"I hope Mrs. M. is quite re-established. The little girl was born on the 10th of December last; her name is Augusta _Ada_ (the second a very antique family name,--I believe not used since the reign of King John). She was, and is, very flourishing and fat, and reckoned very large for her days--squalls and sucks incessantly. Are you answered? Her mother is doing very well, and up again. "I have now been married a year on the second of this month--heigh-ho! I have seen nobody lately much worth noting, except S * * and another general of the Gauls, once or twice at dinners out of doors. S * * is a fine, foreign, villanous-looking, intelligent, and very agreeable man; his compatriot is more of the _petit-maitre_, and younger, but I should think not at all of the same intellectual calibre with the Corsican--which S * *, you know, is, and a cousin of Napoleon's. "Are you never to be expected in town again? To be sure, there is no one here of the 1500 fillers of hot-rooms, called the fashionable world. My approaching papa-ship detained us for advice, &c. &c. though I would as soon be here as any where else on this side of the Straits of Gibraltar. "I would gladly--or, rather, sorrowfully--comply with your request of a dirge for the poor girl you mention.[90] But how can I write on one I have never seen or known? Besides, you will do it much better yourself. I could not write upon any thing, without some personal experience and foundation; far less on a theme so peculiar. Now, you have both in this case; and, if you had neither, you have more imagination, and would never fail. "This is but a dull scrawl, and I am but a dull fellow. Just at present, I am absorbed in 500 contradictory contemplations, though with but one object in view--which will probably end in nothing, as most things we wish do. But never mind,--as somebody says, 'for the blue sky bends over all.' I only could be glad, if it bent over me where it is a little bluer; like the 'skyish top of blue Olympus,' which, by the way, looked very white when I last saw it. "Ever," &c. [Footnote 90: I had mentioned to him, as a subject worthy of his best powers of pathos, a melancholy event which had just occurred in my neighbourhood, and to which I have myself made allusion in one of the Sacred Melodies--"Weep not for her."] * * * * *