My Very Dear Mr. Fields: I am beginning to get very fidgety about
you, and thinking rather too often, not only of the breadth of the
Atlantic, but of its dangers. However I must hear soon, and I write
now because I am expecting a fellow-townsman of yours, Mr. Thompson,
an American artist, who expected to find you still in England, and
who is welcomed, as I suppose all Boston would be ... People do not
love you the less, dear friend, for missing you.
I write to you this morning, because I have something to say and
something to ask. In the first place, I am better. Mr. Harness, who,
God bless him, left that Temple of Art, the Deepdene, and Mr. Hope's
delightful conversation, to come and take care of me, stayed at
Swallowfield three weeks. He found out a tidy lodging, which he has
retained, and he promises to come back in November; at present he is
again at the Deepdene. Nothing could be so judicious as his way of
going on; he came at two o'clock to my cottage and we drove out
together; then he went to his lodgings to dinner, to give me three
hours of perfect quiet; at eight he and the Russells met here to
tea, and he read Shakespeare (there is no such reader in the world)
till bedtime. Under his treatment no wonder that I improved, but the
low-fever is not far off; doing a little too much, I fell back even
before his departure, and have been worse since. However, on the
whole, I am much better.
Now to my request. You perhaps remember my speaking to you of a copy
of my "Recollections," which was in course of illustration in the
winter. Mr. Holloway, a great print-seller of Bedford Street, Covent
Garden, has been engaged upon it ever since, and brought me the
first volume to look at on Tuesday. It would have rejoiced the soul
of dear Dr. Holmes. My book is to be set into six or seven or eight
volumes, quarto, as the case may be; and although not unfamiliar
with the luxuries of the library, I could not have believed in the
number and richness of the pearls which have been strung upon so
slender a thread. The rarest and finest portraits, often many of one
person and always the choicest and the best,--ranging from
magnificent heads of the great old poets, from the Charleses and
Cromwells, to Sprat and George Faulkner of Dublin, of whom it was
thought none existed, until this print turned up unexpectedly in a
supplementary volume of Lord Chesterfield; nothing is too odd for
Mr. Holloway. There is a colored print of George the Third,--a full
length which really brings the old king to life again, so striking
is the resemblance, and quantities of theatrical people, Munden and
Elliston and the Kembles. There are two portraits of "glorious John"
in Penruddock. Then the curious old prints of old houses. They have
not only one two hundred years old of Dorrington Castle, but the
actual drawing from which that engraving was made; and they are rich
beyond anything in exquisite drawings of scenery by modern artists
sent on purpose to the different spots mentioned. Besides which
there are all sorts of characteristic autographs (a capital one of
Pope); in short, nothing is wanting that the most unlimited expense
(Mr. Holloway told me that his employer, a great city merchant of
unbounded riches, constantly urged him to spare no expense to
procure everything that money would buy), added to taste, skill, and
experience, could accomplish. Of course the number of proper names
and names of places have been one motive for conferring upon my book
an honor of which I never dreamt; but there is, besides, an
enthusiasm for my writings on the part of Mrs. Dillon, the lady of
the possessor, for whom it is destined as a birthday gift. Now what
I have to ask of you is to procure for Mr. Holloway as many
autographs and portraits as you can of the American writers whom I
have named,--dear Dr. Holmes, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier,
Prescott, Ticknor. If any of them would add a line or two of their
writing to their names, it would be a favor, and if; being about it,
they would send two other plain autographs, for I have heard of two
other copies in course of illustration, and expect to be applied to
by their proprietors every day. Mr. Holloway wrote to some trade
connection in Philadelphia, but probably because he applied to the
wrong place and the wrong person, and because he limited his
correspondent to time, obtained no results. If there be a print of
Professor Longfellow's house, so much the better, or any other
autographs of Americans named in my book. Forgive this trouble, dear
friend. You will probably see the work when you come to London in
the spring, and then you will understand the interest that I take
in it as a great book of art. Also my dear old friend, Lady Morley
(Gibbon's correspondent), who at the age of eighty-three is caught
by new books and is as enthusiastic as a girl, has commissioned me
to inquire about your new authoress, the writer of ----, who she is
and all about her. For my part, I have not finished the book yet,
and never shall. Besides my own utter dislike to its painfulness,
its one-sidedness, and its exaggeration, I observe that the sort of
popularity which it has obtained in England, and probably in
America, is decidedly _bad_, of the sort which cannot and does not
last,--a cry which is always essentially one-sided and commonly
wrong....
Ever most faithfully and affectionately yours,