And I am ever yours truly
E. F.G.
LIV.
Woodbridge: April 3/79.
My dear Mrs. Kemble:—
I know well how exact you are in answering Letters; and I was afraid that you must be in some trouble, for yourself, or others, when I got no reply to a second Letter I wrote you addressed to Baltimore Hotel, Leamington—oh, two months ago. When you last wrote to me, you were there, with a Cough, which you were just going to take with you to Guy’s Cliff. That I thought not very prudent, in the weather we then had. Then I was told by some one, in a letter (not from any Donne, I think—no, Annie Ritchie, I believe) that Mrs. Sartoris was very ill; and so between two probable troubles, I would not trouble you as yet again. I had to go to London for a day three weeks ago (to see a poor fellow dying, sooner or later, of Brain disease), and I ferreted out Mowbray Donne from Somerset House and he told me you were in London, still ill of a Cough; but not your Address. So I wrote to his Wife a few days ago to learn it; and I shall address this Letter accordingly. Mrs. Mowbray writes that you are better, but obliged to take care of yourself. I can only say ‘do not trouble yourself to write’—but I suppose you will—perhaps the more if it be a trouble. See what an Opinion I have of you!—If you write,
pray tell me of Mrs. Sartoris—and do not forget yourself.
It has been such a mortal Winter among those I know, or know of, as I never remember. I have not suffered myself, further than, I think, feeling a few stronger hints of a constitutional sort, which are, I suppose, to assert themselves ever more till they do for me. And that, I suppose, cannot be long adoing. I entered on my 71st year last Monday, March 31.
My elder—and now only—Brother, John, has been shut up with Doctor and Nurse these two months—Æt. 76; his Wife Æt. 80 all but dead awhile ago, now sufficiently recovered to keep her room in tolerable ease: I do not know if my Brother will ever leave his house.
Oh dear! Here is enough of Mortality.
I see your capital Book is in its third Edition, as well it deserves to be. I see no one with whom to talk about it, except one brave Woman who comes over here at rare intervals—she had read my Atlantic Copy, but must get Bentley’s directly it appeared, and she (a woman of remarkably strong and independent Judgment) loves it all—not (as some you know) wishing some of it away. No; she says she wants all to complete her notion of the writer. Nor have I heard of any one who thinks otherwise: so ‘some people’ may be wrong. I know you do not care about all this.