Now I have two long letters of yours to answer, and my own opinion is that they will not be answered until I get to the Beeches, and have a few hours' breathing-time, for I am just now setting off for Cambridge, where I act to-night. To-morrow I travel to Bury St. Edmund's, and act there the same night; and Friday I shall just get to London in time for my dinner, and the next morning I go down to Birnham.... The air of St. Leonard's, though you call it cold and sharp, was mild compared with the raw, sunless climate I have since enjoyed at Lynn and Yarmouth; a bracing climate always suits me better than a relaxing one.... I cannot, however, agree with you that there is more "excitement" in rehearsing every morning, and sitting in a dull, dirty, hired room, and acting that everlasting "Hunchback" every evening, than in being your mounted escort to Bex Hill and Fairlight church, and reading to you either "Mary Stuart" or "Jane Eyre." I am glad to see that L—— and I agree about what always seems to me the most improbable part of the latter very remarkable book. I am slow in determining in my own mind the course that other women would pursue in exceptionally difficult circumstances; many of them would doubtless display an amount of principle of which I should be quite incapable; and so I am glad that L—— thinks, as I do, that Jane Eyre's safest course would have been to have left Thornfield without meeting her lover's despair.
Fever at the gates of Ardgillan, my dear Hal, must indeed make you anxious; but as your family have moved thence, I suppose they will not return while there is any danger to be apprehended from doing so.
And now, dear Hal, from the Beeches, where I arrived yesterday afternoon, and am now writing to you.... I have really kept both cold and cough down wonderfully, considering the horrible weather and exposure I have gone through travelling, and in those damp barns of theatres. Hayes will certainly not recover as soon as I do, for she has all the aversion of her class to physic and spare diet....
Charles Greville is here, and I asked him your question, if he had ever published any other book but the one upon Ireland you are reading. He said no. He has, however, written pamphlets and newspaper articles of considerable ability upon political subjects. I have been taking a long walk, and will now resume my letter to you. I perceive I have brought Charles Greville and his book into the middle of what I was telling you about those poor young Norwich actors.
A very pretty and charming niece of my dear friend, Mr. Harness, is married and living within a short distance of Lynn, and as I had not time to stay with her now, I have promised to go back into Norfolk to visit her, and at the same time I have promised to act a night for these poor people if they can get their manager's leave for me to do so.
MRS. GROTE. My dear Hal, this letter seems destined to pass its unfinished existence on the railroads. I am now at this present moment finishing it in my King Street lodging, to which I returned yesterday afternoon, Mrs. Grote being seized in the morning with one of her attacks of neuralgia, for which she is obliged to take such a quantity of morphine that she is generally in a state of stupor for four and twenty to thirty hours. The other guests departed in the morning, and I in the afternoon, after giving her medicine to her, and seeing her gradually grow stupid under its effect. Poor woman, she is a wretched sufferer, and I think these attacks of acute pain in her head answerable for some of the singularity of her demeanor and conversation, which are sometimes all but unaccountably eccentric.
You ask me if I saw anything on that bitter cold journey, as I went along, to interest me. You know I am extremely fond of the act of travelling: being carried through new country excites one's curiosity and stimulates one's powers of observation very agreeably, even when nothing especially beautiful or noteworthy presents itself in the landscape. I had never seen the east counties of England before, and am glad to have become acquainted with their aspect, though it is certainly not what is usually called picturesque. The country between Norwich and Yarmouth is like the ugliest parts of Holland, swampy and barren; the fens of Lincolnshire flat and uninteresting, though admirably drained, cultivated, and fertile. Ely Cathedral, of which I only saw the outside, is magnificent, and the most perfect view of it is the one from the railroad, as one comes from Lynn.
Lynn itself is a picturesque and curious old town, full of remains of ancient monastic buildings. The railroad terminus is situated in a property formerly part of a Carthusian convent, and the wheelwrights' and blacksmiths' and carpenters' cottages are built partly in the old monkish cells, of which two low ranges remain round a space now covered with sleepers, and huge chains, and iron rails, and all the modern materials of steam travel.
Cambridge, of course, I saw nothing of. On the road between it and Bury St. Edmund's one passes over Newmarket heath, the aspect of which is striking, apart from its "associations." Bury St. Edmund's—which is famous, as you know, for its beautiful old churches and relics of monastic greatness—I saw nothing of, but was most kindly and hospitably sheltered by Mr. Donne, who, being now the father of sons, is living in Bury in order to educate them at the school where he and my brothers were as boys under Dr. Malkin. [William Bodham Donne, my brother John's school and college mate, for more than fifty years of this changeful life the unchanged, dear, and devoted friend of me and mine—accomplished scholar, elegant writer, man of exquisite and refined taste, and such a gentleman that my sister always said he was the original of the hero of Boccaccio's story of the "Falcon.">[
God bless you, my dear. I have a pain in my chest, and bad cough, which don't prevent my being