I will make a point of going to the Athenæum on Monday night; and if I had five hundred votes to give, Mr. Macdonald should have them all, for your sake.
I grieve to hear that you have been ill, but I hope that the spring, when it comes, will find you blooming with the rest of the flowers.
Very faithfully yours.
Mr. Edmund Yates.
Tavistock House, Tavistock Square, London, W.C.,
Wednesday, April 28th, 1858.
My dear Yates,
For a good many years I have suffered a great deal from charities, but never anything like what I suffer now. The amount of correspondence they inflict upon me is really incredible. But this is nothing. Benevolent men get behind the piers of the gates, lying in wait for my going out; and when I peep shrinkingly from my study-windows, I see their pot-bellied shadows projected on the gravel. Benevolent bullies drive up in hansom cabs (with engraved portraits of their benevolent institutions hanging over the aprons, like banners on their outward walls), and stay long at the door. Benevolent area-sneaks get lost in the kitchens and are found to impede the circulation of the knife-cleaning machine. My man has been heard to say (at The Burton Arms) "that if it was a wicious place, well and good—that an't door work; but that wen all the Christian wirtues is always a-shoulderin' and a-helberin' on you in the 'all, a-tryin' to git past you and cut upstairs into master's room, why no wages as you couldn't name wouldn't make it up to you."
Persecuted ever.
Mrs Yates.
(THE CHARMING ACTRESS, THE MOTHER OF MR. EDMUND YATES.)