[Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.]

CHELTENHAM, _Friday, Jan. 3rd, 1862._

MY DEAREST GEORGY,

Mrs. Macready in voice is very like poor Mrs. Macready dead and gone;
not in the least like her otherwise. She is perfectly satisfactory, and
exceedingly winning. Quite perfect in her manner with him and in her
ease with his children, sensible, gay, pleasant, sweet-tempered; not in
the faintest degree stiff or pedantic; accessible instantly. I have very
rarely seen a more agreeable woman. The house is (on a smaller scale)
any house we have known them in. Furnished with the old furniture,
pictures, engravings, mirrors, tables, and chairs. Butty is too tall for
strength, I am afraid, but handsome, with a face of great power and
character, and a very nice girl. Katie you know all about. Macready,
decidedly much older and infirm. Very much changed. His old force has
gone out of him strangely. I don't think I left off talking a minute
from the time of my entering the house to my going to bed last night,
and he was as much amused and interested as ever I saw him; still he
was, and is, unquestionably aged.

And even now I am obliged to cut this letter short by having to go and
look after Headland. It would never do to be away from the rest of them.
I have no idea what we are doing here; no notion whether things are
right or wrong; no conception where the room is; no hold of the business
at all. For which reason I cannot rest without going and looking after
the worthy man.

[Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.]

TORQUAY, _Wednesday, Jan. 8th, 1862._

You know, I think, that I was very averse to going to Plymouth, and
would not have gone there again but for poor Arthur. But on the last
night I read "Copperfield," and positively enthralled the people. It was
a most overpowering effect, and poor Andrew[7] came behind the screen,
after the storm, and cried in the best and manliest manner. Also there
were two or three lines of his shipmates and other sailors, and they
were extraordinarily affected. But its culminating effect was on
Macready at Cheltenham. When I got home after "Copperfield," I found him
quite unable to speak, and able to do nothing but square his dear old
jaw all on one side, and roll his eyes (half closed), like Jackson's
picture of him. And when I said something light about it, he returned:
"No--er--Dickens! I swear to Heaven that, as a piece of passion and
playful