,--if they were gifted with wit,
humor, and fancy, like the first masters of style,--they would take
pleasure in epistolary composition, and be good correspondents; but
anything short of that is so intolerable, that, except in cases of life
and death or urgent business, you cannot get a line out of them. Yet
they write very fair, agreeable, womanly letters, and would write much
better ones, if they allowed themselves a little more practice.

Mrs. More is devoured by care. She sits with a clouded brow in her
elegant, well-regulated house; and when you talk with her, you are
surprised to learn that everything in it is in the most dreadful
disorder from one end to the other. You ask for particulars, and find
that the disorder has relation to exquisite standards of the ways of
doing things, derived from observation of life in the most subdivided
state of European service,--to all of which she has not as yet been able
to raise her domestics. You compliment her on her cook, and she
responds, in plaintive accents, "She can do a few things decently, but
she is nothing of a cook." You refer with enthusiasm to her bread, her
coffee, her muffins and hot rolls, and she listens and sighs. "Yes," she
admits, "these are eatable,--not bad; but you should have seen the rolls
at a certain _cafe_ in Paris, and the bread at a certain nobleman's in
England, where they had a bakery in the castle, and a French baker, who
did nothing all the while but to refine and perfect the idea of bread.
When she thinks of these things, everything in comparison is so coarse
and rough!--but then she has learned to be comfortable." Thus, in every
department of housekeeping, to this too well-instructed person,

"Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise."

Not a thing in her wide and apparently beautifully kept establishment
is ever done well enough to elicit from her more than a sigh of
toleration. "I suppose it must do," she faintly breathes, when poor
human nature, having tried and tried again, evidently has got to the
boundaries of its capabilities; "you may let it go, Jane; I never expect
to be suited."

The poor woman, in the midst of possessions and attainments which excite
the envy of her neighbors, is utterly restless and wretched, and feels
herself always baffled and unsuccessful. Her exacting nature makes her
dissatisfied with herself in everything that she undertakes, and equally
dissatisfied with others. In the whole family there is li