upon the subject, it does not seem as though the system of election prevalent here works much better, or is much freer from abuses, than the well-vilified one which England has just been reforming.  Bribery and corruption are familiar here as elsewhere, to those who have, and those who wish to have, power; and I have not yet heard a single American speak of our Radical reformers without uplifted hands at what they consider their folly in not “letting well alone,” or, as they say, in substituting one set of abuses for another, as they declare we shall do if we adopt their vote by ballot system.

I have now written you a philosophical, moral, and political letter, and beg you will score up my attempt to write rationally against the loads of gibberish I have from time to time discoursed to you.  Good bless you, dearest H——!  Three thousand miles away, I am still

Always your affectionate
F. A. K.

PHILADELPHIA, October 22, 1832. 
DEAR H——­,

My first news is deplorable, and I beg you will lament over it accordingly.  I eat little, drink less, rehearse six mornings and act five nights a week; in spite of all which, and riding a heavy-going, jolting, shambling, hard-pulling horse, I have grown so fat that I really cannot perceive that there is any shape in particular about me.  Grotesque things sometimes are melancholy too, and it is so with me, for I am both....

My father and Dall are very well; at this moment he is busy saying, and she hearing him say, the part of Fazio, which he is to act with me to-morrow night.  I dread it dreadfully; acting anything painful with him always tries my nerves extremely.

Bianca is a part of terrible excitement in itself, without the addition of having to act it to his Fazio.  I cannot get rid of his being he, and it agonizes me really to see his sham agony; however, “’tis my vocation, Hal.”  It is very well that our audiences should look at us as mere puppets, for could they sometimes see the real feelings of those for whose false miseries their sympathies are excited, I believe sufficiently in their humanity to think they would kindly give us leave to leave off and go home.  Ours is a very strange trade, and I am sorry to say that every day increases my distaste for it....  I do not think that during my father’s life I shall ever leave the stage; it is very selfish to feel regret at this, I know, but it sometimes seems to me rather dreary to look along my future years, and think that they will be devoted to labor that I dislike and despise....  For many years—­ever since I entered upon my first girlhood, indeed—­a quiet, lonely life upon a small independence has been the aim of my desires and my notion of happiness.  Italy and the south of France formerly constantly solicited my imagination, as offering pleasant places wherein to build a solitary nest....  And now a cottage near Edinburgh, with an income