My Dear Felton:  I was delighted to receive your letter yesterday, and was well pleased with its contents.  I anticipated objection to Carlyle’s letter.  I called particular attention to it for three reasons.  Firstly, because he boldly said what all the others think, and therefore deserved to be manfully supported.  Secondly, because it is my deliberate opinion that I have been assailed on this subject in a manner in which no man with any pretensions to public respect or with the remotest right to express an opinion on a subject of universal literary interest would be assailed in any other country.....

    I really cannot sufficiently thank you, dear Felton, for your warm
    and hearty interest in these proceedings.  But it would be idle to
    pursue that theme, so let it pass.

The wig and whiskers are in a state of the highest preservation.  The play comes off next Wednesday night, the 25th.  What would I give to see you in the front row of the centre box, your spectacles gleaming not unlike those of my dear friend Pickwick, your face radiant with as broad a grin as a staid professor may indulge in, and your very coat, waistcoat, and shoulders expressive of what we should take together when the performance was over!  I would give something (not so much, but still a good round sum) if you could only stumble into that very dark and dusty theatre in the daytime (at any minute between twelve and three), and see me with my coat off, the stage manager and universal director, urging impracticable ladies and impossible gentlemen on to the very confines of insanity, shouting and driving about, in my own person, to an extent which would justify any philanthropic stranger in clapping me into a strait-waistcoat without further inquiry, endeavoring to goad H. into some dim and faint understanding of a prompter’s duties, and struggling in such a vortex of noise, dirt, bustle, confusion, and inextricable entanglement of speech and action as you would grow giddy in contemplating.  We perform A Roland for an Oliver, A good Night’s Rest, and Deaf as a Post.  This kind of voluntary hard labor used to be my great delight.  The furor has come strong upon me again, and I begin to be once more of opinion that nature intended me for the lessee of a national theatre, and that pen, ink, and paper have spoiled a manager.

O, how I look forward across that rolling water to home and its small tenantry!  How I busy myself in thinking how my books look, and where the tables are, and in what positions the chairs stand relatively to the other furniture; and whether we shall get there in the night, or in the morning, or in the afternoon; and whether we shall be able to surprise them, or whether they will be too sharply looking out for us; and what our pets will say; and how they’ll look, and who will be the first to come and shake hands, and so forth!  If I could but tell you how I have set my heart on