To Sir James Fellowes.

Bath, 25 January, 1816.

I HAVE suffered much from nervous irritation, but your kind father is so good to me. I did not tell him that I apprehended aphthæ, but the lady who was afraid of her own hearth-rug could not be more fanciful than I have been.

"Strong and more strong her terrors rose,

Her shadow did the nymph appal;

She trembled at her own long nose,

It looked so long against the wall."

.....

Now for what the newspaper calls miscellaneous articles. Your father bids me drink the Bath water, and I did do so yesterday, and was more alive than . . . . . and I tried the Bishop of Salisbury's party last night, but made a poor figure, so hoarse. A mute Piozzi is a miserable thing indeed, but health will mend.

The bishop is very agreeable; and though he is a nobleman now and a courtier, remembers old times and old jokes, and how he and I sat down together on a dirty bench in St. Mark's Place, Venice, to hear a Dominican friar, while harlequin jumped about unheeded on the other side of the square.

وو

Your . . . . . must see the new book, though the best thing in it is telling how the foreigner comes to an inn at Dover, and finding a member of the Bang-up Club loitering about the yard, cries, "Here, Ostler, hold my horse." "Know your road work better, you ... replies the other, and challenges him. Escaped from this misery, he meets a lady going to a party, her head heaped in the fashionable way with flowers. "Sell me some roses, pretty dear!" cries the new-arrived foreigner, laying hold of them. Insulting fellow!" cries the girl; "I'll have you punished for an assault." A passer-by relieves him from this difficulty, and they strike up a friendship and go together to the inn. Pray, Sir, who have I the honor to be so much obliged to?" says the stranger. "I, Sir, am captain of the band of pensioners." The Spaniard looks in his English dictionary (Johnson's) for so hard a word; and finds Pensioner, a man hired

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for the destruction of his country. "O, for pity leave me directly," cries he; "I am in company with a chief of banditti. What will become of me? Get out of my apartments."

Well! now I will have done with all this buffooning nonsense, and with the truest regard,

To Sir James Fellowes.

H. L. P.

Saturday, 3 February, 1816.

I HAVE Some very curious things at Streatham, more curious than you think for; one pair of frightful old Etruscan jars, for example, given me by a monsignore, Ennio Visconte, a Milanese nobleman, then resident at Rome, and a first-rate connoisseur. "These," said I, are indeed antiques."

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Antiques!" replies the man; "why they were antiques when in Cicero's cabinet. Antiques! why they were antiques in Romulus's time; they are coeval with the Babylonish captivity." With proper blushes I accepted them, and there they are.

I have a pair of old blue and white porcelain bottles, too, which were brought into my family by an old Salusbury in the year 1400; and my grandmother used to frighten my father from improper matches by holding them in her hand, and protesting she would break them; "for," said she, "they came by the Red Sea before the passage round the Cape of Good Hope was discovered, and do you think they shall ever be possessed by Miss Such-a-one?" When, however, she learned that he had united himself with his cousin Cotton of Combermere's daughter, she said: "Well, then, now I will kiss my old bottles, and keep them for John's eldest child." They are yet in her possession, 1816. To-morrow I shall break quarantine, go to church (in a chair), and give God thanks for all his mercies.

Your ever obliged and grateful

To Sir James Fellowes.

H. L. P.

Bath, 29 February, 1816.

SUCH a kind letter as your dear father put in my hand this day, and I, bankrupt even in acknowledgment, can only curtsey

and say, Thank you, Sir. In return for your confidence, however, I shall tell you a secret; and that is, that I am engaged to dine at No. 13 on Tuesday next, 5th March, and your mamma says we are to drink sweet wine, I suppose till we see double.

My heart has been so bruised of late; it did promise me to think all of the next world and no more of this; but Doctor Halley said, you know, that in the centre of this globe there was a great spherical magnet pulling and attracting us down to earth; from which pieces, which he calls Terrellæ, broken off from the grand loadstone, but partaking its powers, are scattered up and down in order to hold us fast. Your happiness is one of these Terrellæ to me, and I wish to remain here till I see it completed, for which reason not a word will I utter about provocations, only to say they had nothing to do with the small shot.

