778. RB to William Charles Macready
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 304–305.
[London]
Tuesday night. [15 December 1840] [1]
Dear Macready,
“My friends—do they now and then send”—and so on. Have you divined, arch-diviner as you are, that I have been sick, and doctored, and slowly convales[c]ent, and enforcedly quiescent, and all and everything except indifferent to you and yours—new play included? [2] I may go out on mornings already—(loquitur Medicus) [3] —on evenings, Haymarket-ward, next week—and have to get as far as Clarence Terrace through a few more bottles-full of Tonic: what motives are here for getting strong! (I ought to have said that something is, or was, wrong in my circulation and that it nearly stopped of a sudden). Will you do me the favour to remember me to Mrs and Miss Macready?– But I must call myself,—for we remove into a new house, the week after next, [4] —a place really not impossible to be got at—and monstrously ambitious thoughts begin to rise like clouds within me: “By that sin, fell the angels” [5] … noun—no use!
Ever yours, and ambitious
of that,
R Browning.
Publication: LRB, pp. 4–5.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Dated by the impending move to New Cross.
2. Macready’s new play was Bulwer-Lytton’s Money, first performed on 8 December.
3. “Says the Doctor.”
4. At the end of December, the Brownings moved from Camberwell to a larger house in New Cross. In a letter dated 31 [sic] April 1841 to Laman Blanchard, RB described it as “resembling a goose-pie—only a crooked hasty and rash goose-pie.”
5. Henry VIII, III, 2, 441.
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