r. A conversation I had with my admirable and excellent
friend Sydney Smith determined me to decline joining the party. He
wound up his kind and friendly advice to me upon the subject by
saying, "No, no, my child; that's all very well for Grota" (the name
he always gave Mrs. Grote, whose good qualities and abilities he
esteemed very highly, whatever he may have thought of her
eccentricities); "but don't mix yourself up with that sort of
thing." And I had reason to rejoice that I followed his good advice.
Mrs. Grote told me, in the course of a conversation we once had on
the subject of Mdlle. Ellsler, that when the latter went to America,
she, Mrs. Grote, had undertaken most generously the entire care and
charge of her child, a lovely little girl of about six years old.
"All I said to her," said this strange, kind-hearted woman, "was
'Well, Fanny, send the brat to me; I don't ask you whose child it
is, and I don't care, so long as it isn't that fool d'Orsay's'"
(Mrs. Grote had small esteem for _the_ dandy of his day), "'and I'll
take the best care of it I can.'" And she did take the kindest care
of it during the whole period of Mdlle. Ellsler's absence from
Europe.

The next time I visited the Beeches was after an interval of some
years, when I went thither with my kind and constant friend Mr.
Rogers. My circumstances had altered very painfully, and I was again
laboring for my own support.

I went down to Burnham with the old poet, and was sorry to find
that, though he had consented to pay Mrs. Grote this visit, he was
not in particularly harmonious tune for her society, which was
always rather a trial to his fastidious nerves and refined taste.
The drive of between three and four miles in a fly (very different
from his own luxurious carriage), through intricate lanes and rural
winding avenues, did not tend to soften his acerbities, and I
perceived at once, on alighting from the carriage, that the aspect
of the place did not find favor in his eyes.

Mrs. Grote had just put up an addition to her house, a sort of
single wing, which added a good-sized drawing-room to the modest
mansion I had before visited. Whatever accession of comfort the
house received within from this addition to its size, its beauty,
externally, was not improved by it, and Mr. Rogers stood before the
off