Records of a Girlhood

by Fanny Kemble

JOURNAL, 1831.

Thursday, April 21st.—Walked in the square, and studied Lady Teazle. The trees are thickly clothed with leaves, and the new-mown grass, even in the midst of London, smelt fresh and sweet; I was quite alone in the square, and enjoyed something like a country sensation. I went to Pickersgill, and Mrs. Jameson came while I was sitting to him; that Medora of his is a fine picture, full of poetry. We dined with the Harnesses; Milman and Croly were among the guests (it was a sort of Quarterly Review in the flesh). I like Mr. Milman; not so the other critic.

Friday, 22d.—Visiting with my mother; called on Lady Dacre, who gave me her pretty little piece of "Wednesday Morning," with a view to our doing it for my father's benefit. It is really very pretty, but I fear will look in our large theater as a lady's water-color sketch of a landscape would by way of a scene. I walked in the square in the afternoon, and studied Lady Teazle, which I do not like a bit, and shall act abominably. At the theatre to-night the house was not very full, and the audience were unpleasantly inclined to be political; they took one of the speeches, "The king, God bless him," and applied it with vehement applause to his worthy Majesty, William IV.

Saturday, 23d.—After my riding lesson, went and sat in the library to hear Sheridan Knowles's play of "The Hunchback." Mr. Bartley and my father and mother were his only audience, and he read it himself to us. A real play, with real characters, individuals, human beings, it is a good deal after the fashion of our old playwrights, and does not disgrace its models. I was delighted with it; it is full of life and originality; a little long, but that's a trifle. There is a want of clearness and coherence in the plot, and the comic part has really no necessary connection with the rest of the piece; but none of that will signify much, or, I think, prevent it from succeeding. I like the woman's part exceedingly, but am afraid I shall find it very difficult to act.

After dinner there was a universal discussion as to the possibility and probability of Adorni's self-sacrifice in "The Maid of Honor," and as the female voices were unanimous in their verdict of its truth and likelihood, I hold it to be likely and true, for Dante says we have the "intellect of love," and Cherubino (a very different kind of authority) says the same thing; and I suppose we are better judges of such questions than men. The love of Adorni seems to me, indeed, more like a woman's than a man's, but that does not tell against its verisimilitude. Our love is characterized generally by self-devotion and self-denial, but the qualities which naturally belong to our affection were given to Adorni by his social and conventional position. He was by birth and fortune dependent on and inferior to Camiola, as women are by nature dependent on and inferior to men; and so I think his love for her has something of a feminine quality.

In the evening went with my mother to a party at old Lady Cork's. We started for our assembly within a few minutes of Sunday morning. Such rooms—such ovens! such boxes full of fine folks and foul air! in which we stood and sat, and looked and listened, and talked nonsense and heard it talked, and perspired and smothered and suffocated. On our arrival, as I was going upstairs, I was nearly squeezed flat against the wall by her potent grace, the Duchess of St. Albans. We remained half an hour in the steaming atmosphere of the drawing-rooms, and another half-hour in the freezing hall before the carriage could be brought up; caught a dreadful cold and came home; did not get to bed till two o'clock, with an intolerable face-ache and tooth-ache, the well-earned reward of a well-spent evening.

[The career of the Duchess of St. Albans was, as far as worldly circumstances went, a curious one. As Miss Mellon she was one of my mother's stage contemporaries; a kind-hearted, good-humored, buxom, rather coarse actress, with good looks, and good spirits of a somewhat unrefined sort, which were not without their admirers; among these the old banker, Mr. Coutts, married her, and dying, left her the sole possessor and disposer of his enormous wealth. My mother, who had always remained on friendly though not intimate terms with her old stage-mate, went to see her in the early days of her widowhood, when Mrs. Coutts gave her this moderate estimate of her "money matters:" "Ah, I assure you, dear Mrs. Charles, the reports of what poor, dear Mr. Coutts has left me are very much exaggerated—not, I really believe, more than a few hundred thousand pounds. To be sure" (after a dejected pause), "there's the bank—they say about fifty thousand a year."

