ly a "Fanny." Fanny
Kemble, though always called so, was not.

[43] She was the niece of Mrs. Siddons and of John Kemble, generally
considered the greatest tragic actor and actress we have had; the
daughter of Charles Kemble, a player and manager of long practice and
great ability; while she had yet another uncle and any number of more
distant relations in the profession.

[44] See Prefatory Note on her letters _infra_, for an illustration of
what is said of her here and of Mrs. Carlyle a little further.

[45] Gray may not produce this effect of slight repulsion on everyone:
but on the other hand it is pretty generally admitted that the more you
read Walpole the more does the prejudice, which Macaulay and others have
helped to create against him, crumble and melt.

[46] They grow more and more numerous; a fresh batch having been
announced while this Introduction was being written.

[47] I see that Mr. Paul also has made special reference to this letter
and no wonder. From the time of its first publication I have regarded it
as matchless. But it seems to me that while it is lawful to mention it,
it should not have been published and that to republish it here would be
at least questionable.

[48] The present writer remembers as a boy reading (he supposes in the
newspaper to which it was addressed but is not sure) this very
remarkable epistle of Reade's to an editor: "Sir, you have brains of
your own and good ones. Do not echo the bray of such a very small ass as
the...." There was more, but this was the gist of it. Whether it has
ever reappeared he cannot say.

[49] Anthony Trollope did not choose to make his Autobiography a
"Life-and-Letters." But he has used the inserted letter very freely and
sometimes with great effect in his novels, for instance Mr. Slope's to
Eleanor Harding in _Barchester Towers_.

[50] In his Essay mentioned in Preface.

[51] The "Answer to the Introductory Epistle" of _The Monastery_.

[52] This plan was older than the "novel _by_ letters," and had, as
noticed above, been largely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century "heroic" romance.

[53] There is of course a class exactly opposite to the
love-letter--that of more or less modified hate or at least dislike.
Johnson's epistle to Chesterfield is an example of the dignified form of
this; Hazlitt's to Gifford of the undignified. But considering our
deserved reputation for humour we are less strong than might be expected
in lett