us times when empires and races have crumbled and fallen
from inward decay."

Margaret expresses the hope that the social revolution, which to her
seemed imminent in England, may be a peaceful one, "which shall destroy
nothing except the shocking inhumanity of exclusiveness." She speaks
with appreciation of the National and Dulwich Galleries, the British
Museum, the Zooelogical Gardens. Among the various establishments of
benevolence and reform, she especially mentions a school for poor
Italian boys, with which Mazzini had much to do. This illustrious man
was already an exile in London, as was the German poet, Freiligrath.

Margaret was an admirer of Joanna Baillie, and considered her and the
French Madame Roland as "the best specimens hitherto offered of women of
a Roman strength and singleness of mind, adorned by the various culture
and capable of the various action opened to them by the progress of the
Christian idea."

She thus chronicles her visit to Miss Baillie:

"We found her in her little, calm retreat at Hampstead, surrounded by
marks of love and reverence from distinguished and excellent friends.
Near her was the sister, older than herself, yet still sprightly and
full of active kindness, whose character she has, in one of her last
poems, indicated with such a happy mixture of sagacity, humor, and
tender pathos, and with so absolute a truth of outline. Although no
autograph hunter, I asked for theirs; and when the elder gave hers as
'sister to Joanna Baillie,' it drew a tear from my eye,--a good tear, a
genuine pearl, fit homage to that fairest product of the soul of man,
humble, disinterested tenderness."

Margaret also visited Miss Berry, the friend of Horace Walpole, long a
celebrity, and at that time more than eighty years old. In spite of
this, Margaret found her still characterized by the charm, "careless
nature or refined art," which had made her a social power once and
always.

But of all the notable personages who might have been seen in the London
of that time, no one probably interested Margaret so much as did Thomas
Carlyle. Her introduction to him was from Mr. Emerson, his friend and
correspondent; and it was such as to open to her, more than once, the
doors of the retired and reserved house, in which neither time nor money
was lavished upon the entertainment of strangers.

Mr. Carlyle's impressions of Margaret have now been given to the world
in the published correspondence of Carlyle an