time at
Torquay is over! especially for you, who will have to see misery and
sometimes hear nonsense. I mean when you go back to Ireland; not, _of
course_, while you are with me....

ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, Sunday, 7th.

I have minded what you said (as when didn't I?), and am swallowing
ipecacuanha lozenges by the gross. It drives me almost crazy that you
should be compelled to make your plans so dependent upon mine, which are
so dependent upon the uncertain wills and arrangements of so many
people.

The manager of the Princess's Theatre, where I am engaged to act in
London, will not allow me to act for the proposed charity at the St.
James's Theatre. I offered to give up the engagement with him rather
than break my promise to the amateurs and disappoint all their plans;
but he will not let me off my engagement to him, and will not permit me
to appear anywhere else before that takes place. I think he is injuring
himself by balking a pet plan of amusement in which all manner of fine
folks, lady patronesses, and the Queen herself, had been induced to
interest themselves; and I think his preventing my acting for this
charity will injure him much more than my appearance on this occasion,
before my coming out at his theatre, could have done. But, of course, he
must be the judge of his own interest; and, at any rate, having entered
into an engagement with him, I cannot render myself liable to squabbles,
and perhaps a lawsuit with him, about it. All these petty worries and
annoyances torment and confuse me a good deal. I have a very poor brain
for business, and there is something in the ignoble vulgarity and
coarseness of manner that I occasionally encounter that increases my
inaptitude by the sort of dismay and disgust with which it fills me. If
the person who has hired me does not relent about these charity
representations, I shall be obliged to give them up, and then I shall
act in Manchester at that time, instead of on the 25th and 27th of
March, which had been before intended, but which I now think I should
give to two representations in Chester on my way back from Dublin. All
this, you see, is still in a state of most vexatious uncertainty, and I
can give you no satisfaction about it, having been able to obtain none
myself....

Perhaps, dearest Hal, I ought not to have asked you the precise meaning
of what you wrote about dear little H----[her nephew, a charming child,
who died i