...y friend James T. Fields had volunteered a refusal of any, so strong was the impression that the poet disliked to be bored by Americans; but when two ladies whom I had met in London, Lady Pollock and Miss Anne Thackeray , afterwards Mrs. Ritchie,--had kindly offered to introduce me, and to write in advance that I was coming, it was not in human nature, at least in American nature, to decline. I spent the night at C...