declaring nobody danced it as well as herself, and that I should see it immediately; and began running through the rooms, with a gauze scarf that had fallen from her shoulders fluttering and trailing after her, calling loudly for a certain young member of the viceregal staff, who was among the guests invited to a large evening party after the dinner, to be her partner.  But the gentleman had already departed (for it was late), and I might have gone to my grave unenlightened upon the subject of jigs if I had not seen one performed, to great perfection, by some gay young members of a family party, while I was staying at Worsley with my friends Lord and Lady Ellesmere, whose children and guests got up an impromptu ball on the occasion of Lady Octavia Grosvenor’s birthday, in the course of which the Irish national dance was performed with great spirit, especially by Lord Mark Kerr and Lady Blanche Egerton.  It resembles a good deal the saltarello of the Italian peasants in rhythm and character; and a young Irishman, servant of some friends of mine, covered himself with glory by the manner in which he joined a party of Neapolitan tarantella dancers, merely by dint of his proficiency in his own native jig.  A great many years after my first acquaintance with Lady Morgan in Dublin, she renewed our intercourse by calling on me in London, where she was spending the season, and where I was then living with my father, who had become almost entirely deaf and was suffering from a most painful complication of maladies.  My relations with the lively and amusing Irish authoress consisted merely in an exchange of morning visits, during one of which, after talking to me with voluble enthusiasm of Cardinal Gonsalvi and Lord Byron, whose portraits hung in her room, and who, she assured me, were her two pre-eminent heroes, she plied me with a breathless series of pressing invitations to breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, evening parties, to meet everybody in London that I did and did not know, and upon my