Poor Charles Kemble! I knew the whole dynasty of the Kembles, from King John downwards; Charles was the last and best of the whole stock—beautiful, graceful, gallant, and a very fine gentleman; such he was when I first knew him.

July.—Silvio Pellico is dead.

During our delightful residence on the Lake of Como, the Villa Fontana was frequented by some of the most illustrious men in Lombardy. Confalonieri, Count Porro, Count Pecchio, and the charming women of their family. Silvio Pellico was the delight of all; he was then all poetry. Many a moonlight night he passed with us in a gondola on the lake, while Pecchio

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sang to his guitar and the others joined in one of their sweet canzone. He was a great favourite with my dear Morgan.

The poor Pellico on his deliverance from prison entered into the travaux forcés of the old, bigoted Marchesa Baralo. His great merits, his glowing imagination were gone; the most elegant of poets, the most free-thinking of philosophers, became a melancholy monk, and earned shrift by the utter prostration of his intellect.

September 2.—Moore Park. A sort of hospital for odds and ends. Since I arrived here, a month this day, I have been charmed with everything, en gros et en détail. I have an obituary already. Abbott Lawrence, my most kind and hospitable host is gone. Poor old Colburn gone too—my brilliant advertiser and publisher of thirty years! one who could not take his tea without a stratagem. He was a strange mélange of meanness and munificence in his dealings. There was a desperate vengeance that had more of the jealousy of love than the resentment of business in his attempt to destroy my fame and fortune when I went to Messrs. Saunders and Otley with my second France. We had a last quarrel about the cheap edition of my novels two months ago. I read of his death in the papers. I wish that we had parted friends.

Another death!—General Pepe is dead at Turin, at the age of seventy-two—one of the noblest men in the contemporary history of modern Italy.

I am getting up memorials for a history of Moore

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Park and its many associations. Sir William Temple, Swift, Stella, &c. Shall I ever get it finished?

November.—In the beginning of September I went to Llanover on a visit to Sir Benjamin and Lady Hall. The gardens there are always in their full beauty in the autumn.

I went thence to Stamford Hall, Leicestershire, to pay one more visit to my dear and venerable friend, the Baroness Braye, and her charming daughter, Catherine, Countess of Beauchamp.

Lady Braye’s last words to me were to intreat that I would keep away as long as I could from the fogs of London. But I found myself so unwell on the railway, that is, my eyes so painful, that I proceeded on to London, and found my house more comfortable and pretty than ever. No high stairs! no long galleries and their draughts! and in short, I was at home. And so ends my vittegiatura of the autumn of 1855.

How kindly you have written to me. Malahide was indeed full to me of pleasant, though mixed, memories, and I am sure you will not think the vivid historian of its storied site was omitted from them. It appeared to me a great change from former times, when we rollicked on oysters, and barristers sang treasonable songs. Now, we talked of archaeology, and looked at old porcelain. The portrait-gallery has received additions. I thought Dublin smiled very graciously on my levee and drawing-room, and my health has not, as yet, at all repined at my splendid captivity in the Castle, and we are to have Grecian theatricals, and an amateur opera, got up by Lady Downshire, and mainly indebted to Mrs. Geale.

Macaulay is not in power at the Castle of Tyrconnel, as you may well guess. Have you good authority for the striking speech you recounted to me of the Duchess to James, after the Boyne?

Maclean, the publisher of a portrait of mine, showed me lately a list of the subscribers names, among whom the one that most gratified me, was yours! You, probably, scarcely remember a girl with (what in Irish we call) a Cathath head, and a very nimble foot at crossing a ford and dancing an Irish jig, or taking a game of romps out of “little Malby;” but she can never forget days so happy and so careless, and which furnished forth the details of the Wild Irish Girl—the progenitress of her own little fame and fortune! Still living on amid all these pleasant impressions, I cannot resist writing you a few lines, not only to recal myself to your memory, but to set at rest all my traditional shanaos of the Crofton family. I found my claim on your attention by a fact of which perhaps you

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are not aware—that I have the distinction of being the grand-daughter of one who had the honour to be a daughter of the house of Crofton! Sydney Crofton Bell, in her time celebrated for her poetical and musical talents, and bearing the Irish cognomen of Clasagh na Valla—“the Harp of the Valley”; from this gifted individual has been derived whatever talent has distinguished her descendants for three generations. She threw her Irish mantle over us, and though somewhat the worse for the wear (as Irish mantles generally are!), it has stood us all in good stead. Your own amiable and distinguished grandmother, my dear Lady Crofton, the friend and protectress of my own early life, and one of the noblest creatures I ever knew, always acknowledged the Irish cousinship, of which I am as proud as I am of my relationship with Oliver Goldsmith, though his illustrations were not of such genealogical distinction as the descendants of the friend of the Earl of Essex, who founded your family. If you admit the “propinquity of kin,” dear Sir Malby, I should be much gratified. Now, tell me, dear Sir Malby, why, in Burke’s Peerage, they date your baronetage only from 1838? Time immemorial your grandfather Malby was always titled. I had hoard there was some forfeiture “in the time of the troubles!” Why, too, was the ancient seat of the family called Longford? had it not an Irish name? and what name? Is the old chapel standing? or the original Crofton apple trees, that were brought over to Ireland in the time of Queen Elizabeth? Well, I will bother you no more with my antiquarian questions, but in conclusion

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only say, that if you or any of your family should come to London, and will try my “tap,” at the sign of the Irish Harp, you will meet with “cead mille falthæ” from, dear Sir Malby,

