observation of my acting.  I am always thankful for your criticisms, even when I do not quite agree with them; for I know that you are always kindly anxious that I should not destroy my own effects, which I believe I not unfrequently do.  With regard to my action, unless in passages which necessarily require a specific gesture, such as, “You’ll find them at the Marchesa Aldabella’s,” I never determine any one particular movement; and, of course, this must render my action different almost every time; and so it depends upon my own state of excitement and inspiration, so to speak, whether the gesture be forcible or not.  My father desires me to send you Retsch’s “Hamlet;” it is his, and I request you not to judge it too hastily:  I have generally heard it abused, but I think in many parts it has very great merit.  I am told that Retsch says he has no fancy for illustrating “Romeo and Juliet,” which seems strange.  One would have thought he would have delighted in portraying those lovely human beings, whom one always imagines endowed with an outward and visible form as youthful, beautiful, and full of grace, as their passion itself was.  Surely the balcony, the garden, and grave-yard scenes, would have furnished admirable subjects for his delicate and powerful hand.  Is it possible that he thinks the thing beyond him?  I must go to work.  Good-by.

Ever yours truly,
F. A. K.

You marked so many things in my manuscript book that I really felt ashamed to copy them all, for I should have filled more than half yours with my rhymes.  I have just added to those I did transcribe a sonnet I wrote on Monday night after the play.

It may have been that the execution of “Faust,” his masterpiece, disinclined Retsch for the treatment of another love story.  He did subsequently illustrate “Romeo and Juliet” with much grace and beauty; but it is, as a whole, undoubtedly inferior to his illustrations of Goethe’s tragical love story.  Retsch’s genius was too absolutely German to allow of his treating anything from any but a German point of view.  Shakespeare, Englishman as he is, has written an Italian “Romeo and Juliet;” but Retsch’s lovers are Teutonic in spite of their costume, and nowhere, as in the wonderful play, is the Southern passion made manifest through the Northern thought.

The private theatricals at Bridgewater House were fruitful of serious consequences to me, and bestowed on me a lasting friendship and an ephemeral love:  the one a source of much pleasure, the other of some pain.  They entailed much intimate intercourse with Lord and Lady Francis Leveson Gower, afterward Egerton, and finally Earl and Countess of Ellesmere, who became kind and constant friends of mine.  Victor Hugo’s play of “Hernani,” full of fine and striking things, as well as of exaggerations verging on the ludicrous, had been most admirably rendered into rhymed verse by Lord Ellesmere.  His translations from the German and his English version of “Faust,”