Last Wednesday Miss Ellen Terry, whose name you are doubtless familiar
with as being the leading actress in London, well, she called upon me to
ask my advice or opinion of a drawing connected with my father's book.
Ellen Terry expressed herself highly interested in our house, pictures,
decorations and so forth. Her manner was a little stagey, but graceful to
the extreme, and you could see peeping out of this theatric manner a kind,
good heart, oh, so kind, I feel as if I would do anything for her, her
manners were so winning. "Will you come to the stage entrance of the
Lyceum some day soon and you shall have stalls for two; now will you come?
Do." Were her last words to Grace. I called on her at Kensington last
week, returning the drawing, and I was so charmed with two beautiful
children of hers, a tall, fair girl, a pretty mixture of shyness and
self-possession that quite won me. She too I should fancy will be a great
actress some day, she has such a bright face. The boy, Master Ted, was
nice too.
Well, I gave Ellen Terry a proof of a drawing that I have just completed
for Dr. Bucke's book--a job I got through Buxton Forman, a great friend of
Bucke's, done _con amore_ on my part. This drawing has been beautifully
reproduced by the new photo intaglio-process. I hope Dr. Bucke will like
it, but I should not expect great things from him in that line, judging
from the twopenny hapenny little pen & ink sketch by Waters which he sent
over in the first instance; however, Forman rescued him from that & so far
he has been guided by his friend. Whether he will when he sees my drawing,
we neither of us know; but both feel to have done our best in the matter.
I said that Ellen Terry must ask for you when she goes to America, which
she contemplates some day. I have sold the last drawing I made in New
York of you for £10. 10s to Buxton Forman ($50. odd). Church bells have
just commenced chiming in the distance, a sound I like better than the
parsons. I hear that the young American artists are doing capitally
filling their pockets. My cousin Sidney Thomas is, or was, in America, a
good deal lionized, I understand. If at any time you favour me with a
letter let it be a letter and not a postcard please. I have been reading
Carlyle's reminiscences--good stuff in them, brilliant touches, but
dreadfully morbid, don't you think? & one shuts the book up with a feeling
that in some respect one Carlyle is enough in the world: & yet in some
respects a million wouldn't be too many. I often think of your remark to
us one day that tolerance is the rarest quality in the world.
Interested in those Boston scraps you send my mother. You have always been
pretty well received in Boston, have you not--I mean in the Emerson days?
Pity that when Emerson is no more there will be no fine portrait of him in
existence; there was a nobility stamped upon his face that I never saw the
like of, and which should have been caught and stamped forever on canvas.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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