It went, as the
enthusiastic Barrett used to say, "with a shout," though to please him I
had hurt it all I could by some additions and adaptations; and though it
was a most ridiculously romantic story of the tragical loves of Yorick
(whom the Latins like to go on imagining out of Hamlet a much more
interesting and important character than Shakespeare ever meant him to
be fancied), and ought to have remained the fiasco it began, still it
gained Barrett much money and me some little.
I was always proud of this success, and I boasted of it to the
bookseller in Madrid, whom I interested in finding me some still
moderner plays after quite failing to interest another bookseller. Your
Spanish merchant seems seldom concerned in a mercantile transaction; but
perhaps it was not so strange in the case of this Spanish bookseller
because he was a German and spoke a surprising English in response to my
demand whether he spoke any. He was the frowsiest bookseller I ever saw,
and he was in the third day of his unshavenness with a shirt-front and
coat-collar plentifully bedandruffed from his shaggy hair; but he
entered into the spirit of my affair and said if that Spanish play had
succeeded so wonderfully, then I ought to pay fifty per cent, more than
the current price for the other Spanish plays which I wanted him to get
me.
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