arden, was obliged to bestride one of Mr. Allen's screws, as he
calls them. The day was dusty and windy, and very disagreeable, but I
was all the better for my shaking, as I always am. I am never in health,
looks, or spirits without daily hard exercise on horseback.

My first meeting with Mrs. Grote (I am answering your questions, dearest
H----, though you have probably forgotten them) took place after all at
Sydney Smith's, at a dinner the very next day after you left us. We did
not say a great deal to each other, but upon my saying incidentally (I
forget about what) "I, who have always preserved my liberty, at least
the small crumb of it that a woman can own anywhere," she faced about,
in a most emphatical manner, and said, "Then you've struggled for it."
"No, I have not been obliged to do so." "Ah, then you must, or you'll
lose it, you'll lose it, depend upon it." I smiled, but did not reply,
because I saw that she was not taking into consideration the fact of my
living in America; and this was the only truly _Grotesque_ (as Sydney
Smith says) passage between us. Since then we have again ineffectually
exchanged cards, and yesterday I received an invitation to her house, so
that I suppose we shall finally become acquainted with each other.

[Mrs. Grote, wife of George Grote, the banker, member of
Parliament, and historian of Greece, was one of the cleverest and
most eccentric women in the London society of my time. No worse a
judge than De Tocqueville pronounced her the cleverest woman of his
acquaintance; and she was certainly a very remarkable member of the
circle of remarkable men among whom she was living when I first knew
her. At that time she was the female centre of the Radical party in
politics--a sort of not-young-or-handsome feminine oracle among a
set of very clever half-heathenish men, in whose drawing-room,
Sydney Smith used to say, he always expected to find an altar to
Zeus. At this time Mr. Grote was in the House of Commons, and as it
was before the publication of his admirable history, his speeches,
which were as remarkable for their sound sense and enlightened
liberality as for their clear and forcible style, were not
unfrequently attributed to his wife, whose considerable
conversational powers, joined to a rather dictatorial style of
exercising them, sometimes threw her refined and modest husband a
little into the shade in gener