“Sir,—I send back the second
volume of ‘Tremaine,’ and am gratified to find it has been thought liable to
so few corrections by
| R. PLUMER WARD. | 15 |
“As to the corrections, I have adopted almost every one of them; and though I did not like to part with the conversations after dinner at Bellenden House, I have reduced them by a full half. I did not part with them altogether, because the speakers are real characters, which will be recognised by many. Mrs. Neville is in particular a portrait; so is Beaumont; so the Scotch Doctor, the Traveller, and Miss Lyttleton: nay, the leather breeches story is a fact well known among the gentry in the north, and I therefore keep it.
“As you may possibly send this to your friend, I will add a few more remarks, relative to those he has been so good as to make himself.
| 16 | R. PLUMER WARD. |
“He asks why Tremaine is called Mr. Belville. It is in allusion to ‘The Conscious Lovers,’ Belville in that play being the protector of Indiana, and wooing her in that capacity. So here, according to Mrs. Neville’s scandal, Tremaine and Melainie.
“The remark on the Opera failing in its power over thorough-paced opera-goers is very just; but the effect too often is, that they do not recover the tone of their minds, but become blasés. It is like dram drinking.
“The remark on the words ‘true God,’ which is corrected to ‘what the Jews thought the true God,’ better expresses the author’s sense, and I have adopted it.
“I have kept the story of Sergeant B.’s law pedantry, because it is known and apposite. * * *
“I am not wedded to the fact of the accident at the breakfast table; but it is the keystone to so many passages of the history (I mean in point of form) afterwards, that, finding it difficult to alter, I have left it.