This small fortune and inconsiderable income proved sufficient to the moderate desires of the young Duke of St. Albans, who married this destitute widow, who thenceforth took her place (and a large one) in the British aristocracy, and chaperoned the young Ladies Beauclerc, her husband's sisters, in society. She was a good-natured woman, and more than once endeavored to get my father and mother to bring me to her balls and magnificent parties. This, however, they steadily declined, and she, without resenting it, sent her invitations to my youngest brother alone, to whom she took a great fancy, and to whose accepting her civilities no objection was made. At her death she left her great wealth to Mr. Coutts's granddaughter, Miss Burdett Coutts, the lady whose excellent use of her riches has made her known all over the world as one of the most munificently charitable of Fortune's stewards.

The Duchess of St. Albans was not without shrewd sense and some humor, though entirely without education, and her sallies were not always in the best possible taste. Her box at Covent Garden could be approached more conveniently by crossing the stage than by the entrance from the front of the house, and she sometimes availed herself of this easier exit to reach her carriage with less delay. One night when my father had been acting Charles II., the Duchess of St. Albans crossing her old work-ground, the stage, with her two companions, the pretty Ladies Beauclerc, stopped to shake hands with him (he was still in his stage costume, having remained behind the scenes to give some orders), and presenting him to her young ladies, said, "There, my dears; there's your ancestor." I suppose in her earlier day she might not have been a bad representative of their "ancestress.">[

Monday, April 25th.—Finished studying Lady Teazle. In the evening at the theater the house was good, but the audience was dull and I was in wretched spirits and played very ill.

Dall was saying that she thought in two years of hard work we might—that is, my father and myself—earn enough to enable us to live in the south of France. This monstrous theater and its monstrous liabilities will banish us all as it did my uncle Kemble. But that I should be sorry to live so far out of the reach of H——, I think the south of France would be a pleasant abode: a delicious climate, a quiet existence, a less artificial state of society and mode of life, a picturesque nature round me, and my own dear ones and my scribbling with me—I think with all these conditions I could be happy enough in the south of France or anywhere.

The audience were very politically inclined, applied all the loyal speeches with fervor, and called for "God save the King" after the play. The town is illuminated, too, and one hopes and prays that the "Old Heart of Oak" will weather these evil days, but sometimes the straining of the tackle and the creaking of the timbers are suggestive of foundering even to the most hopeful. The lords have been vindicating their claim to a share in common humanity by squabbling like fishwives and all but coming to blows; the bishops must have been scared and scandalized, lords spiritual not being fighting men nowadays.

After the play Mr. Stewart Newton, the painter, supped with us—a clever, entertaining man and charming artist; a little bit of a dandy, but probably he finds it politic to be so. He told us some comical anecdotes about the Royal Academy and the hanging of the pictures.

The poor, dear king [William IV.], who it seems knows as much about painting as una vacca spagnuola, lets himself, his family, and family animals be painted by whoever begs to be allowed that honor. So when the pictures were all hung the other day, somebody discovered in a wretched daub close to the ceiling a portrait of Lady Falkland [the king's daughter], and another of his Majesty's favorite cat, which were immediately lowered to a more honorable position, to accomplish which desirable end, Sir William Beechey [then president of the academy] removed some of his own paintings. On a similar occasion during the late King George IV.'s life, a wretched portrait of him having been placed in one of the most conspicuous situations in the room, the Duke of Wellington and sundry other distinguished cognoscenti complimented Sir Thomas Lawrence on it as his; this was rather a bitter pill, and must have been almost too much for Lawrence's courtierly equanimity.

Wednesday, April 27th.—To the riding school, where Miss Cavendish and I discoursed on the stay-at-home sensation, and agreed that it is bad to encourage it too far, as one may narrow one's social circle till at last it resolves itself into one's self.

