and people it with inhabitants, who are so many Melchisedecs, and have
no father nor mother but your own imagination.... I am sorry I did
not exist fifty or sixty years ago, when the _Ladies' Magazine_ was
flourishing like a green bay tree. In that case, I make no doubt, my
aspirations after literary fame would have met with due encouragement,
and I should have had the pleasure of introducing Messrs. Percy and
West into the very best society, and recording all their sayings and
doings in double-columned close-printed pages.... I recollect, when I
was a child, getting hold of some antiquated volumes, and reading
them by stealth with the most exquisite pleasure. You give a correct
description of the patient Grisels of those days. My aunt was one of
them; and to this day she thinks the tales of the _Ladies' Magazine_
infinitely superior to any trash of modern literature. So do I; for
I read them in childhood, and childhood has a very strong faculty of
admiration, but a very weak one of criticism.... I am pleased that
you cannot quite decide whether I am an attorney's clerk or a
novel-reading dressmaker. I will not help you at all in the discovery;
and as to my handwriting, or the ladylike touches in my style and
imagery, you must not draw any conclusion from that--I may employ an
amanuensis. Seriously, sir, I am very much obliged to you for your
kind and candid letter. I almost wonder you took the trouble to read
and notice the novelette of an anonymous scribe, who had not even the
manners to tell you whether he was a man or a woman, or whether his
'C.T.' meant Charles Timms or Charlotte Tomkins.

TO A FRIEND

_At school abroad_

Brussels [c. _May_ 1842].

I was twenty-six years old a week or two since; and at this ripe time
of life I am a school-girl, and, on the whole, very happy in that
capacity. It felt very strange at first to submit to authority instead
of exercising it--to obey orders instead of giving them; but I like
that state of things. I returned to it with the same avidity that a
cow, that has long been kept on dry hay, returns to fresh grass. Don't
laugh at my simile. It is natural to me to submit, and very unnatural
to command.

This is a large school, in which there are about forty externes, or
day-pupils, and twelve pensionnaires, or boarders. Madame Heger,
the head, is a lady of precisely the same cast of mind, degree of
cultivation, and quality of intellect as Miss ----. I think the severe
p