It really seemed to show me more than I had yet seen
in the original.

Ever yours,
E. F.G.

XLIII.

LOWESTOFT: _October_ 24/76.

DEAR MRS. KEMBLE,

Little--Nothing--as I have to write, I am nevertheless beginning to write
to you, from this old Lodging of mine, from which I think our
Correspondence chiefly began--ten years ago. I am in the same Room: the
same dull Sea moaning before me: the same Wind screaming through the
Windows: so I take up the same old Story. My Lugger was then about
building: {115} she has passed into other hands now: I see her from time
to time bouncing into Harbour, with her '244' on her Bows. Her Captain
and I have parted: I thought he did very wrongly--Drink, among other
things: but he did not think he did wrong: a different Morality from
ours--that, indeed, of Carlyle's ancient Sea Kings. I saw him a few days
ago in his house, with Wife and Children; looking, as always, too big for
his house: but always grand, polite, and unlike anybody else. I was
noticing the many Flies in the room--'Poor things,' he said, 'it is the
warmth of our Stove makes them alive.' When Tennyson was with me, whose
Portrait hangs in my house in company with those of Thackeray and this
Man (the three greatest men I have known), I thought that both Tennyson
and Thackeray were inferior to him in respect of Thinking of Themselves.
When Tennyson was telling me of how The Quarterly abused him (humorously
too), and desirous of knowing why one did not care for his later works,
etc., I thought that if he had lived an active Life, as Scott and
Shakespeare; or even ridden, shot, drunk, and played the Devil, as Byron,
he would have done much more, and talked about it much less. 'You know,'
said Scott to Lockhart, 'that I don't care a Curse about what I write,'
{116} and one sees he did not. I don't believe it was far otherwise with
Shakespeare. Even old Wordsworth, wrapt up in his Mountain mists, and
proud as he was, was above all this vain Disquietude: proud, not vain,
was he: and that a Great Man (as Dante) has some right to be--but not to
care what the Coteries say. What a Rigmarole!

Donne scarce ever writes to me (Twalmley the Great), and if he do not
write to you, depend upon it he thinks he has nothing worth sending over
the Atlantic. I heard from Mowbray quite lately that his Father was very
well.

Yes: you told me in a previous Letter that you were coming to England
after Christmas. I shall n