It was in the spring of 1842 that I had the good fortune to be introduced to Mrs. S. C. Hall; and, happily for me, mere acquaintanceship soon passed into a friendship that brightened my life. She was then in the zenith of her popularity, for her best novels and her admirable Irish stories were already before the world; but, though the outside public might from her books gain some idea of the writer, it required intimate personal knowledge to form anything like an estimate of her many great qualities. For my own part I cannot imagine a character more finely balanced, and in this balance lay her strength and her influence. She called herself an Irishwoman, but her mother, Mrs. Fielding, whom I well remember as a very cultivated old lady, was of Swiss Huguenot extraction, and I was told that on her father's side Mrs. Hall claimed some collateral relationship to Henry Fielding the novelist. The first fifteen years of her life were spent in Ireland, but, except in her love of that country, her appreciation of the best points of the Irish character, her ardent endeavours to amend its faults, and benefit the people in days when they had a few things of which to complain, she was as little what we are accustomed to call Irish as any one I ever knew.