g, or rise from
my chair without assistance, walk quite double, and am lifted up
stairs step by step by my man-servant. I thought, two years ago, I
could walk fifteen or sixteen miles a day! O, I was too proud of my
activity! I am sure we are smitten in our vanities. However, you
will bring the summer, which is, they say, to do me good; and even
if that should fail, it will do me some good to see you, that is
quite certain. Thank you for telling me about the Galignani, and
about the kind American reception of my book; some one sent me a New
York paper (the Tribune, I think), full of kindness, and I do assure
you that to be so heartily greeted by my kinsmen across the Atlantic
is very precious to me. From the first American has there come
nothing but good-will. However, the general kindness here has taken
me quite by surprise. The only fault found was with the title,
which, as you know, was no doing of mine; and the number of private
letters, books, verses, (commendatory verses, as the old poets have
it), and tributes of all sorts, and from all manner of persons, that
I receive every day is something quite astonishing.

Our great portrait-painter, John Lucas, certainly the first painter
of female portraits now alive, has been down here to take a portrait
for engraving. He has been most successful. It is looking better, I
suppose, than I ever do look; but not better than under certain
circumstances--listening to a favorite friend, for example--I
perhaps might look. The picture is to go to-morrow into the
engraver's hands, and I hope the print will be completed before your
departure; also they are engraving, or are about to engrave, a
miniature taken of me when I was a little girl between three and
four years old. They are to be placed side by side, the young child
and the old withered woman, ---- a skull and cross-bones could
hardly be a more significant _memento mori_! I have lost my near
neighbor and most accomplished friend, Sir Henry Russell, and many
other friends, for Death has been very busy this winter, and Mr.
Ware is gone! He had sent me his "Zenobia," "from the author," and
for that very reason, I suppose, some one had stolen it; but I had
replaced both that and the letters from Rome, and sent them to Mr.
Kingsley as models for his "Hypatia." He has them still. He had
n