I suppose there is no chance of your being over in England this year, and perhaps as little Chance of my being in Italy. All I can say is, the latter is not impossible, which I suppose I may equally say of the former. But pray write me. You can always direct to me at Donne's, 12, St. James' Square, or at Rev. G. Crabbe's, Bredfield, Woodbridge. Either way the letter will soon reach me. Write soon, Frederic, and let me hear how you and yours are: and don't wait, as you usually do, for some inundation of the Arno to set your pen agoing. Write ever so shortly and whatever-about-ly. I have no news to tell you of Friends. I saw old Spedding in London; only doubly calm after the death of a Niece he dearly loved and whose deathbed at Hastings he had just been waiting upon. Harry Lushington wrote a martial Ode on seeing the Guards march over Waterloo Bridge towards the East: I did not see it, but it was much admired and handed about, I believe. And now my paper is out: and I am going through the rain (it is said to rain very much here) to my Sister's. So Goodbye, and write to me, as I beg you, in reply to this long if not very interesting letter.
FOOTNOTES:
[124] "Fitz's" remarks on Landor's judgment of "Pictures, Books and Men" are very amusing; for they have been often repeated in regard to his own on all these subjects. In fact the two, though FitzGerald was not so childish as Landor, had much in common.
[125] The curious eulogy—preferring it to Oxford as being "large and busy" enough to "drown one as much" as London—is also very characteristic of FitzGerald. You can be alone in the country and in a large town—hardly in a small one.
FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE (1809-1893)
To what has been said before of this remarkably gifted lady little need be added. The two letters which follow, derived from Further Records (London, 1890), were written rather late in her life, but are characteristic, in ways partly coinciding, partly divergent, of her strong intellect[126] and her powers of expression. The note to the ghost-story leaves open the question whether Fanny did or did not know the accepted doctrine that the master and mistress of a haunted house are exempt from actual haunting. The "whiff of grape-shot" (as Carlyle might have called it) on the "Bakespearian" absurdity is one of the best things on the subject that the present writer, in a long and wide experience, has come across.
45. To H—— [extract]
York Farm, Branchtown,
Philadelphia, Monday May 18th, 1874.