ies of honor, that one
day at St. Cloud she shot thirteen brace of partridges; "but," added
the narrator, "she is so sweet and charming a creature that any man
might fall in love with her notwithstanding." To be sure Mr.
Thackeray liked you. How could he help it? Did not he also like Dr.
Holmes? I hope so. How glad I should be to see him in England, and
how glad I shall be to see Mr. Hawthorne! He will find all the best
judges of English writing admiring him to his heart's content,
warmly and discriminatingly; and a consulship in a bustling town
will give him the cheerful reality, the healthy air of every-day
life, which is his only want. Will you tell all these dear friends,
especially Mr. and Mrs. W----, how deeply I feel their affectionate
sympathy, and thank Mr. Whittier and Professor Longfellow over and
over again for their kind condolence? Tell Mr. Whittier how much I
shall prize his book. He has an earnest admirer in Buckingham
Palace, Marianne Skerrett, known as the Queen's Miss Skerrett, the
lady chiefly about her, and the only one to whom she talks of books.
Miss Skerrett is herself a very clever woman, and holds Mr. Whittier
to be not only the greatest, but the _one_ poet of America; which
last assertion the poet himself would, I suspect, be the very first
to deny. Your promise of Dr. Parsons's poem is very delightful to
me. I hold firm to my admiration of those stanzas on Webster.
Nothing written on the Duke came within miles of it, and I have no
doubt that the poem on Dante's bust is equally fine.... Mr. Justice
Talfourd has just printed a new tragedy. He sent it to me from
Oxford, not from Reading, where he had passed four days and never
gave a copy to any mortal, and told me, in a very affectionate
letter which accompanied it, that "it was at present a very private
sin, he having only given eight or ten copies in all." I suppose
that it will be published, for I observe that the "not published" is
written, not printed, and that Moxon's name is on the title-page. It
is called "The Castilian,"--is on the story of a revolt headed by
Don John de Padilla in the early part of Charles the Fifth's reign,
and is more like Ion than either of his other tragedies. I have just
been reading a most interesting little book in manuscript, called
"The Heart of Montrose." It is a versifica