Wrote to thank Dr. Thackeray [provost of King's College, Cambridge, and father of my life-long friend A—— T——] for the Shakespeare he has sent me, and Lady Dacre for her piece of "Wednesday Morning." In the evening they all drove out in the open carriage to see the illuminations; I stayed at home, for the carriage was full and I had no curiosity about the sight. The town is one blaze of rejoicing for the Reform Bill triumph; the streets are thronged with people and choked up with carriages, and the air is flashing and crashing with rockets and squibs and crackers, to the great discomfort of the horses. So many R's everywhere that they may stand for reform, revolution, ruin, just as those who run may choose to read, or according to the interpretation of every individual's politics; the most general acceptation in which they will be taken by the popular understanding will assuredly be row.

Friday, 29th.—Went off to rehearsal without any breakfast, which was horrible! but not so horrible as my performance of Lady Teazle promises to be. If I do the part according to my notion, it will be mere insipidity, and yet all the traditional pokes and pats with the fan and business of the part, as it is called, is so perfectly unnatural to me that I fear I shall execute it with a doleful bad grace. It seems odd that Sir Peter always wears the dress of the last century, while the costume of the rest of the dramatis personæ is quite modern. Indeed, mine is a ball dress of the present day, all white satin and puffs and clouds of white tulle, and garlands and wreaths of white roses and jasmine; it is very anomalous, and makes Lady Teazle of no date, as it were, for her mariners are those of a rustic belle of seventeen hundred and something, and her costume that of a fine lady of the present day in the height of the present fashion, which is absurd.

Mrs. Jameson paid me a long visit; she threatens to write a play; perhaps she might; she is very clever, has a vast fund of information, a good deal of experience, and knowledge and observation of the world and society. She wanted me to have spent the evening with her on the 23d, Shakespeare's birth and death day, an anniversary all English people ought to celebrate. Lady Dacre called, in some tribulation, to say that she had committed herself about her little piece of "Wednesday Morning," and that Lady Salisbury, who wants it for Hatfield, does not like its being brought out on the stage.

Lady Dacre says Lady Salisbury is "afraid of comparisons" (between herself and me, in the part), I think Lady Salisbury, would not like "our play" to be made "common and unclean" by vulgar publicity. In the evening I went to the theater to see a new comedy by a Spaniard. The house was literally empty, which was encouraging to all parties. The piece is slightly constructed in point of plot, but the dialogue is admirably written, and, as the work of a foreigner, perfectly surprising. I was introduced to Don Telesforo de Trueba, the author, an ugly little young man, all hair and glare, whiskers and spectacles; he must be very clever and well worth knowing, Mr. Harness took tea with us after the play.

[The comedy, in five acts, of "The Exquisites" was a satirical piece showing up the ridiculous assumption of affected indifference of the young dandies of the day. The special airs of impertinence by which certain officers of a "crack" regiment distinguished themselves had suggested several of the most telling points of the play, which was in every respect a most remarkable performance for a foreigner.]

Saturday, April 30th.—Received a letter from John; he has determined not to leave Spain at present; and were he to return, what is there for him to do here? In the evening to Mrs. C——'s ball; it was very gay, but I am afraid I am turning "exquisite," for I didn't like the music, and my partners bored me, and the dancing tired me, and my journal is getting like K——'s head—full of naked facts, unclothed with a single thought.

Sunday, May 1st.—As sulky a day as ever glouted in an English sky. The "young morn" came picking her way from the east, leading with her a dripping, draggled May, instead of Milton's glorious vision.

After church, sundry callers: Mr. C—— bringing prints of the dresses for "Hernani," and the W——s, who seem in a dreadful fright about the present state of the country. I do not suppose they would like to see Heaton demolished.

In the evening we went to the Cartwrights'. It is only in the morning that one goes there to be tortured; in the evening it is to eat delicious dinners and hear delightful music.

