ugh he was perfectly amiable, and she married him for love, he
was an intellectual zero; but perhaps the man who, acknowledging her
brilliant intellectual superiority, could say, "Je l'aimerai tant,
qu'elle finira par m'aimer," deserved to be master even of his wife's
brains.... I wish women could be dealt with, not mercifully, nor
compassionately, nor affectionately, but _justly_; it would be so much
better--for men.

How can you ask me if I despise, as great gossip, Emily's telling you
that I am writing another tragedy! Why, my dear, I shouldn't consider it
despicable gossip if Emily were to tell you what colored gloves I had on
the last time she saw me. Do we not all three love each other dearly?
and is not everything, no matter how trifling, of interest in that case?
But Mrs. John Kemble does not pretend to love me dearly, I flatter
myself, and therefore her writing to inquire into my proceedings, and
for minute details of my presentation at Court, did seem to me
contemptible gossip. At her age, perhaps, it is pardonable enough,
though it appears to me rather inconsistent, when one has no liking for
a person, to trouble one's head about where they go or what they do.

You ask me about the subject of my play. It is one that my father
suggested to me years ago, and which grew out of a question as to
whether the Stranger (in Kotzebue's play so called) does or does not
forgive his unfaithful wife in the closing scene. With several other
dramatic schemes, it has hovered dimly before my imagination for some
time past. The other night, however, as I was brushing my hair before
going to bed, my brain, I suppose, receiving some stimulus from the
scrubbing of my skull, the whole idea suddenly came towards me with
increasing distinctness, till it gradually stood up as it were from head
to foot before me--a very mournful figure, whose form and features were
all vividly defined. I instantly caught up S----'s copy-books--there
was no other paper at hand--and on the covers of two of them wrote out
my play, act by act and scene by scene.... The short-lived triumph of
this spirit of inspiration died away under the effect of a conversation
by which it was interrupted, and I collapsed like a fallen _omelette
soufflee_ (not to say _souffletee_).

The story of my piece is a sequel to "The Stranger," the retribution
which reaches the faithless wife and mother in her children, after they
grow up; which, together with the perpetual strug