d eccentric
Consul General at Quebec, got me a copy of the play from Madrid, and I
thought there was great reason in a suggestion from another friend that
it had failed because it put Shakespeare on the stage as one of its
characters; but it seemed to me that the trouble could be got over by
making the poet Heywood represent the Shakespearian epoch. I did this
and the sole obstacle to its success seemed removed. It went, as the
enthusiastic Barrett used to say, "with a shout," though to please him I
had hurt it all I could by some additions and adaptations; and though it
was a most ridiculously romantic story of the tragical loves of Yorick
(whom the Latins like to go on imagining out of Hamlet a much more
interesting and important character than Shakespeare ever meant him to
be fancied), and ought to have remained the fiasco it began, still it
gained Barrett much money and me some little.

I was always proud of this success, and I boasted of it to the
bookseller in Madrid, whom I interested in finding me some still
moderner plays after quite failing to interest another bookseller. Your
Spanish merchant seems seldom concerned in a mercantile transaction;
but perhaps it was not so strange in the case of this Spanish bookseller
because he was a German and spoke a surprising English in response to my
demand whether he spoke any. He was the frowsiest bookseller I ever saw,
and he was in the third day of his unshavenness with a shirt-front
and coat-collar plentifully bedandruffed from his shaggy hair; but he
entered into the spirit of my affair and said if that Spanish play had
succeeded so wonderfully, then I ought to pay fifty per cent, more than
the current price for the other Spanish plays which I wanted him to get
me. I laughed with him at the joke which I found simple earnest when our
glowing concierge gave me the books next day, and I perceived that
the proposed supplement had really been paid for them on my account.
I should not now be grieving for this incident if the plays had proved
better reading than they did on experiment. Some of them were from the
Catalan, and all of them dealt with the simpler actual life of Spain;
but they did not deal impressively with it, though they seemed to me
more hopeful in conception than certain psychological plays of ten or
fifteen years ago, which the Spanish authors had too clearly studied
from Ibsen.

They might have had their effect in the theater, but the rainy weather
had