[Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake, journalist and writer on art, wife of painter Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, President of the Royal Academy and first Director of the National Gallery.] Autograph Letter Signed to Lady Alderson, reporting a death in the family,

See her entry in the Oxford DNB, and that of the recipient’s husband, the judge Sir Edward Hall Alderson (1787-1857). 4pp, 16mo. Bifolium with thick mourning border. In fair condition, lightly aged and worn. Folded for postage. Begins: ‘Dear Lady Alderson / Fresh, & very heavy sorrow has befallen us, or I wd. sooner have answered yr ot of last Saturday. The death of Captn. de Wahl, a most distinguished [army?] officer - my sister’s son - has engrossed all my thoughts.’ She is enclosing ‘a few specimens of the ‘blue paper’ which I have found so efficacious - If you put the corner of the paper to a candle it will immediately burn like ‘touch paper’. She gives advice regarding the paper, whose smoke ‘burnt [?] round the patie nt, gives great relief in asthma or bad cough’. After the valediction she gives ‘the simple receipt’, covering nineteen lines, in which the paper is named as ‘lace paper’.