As soon as a week occurs in which I have two holidays I will try to give you one of them.  I send you back Crabbe, which I have kept for ever; for a great poet, which he is, he is curiously unpoetical, I think.  Yours ever truly,

F.A.  KEMBLE.

GREAT RUSSELL STREET. 
DEAR MRS. JAMESON,

My mother bids me say that you certainly will suppose she is mad, or else Mother Hubbard’s dog; for when you called she was literally ill in bed, and this evening she cannot have the pleasure of receiving you, because she is engaged out, here in our own neighborhood, to a very quiet tea.  She bids me thank you very much for the kindness of your proposed visit, and express her regret at not being able to avail herself of it.  If you can come on Thursday, between one and two o’clock, I shall be most happy to see you.  Thank you very much for Lamb’s “Dramatic Specimens;” I read the scene you had copied from “Philaster” directly; how fine it is! how I should like to act it!  Mr. Harness has sent me the first volume of the family edition of the “Old Plays.”  I think sweeping those fine dramas clean is a good work that cannot be enough commended.  What treasures we possess and make no use of, while we go on acting “Gamesters” and “Grecian Daughters,” and such poor stuff!  But I have no time for ecstasies or exclamations.  Yours ever most truly,

F.A.  KEMBLE.

I have said that hardly any new part was ever assigned to me that I did not receive with a rueful sense of inability to what I called “do anything with it.”  Julia in “The Hunchback,” and Camiola in “The Maid of Honor,” were among the few exceptions to this preparatory attack of despondency; but those I in some sort choose myself, and all my other characters were appointed me by the management, in obedience to whose dictates, and with the hope of serving the interests of the theater, I suppose I should have acted Harlequin if I had been ordered to do so.

Lady Teazle and Mrs. Oakley were certainly no exceptions to this experience of a cold fit of absolute incapacity with which I received every new part appointed me, and my studying of them might have been called lugubrious, whatever my subsequent performance of them may have been.  My mother was of invaluable assistance to me in the process, and I owe to her whatever effect I produced in either part.  She had great comic as well as pathetic power, and the incisive point of her delivery gave every shade of meaning of the dialogue with admirable truth and pungency; her own performance of Mrs. Oakley had been excellent; I acted it, even with the advantage of her teaching, very tamely.  Jealousy, in any shape, was not a passion that I sympathized with; the tragic misery of Bianca’s passion was, however, a thing I could imagine sufficiently well to represent it; but not so Mrs. Oakley’s fantastical frenzies.  But the truth is that it was not until many years later and in my readings of Shakespeare that I developed any real comic faculty at all; and I have been amused in the later part of my public career to find comedy often considered my especial gift, rather than the tragic and pathetic one I was supposed at the beginning of it to possess.