“The lieutenant-governor’s compliments to Mr. Emmet. He hopes Mrs. Emmet suffered no inconvenience from the alarm of fire which was given last night. As the idea of being locked in may occasion a disagreeable sensation to a lady’s mind, in case of any sudden occurrence (though the lieutenant-governor flatters himself that none in future will arise), he will give directions that the passage door leading to Mr. Emmet’s apartments shall not in future be locked, being convinced Mr. Emmet would make no improper use of all the doors being left open.” The letters which came from Casino were eagerly welcomed by Jane Emmet and her husband, telling, as they did, so much that they longed to know of the little ones left behind. John is Grandmother Patten’s favourite, and when he goes to visit her he comes back the proud possessor of “new clothes and a great number of Buttons.” “He felt very visibly the importance he had acquired by his visit to town, for as soon as he returned he desired John Delany should be brought in to play with him, as his grandmamma had always a boy on purpose to play with him.” John’s slowness, to which there are frequent allusions in the letters, seems to have caused a little anxiety to his father, so his grandmother is eager to do him justice. “He does not, I assure you, want either observation or intellect, he has great natural justice and a very open good-natured temper.” We learn from his grandfather that he is at “a crown and a quarter school, where he tells me he makes great proficiency, four or five lessons a day in his A, B, C, but as yet he does not couple them very accurately. John, however, is a very well-disposed, well-tempered child, and if he does not mount into the Empyrean galaxy, he will always keep the Milky Way of life, and never tread on thorns.” On another occasion John is at his grandmother’s elbow while she is writing to father and mother and he expressly desires her to tell them that “he is a very good boy; that he has gotten a new spelling book from his grandmamma Patten, and that he will take care and get his lessons well.” All this Grandmamma Emmet is sure “he has sincere intentions of performing, tho’ I must confess that in his old spelling-book he is not very brilliant. He, however, I am told, performs the part of an usher in the school, and acquits himself with great propriety.... John, I think, is much better at school, it helps to enliven him and in some measure open his ideas; he does not learn any bad habits, and he is very fond of it; at home he would be apt to grow sluggish.” As John had not completed his _fifth_ year at the time these letters were written, we need not share too acutely his absent father’s anxiety about him—especially as _we_ from our point of vantage, some six score years later, discern in John one of the most brilliant men of his time. When he died—in the prime of his manhood, at the age of forty-six, his colleagues of the