Many thanks for your kind note. I shall hope to see you when we return
to town, from which we shall now be absent (with a short interval in
next month) until October. Your account of the Cornishmen gave me great
pleasure; and if I were not sunk in engagements so far, that the crown
of my head is invisible to my nearest friends, I should have asked you
to make me known to them. The new dialogue I will ask you by-and-by to
let me see. I have, for the present, abandoned the idea of sinking a
shaft in Cornwall.
I have sent your Shakesperian extracts to Collier. It is a great
comfort, to my thinking, that so little is known concerning the poet. It
is a fine mystery; and I tremble every day lest something should come
out. If he had had a Boswell, society wouldn't have respected his
grave, but would calmly have had his skull in the phrenological
shop-windows.
Believe me,
Faithfully yours.
[Sidenote: Mr. H. P. Smith.]