Hummel, Moscheles, Neukomm, Horsley, and Sir George Smart, and how they did play! à l'envi l'un de l'autre. They sang, too, that lovely glee, "By Celia's Arbor." The thrilling shudder which sweet music sends through one's whole frame is a species of acute pleasure, very nearly akin to pain. I wonder if by any chance there is a point at which the two are one and the same thing!

Tuesday, May 3d.—I wrote the fourth scene of the fifth act of my play ["The Star of Seville">[, and acted Lady Teazle for the first time; the house was very good, and my performance, as I expected, very bad; I was as flat as a lady amateur. I stayed after the play to hear Braham sing "Tom Tug," which was a refreshment to my spirit after my own acting; after I came home, finished the fifth act of "The Star of Seville." "Joy, joy for ever, my task is done!" I have not the least idea, though, that "heaven is won."

Wednesday, May 4th.—A delightful dinner at the B——s', but in the evening a regular crush; however, if one is to be squeezed to death (though 'tis an abolished form of torture), it may as well be in good company, among the fine world, and lots of pleasant people besides: Milman, Sotheby, Lockhart, Sir Augustus Calcott, Harness, Lady Dacre, Joanna Baillie, Lady Calcott, etc.

Friday, May 6th.—Real March weather: cold, piercing, damp, wretched, in spite of which I carried Shakespeare to walk with me in the square, and read all over again for the fiftieth time all the conjectures of everybody about him and his life. How little we know about him, how intimately we seem to know him! I had the square all to myself, and it was delicious: lilac, syringa, hawthorn, lime blossoms, and new-mown grass in the midst of London—and Shakespeare to think about. How grateful I felt for so much enjoyment! When I got home, corrected the proof-sheets of "Francis I.," and thought it looked quite pretty in print.

Out so late dancing, Wednesday and Thursday nights, or rather mornings, that I had no time for journal-writing. What a life I do lead!

Friday, May 13th.—At twelve o'clock to Bridgewater House for our first rehearsal of "Hernani." Lady Francis wants us to go down to them at Oatlands. I should like of all things to see Weybridge once more; there's many a nook and path in those woods that I know better than their owners. The rehearsal lasted till three, and was a tolerably tidy specimen of amateur acting. Mr. Craven is really very good, and I shall like to act with him very much, and Mr. St. Aubin is very fair. Was introduced to Mrs. Bradshaw, whose looks rather disappointed me, because she "did contrive to make herself look so beautiful" on the stage, in Clari and Mary Copp and everything she did; I suppose her exquisite acting got into her face, somehow. Henry Greville is delightful, and I like him very much. When we left Bridgewater House we drove to my aunt Siddons's. Every time I see that magnificent ruin some fresh decay makes itself apparent in it, and one cannot but feel that it must soon totter to its fall.

What a price she has paid for her great celebrity!—weariness, vacuity, and utter deadness of spirit. The cup has been so highly flavored that life is absolutely without savor or sweetness to her now, nothing but tasteless insipidity. She has stood on a pinnacle till all things have come to look flat and dreary; mere shapeless, colorless, level monotony to her. Poor woman! what a fate to be condemned to, and yet how she has been envied, as well as admired!

After dinner had only just time to go over my part and drive to the theater. My dear, delightful Portia! The house was good, but the audience dull, and I acted dully to suit them; but I hope my last dress, which was beautiful, consoled them. What with sham business and real business, I have had a busy day.

Saturday, May 14th.—Received a note from Theodosia [Lady Monson], and a whole cargo of delicious flowers from Cassiobury. She writes me that poor old Foster [an old cottager who lived in Lord Essex's park and whom my friend and I used to visit] is dying. The last I saw of that "Old Mortality" was sitting with him one bright sunset under his cottage porch, singing to him and dressing his hat with flowers, poor old man! yet after walking this earth upward of ninety-seven years the spirit as well as the flesh must be weary. His cottage will lose half its picturesqueness without his figure at the door; I wonder who will take care now of the roses he was so fond of, and the pretty little garden I used to forage in for lilies of the valley and strawberries! I shall never see him again, which makes me sad; I was often deeply struck by the quaint wisdom of that old human relic, and his image is associated in my thoughts with evening walks and summer sunsets and lovely flowers and lordly trees, and he will haunt Cassiobury always to me. I went with my mother to buy my dresses for "Hernani," which will cost me a fortune and a half.

