"Thus much for Lady Adeline's appearance and manners. In regard to the acquirements and endowments of her mental being, I am perhaps not myself qualified to speak--she is not precisely what the laborious educating mammas would call accomplished, but she has a master genius for _one_ art and a love for all. Her musical talent certainly requires much instruction to bring it to any perfection, but the scraps of airs she warbles as she flies about the house, are in the best taste as far as they go--and a few Venetian ballads which she sings to her guitar, and which she says her cousin taught her, are quite inebriating. "She unfeignedly undervalues all she does; perhaps too much so; but you read in her countenance that she is perfectly sincere; that all _spoken_ praise distresses her; and you are involuntarily led to seek to give her homage in some more palatable shape. "What do you think of this portrait of the young Adeline? It looks like that of a heroine in romance, as I glance my eyes over the words, and yet I have such a nausea at all the persons bearing that designation, that I would fain save the delightful one of whom I am writing from that hacknied name. You must have heard, of course, that she is engaged to her cousin Lord Albert D'Esterre; but like all those engagements made for people when they are children, I do not think it will be fulfilled _con amore_--not but what she blushes whenever she speaks of him, and _that_ she does pretty frequently; and if he is grown up like a certain bust (for I have not seen him these three years, and boys change so from eighteen to one and twenty), he really must be _un bel Giovane_. By the way, she has made an exquisite drawing of _mon beau cousin_, but that is neither here nor there, the fiction of seventeen is always beautiful. Pray in your next gracious letter inform me what sort of man he has become, for I feel a brotherly regard for this very nice person, Lady Adeline Seymour, and should like to think she had a chance of happiness. Happiness, what a sound! but the reality, where is it? 'Come L'Araba Fenicè Che ci sia, ciascun lo dicè Dove sia, nessun lo sà.' "I should have told you, by the bye, that with all the gaiety, which is one of her greatest charms, Lady Adeline has a tincture of seriousness mingled with it, which some might suppose approached to Methodism; but even if it is so, _à son age elle en guérira_.