Believe me, it is our house which should be proud of a kinswoman who, having fought her way to fame, as you have, is willing to remember her friends of “long ago,” even to the romps with “little Malby,” who, for his part recollects well, one whose name has been a household word at Longford. You desire a history of the Croftons since you were among us; it would be tedious to any one else; should it prove so to you, you must only confess that you provoked it. To begin with the title. It was discovered, some time after my grandfather’s death, by the Herald at Arms, that we were descended from the next brother of the first baronet, and not from the first baronet himself, to whose male issue that patent limited the title. This was a great trouble to us at Longford, and a surprise

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to the whole family, among whom there never had been any doubt as to my grandfather’s right to the title; but there was no help for it, and after an effort to obtain a revival of the original grant, my father had to put up with a new patent, so that now, although I am the acknowledged head of a family numbering in it one baron, and, including Lord Crofton’s baronetcy, three baronets, my title dates later than any of the others. You are too Irish to laugh at this trifle being deemed a grievance; but here, by the shores of the Atlantic, where little questions of precedence still at times arise, it was unpleasant, to say the least, to be obliged to make way for those who ought, as they used, to follow us.

My father died six years ago. I myself have left to me three sons and three daughters.

Now for the Longford estates. Longeuth, I believe, is the Irish for it. When this latter passed into Longford, I am unable to discover; but am disposed to think that the first Crofton possessor changed the name—so much for the name. The estate itself is the same as it was,—very large. Since the troubles of 1668, we have not parted with an acre of it, nor are we likely to do so. Thanks to the Encumbered Estate Court, which gave every facility for selling Irish estates when, from the condition of the country they were least valuable; many an ancient family has been pressed out of home and fortune. One family (some of the members of which you must have known) the Percivals, of Temple House, in this county, must, I fear, transfer to strangers an estate which they ac-

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quired by intermarriage with us; but God, who gave us the property (you remember the motto “Dat dens incrementum”), still permits the Croftons of Longford to hold their own. They do little more, however, than hold their own, for the family exchequer has never been full enough to rebuild the house, the scene, dear Lady Morgan, of our romps, which was burned down in my father’s time; but though the old house is a ruin, there has grown up beside it, by little and little. a house reasonably large and comfortable. That would be a welcome day to it, and its inhabitants, on which you would come and visit us; you would find the chapel as in your youth, and beside it, the home of Friar John Crofton “Comitesque flavicomæ,” the companion which good-natured people represent to have been a fox—the ill-natured, as a nymph, with golden hair.

I take the liberty of addressing you on the subject of our common correspondence with the editor or author of Rogers’s Table Twaddle.

There never was anything more false than that my dear old friend, Viscountess Keith, and her sister, Miss Thrale, and her late sister, Mrs. Meyrick Hoare, refused to be reconciled to their mother. On the contrary, as soon as Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi returned from their wedding tour of four or five years on the Continent, Lady Keith and her two younger sisters, then

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fine, handsome girls, fresh from school, made a point of soliciting a renewal of intercourse. And Lady Keith has often related to me their first meeting, which was a very curious one, at Mrs. Piozzi’s own house, and after that Lady Keith, who had a very handsome establishment, gave Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi many good dinners, and thereby aggravated Piozzi’s gout,—Piozzi, of whom Lady Keith always speaks very kindly.

Long after Miss Thrale’s marriage with Lord Keith, Mrs. Piozzi died, and Lady Keith went from Tulliallan, in Scotland, to Bath, to attend her death-bed. It is very unfair to bring such stories forward, which are calculated to annoy two excellent old ladies—I say two, because there never was any question of reconciliation with the youngest, Mrs. Mostyn, who lived with her mother until her marriage, which, by-the-way, was a run-a-way one. Old Rogers ought to have known better than to circulate such false trash; for he was at one time intimate, and was, indeed, an admirer, if not a suitor, to one of the younger Miss Thrales.

I could have given the editor of the Twaddle a much more pleasing anecdote of old Rogers than any of those in his book. About nine years ago, a letter containing bills which I had signed, amounting to upwards of two thousand pounds, was not received by my steward, to whom I had addressed it. It was found, a month after, safe at the bottom of the dead-letter box, in the post-office of Glasgow, having been oddly mistaken for a valentine. However, for some weeks I was in great alarm, and I called on Rogers,

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with whom I had, for some time, been acquainted, to ask his advice, as he also, shortly before, had the misfortune to have bills to a very large amount abstracted from his bank. After very kindly telling me how he thought I ought to proceed under my supposed loss, he went on to say (and here his face became quite beaming with benevolence and satisfaction) that as soon as his loss became known, he received offers of pecuniary aid and credit to any amount, from hosts and hosts of friends, amongst the highest character, station, and rank in England—men from whom he little expected such proofs of disinterested regard. He added, that his opinion of human nature had, from that day, been immeasurably improved. This is, I think, a more pleasant anecdote than any contained in the Table Twaddle, and on that account I beg you to pardon this long letter.

Would that I were near you, dearest Lady Morgan, to accept your agreeable invitation of a chat between four and six: but there is always a reaction in our society at Brighton. After our winter season is

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ended, we begin again with fresh friends, who stay till Easter; and I have not the moral courage to leave them to an empty house.

The Athenæum confirms one’s opinion of the editor of Rogers’s Table Talk. As far as I am concerned, they are all wrong. Being but a child of nine years old on my mother’s return to England, I was taken home to Streatham, and brought up an opposition child, living with her and dear Piozzi until I was married, in 1795.

These are not important events to bring before the public; and Rogers appears to have talked very little of Streatham, considering he lived there so much in my time; but he never was a talker. I have many letters, or had, and now possess his proposal of marriage to me at thirteen, with my impertinent caricature of him, and old Murphy calling me a saucy girl.

Excuse an abrupt conclusion to this family gossip, dear Lady Morgan, for I have a long dinner table today, and my head full of domestic cares.