Great Russell Street, Saturday.

My dearest H——,

You see I have taken your advice, and, moreover, your paper, in order that, in spite of the dispersion of Parliament and the unattainability of franks, our correspondence may lose nothing in bulk, though it must in frequency. I think you are behaving very shabbily in not writing to me. Are you consulting your own pleasure, or my purse? I dedicate so much of my income to purposes which go under the head of "money thrown away;" don't you think the cost of our correspondence may be added to that without seriously troubling my conscience? What shall I say to you? "Reform" is on the tip of my pen, and great as are our private matters of anxiety, they scarcely outweigh in our minds the national interest that is engrossing almost every thinking person throughout the country. You know I am no politician, and my shallow causality and want of adequate information alike unfit me from understanding, much less discussing, public questions of great importance; but the present crisis has aroused me to intense interest and anxiety about the course events are taking. You can have no conception of the state of excitement prevailing in London at this moment. The scene in the House of Lords immediately preceding the dissolution the papers will have described to you, though if the spectators and participators in it may be believed, the tumult, the disorder, the Billingsgate uproar on that occasion would not be easy to describe. Lord Londonderry, it seems, thought that the days of faust-recht had come back again, and I fancy more than he are of that opinion.

An illumination was immediately ordered by the Lord Mayor Donkin (or key, as "t'other side" call him); but, owing to the shortness of the notice he gave, it seems the show of light was not satisfactory to the tallow chandler part of the population, so another was appointed two nights after. My mother and the two Harrys went out in the open carriage to drive through the streets. I was depressed and disinclined for sight-seeing, and did not go, which I regretted afterward, as all strong exhibitions of public feeling are curious and interesting. They say the crowd was immense in all the principal thoroughfares, and of the lowest order. They testified their approbation of the various illuminated devices by shouts and hurrahs and applause; their displeasure against the various non-illuminators was more violently manifested by assailing their houses and breaking their windows.

Sundry were the glass sacrifices offered at the shrine of consistent Tory patriotism at the West End of the town. The mottoes and sentences on some of the illuminations were noteworthy for their democratic flavor: "The king and the people," "The people of England," "The glorious dissolution," "The glorious reform," "The people and the press," "The people's triumph." A man who seemed by his dress to belong to the very lowest class (a cross apparently between a scavenger and a rag-seller), with a branch of laurel waving in his tattered hat, stopped before this last sentence and exclaimed, "No—they don't yet; but they will."

I have been having quite a number of holidays at the theater lately. They have brought out a comedy in which I do not play, and are going to bring out a sort of historical melodrama on the life of Bonaparte, so that I think I shall have easy work, if that succeeds, for the rest of the season. I have just finished correcting the proof-sheets of "Francis I.," and think it looks quite pretty in print, and have dedicated it to my mother, which I hope will please her....

Dear H——, this is Saturday, the 14th, and 'tis now exactly three weeks since I began this letter. I know not what you will think of this, but, indeed, I am almost worn out with the ceaseless occupations of one sort and another that are crowded into every day, and the impossibility of commanding one hour's quiet out of the twenty-four....

I am afraid we shall not come to Ireland this summer, after all, my dear H——. The Dublin manager and my father have not come to terms, and I hear Miss Inverarity (a popular singer) is engaged there, so that I conclude we shall not act there this season. This is so great a disappointment to me that I cannot say anything whatever about it. I have been acting Lady Teazle for Mr. Bartley and my father's benefit. It seems to have pleased the public very well. Without caring for it much myself, I find it light and amusing work, and much easier for me than Lady Townley, because it is a natural and that an entirely artificial character; the whole tone and manners, too, of Sheridan's rustic belle are much more within my scope than those of the woman of fashion of Sir John Vanbrugh's play.

