We do not think that your Doncaster Belles sounded very captivating. I think I could have shown you at one glance a better show on the Pantiles yesterday--the beauties who turned out with a bright gleam after a horrid morning. To begin with the greatest, Miss Eden looked magnificent, and is pronounced very agreeable. With her was Lord Auckland's sister, extremely pretty and elegant, quite a _Lucile_, then Miss Bruce, smart, with well made boots, and Miss Anstruther who, perhaps, would be least thought of and attract the most. After leaving there I met the Douglases--Miss D. looking as if her blood did not circulate and Caroline as if she wished to be civil but found it inconvenient.... Should you have to write to Murray, tell him to send to Grosvenor Square the second part of "Childe Harold," and also the new novel by the "Author of Waverley." In the ensuing year Frances Stanhope was taken to Court by her mother. Tall, graceful, and with a dazzling complexion, her beauty was singularly striking, and she used to relate that when she was presented to the Regent, H.R.H., who always distinguished between the pretty débutantes and the plain, graciously honoured her by bestowing upon her two resounding kisses on each cheek. Not long after this auspicious entry into society, however, her mother decided that a couple of years spent on the Continent might be equally advantageous to the health of Walter Stanhope and to the education of his children. The family therefore migrated to Paris, where everything at this date was in a curious state of transition. With Napoleon far away at St Helena, Louis XVIII. was firmly established on the Throne of his ancestors, and France was endeavouring to recover something of her pristine gaiety. Sir Charles Stuart was now Ambassador at the French Court; many English were in Paris, and like a fresh act of a Play wherein the various _dramatis personae_, moved by a common impulse, translate themselves _en masse_ to a fresh locality, so the Stanhopes appear, in the midst of their new surroundings, to have found themselves encircled by their former friends. _Marianne Spencer-Stanhope to John Spencer-Stanhope._ 35 RUE DE LA MADELEINE, _February 7th, 1818._ I will not lose the opportunity of sending you a letter by Lady Crompton, who goes to England in two days. Mrs Beaumont, her two daughters and Wentworth are here, very grand and gay, talking of giving two grand balls; she is of course the _first_ everywhere.