Fanny.
[Lucy Austin, the clever and handsome daughter of a cleverer and handsomer mother—Mrs. John Austin, wife of the eminent lawyer and writer—excited a great deal of admiration, as the wife of Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, in the London society of my day. Loss of health compelled her to pass the last years of her life in the East; and the letters she wrote during her sojourn there are not only full of charm and interest, but bear witness to a widespread personal influence over the native population among whom she lived, the result of her humane benevolence towards, and kindly sympathy for, them.
One or two amusing incidents occurred with regard to my reading of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" at Manchester. The gentleman who had the management of the performance wrote to me offering me forty pounds for my share of it—a very liberal price, which I declined, my price for one of my readings being invariably twenty pounds. At the end of the performance one of the gentlemen of the committee came to pay me my salary, which having done, he expressed himself, in his own behalf and that of his fellow-managers, greatly obliged to me for the liberality I had exhibited (honesty, it seems to me) in not accepting double my usual terms when they offered it to me. "And," said he, drawing a five-pound note from his pocket-book, "I really—we really—if you would—if you could—allow us to offer you five pounds in addition——" The gentleman's voice died away, and he seemed to be becoming nervous, under the effect of the steadfast seriousness with which, in spite of the greatest inclination to burst out laughing, I listened to this strange proposal. The five-pound note fluttered a little between his finger and thumb, and for one moment I had a diabolical temptation to twitch it from him and throw it into the fire. This prompting of Satan, however, I womanfully resisted, and merely civilly declined the gratuity; and the gentleman left me with profuse acknowledgments of the service I had rendered them and my "extreme liberality."
CHARLES HALLÉ. My friend Charles Hallé, coming in just at this moment, was thrown into fits of laughter at the transaction, and my astonishment at it.
Hallé was a friend of ours, an admirable musician, and a most amiable man, and one of the best masters of our modern day. His style was more remarkable for sensibility, delicacy, and refinement, than for power or brilliancy of execution; but I preferred his rendering of Beethoven to that of all the other virtuosi I ever heard; and some of the hours of greatest musical enjoyment I have had in my life I owe to him, when he and his friend Joachim, playing almost, as it seemed, as much for their own delight as ours, enchanted a small circle of enthusiastic and grateful listeners, gathered round them in my sister's drawing-room.
Mr. Scott's comment upon my reading gave me great pleasure. "It was good," he said, "from beginning to end; but you are Theseus." Oddly enough, a similar compliment was paid me in the same words at the end of a reading that I gave for the Working Men's Institute in Brighton, when my friend, Mr. R——, kindly complimenting me on the performance, said, "It was all delightful: but you are Henry V.," and whatever difference of opinion may have existed among my critics as to my rendering the tragic and comic characters of Shakespeare's plays, I think the heroic ones were those in which I ought to have succeeded best, for they were undoubtedly those with which I had most sympathy.]
My dearest Hal,
I am amused at your gasping anxiety to be told where I am going, as if I was about to depart into some non-postal region, where letter of yours should never reach me more, instead of spending the next week in Edinburgh, which surely you did know.... My dearest Hal, J—— W—— has just come into my room, bringing the news of the Emperor of Russia's death. It has seized me quite hysterically, and the idea of the possible immediate cessation of carnage and desolation, and war and wickedness (in that peculiar shape), has shaken me inexpressibly, and I am shocked at the tears of joy that are raining from my eyes, so that I can't see the paper on which I am writing to you; and if I can thus weep my thanksgivings for the news of this man's death, who have no dear son, or brother, or husband on that murderous Crimean soil, think of the shout of rejoicing which will be his only dirge throughout France and England. I am shocked at the exclamation of gratitude which escaped my lips when I heard the announcement. Poor human soul, how terrible that its sudden summons from its heavy and difficult responsibilities should thus be hailed by any other human creature! and yet how many will draw a long breath, as of a great deliverance, at this news!
I can hardly write at all, my hand shakes so, and I cannot think of anything else; and yet I had purposed to send dear Dorothy some account of her family here, who are all well and most kind to me. I will wait a while....