it to a celebrated prophet of mesmerism in Paris, to have an oracle
concerning me. Did you ever, since the days of the witches, hear a
more ghastly proposition? It shook me so with horror, I had scarcely
voice to say 'no,' hough I _did_ say it very emphatically at last, I
assure you. A lock of my hair for a Parisian prophet? Why, if I had
yielded, I should have felt the steps of pale spirits treading as
thick as snow all over my sofa and bed, by day and night, and pulling
a corresponding lock of hair on my head at awful intervals. _I_, who
was born with a double set of nerves, which are always out of
order; the most excitable person in the world, and nearly the most
superstitious. I should have been scarcely sane at the end of a
fortnight, I believe of myself! Do you remember the little spirit in
gold shoe-buckles, who was a familiar of Heinrich Stilling's? Well,
I should have had a French one to match the German, with Balzac's
superfine boot-polish in place of the buckles, as surely as I lie here
a mortal woman.

I congratulate you (amid all cares and anxieties) upon the view
of Naples in the distance, but chiefly on your own happy and just
estimate of your selected position in life. It does appear to me
wonderfully and mournfully wrong, when men of letters, as it is too
much the fashion for them to do, take to dishonoring their profession
by fruitless bewailings and gnashings of teeth; when, all the time,
it must be their own fault if it is not the noblest in the world. Miss
Mitford treats me as a blind witness in this case; because I have seen
nothing of the literary world, or any other sort of world, and yet cry
against her 'pen and ink' cry. It is the cry I least like to hear from
her lips, of all others; and it is unworthy of them altogether. On the
lips of a woman of letters, it sounds like jealousy (which it
cannot be with _her_), as on the lips of a woman of the world, like
ingratitude. Madame Girardin's 'Ecole des Journalistes' deserved Jules
Janin's reproof of it; and there is something noble and touching in
that feeling of brotherhood among men of letters, which he invokes.
I am so glad to hear you say that I am right, glad for your sake and
glad for mine. In fact, there is something which is attractive to
_me_, and which has been attractive ever since I was as high as this
table, even in the old worn type of Grub Street authors and garret
poets. Men and women of letters are the first in the whole world to