GREAT RUSSELL STREET, October 24, 1830. 
     DEAR H——­,

I have been too busy to answer your last sooner, but this hour before bedtime, the first quiet one for some time, shall be yours.  I have heard nothing more of my brother, and am ignorant where he is or how engaged at present.  You judged rightly with respect to the impossibility of longer keeping my mother in ignorance of his absence from England.  The result was pretty much what I had apprehended; but her feelings have now become somewhat calmer on the subject.  We are careful, however, as much as possible, to avoid all mention of or reference to my brother in her presence, for she is in a very cruel state of anxiety about him.

I am endeavoring as much as possible to follow my studies with some regularity.  I have forsworn paying and receiving morning visits; so that, when no rehearsal interferes, I get my practicing, my singing, and my reading in tolerable peace.

I have had a key of Russell Square offered me, which privilege I shall most thankfully accept.  Walking regularly is, of course, essential, and though I rather dread the idea of solitarily turning round and round that dreary emblem of eternity, a circular gravel-walk, over-gloomed with soot-blackened privet bushes, I am sure I ought, and I mean to do it every day for an hour.  We do not dine till six, when I do not act, and when I do, I do not go to the theater till that hour; so that from ten in the morning, when breakfast is over, I get a tolerably long day.  I have obtained my father’s leave to learn drawing and German, and as soon as our house is a little more comfortably settled, I shall begin both.  I do not know whether I have the least talent for drawing, but I have so strong a desire to possess that accomplishment that I think, by the help of a good master and patience and hard work, I must succeed to some decent degree.  I wish to provide myself with every possible resource against the engrossing excitement of my profession while I remain in it, and to fill its place whenever I leave it, or it leaves me; all my occupations are with that view and to that end.

My father has promised me to speak to Mr. Murray about publishing my play and my verses.  I am anxious for this for several reasons, some of which I believe I mentioned to you; and to these I have since added a great wish to have some good prints I possess framed, for my little room, and I should not scruple to apply part of the money so earned to that purpose.  You asked me which is my room.  You remember the bathroom, next to what was my uncle John’s bedroom, on the third floor; the room above that my mother has fitted up beautifully for me, and I inhabit it all day long with great complacency and a sort of comfortable, Alexander-Selkirk feeling.  And this suggests a question which has seldom been out of my mind, and which I wish to recall