My next letter from dear Sir James will be dated Streatham Park. Thus will he

Is it not a shame to fancy you have time to read a letter? yet vanity, that vile passion, says you will read it.

And now let me finish with the most serious and solemn wishes for every possible happiness to you and yourself, and yourself's half. I like the expression, 't is sincere and new; new I suppose because it is sincere. So God bless you, my dear and highlyvalued friend. Yours, &c.

H. L. P.

To Sir James Fellowes.

Bath, 1 March, 1816.

ON St. Taffy's day does -'s little Welsh friend renew her wishes of happiness. The thought of its being so near, and the delightful certainty of your going to my house at Streatham Park

to be happy, puts me in the best good-humor possible. And since has written again without insolence or peevishness, I have contented myself, in reply to his inquiries after my health, with saying that my cough is gone, and that I hope he is recovered from his nettle-spring rash, which seems to burst out annually, as I had an odd letter from him in the same style ten or twelve months ago.

We are raving mad here about the property tax. Will it be abolished or no?

General Doukin is married and Mrs. Wroughton dead, characters well known in Bath. They are nearly of an age, but the lady's is the more prudent step, sure, after ninety.

Did Leak show you the bason I was baptized in so many years ago? it is in the china closet next the drawing-room door, with a bit of dirty paper in it which Mr. Piozzi made me write, I think, but am not sure, lest it should be confounded with the other things.

Did you never go to Hampton Palace, Hampton Court I mean, and see a poor, half-starved, snuffy-nosed old woman showing the now nearly empty rooms, and saying in a shrill though sleepy tone: "And here's Prince George of Denmark over the chimney." Then, with a sigh: "Over the chimney Prince George of Denmark," hoping her task near over.

Now don't you be thinking of her when I show my little show, as Mrs Siddons was caught recollecting some of my silly jokes, and burst out o' laughing in the most mournful part of Aspasia's character, to the amusement of Kemble and annoyance of all the actors at rehearsal.

Adieu, dear Sir, and burn this nonsense, for the sake of your faithful, obliged,

H. L. P.

Give my truest regards to your brother, and tell the lady you love best how sincerely I am disposed to love her; and write to me from Streatham Park. Oh! that is the letter I long for.

To Sir James Fellowes.

18 April, 1816.

My home for fifty years will, I hope, procure me, by disposing of it, a temporary residence for the remainder of my short term; and what more ought to be wished by one who will soon take up a narrower space? I am glad Squib * is so sanguine. Did you see real Squib, the father? he is a very good-looking man.

There is an old story of Balbus,† when Quæstor at Seville, throwing an auctioneer to the lyons in his menagerie, because a female friend, who was selling up her possessions, complained to him that the auctioneer was so ugly and deformed, he frighted all buyers away. Our people will lose no bidders by that fault; but is it not odd that the world, with all its fluctuations, should have undergone so little change? Always vexations, disappointments, and inadequate anger for what can hardly be helped, though the mode of expressing that anger is altered by the different situations of society.

Always a friend or two, perhaps, in the world like Sir J F; always luckless ladies enough, like your faithful, obliged,

H. L. P.

To Sir James Fellowes.

F

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Here is the 9th of May; and now if S- J— news his kind invitation very pressingly, I will have the honor to wait on him and his lady in the Whitsun Week, having a mind to break up, as children say, for the holy days, and run to see the Waterloo Bridge, the Western Exchange, and other London wonders; then return, shut my front windows, and protest myself (with the strictest truth) in the country.

Hope, says Lord Bacon, is a good breakfast, but a bad supper; and with regard to this life, he is right; no other supper would sit easy, however, during the long night of the grave.

Do you feel interested in Southey's or Canning's Attack and Defence? I am pleased to see them turn with so much vigor on their enemies.

*The well known auctioneer of Saville Row.

†The anecdote is recorded in a letter to Cicero from Apicius Pollio.