[Nov., 1882.]

My dear Mrs. Kemble:

You must be homeward-bound by this time, I think: but I hope my letter won’t light upon you just when you are leaving Paris, or just arriving in London—perhaps about to see Mrs. Wister off to America from Liverpool! But you will know very well how to set my letter aside till some better opportunity. May Mrs. Wister fare well upon her Voyage over the Atlantic, and find all well when she reaches her home.

I have been again—twice or thrice—to Aldeburgh, when my contemporary old Beauty Mary Lynn was staying there; and pleasant Evenings enough we had, talking of other days, and she reading to me some of her Mudie Books, finishing with a nice little Supper, and some hot grog (for me) which I carried back to the fire, and set on the carpet. [252b] She read me (for one thing) ‘Marjorie Fleming’ from a Volume of Dr. Brown’s Papers [253a]—read it as well as she could for laughing—‘idiotically,’ she said—but all the better to my mind. She had been very dismal all day, she said. Pray get some one to read you ‘Marjorie’—which I say, because (as I found) it agrees with one best in that way. If only for dear Sir Walter’s sake, who doated on the Child; and would not let his Twelfth Night be celebrated till she came through the Snow in a Sedan Chair, where (once in the warm Hall) he called all his Company down to see her nestling before he carried her upstairs in his arms. A very pretty picture. My old Mary said that Mr. Anstey’s ‘Vice Versa’ made her and a friend, to whom she read it, laugh idiotically too: but I could not laugh over it alone, very clever as it is. And here is enough of me and Mary.

Devrient’s Theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (which you wrote me of) I cannot pretend to judge of: what he said of the Englishwomen, to whom the Imogens, Desdemonas, etc., were acceptable, seems to me well said. I named it to Aldis Wright in a letter, but what he thinks on the subject—surely no otherwise than Mrs. Kemble—I have not yet heard. My dear old Alfred’s Pastoral troubles me a little—that he should have exposed himself to ridicule in his later days. Yet I feel sure that his aim is a noble one; and there was a good notice in the Academy [253b] saying there was much that was fine in the Play—nay, that a whole good Play might yet be made of it by some better Playwright’s practical Skill.

And here is the end of my paper, before I have said something else that I had to say. But you have enough for the present from your ancient E. F.G.—who has been busy arranging some ‘post mortem’ papers.