My dear Mr. Hill,--It was kind and considerate of you to suppress the paragraph which you send me,--and of which the publication would have been unpleasant for reasons quite other than as regarding my own work,--which exists to defend or accuse itself. You will judge of the true reasons when I tell you the facts--so much of them as contradicts the statements of your critic--who, I suppose, has received a stimulus from the notice, in an American paper which arrived last week, of Mr. Laurence Barrett's intention 'shortly to produce the play' in New York--and subsequently in London: so that 'the failure' of forty-one years ago might be duly influential at present--or two years hence perhaps. The 'mere amateurs' are no high game. Macready received and accepted the play, while he was engaged at the Haymarket, and retained it for Drury Lane, of which I was ignorant that he was about to become the manager: he accepted it 'at the instigation' of nobody,--and Charles Dickens was not in England when he did so: it was read to him after his return, by Forster--and the glowing letter which contains his opinion of it, although directed by him to be shown to myself, was never heard of nor seen by me till printed in Forster's book some thirty years after. When the Drury Lane season began, Macready informed me that he should act the play when he had brought out two others--'The Patrician's Daughter', and 'Plighted Troth': having done so, he wrote to me that the former had been unsuccessful in money-drawing, and the latter had 'smashed his arrangements altogether': but he would still produce my play. I had--in my ignorance of certain symptoms better understood by Macready's professional acquaintances--I had no notion that it was a proper thing, in such a case, to 'release him from his promise'; on the contrary, I should have fancied that such a proposal was offensive. Soon after, Macready begged that I would call on him: he said the play had been read to the actors the day before, 'and laughed at from beginning to end': on my speaking my mind about this, he explained that the reading had been done by the Prompter, a grotesque person with a red nose and wooden leg, ill at ease in the love scenes, and that he would himself make amends by reading the play next morning--which he did, and very adequately--but apprised me that, in consequence of the state of his mind, harassed by business and various trouble, the principal character must be taken by Mr. Phelps; and again I failed to understand,--what Forster subsequently assured me was plain as the sun at noonday,--that to allow at Macready's Theatre any other than Macready to play the principal part in a new piece was suicidal,--and really believed I was meeting his exigencies by accepting the substitution. At the rehearsal, Macready announced that Mr. Phelps was ill, and that he himself would read the part: on the third rehearsal, Mr. Phelps appeared for the first time, and sat in a chair