relation, which thus rendered our performance of comedy
together especially comical to my father, added infinitely to my
distress in all tragedies in which we acted together; the sense of his
displeasure or the sight of his anguish invariably bringing him, my
father, and not the part he was acting, before me; and, as in the play
of "The Stranger" and the pathetic little piece of "The Deserter,"
affecting me with almost uncontrollable emotion.

GREAT RUSSELL STREET, April 10, 1831.
MY DEAREST H----,

I owe you something like an explanatory note after that ejaculatory
one I sent you the other day. You must have thought me crazy; but
indeed, since all these late alarming reports from Spain, until the
news came of John's safety, I did not know how much fear and
anxiety lay under the hope and courage I had endeavored to maintain
about him.

From day to day I had read the reports and tried to reason with
regard to their probability, and to persuade my mother that we had
every cause for hoping the best; and it was really not until that
hope was realized that it seemed as if all my mental nerves and
muscles, braced to the resistance of calamity, had suddenly relaxed
and given way under the relief from all further apprehension of it.
I have kept much of my forebodings to myself, but they have been
constant and wretched enough, and my gratitude for this termination
of them is unspeakable.

I heard last night a report which I have not mentioned to my mother
for fear it should prove groundless. Horace Twiss showed me a note
in which a gentleman assured him that John had positively taken his
passage in a Government vessel, and was now on his way home; even
if this is true, I am afraid to tell my mother, because if the
vessel should be delayed a day or two by weather or any other
cause, her anxiety will have another set of apprehensions to feed
upon, and to prey upon her with. She desires her best love to you;
she likes your pamphlet on "The Education of the People" very much,
at the same time that it has not convinced her that instruction is
wholesome for the lower orders; she thinks the dependence of
helplessness and ignorance a better security (for them, or for
those above them, I wonder?) than the power of reasoning rightly
and a sense of duty,