f
laughter and tears. How often have I heard her describe John Kemble,
Mrs. Siddons, Miss O'Neil, and Edmund Kean, as they were wont to
electrify the town in her girlhood! With what gusto she reproduced
Elliston, who was one of her prime favorites, and tried to make me,
through her representation of him, feel what a spirit there was in the
man. Although she had been prostrated by the hard work and increasing
anxieties of forty years of authorship, when I saw her she was as fresh
and independent as a skylark. She was a good hater as well as a good
praiser, and she left nothing worth saving in an obnoxious reputation.

I well remember, one autumn evening, when half a dozen friends were
sitting in her library after dinner, talking with her of Tom Taylor's
Life of Haydon, then lately published, how graphically she described to
us the eccentric painter, whose genius she was among the foremost to
recognize. The flavor of her discourse I cannot reproduce; but I was too
much interested in what she was saying to forget the main incidents she
drew for our edification, during those pleasant hours now far away in
the past.

"I am a terrible forgetter of dates," she used to say, when any one
asked her of the _time when_; but for the _manner how_ she was never at
a loss. "Poor Haydon!" she began. "He was an old friend of mine, and I
am indebted to Sir William Elford, one of my dear father's
correspondents during my girlhood, for a suggestion which sent me to
look at a picture then on exhibition in London, and thus was brought
about my knowledge of the painter's existence. He, Sir William, had
taken a fancy to me, and I became his child-correspondent. Few things
contribute more to that indirect after-education, which is worth all the
formal lessons of the school-room a thousand times told, than such
good-humored condescension from a clever man of the world to a girl
almost young enough to be his granddaughter. I owe much to that
correspondence, and, amongst other debts, the acquaintance of Haydon.
Sir William's own letters were most charming,--full of old-fashioned
courtesy, of quaint humor, and of pleasant and genial criticism on
literature and on art. An amateur-painter himself, painting interested
him particularly, and he often spoke much and warmly of the young man
from Plymouth, whose picture of the 'Judgment of Solomon' was then on
exhibition in London. 'You must see it,' said he, 'even if you come to
town on purpose.'"--The r