So strongly do I feel this, as I sip my coffee this morning, (May 24th,) after being made profoundly miserable last night, because I did not think it likely I should be accepted if I made an offer to any one of three beautiful young ladies who were crushing and rending my heart into a mere shamrock leaf, the whole afternoon; nor had any power to do, what I should have liked better still, send Giafar (without Zobeide’s knowing anything about it) to superintend the immediate transport to my palace of all three;—that I am afraid, if it were left to me at present to institute, without help from kinder counsellors, the education of the younger children on St. George’s estate, the methods of the old woman who lived in a shoe would be the first that occurred to me as likely to conduce most directly to their future worth and felicity. And I chanced, as Fors would have it, to fall, but last week, as I was arranging some books bought two years ago, and forgotten ever since,—on an instance of the use of extreme severity in education, which cannot but commend itself to the acceptance of every well informed English gentlewoman. For all well informed English gentlewomen and gentle-maidens, have faithful respect for the memory of Lady Jane Grey. But I never myself, until the minute when I opened that book, could at all understand Lady Jane Grey. I have seen a great deal, thank Heaven, of good, and prudent, and clever girls; but not among the very best and wisest of them did I ever find the slightest inclination to stop indoors to read Plato, when all their people were in the Park. On the contrary, if any approach to such disposition manifested itself, I found it was always, either because the scholastic young person thought that somebody might possibly call, suppose—myself, the Roger Ascham of her time,—or suppose somebody else who would prevent her, that day, from reading “piu avanti,” or because the author who engaged her attention, so far from being Plato himself, was, in many essential particulars, anti-Platonic. And the more I thought of Lady Jane Grey, the more she puzzled me. Wherefore, opening, among my unexamined books, Roger Ascham’s Scholemaster, printed by John Daye, dwelling over Aldersgate, An. 1571, just at the page where he gives the original account of the thing as it happened, I stopped in my unpacking to decipher the black letter of it with attention; which, by your leave, good reader, you shall also take the trouble to do yourself, from this, as far as I can manage to give it you, accurate facsimile of the old page. And trust me that I have a reason for practising you in these old letters, though I have no time to tell it you just now.