"We received your songs to-day, with which we are exceedingly pleased. I
shall profit by your proposed alterations; but I'd have you to know that
we are much too chaste in London to admit such strains as your Bath
spring inspires. We dare not propose a peep beyond the ankle on any
account; for the critics in the pit at a new play are much greater
prudes than the ladies in the boxes. Betsey intended to have troubled
you with some music for correction, and I with some stanzas, but an
interview with Harris to-day has put me from the thoughts of it, and
bent me upon a much more important petition. You may easily suppose it
is nothing else than what I said I would not ask in my last. But, in
short, unless you can give us three days in town, I fear our opera will
stand a chance to be ruined. Harris is extravagantly sanguine of its
success as to plot and dialogue, which is to be rehearsed next Wednesday
at the theatre. They will exert themselves to the utmost in the scenery,
&c., but I never saw any one so disconcerted as he was at the idea of
there being no one to put them in the right way as to music. They have
no one there whom he has any opinion of--as to Fisher (one of the
managers), he don't choose he should meddle with it. He entreated me in
the most pressing terms to write instantly to you, and wanted, if he
thought it could be any weight, to write himself.

"Is it impossible to contrive this? couldn't you leave Tom [Footnote:
Mrs. Sheridan's eldest brother] to superintend the concert for a few
days? If you can manage it, you will really do me the greatest service
in the world. As to the state of the music, I want but three more airs,
but there are some glees and quintets in the last act, that will be
inevitably ruined, if we have no one to set the performers at least in
the right way. Harris has set his heart so much on my succeeding in this
application, that he still flatters himself we may have a rehearsal of