vising.

I think Mrs. Jameson would like you, and you her, if you met, but
my mind is running on something else than this. My father's income
is barely eight hundred a year. John's expenses, since he has been
at college, have been nearly three. Five hundred a year for such a
family as ours is very close and careful work, dear H----, and if
my going on the stage would nearly double that income, lessen my
dear father's anxieties for us all, and the quantity of work which
he latterly has often felt too much for him, and remove the many
privations which my dear mother cheerfully endures, as well as the
weight of her uncertainty about our future provision, would not
this be a "consummation devoutly to be wished"?

ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, March, 1828.
MY DEAREST H----,

I have been thinking what you have been thinking of my long
silence, about which, however, perhaps you have not been thinking
at all. What, you say in one of your last about my destroying your
letters troubles me a good deal, dearest H----. I really cannot
bear to think of it; why, those letters are one of my very few
precious possessions. When I am unhappy (as I sometimes am), I read
them over, and I feel strengthened and comforted; if it is your
_positive desire_ that I should burn them, of course I must do it;
but if it is only a sort of "I think you had better" that you have
about it, I shall keep them, and you must be satisfied with one of
my old "I can't help it's." As for my own scrawls, I do _not_
desire that you should keep them. I write, as I speak, on the
impulse of the moment, and I should be sorry that the incoherent
and often contradictory thoughts that I pour forth daily should be
preserved against me by anybody.

My father is now in Edinburgh. He has been absent from London about
a week. I had a conversation with him about the stage some time
before he went, in which he allowed that, should our miserably
uncertain circumstances finally settle unfavorably, the theatre
might be an honorable and advantageous resource for me; but that at
present he should be sorry to see me adopt that career. As he is
the best and kindest father and friend to us all, such a decision
on his part was conclusive, as you will easily believe; and I have