r's. So Goodbye, and write to me, as I beg you, in reply to this
long if not very interesting letter.

FOOTNOTES:

[124] "Fitz's" remarks on Landor's judgment of "Pictures, Books and Men"
are very amusing; for they have been often repeated in regard to his own
on all these subjects. In fact the two, though FitzGerald was not so
childish as Landor, had much in common.

[125] The curious eulogy--preferring it to Oxford as being "large and
busy" enough to "drown one as much" as London--is also very
characteristic of FitzGerald. You can be alone in the country _and_ in a
large town--hardly in a small one.

FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE (1809-1893)

To what has been said before of this remarkably gifted lady
little need be added. The two letters which follow, derived
from _Further Records_ (London, 1890), were written rather
late in her life, but are characteristic, in ways partly
coinciding, partly divergent, of her strong intellect[126]
and her powers of expression. The note to the ghost-story
leaves open the question whether Fanny did or did not know
the accepted doctrine that the master and mistress of a
haunted house are exempt from actual haunting. The "whiff of
grape-shot" (as Carlyle might have called it) on the
"Bakespearian" absurdity is one of the best things on the
subject that the present writer, in a long and wide
experience, has come across.

45. TO H---- [EXTRACT]

YORK FARM, BRANCHTOWN,
PHILADELPHIA, Monday May 18th, 1874.

One evening that my maid was sitting in the room from which she could
see the whole of the staircase and upper landing, she saw the door of my
bedroom open, and an elderly woman in a flannel dressing-gown, with a
bonnet on her head, and a candle in her hand come out, walk the whole
length of the passage, and return again into the bedroom, shutting the
door after her. My maid knew that I was in the drawing-room below in my
usual black velvet evening dress; moreover, the person she had seen bore
no resemblance either in figure or face to me, or to any member of my
household, which consisted of three young servant women besides herself,
and a negro man-servant. My maid was a remarkably courageous and
reasonable person, and, though very much startled (for she went directly
upstairs and found no one in the rooms), she kept her counsel, and
mentioned the circumstance to nobody, though, as she told me afterwards,
she wa