you to remember that praise is, to the majority of readers, a much more vapid thing than censure, and that if you could admire me less and criticise me more, I am sure, as the housemaids say, you would give more satisfaction.  However, keep your conscience by you; praise or blame, it is none of my business.  Talking of that same Juliet, I received a letter from Hayter the other day which gave me some pain.  He tells me that he has all those sketches on his hands, and asks me if I am inclined to take them of him.  I fear his applying to me, at such a distance, on this subject, is a sign that he is not prosperous or doing well.  He is an amiable, clever little man, and I shall feel very sorry if my surmise proves true.  My father wishes to have the collection, and I shall write to tell him so forthwith.

It is no slight illustration to me of the ephemeral nature of the popularity which I enjoyed, to think that those drawings, which, as works of art, were singularly elegant and graceful, should go a-begging for a purchaser.  Verily “all is vanity!”

[My friend, Lord Ellesmere, purchased the series of drawings Mr. Hayter made from my performance of Juliet; and on my last visit to Lady Ellesmere at Hatchford, she pointed them out to me round a small hall that led to her private sitting-room, over the writing-table of which hung a miniature of me copied from a drawing of Mrs. Jameson’s by that charming and clever woman, Miss Emily Eden.]

You will be sorry for me and for many when I tell you that our good, dear friend Dall is dangerously ill.  I am writing at this moment by her bed....  This is the only trial of the kind I have ever undergone; God has hitherto been pleased to spare all those whom I love, and to grant them the enjoyment of strength and health.  This is my first lonely watching by a sick-bed, and I feel deeply the sadness and awfulness of the office....  Now that I am beginning to know what care and sorrow really are, I look back upon my past life and see what reason I have to be thankful for the few and light trials with which I have been visited.  My poor dear aunt’s illness is giving us a professional respite, for which my faculties, physical and mental, are very grateful.  They needed it sorely; I was almost worn out with work, and latterly with anxiety and bitter distress.

We terminated our last engagement here on Friday last, when the phlegmatic Bostonians seemed almost beside themselves with excitement and enthusiasm:  they shouted at us, they cheered us, they crowned me with roses.  Conceive, if you can, the shocking contrast between all this and the silent sick-room, to which I went straight from the stage....

Surely, our profession involves more intolerable discords between the real human beings who exercise it and their unreal vocation, than any in the world!...  In returning to England, two advantages, which I shall value much, will