one with Covent Garden. I suppose it will
remain an opera-house; for to fit it for that it has been made well-nigh
unavailable for any other purpose, as I think we shall find on the 7th
December, when a representation of "Scenes" from various of
Shakespeare's plays is to take place there, for the purpose of raising
funds for the purchase of the house Shakespeare was born in.

You know what my love and veneration for Shakespeare are; you know, too,
how comparatively indifferent to me are those parts of the natures even
of those I most love and honor which belong only to their mortality. The
dead bodies of my friends appeal, perhaps, even less than they should do
to my feelings, since they have been temporarily inhabited and informed
by their souls; but acquainted as you are with these notions of mine,
you will understand that I do not entirely sympathize with all that is
being said and done about the four walls between which the king of poets
came into his world. The thing is more distasteful to me, because
originally got up by an American charlatan of the first water, with a
view to thrust himself into notoriety by shrieking about the world
stupendous commonplaces about the house where Shakespeare was born. It
has been taken up by a number of people, theatrical and other, who, with
the exception of Macready, have many of them the same petty personal
objects in view. Those whose profession compels them, by the absolute
necessity of its conditions, to garble and hack and desecrate works
which else could not be fit for acting purposes (a fact which in itself
sets forth what theatrical representation really is and always must
be--do read, _a propos_ to this, Serlo's answer to Wilhelm Meister about
the impossibility of representing dramatically a great poetical whole),
and who now, on this very Shakespearian Memorial night, instead of
acting some one of his plays in its integrity, and taking zealously any
the most insignificant part in it, have arranged a series of truncated,
isolated scenes, that the actors may each be the hero or heroine of
their own _bit_ of Shakespeare.... This is all I know of the immediate
destinies of Covent Garden. They have written to me to act the dying
scene of Queen Katharine, to which I have agreed, not choosing to
decline any part assigned me in this "Celebration," little as I
sympathize with it.

If I should hear anything further, as I very likely may, from Henry
Greville, of the probable fat