Lowestoft: June 2/74.

Dear Mrs. Kemble,

Many a time have I written to you from this place: which may be the reason why I write again now—the very day your Letter reaches me—for I don’t know that I have much to say, nor anything worth forcing from you the Answer that you will write. Let me look at your Letter again. Yes: so I thought of ‘he sleeps well,’ and yet I do not remember to have heard it so read. (I never heard you read the Play) I don’t think Macready read it so. I liked his Macbeth, I must say: only he would say ‘Amen st-u-u-u-ck in his throat,’ which was not only a blunder, but a vulgar blunder, I think.

Spedding—I should think indeed it was too late for him to edit Shakespeare, if he had not gone on doing so, as it were, all his Life. Perhaps it is too late for him to remember half, or a quarter, of his own Observations. Well then: I wish he would record what he does remember: if not an Edition of Shakespeare yet so many Notes toward an Edition. I am persuaded that no one is more competent. [45a]

You see your Americans will go too far. It was some American Professor’s Note [45b] on ‘the Autumn of his Bounty’ which occasioned Spedding’s delightful Comment some while ago, and made me remember my old wish that he should do the thing. But he will not: especially if one asks him.

Donne—Archdeacon Groome told me a Fortnight ago that he had been at Weymouth Street. Donne better, but still not his former Self.

By the by, I have got a Skeleton of my own at last: Bronchitis—which came on me a month ago—which I let go on for near three weeks—then was forced to call in a Doctor to subdue, who kept me a week indoors. And now I am told that, every Cold I catch, my Skeleton is to come out, etc. Every N.E. wind that blows, etc. I had not been shut up indoors for some fifty-five years—since Measles at school—but I had green before my Windows, and Don Quixote for Company within. Que voulez-vous?

Shakespeare again. A Doctor Whalley, who wrote a Tragedy for Mrs. Siddons (which she declined), proposed to her that she should read—‘But screw your Courage to the sticking place,’ with the appropriate action of using the Dagger. I think Mrs. Siddons good-naturedly admits there may be something in the suggestion. One reads this in the last memoir of Madame Piozzi, edited by Mr. Hayward.

Blackbird v. Nightingale. I have always loved the first best: as being so jolly, and the Note so proper from that golden Bill of his. But one does not like to go against received opinion. Your Oriole has been seen in these parts by old—very old—people: at least, a gay bird so named. But no one ever pretends to see him now.

Now have you perversely crossed the Address which you desire me to abide by: and I can’t be sure of your ‘Branchtown’? But I suppose that enough is clear to make my Letter reach you if it once gets across the Atlantic. And now this uncertainty about your writing recalls to me—very absurdly—an absurd Story told me by a pious, but humorous, man, which will please you if you don’t know it already.

Scene.—Country Church on Winter’s Evening. Congregation, with the Old Hundredth ready for the Parson to give out some Dismissal Words.

Good old Parson, not at all meaning rhyme, ‘The Light has grown so very dim, I scarce can see to read the Hymn.’

Congregation, taking it up: to the first half of the Old Hundredth—

‘The Light has grown so very dim,
I scarce can see to read the Hymn.’

(Pause, as usual: Parson, mildly impatient) ‘I did not mean to read a Hymn; I only meant my Eyes were dim.’

Congregation, to second part of Old Hundredth:—

‘I did not mean to read a Hymn;
I only meant my Eyes were dim.’

Parson, out of Patience, etc.:—

‘I didn’t mean a Hymn at all,—
I think the Devil’s in you all.’

I say, if you don’t know this, it is worth your knowing, and making known over the whole Continent of America, North and South. And I am your trusty and affectionate old Beadsman (left rather deaf with that blessed Bronchitis)

E. F.G.