of Virginia.”  As fast as I gather my wits together for any steady occupation, I am whisked off to some new place, and do not recover from one journey before I have to take another.  The roads here shake one’s body, soul, thoughts, opinions, and principles all to pieces; I assure you they are wicked roads.

Our theater, Covent Garden, is, we understand, going to the dogs.  I cannot help it any more, that is certain, and feel about that as about all things that have had their day—­it must go.  Taglioni is like a dream, and you must not abuse Mademoiselle Mars to me.  I never saw her but twice—­in “L’Ecole des Vieillards” and “Valerie”—­and I thought her perfection in both....  If I do not leave off, you will be blind for the next fortnight with reading this crossed letter.  I wish you success most heartily in all you undertake, and am truly and faithfully yours,

FANNY KEMBLE.

[Washington Irving was intimately acquainted with my father and mother, and a most kind and condescending friend to me.  He often told me that when first he went to England, long before authorship or celebrity had dawned upon him, he was a member of a New York commercial house, on whose affairs he was sent to Europe.  It was when he was a mere obscure young man of business in London that he had been introduced to my mother, whose cordial kindness to him in his foreign isolation seemed to have made a profound impression on him; for when I knew him, in the days of his great literary celebrity and social success, he often referred to it with the warmest expressions of gratitude.  I think, of all the distinguished persons I have known, he was one of the least affected by the adulation and admiration of society.  He remained quite unchanged by his extreme social popularity.  Simple, unaffected, unconstrained, genial, kindly, and good, he seemed so entirely to forget his own celebrity, that one almost forgot it too in talking to him.  I remember his coming, the day after my first appearance at Covent Garden, to see us, and congratulated my parents on the success of that terrible experiment.  I, who was always delighted to see him, ran to fetch the pretty new watch I had received from my father the night before, and displayed its beauties with an eager desire for his admiration of them.  He took it and slowly turned it about, commending its fine workmanship and pretty enamel and jewelry; then putting it to his ear, with a most mischievous look of affected surprise, he exclaimed, as one does to a child’s watch, “Why, it goes, I declare!”

To my great regret and loss, I saw Mademoiselle Mars only in two parts, when, in the autumn of her beauty and powers, she played a short engagement in London.  The grace, the charm, the loveliness, which she retained far into middle age, were, even in their decline, enough to justify all that her admirers said of her early incomparable fascination.  Her figure had grown large and her face become round, and lost their fine