ue, to which these were held out as
inducements; and there followed what it was supposed I could not resist,
a transformation into the broadest farce of a deep tragedy by a dear
friend of ours. "Now you really must come. Seeing only is believing,
very often isn't that, and even Being the thing falls a long way short
of believing it. Mrs. Nickleby herself once asked me, as you know, if I
really believed there ever was such a woman; but there'll be no more
belief, either in me or my descriptions, after what I have to tell of
our excellent friend's tragedy, if you don't come and have it played
again for yourself 'by particular desire.' We saw it last night, and oh!
if you had but been with us! Young Betty, doing what the mind of man
without my help never _can_ conceive, with his legs like padded
boot-trees wrapped up in faded yellow drawers, was the hero. The comic
man of the company enveloped in a white sheet, with his head tied with
red tape like a brief and greeted with yells of laughter whenever he
appeared, was the venerable priest. A poor toothless old idiot at whom
the very gallery roared with contempt when he was called a tyrant, was
the remorseless and aged Creon. And Ismene being arrayed in spangled
muslin trowsers very loose in the legs and very tight in the ankles,
such as Fatima would wear in _Blue Beard_, was at her appearance
immediately called upon for a song. After this, can you longer. . . ?"

With the opening of September I had renewed report of his book, and of
other matters. "The Philadelphia chapter I think very good, but I am
sorry to say it has not made as much in print as I hoped . . . In America
they have forged a letter with my signature, which they coolly declare
appeared in the _Chronicle_ with the copyright circular; and in which I
express myself in such terms as you may imagine, in reference to the
dinners and so forth. It has been widely distributed all over the
States; and the felon who invented it is a 'smart man' of course. You
are to understand that it is not done as a joke, and is scurrilously
reviewed. Mr. Park Benjamin begins a lucubration upon it with these
capitals, DICKENS IS A FOOL, AND A LIAR. . . . I have a new protege, in the
person of a wretched deaf and dumb boy whom I found upon the sands the
other day, half dead, and have got (for the present) into the union
infirmary at Minster. A most deplorable case."

On the 14th he told me: "I have pleased myself very much to-day in th