[88a] ‘The Exile,’ quoted from memory.
[88b] See letter of August 24, 1875.
[89] Atlantic Monthly, August 1875, p. 156.
[90a] Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. De Quincey’s account of him is in his essay on Charles Lamb (‘Works,’ ed. 1862, viii. 146). His career was the subject of a story by Dickens, called ‘Hunted Down.’
[90b] Minnie Thackeray (Mrs. Leslie Stephen) died Nov. 28.
[91] About the same time he wrote to me:—
‘A dozen years ago I entreated Annie Thackeray, Smith & Elder, &c., to bring out a Volume of Thackeray’s better Drawings. Of course they wouldn’t—now Windus and Chatto have, you know, brought out a Volume of his inferior: and now Annie T. S. & E. prepare a Volume—when it is not so certain to pay, at any rate, as when W. M. T. was the Hero of the Day. However, I send them all I have: pretty confident they will select the worst; of course, for my own part, I would rather have any other than copies of what I have: but I should like the World to acknowledge he could do something beside the ugly and ridiculous. Annie T. sent me the enclosed Specimen: very careless, but full of Character. I can see W. M. T. drawing it as he was telling one about his Scotch Trip. That disputatious Scotchman in the second Row with Spectacles, and—teeth. You may know some who will be amused at this:—but send it back, please: no occasion to write beside.’
[92] When I was preparing the first edition of FitzGerald’s Letters I wrote to Mrs. Kemble for permission to quote the passage from her Gossip which is here referred to. She replied (11 Dec. 1883):—
‘I have no objection whatever to your quoting what I said of Edward Fitzgerald in the Atlantic Monthly, but I suppose you know that it was omitted from Bentley’s publication of my book at Edward’s own desire. He did not certainly knock me on the head with Dr. Johnson’s sledge-hammer, but he did make me feel painfully that I had been guilty of the impertinence of praising.’
I did not then avail myself of the permission so readily granted, but I venture to do so now, in the belief that the publicity from which his sensitive nature shrank during his lifetime may now without impropriety be given to what was written in all sincerity by one of his oldest and most intimate friends. It was Mrs. Kemble who described him as ‘an eccentric man of genius, who took more pains to avoid fame than others do to seek it,’ and this description is fully borne out by the account she gave of him in the offending passage which follows:—