Great Russell Street, Friday, October 1, 1830.
Dearest H——,
I have risen very early, for what with excitement, and the wakefulness always attendant with me upon a new bed, I have slept but little, and I snatch this first hour of the day, the only one I may be able to command, to tell you that I have heard from my brother, and that he is safe and well, for which, thank God! Further I know nothing. He talks vaguely of being with us toward the end of the winter, but in the meantime, unless he finds some means of conveying some tidings of his welfare to me, I must remain in utter ignorance of his circumstances and situation. Your letter, which was to welcome me to my new home, arrived there two days before I did, and was forwarded to me into Buckinghamshire. A few days there—taking what interest I could in the sporting and fishing, the country quiet of the place, and above all the privilege of taking the sacrament, which, had I remained at Heaton, I should have had no opportunity of doing—gave me a breathing-time and a sense of mental repose before entering again upon that busy life whose demands are already besieging me in the inexorable form of half a dozen new stage dresses to be devised, ordered, and executed in the shortest imaginable time.
You see how truly I prophesied at the beginning of this letter, when I said that the hour before breakfast was perhaps the only one I should be able to command that day. I might have said that week, for this is the first instant I have been able to call my own since then. I rehearsed Juliet yesterday, and shall do so again to-morrow morning; the theater opens with it to-morrow night. I have a new nurse, and I am rehearsing for her, poor woman! She is dreadfully alarmed at taking Mrs. Davenport's place, who certainly was a very great favorite. I am half crazy with the number of new dresses to be got; for though, thanks to the kindness and activity of my mother, none of the trouble of devising them ever falls on me, yet the bare catalogue of silks and satins and velvets, hats and feathers and ruffs, fills me with amazement and trepidation. I fancy I shall go through all the old parts, and then come out in a new tragedy. I shall be most horribly frightened, but I hope I shall do well, for the sake of the poor author, who is a young man of great abilities, and to whom I wish every success. The subject of his play is taken from a Spanish one, called "The Jew of Aragon," and the whole piece is of a new and unhackneyed order. My father and I play a Jewish father and daughter; this and the novelty of the story itself will perhaps be favorable to the play; I hope so with all my heart.
Mrs. Henry Siddons has taken a house in London for six months; I have not seen her yet, but am most anxious to do so. Anxiety and annoyance, I fear, have just caused her a severe indisposition, but she is a little better now. Mrs. Siddons is much better. She is staying at Leamington at present.
Dearest H——, returning from Buckinghamshire the other day, I passed Cassiobury, the grove, the little lane leading down to Heath Farm, and Miss M——'s cottage, and the first days of our acquaintance came back to my memory. I suppose I should have liked and loved you wherever I had met you, but you come in for a share of my love and liking of Cassiobury, and the spring, the beautiful season in which we met first. I send you the long-promised lock of my hair; you will be surprised at the lightness of the shade—at least, I was. It was cut from my forehead, and I think it is a nice bit; tell me that you get it safe.
Henry is staying in Buckinghamshire in all the ecstasy of a young cockney's first sporting days. When he was quite a child and was asked what profession he intended to embrace, he replied that he would be "a gentleman and wear leather breeches," and I think it is the very destiny he is fitted to fill. He is the perfect picture of happiness when in his shooting-jacket and gaiters, with his gun on his shoulder and a bright day before him; and although we were obliged to return to town, my mother was unwilling to curtail his pleasure, and left him to murder pheasants and hares, and amuse himself in a manly fashion.
I did not like the place at which they were staying as much as they did, for though the country was very pretty, I had during the summer tour seen so much that surpassed it that I saw it at a disadvantage. Then, I have no fancy for gypsying, and the greatest taste for all the formal proprieties of life, and what I should call "silver fork existence" in general; and the inconveniences of a small country inn, without really affecting my comfort, disturb my decided preference for luxury. The principal diversion my ingenious mind discovered to while away my time with was a fiddle (an elderly one), which I routed out of a lumber closet, and from which, after due invocations to St. Cecilia, I drew such diabolical sounds as I flatter myself were never excelled by Tartini or his master, the devil himself. I must now close this, for it is tea-time.
The play of "The Jew of Aragon," the first dramatic composition of a young gentleman of the name of Wade, of whose talent my father had a very high opinion, which he trusted the success of his piece would confirm, I am sorry to say failed entirely. It was the first time and the last that I had the distress of assisting in damning a piece, and what with my usual intense nervousness in acting a new part, my anxiety for the interests of both the author and the theatre, and the sort of indignant terror with which, instead of the applause I was accustomed to, I heard the hisses which testified the distaste and disapprobation of the public and the failure of the play, I was perfectly miserable when the curtain fell, and the poor young author, as pale as a ghost, came forward to meet my father at the side scene, and bravely holding out his hand to him said, "Never mind for me, Mr. Kemble; I'll do better another time." And so indeed he did; for he wrote a charming play on the old pathetic story of "Griselda," in which that graceful actress Miss Jarman played his heroine, and my father the hero, and which had an entire and well-deserved success. I am obliged to confess that I retain no recollection whatever of the ill-fated play of "The Jew of Aragon," or my own part in it, save the last scene alone; this, I recollect, was a magnificent Jewish place of worship, in which my father, who was the high priest, appeared in vestments such as I believe the Jewish priests still wear in their solemn ceremonies, and which were so closely copied from the description of Aaron's sacred pontifical robes that I felt a sense of impropriety in such a representation (purely historical, as it was probably considered, and in no way differing from the costume accepted on the French stage in Racine's Jewish plays). And I think it extremely likely that the failure of the piece, which had been imminent all through, found its climax in the unfavorable impression made upon the audience by this very scene, in spite of my father's noble and picturesque appearance.