ere,
or enjoyed myself more completely. The great chemist, Gregory, who spoke
at the meeting, returned with us to Edinburgh to-day, and gave me many
new lights on the road regarding the extraordinary pains Macaulay seems
for years to have taken to make himself disagreeable and disliked here.
No one else, on that side, would have had the remotest chance of being
unseated at the last election; and, though Gregory voted for him, I
thought he seemed quite as well pleased as anybody else that he didn't
come in. . . . I am sorry to report the Scott Monument a failure. It is
like the spire of a Gothic church taken off and stuck in the ground." On
the first day of 1848, still in Edinburgh, he wrote again: "Jeffrey, who
is obliged to hold a kind of morning court in his own study during the
holidays, came up yesterday in great consternation, to tell me that a
person had just been to make and sign a declaration of bankruptcy; and
that on looking at the signature he saw it was James Sheridan Knowles.
He immediately sent after, and spoke with him; and of what passed I am
eager to talk with you." The talk will bring back the main subject of
this chapter, from which another kind of strolling has led me away; for
its results were other amateur performances, of which the object was to
benefit Knowles.

This was the year when a committee had been formed for the purchase and
preservation of Shakespeare's house at Stratford, and the performances
in question took the form of contributions to the endowment of a
curatorship to be held by the author of _Virginius_ and the _Hunchback_.
The endowment was abandoned upon the town and council of Stratford
finally (and very properly) taking charge of the house; but the sum
realised was not withdrawn from the object really desired, and one of
the finest of dramatists profited yet more largely by it than Leigh Hunt
did by the former enterprise. It may be proper to remark also, that,
like Leigh Hunt, Knowles received soon after, through Lord John Russell,
the same liberal pension; and that smaller claims to which attention had
been similarly drawn were not forgotten, Mr. Poole, after much kind help
from the Bounty Fund, being in 1850 placed on the Civil List for half
the amount by the same minister and friend of letters.

Dickens threw himself into the new scheme with all his old energy;[149]
and prefatory mention may be made of our difficulty in selection of a
suitable play to alternate with our old