dramatic, done with simple means, if the
art would justify the theme." Apart from mere personal considerations,
the whole question lay in these last words. It was impossible for me to
admit that the effect to be produced was legitimate, or such as it was
desirable to associate with the recollection of his readings.

Mention should not be omitted of two sorrows which affected him at this
time. At the close of the month before the readings began his youngest
son went forth from home to join an elder brother in Australia. "These
partings are hard hard things" (26th of September), "but they are the
lot of us all, and might have to be done without means or influence, and
then would be far harder. God bless him!" Hardly a month later, the last
of his surviving brothers, Frederick, the next to himself, died at
Darlington. "He had been tended" (24th of October) "with the greatest
care and affection by some local friends. It was a wasted life, but God
forbid that one should be hard upon it, or upon anything in this world
that is not deliberately and coldly wrong."

Before October closed the renewal of his labour had begun to tell upon
him. He wrote to his sister-in-law on the 29th of sickness and sleepless
nights, and of its having become necessary, when he had to read, that he
should lie on the sofa all day. After arrival at Edinburgh in December
he had been making a calculation that the railway travelling over such a
distance involved something more than thirty thousand shocks to the
nerves; but he went on to Christmas, alternating these far-off places
with nights regularly intervening in London, without much more complaint
than of an inability to sleep. Trade reverses at Glasgow had checked the
success there,[281] but Edinburgh made compensation. "The affectionate
regard of the people exceeds all bounds and is shown in every way. The
audiences do everything but embrace me, and take as much pains with the
readings as I do. . . . The keeper of the Edinburgh hall, a fine old
soldier, presented me on Friday night with the most superb red camellia
for my button-hole that ever was seen. Nobody can imagine how he came by
it, as the florists had had a considerable demand for that colour, from
ladies in the stalls, and could get no such thing."

The second portion of the enterprise opened with the New Year, and the
_Sikes and Nancy_ scenes, everywhere his prominent subject, exacted the
most terrible physical exertion from him. In Ja