"I am ready and willing to do so;"
but it is nevertheless not altogether easy for me to do it. My life
in London leaves me neither time nor opportunity for any
self-culture, and it seems to me as if my best faculties were lying
fallow, while a comparatively unimportant talent, and my physical
powers, were being taxed to the uttermost. The profession I have
embraced is supposed to stimulate powerfully the imagination. I do
not find it so; it appeals to mine in a slight degree compared with
other pursuits; it is too definite in its object and too confined
in its scope to excite my imagination strongly; and, moreover, it
carries with it the antidote of its own excitement in the necessary
conditions under which it is exercised. Were it possible to act
with one's mind alone, the case might be different; but the body is
so indispensable, unluckily, to the execution of one's most
poetical conceptions on the stage, that the imaginative powers are
under very severe though imperceptible restraint. Acting seems to
me rather like dancing hornpipes in fetters. And, by no means the
least difficult part of the business is to preserve one's own
feelings warm, and one's imagination excited, while one is aiming
entirely at producing effects upon others; surrounded, moreover, as
one is, by objects which, while they heighten the illusion to the
distant spectator, all but destroy it to us of the _dramatis
personae_. None of this, however, lessens the value and importance
of your advice, or my own conviction that "mental bracing" is good
for me. My reception on Monday was quite overpowering, and I was
escorted back to the hotel, after the play, by a body-guard of
about two hundred men, shouting and hurrahing like mad; strange to
say, they were people of perfectly respectable appearance. My
father was not with us, and they opened the carriage door and let
down the steps, when we got home, and helped us out, clapping, and
showering the most fervent expressions of good-will upon me and
aunt Dall, whom they took for my mother. One young man exclaimed
pathetically, "Oh, I hope ye're not too much fatigued, Miss Kemble,
by your exertions!" They formed a line on each side of me, and
several of them dropped on their knees to look under my bonnet, as
I ran laughing, with my head d