likely to be much!), and going to live
abroad; or sending my mother, with us, to live cheaply in the south of
France, while he continued to work in London. Neither alternative was
cheerful for him or my poor mother, and I felt very sorrowful for them,
though I thought I should like living in the south of France better than
in London. I was working with a good deal of enthusiasm at a tragedy on
the subject of Fiesco, the Genoese noble's conspiracy against the
Dorias--a subject which had made a great impression upon me when I first
read Schiller's noble play upon it. My own former fancy about going on
the stage, and passionate desire for a lonely, independent life in which
it had originated, had died away with the sort of moral and mental
effervescence which had subsided during my year's residence in
Edinburgh. Although all my sympathy with the anxieties of my parents
tended to make the theater an object of painful interest to me, and
though my own attempts at poetical composition were constantly cast in a
dramatic form, in spite of my enthusiastic admiration of Goethe's and
Schiller's plays (which, however, I could only read in French or English
translations, for I then knew no German) and my earnest desire to write
a good play myself, the idea of making the stage my profession had
entirely passed from my mind, which was absorbed with the wish and
endeavor to produce a good dramatic composition. The turn I had
exhibited for acting at school appeared to have evaporated, and Covent
Garden itself never occurred to me as a great institution for purposes
of art or enlightened public recreation, but only as my father's
disastrous property, to which his life was being sacrificed; and every
thought connected with it gradually became more and more distasteful to
me. It appears to me curious, that up to this time, I literally knew
nothing of Shakespeare, beyond having seen one or two of his plays
acted; I had certainly never read one of them through, nor did I do so
until some time later, when I began to have to learn parts in them by
heart.

I think the rather serious bias which my mind had developed while I was
still in Scotland tended probably to my greater contentment in my home,
and to the total disinclination which I should certainly now have felt
for a life of public exhibition. My dramatic reading and writing was
curiously blended with a very considerable interest in literature of a
very different sort, and with the perus