(Which, of course, includes Lady
Morgan, you two being one) the same to you, and many of them (I
mean happy returns, &c., &c.) Right glad am I to hear that
Lady Morgan has thrown off her coughs and colds. We
are as dull here as you can be in London, with nothing half so good to enliven
us as Lady Morgan’s
| 472 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
As to my Adam Brown, I know nothing about him, except that Colburn seems rather ashamed to bring him out. I don’t mean to write any more, being quite worn out; so I resign Adam to his fate without any compunctious visitings of nature. I have had as much success as I deserved, and much more than I expected, and more money too, which was ever my sole inspiration.
Make sugar of paper! then there is a hope that poor authors may make plums, and critics become candied, and writers of tragedies may be more successful in the writing mood, and the worst productions be constantly in the mouths of the public, and all the evils of literature be twined into bonbons! I always said and felt that to restore the taste for tragedy, she must be taken from the stilts, and brought down to common life and common language. Everything is a round robin, rudeness, simplicity, perfection, decay, simplicity, rudeness. You must have novelty, and after you have reached perfection, you can only innovate by inferiority.
Never mind, it’s a very pretty world, and I am perfectly well contented with it, especially now that my wife is better, and my three girls at home, and all of us as cozy as possible, trying which can talk the most nonsense, and laugh the loudest at a bad joke.
| ALBERT GATE CONCEDED—1842. | 473 |
Our united regards and wishes for lots of happy new years are wafted to you and Lady Morgan from the family amanuensis.
PS.—Should this papyro-saccharine process go on, what capital kisses will be made from Little’s poems and sugar of lead from my works! You will see in the Magazine a poem of mine which will remind you of the fellow’s recantation for calling another a swindler. “I called you a swindler, it is true; you’re an honest man, I’m a liar.”
