riend, Comte Potocki, is young and tall and strong and active, but I
would a great deal rather have paid a policeman to look after me, as I
did when I went to see a fire, than have depended upon the care of a
gentleman who would feel himself hampered by having me to care for.
After all, I shall probably give it up, and not go....

My father tells me he has definitely renounced all idea of reading
again, so I took heart of grace to ask him to lend me the plays he read
from, to mark mine by. The copy he used is a Hanmer, in six large quarto
volumes, and belongs to Lane, the artist, who has very kindly lent it to
me. My father's marks are most elaborate, but the plays are cruelly
sacrificed to the exigencies of the performance--as much maimed, I
think, as they are for stage representation. My father has executed this
inevitable mangling process with extreme good judgment and taste; but it
gives me the heart-ache, for all that. But he was _timed_, and that
impatiently, by audiences who would barely sit two hours in their
places, and required that the plays should be compressed into the
measure of their intellectual _short_-suffering capacity.

However, it was at the Palace that he had to _compress_ or rather
_compel_ the five acts of "Cymbeline" into a reading of three quarters
of an hour: and how he performed that feat is still incomprehensible to
me....

Everything is black and sad enough as far as I can see, but, thank God,
I cannot see far, and every day has four-and-twenty hours, and in every
minute of every hour live countless seeds of invisible events. I heard a
very good sermon to-day upon Christian liberty, and have been reading
Stanley's sermon upon St. Paul, which made my heart burn within me.... I
am reading an immensely thick book by Gioberti, one of the Italian
reformers, a devout and eloquent Catholic priest, and it enchants me.

Good-bye, my dear.

I am ever yours,
FANNY.

KING STREET, Wednesday, 16th, 1848.

Of course you have heard of the murder of the soldier by that poor girl
in the park. I have heard nothing more special about it, and have not
seen the newspapers lately, so you probably know more about it than I
do. Emily tells me this morning that there were some excellent
observations upon the circumstance, either in the _Examiner_ or
_Spectator_. It will be long