Pollock is busy editing Macready’s Papers.
XVIII.
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?