tled the
matter to put it in the fire yesterday, I should certainly have done it.
Your opinion is requested. I think I shall have grounds for a very good
speech at Brummagem; but I am not sure about Liverpool: having
misgivings of over-gentility." My opinion was clearly for sending the
money back, which accordingly was done.

Both speeches, duly delivered to enthusiastic listeners at the places
named, were good, and both, with suitable variations, had the same
theme: telling his popular audience in Birmingham that the principle of
their institute, education comprehensive and unsectarian, was the only
safe one, for that without danger no society could go on punishing men
for preferring vice to virtue without giving them the means of knowing
what virtue was; and reminding his genteeler audience in Liverpool, that
if happily they had been themselves well taught, so much the more should
they seek to extend the benefit to all, since, whatever the precedence
due to rank, wealth, or intellect, there was yet a nobility beyond them,
expressed unaffectedly by the poet's verse and in the power of education
to confer.

Howe'er it be, it seems to me,
'Tis only noble to be good:
True hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.

He underwent some suffering, which he might have spared himself, at his
return. "I saw the _Carol_ last night," he wrote to me of a dramatic
performance of the little story at the Adelphi. "Better than usual, and
Wright seems to enjoy Bob Cratchit, but _heart-breaking_ to me. Oh
Heaven! if any forecast of _this_ was ever in my mind! Yet O. Smith was
drearily better than I expected. It is a great comfort to have that kind
of meat under done; and his face is quite perfect." Of what he suffered
from these adaptations of his books, multiplied remorselessly at every
theatre, I have forborne to speak, but it was the subject of complaint
with him incessantly; and more or less satisfied as he was with
individual performances, such as Mr. Yates's Quilp or Mantalini and Mrs.
Keeley's Smike or Dot, there was only one, that of Barnaby Rudge by the
Miss Fortescue who became afterwards Lady Gardner, on which I ever heard
him dwell with a thorough liking. It is true that to the dramatizations
of his next and other following Christmas stories he gave help himself;
but, even then, all such efforts to assist special representations were
mere attempts to render more