nuary he was at Clifton,
where he had given, he told his sister-in-law, "by far the best Murder
yet done;" while at the same date he wrote to his daughter: "At Clifton
on Monday night we had a contagion of fainting; and yet the place was
not hot. I should think we had from a dozen to twenty ladies taken out
stiff and rigid, at various times! It became quite ridiculous." He was
afterwards at Cheltenham. "Macready is of opinion that the Murder is two
Macbeths. He declares that he heard every word of the reading, but I
doubt it. Alas! he is sadly infirm." On the 27th he wrote to his
daughter from Torquay that the place into which they had put him to
read, and where a pantomime had been played the night before, was
something between a Methodist chapel, a theatre, a circus, a
riding-school, and a cow-house. That day he wrote to me from Bath:
"Landor's ghost goes along the silent streets here before me. . . . The
place looks to me like a cemetery which the Dead have succeeded in
rising and taking. Having built streets, of their old gravestones, they
wander about scantly trying to 'look alive.' A dead failure."

In the second week of February he was in London, under engagement to
return to Scotland (which he had just left) after the usual weekly
reading at St. James's Hall, when there was a sudden interruption. "My
foot has turned lame again!" was his announcement to me on the 15th,
followed next day by this letter. "Henry Thompson will not let me read
to-night, and will not let me go to Scotland to-morrow. Tremendous house
here, and also in Edinburgh. Here is the certificate he drew up for
himself and Beard to sign. 'We the undersigned hereby certify that Mr.
C. D. is suffering from inflammation of the foot (caused by
over-exertion), and that we have forbidden his appearance on the
platform this evening, as he must keep his room for a day or two.' I
have sent up to the Great Western Hotel for apartments, and, if I can
get them, shall move there this evening. Heaven knows what engagements
this may involve in April! It throws us all back, and will cost me some
five hundred pounds."

A few days' rest again brought so much relief, that, against the urgent
entreaties of members of his family as well as other friends, he was in
the railway carriage bound for Edinburgh on the morning of the 20th of
February, accompanied by Mr. Chappell himself. "I came down lazily on a
sofa," he wrote to me from Edinburgh next day, "hardly changing