advantage of those ladies whose names and works were coupled with hers. It was this classification, however, that annoyed our poetess more than aught else in the review.
Towards the end of November Miss Mitford was enabled to report that her friend was somewhat better, but I fear, she added, "we dare not expect more than a few months of lingering life." But the vital spark did not flutter out, and the improvement in the invalid's condition, if slow, was, with some fluctuations, continuous. "I did not think," she wrote some few months later, "to be better any more, but I have quite rallied now, except as to strength, and they say that on essential points I shall not suffer permanently—and this is a comfort to poor papa." To another correspondent Miss Barrett wrote, as an excuse for not following up some literary labour:—
No—no; the headache is no excuse. I have not frequent headaches, and if just now I am rather more feverish and uncomfortable than usual, the cause is in the dreadful weather—the snow and east wind. . . . These extreme causes do, however, affect me as little, even less, my physician says, than might have been feared; and I think steadily—hope steadily—for London at the end of May, so to attain a removal from this place, which has been so eminently fatal to my happiness.
The only gladness associated with the banishment here has been your offered sympathy and friendship. Otherwise, bitterness has dropped on bitterness like the snows more than I can tell, and independent of that last most overwhelming affliction of my life, from the edge of the chasm of which I may struggle, but never can escape.
Writing on the 17th of May 1841, to Richard H. Horne, the author of Orion and Cosmo de' Medici, with whom she had already been a correspondent for some time past, she says:—
