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[87] house. He is about sixty, with Marchioness to match; side dishes, I presume, but did not inquire. I have just been breakfasting at the Duke of Sutherland's superb palace. I will tell you next time about it. Lady Carlisle says I am nice and pretty, oh! how I love her! . .

In another letter she says:--

“I take some interest in everything I see — especially in all that throws light upon human prog. The Everetts 1 have given us a beautiful and most agreeable dinner: Dickens, Mrs. Norton, Moore, Landseer, and one or two others. Rogers says: ‘I have three pleasures in the day: the first is, when I get up in the morning, and scratch myself with my hair mittens; the second is when I dress for dinner, and scratch myself with my hair mittens; the third is when I undress at night, and scratch myself with my hair mittens.’ . ..”

Beside this feast of hospitality, there was the theatre, with Macready and Helen Faucit in the “Lady of Lyons,” and the opera, with Grisi and Mario, Alboni and Persiani. Julia, who had been forbidden the theatre since her seventh year, enjoyed to the full both music and drama, but “the crowning ecstasy of all” she found in the ballet, of which Fanny Elssler and Cerito were the stars. The former was beginning to wane; the dancing which to Emerson and Margaret Fuller seemed “poetry and religion” had lost, perhaps, something of its magic; the latter was still in her early bloom and grace.

Years later, our mother suggested to Theodore Parker that “the best stage dancing gives the classic, in a

1 Edward Everett was at that time American Minister to England.

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