In another of the 18th of May, 1809--the last before the marriage took place--I find the following, which may interest some people. “I wish you could be here to-morrow,” she writes, “we are going to see the prisoners of war at Odiam (near Reading) perform one of Molière’s plays. Two years ago we attended several of them, and I never enjoyed anything more.” More than a score of these faded eighty-year-old letters are before me; and I might perhaps have gleaned from them some other little touches illustrative of men and manners when George the Third was king, but were I to yield to all the temptations of the sort that beset the path on which I am travelling, I should try my readers’ patience beyond all hope of forgiveness. My mother had brought home with her the MS. of a couple of volumes on America; and the principal business on hand when I came home from Oxford was the finding a publisher for these. In this quest she was zealously and very energetically assisted by Captain Basil Hall, himself the author of a work on America and sundry other books, which at that time had made a considerable reputation. Basil Hall’s book on America did not take a favourable view of the Americans or their institutions; and it had been mercilessly attacked and accused of misrepresentation by all the critics of the Liberal party. For Hall’s book, and everything else concerning America, was in those days looked at from a political party point of view. America and the Americans were understood to be anti-everything that was dear to Conservatives. They were accordingly the pets of the Whigs (Radicals and Radicalism had not yet emerged into the ken of respectable folk, either Whig or Tory), and Hall’s book had been abused accordingly. He was very sore about the accusations of untruthfulness, and was delighted with a book which supported his assertions and his views. How my mother came to be introduced to him, and how it came to pass that the MS. of her work was shown to him, I do not remember, but the result was that he was zealously eager for the publication of it. The title, if I recollect rightly, was proposed by him. _The Domestic Manners of the Americans_ was published, and made an immediate and great success. It was emphatically the book of the season, was talked of everywhere, and read by all sorts and conditions of men and women. It was highly praised by all the Conservative organs of the press, and vehemently abused by all those of the opposite party. Edition after edition was sold, and the pecuniary results were large enough to avert from the family of the successful authoress the results of her husband’s ruined fortunes.