Most of Lady Burton’s remaining letters are full of gratitude to God, tender and Christian sentiment, faulty English and bad spelling.[FN#686] “I did see The Times,” she says, “and was awfully glad of it.  Kinder still is The Sunday Sun, the 1st, the 8th and the 15th of October, five columns each, which say that I have completely lifted any cloud away from his memory, and that his future fame will shine like a beacon in all ages.  Thank God!” St. George Burton was wicked enough to twit her for her spelling, and to say that he found out as many as seventeen words incorrectly spelt in one letter.  But she deftly excused herself by saying that she used archaic forms.  “Never mind St. George,” she writes good-humouredly, to Mrs. E. G. Burton, “I like old spelling.”  She did not excuse her slang by calling it old, or refer her friends to Chaucer for “awfully glad.”

The greatest pleasure of her life was now, as she oddly expresses it, to “dress the mausoleum” on “darling Dick’s anniversary.”  She says (21st October 1893 to Mrs. E. J. Burton),[FN#687] “I received your dear flowers, and the mausoleum was quite lovely, a mass of lights and flowers sent by relations and affectionate friends.  Yours stood in front of the altar.”  Then follows a delicious and very characteristic sample of Lady Burton’s English:  “We had mass and communion,” she says, “and crowds of friends came down to see the mausoleum and two photographers.”

She was glad to visit and decorate the Mortlake tomb certainly, but the pleasure was a very melancholy one, and she could but say, borrowing a thought from The Arabian Nights: 

“O tomb, O tomb, thou art neither earth nor heaven unto me."[FN#688]

When Lady Stisted died (27th December 1893), Lady Burton felt the blow keenly, and she wrote very feelingly on the subject, “Yes,” she says, in a letter to Mrs. E. J. Burton, “I was very shocked at poor Maria’s death, and more so because I wish nothing had come between us.”  “Poor Maria,” she wrote to St. George Burton, “You would be surprised to know, and I am surprised myself, how much I feel it.”  In a letter to Madame de Gutmansthal-Benvenuti (10th January 1894), Lady Burton refers to the Burton tableau to Madame Tussaud’s.  She says, “They have now put Richard in the Meccan dress he wore in the desert.  They have given him a large space with sand, water, palms; and three camels, and a domed skylight, painted yellow, throws a lurid light on the scene.  It is quite life-like.  I gave them the real clothes and the real weapons, and dressed him myself.”

“I am so glad,” she writes to Miss Stisted,[FN#689] “you went to Tussaud’s, and that you admired Dick and his group.  I am not quite content with the pose.  The figure looks all right when it stands up properly, but I have always had a trouble with Tussaud about a certain stoop which he declares is artistic, and which I say was not natural to him.”

182.  The Library Edition of The Nights 1894.