emble at Leamington. Mrs.
Harry Siddons is, I fear, but little better; she has had another
attack of erysipelas, and I am very anxious to get to her, but the
distance, and the dependence of all interesting young females in
London on the legs and leisure of chaperons, prevents me from
seeing her as often as I wish.

German is an arduous undertaking, and I have once more abandoned
it, not only on account of its difficulty, but because I do not at
present wish to enter upon the study of a foreign language, when I
am but just awakened to my radical ignorance of my own. God bless
you, dear H----.

Yours ever,
FANNY.

As long as I retained a home of my own, I resisted my friend's
half-expressed wish that I should destroy her letters; but when I ceased
to have any settled place of habitation, it became impossible to provide
for the safe-keeping of a mass of papers the accumulation of which
received additions every few days, and by degrees (for my courage failed
me very often in the task) my friend's letters were destroyed. Few
things that I have had to relinquish have cost me a greater pang or
sense of loss, and few of the conditions of my wandering life have
seemed to me more grievous than the necessity it imposed upon me of
destroying these letters. My friend did not act upon her own theory with
regard to my correspondence, and indeed it seems to me that no general
rule can be given with regard to the preservation or destruction of
correspondence. What revelations of misery and guilt may lie in the
forgotten folds of hoarded letters, that have been preserved only to
blast the memory of the dead! What precious words, again, have been
destroyed, that might have lightened for a whole heavy lifetime the
doubt and anguish of the living! In this, as in all we do, we grope
about in darkness, and the one and the other course must often enough
have been bitterly lamented by those who "did for the best" in keeping
or destroying these chronicles of human existence.

Madame Pasta's daughter once said to Charles Young, who enthusiastically
admired her great genius, "Vous trouvez qu'elle chante et joue bien,
n'est-ce pas?" "Je crois bien," replied he, puzzled to understand her
drift. "Well," replied the daughter of the great lyrical artist, "to us,
to whom she belongs, and who know and love her