which they originally emanated and into whose bosom they will return.  I cannot now go into all I think about this, for I have so many other things to talk about.  Since I began this letter I have heard a report that John is a prisoner, that he has been arrested and sent to Madrid.  Luckily I do not believe a word of this; if he has rendered himself obnoxious to the British authorities in Gibraltar they may have locked him up for a week or two there, and I see no great harm in that; but that he should have been delivered to the Spaniards and sent to Madrid I do not believe, because I know that the whole revolutionary party is going to pieces, and that they have neither the power nor the means to render themselves liable to such a disagreeable distinction.  We expect him home every day.  Only conceive, dear H——­, the ill-fortune that attends us:  my father, or rather the theater, is involved in six lawsuits I He and my mother are neither of them quite well; anxiety naturally has much share in their indisposition.

I learned Beatrice this morning and the whole of it, in an hour, which I tell you because I consider it a feat.  I am delighted at the thoughts of acting it; it will be the second part which I shall have acted with real pleasure; Portia is the other, but Beatrice is not nearly so nice.  I am to act it next Thursday, when pray think of me.

I do not know whether you have seen anything in the papers about a third theater; we have had much anxiety, vexation, and expense about it, but I have no doubt that Mr. Arnold will carry the question.  The great people want a plaything for this season, and have set their hearts upon that.  I acted Belvidera to my father’s Jaffier at Brighton; you cannot imagine how great a difference it produced in my acting.  Mrs. Siddons and Miss O’Neill had a great advantage over me in their tragic partners.  Have you heard that Mr. Hope, the author of “Anastasius,” is just dead?  That was a wonderfully clever book, of rather questionable moral effects, I think; the same sort of cynical gloom and discontent which pervade Byron’s writings prevail in that; and I thought it a pity, because in other respects it seems a genuine book, true to life and human nature.  A few days before I heard of his death, Mr. Harness was discussing with me a theory of Hope’s respecting the destiny of the human soul hereafter.  His notion is that all spirit is after death to form but one whole spiritual existence, a sort of lumping which I object to.  I should like always to be able to know myself from somebody else.

I do read the papers sometimes, dear H——­, and, whenever I do, I wonder at you and all sensible people who make a daily practice of it; the proceedings of Parliament would make one angry if they did not make one so sad, and some of the debates would seem to me laughable but that I know they are lamentable.

     I have just finished Channing’s essay on Milton, which is
     admirable.