(No date)

Yes, dearest Mr. Fields, I continue to get better and better, and shall be delighted to see you and Mr. and Mrs. W——­ on Friday.  I even went in to surprise Mr. May on Saturday, so, weather permitting, we shall get up to Upton together.  I want you to see that relique of Protestant bigotry.  No doubt many of my dear countrymen would play just the same pranks now, if the spirit of the age would permit; the will is not wanting, witness our courts of law.

I have been reading the “Life of Margaret Fuller.”  What a tragedy from first to last!  She must have been odious in Boston in spite of her power and her strong sense of duty, with which I always sympathize; but at New York, where she dwindled from a sibyl to a “lionne,” one begins to like her better, and in England and Paris, where she was not even that, better still; so that one is prepared for the deep interest of the last half-volume.  Of course her example must have done much injury to the girls of her train.  Of course, also, she is the Zenobia of dear Mr Hawthorne.  One wonders what her book would have been like.

Mr. Bennett has sent me the “Nile Notes.”  We must talk about that, which I have not read yet, not delighting much in Eastern travels, or, rather, being tired of them.  Ah, how sad it will be when I cannot say “We will talk”!  Surely Mr. Webster does not mean to get up a dispute with England!  That would be an affliction; for what nations should be friends if ours should not?  What our ministers mean, nobody can tell,—­hardly, I suppose, themselves.  My hope was in Mr. Webster.  Well, this is for talking.  God bless you, dear friend.

    Ever most affectionately yours, M.R.M.

    August 7, 1852.

Hurrah! dear and kind friend, I have found the line without any other person’s aid or suggestion.  Last night it occurred to me that it was in some prologue or epilogue, and my little book-room being very rich in the drama, I have looked through many hundreds of those bits of rhyme, and at last made a discovery which, if it have no other good effect, will at least have “emptied my head of Corsica,” as Johnson said to Boswell; for never was the great biographer more haunted by the thought of Paoli than I by that line.  It occurs in an epilogue by Garrick on quitting the stage, June, 1776, when the performance was for the benefit of sick and aged actors.

A veteran see! whose last act on the stage Entreats your smiles for sickness and for age; Their cause I plead, plead it in heart and mind, A fellow-feeling makes one wondrous kind.

Not finding it quoted in Johnson convinced me that it would probably have been written after the publication of the Dictionary, and ultimately guided me to the right place.  It is singular that epilogues were just dismissed at the first representation of one of my plays, “Foscari,” and