my part so much better than I, as I should have played hers worse than she did.  Indeed, her performance of the character of Helen saved it from the reproach of coarseness, which very few actresses would have been able to avoid while giving it all the point and lively humor which she threw into it.  I had great pleasure in acting the piece with her, she did her business so thoroughly well and was so amiable and agreeable a fellow-worker.

In my last letter to Miss S——­ I have spoken of a party at the Countess of Cork’s, to which I went.  She was one of the most curious figures in the London society of my girlish days.  Very aged, yet retaining much of a vivacity of spirit and sprightly wit for which she had been famous as Mary Monckton, she continued till between ninety and a hundred years old to entertain her friends and the gay world, who frequently during the season assembled at her house.

I have still a note begging me to come to one of her evening parties, written under her dictation by a young person who used to live with her, and whom she called her “Memory;” the few concluding lines scrawled by herself are signed “M.  Cork, aet. 92.”  She was rather apt to appeal to her friends to come to her on the score of her age; and I remember Rogers showing me an invitation he had received from her for one of the ancient concert evenings (these were musical entertainments of the highest order, which Mr. Rogers never failed to attend), couched in these terms:  “Dear Rogers, leave the ancient music and come to ancient Cork, 93.”  Lady Cork’s drawing-rooms were rather peculiar in their arrangement:  they did not contain that very usual piece of furniture, a pianoforte, so that if ever she especially desired to have music she hired an instrument for the evening; the rest of the furniture consisted only of very large and handsome armchairs placed round the apartments against the walls, to which they were made fast by some mysterious process, so that it was quite impossible to form a small circle or coterie of one’s own at one of her assemblies.  I remember when first I made this discovery expressing my surprise to the beautiful Lady Harriet d’Orsay, who laughingly suggested that poor old Lady Cork’s infirmity with regard to the property of others (a well-known incapacity for discriminating between meum and tuum) might probably be the cause of this peculiar precaution with regard to her own armchairs, which it would not, however, have been a very easy matter to have stolen even had they not been chained to the walls.  In the course of the conversation which followed, Lady E——­, apparently not at all familiar with Chesterfield’s Letters, said that it was Lady Cork who had originated the idea that after all heaven would probably turn out very dull to her when she got there; sitting on damp clouds and singing “God save the King” being her idea of the principal amusements there.  This rather dreary image of