On Friday we had our first rehearsal of "Hernani," at Bridgewater House, and I was greatly surprised with some of the acting, which, allowing for a little want of technical experience, was, in Mr. Craven's instance, really very good. He is the grandson of old Lady Craven, the Margravine of Anspach, and enacts the hero of the piece, which I think he will do very well. The whole play, I think, will be fairly acted for an amateur performance. Lord and Lady Francis have pressed my mother very much to go down for a little while to Oatlands, the beautiful place close to Weybridge, which belonged to the Duke of York, and of which they have taken a lease. My mother has accepted their invitation, and looks forward with great pleasure to revisiting her dear Weybridge. I know a good deal more of that lovely neighborhood and all its wild haunts than the present proprietors of Oatlands. Lady Francis is a famous horsewoman, and told me by way of inducement to go there that we would gallop all over the country together, which sounded very pleasant....

I called on my aunt Siddons the other day, and was shocked to find her looking wretchedly ill; she has not yet got rid of the erysipelas in her legs, and complained of intense headache. Poor woman! she suffers dreadfully.... Cecilia's life has been one enduring devotion and self-sacrifice. I cannot help wishing, for both their sakes, that the period of her mother's infirmity and physical decay may be shortened. I received a charming letter from Theodosia yesterday, accompanying a still more charming basketful of delicious flowers from dear Cassiobury—how much nicer they are than human beings! I don't believe I belong to man (or woman) kind, I like so many things—the whole material universe, for example—better than what one calls one's fellow-creatures. She told me that old Foster (you remember the old cottager in Cassiobury Park) was dying. The news contrasted sadly with the sweet, fresh, living blossoms that it came with. The last time that I saw that old man I sat with him under his porch on a bright sunny evening, talking, laughing, winding wreaths round his hat, and singing to him, and that is the last I shall ever see of him. He was a remarkable old man, and made a strong impression on my fancy in the course of our short acquaintance. There was a strong and vivid remnant of mind in him surviving the contest with ninety and odd years of existence; his manner was quaint and rustic without a tinge of vulgarity; he is fastened to my memory by a certain wreath of flowers and sunset light upon the brook that ran in front of his cottage, and the smell of some sweet roses that grew over it, and I shall never forget him.

I went to the opera the other night and saw Pasta's "Medea" for the first time. I shall not trouble you with any ecstasies, because, luckily for you, my admiration for her is quite indescribable; but I have seen grace and majesty as perfect as I can conceive, and so saying I close my account of my impressions. I fancied I was slightly disappointed in Taglioni, whose dancing followed Pasta's singing, but I suppose the magnificent tragical performance I had just witnessed had numbed as it were my power of appreciation of her grace and elegance, and yet she seemed to me like a dancing flower; so you see I must have like her very much.

God bless you, dear; pray write to me very soon. I want some consolation for not seeing you, nor the dear girls, nor the sea. I could think of that fresh, sparkling, fresh looking, glassy sea till I cried for disappointment.

Ever yours,

F. A. K.

The Miss Inverarity mentioned in this letter was a young Scotch singer of very remarkable talent and promise, who came out at Covent Garden just at this time. She was one of the tallest women I ever saw, and had a fine soprano voice as high as herself, and sang English music well. She was a very great favorite during the short time that I remember her on the stage.

My dearest H——,

My mother has just requested me to talk with A—— about her approaching first communion, and it troubles me because I fear I cannot do so satisfactorily to her (I mean my mother) and myself. I think my feeling about the sacrament, or rather the preparation necessary for receiving it, is different from hers. It is not so much to me an awful as a merciful institution. One goes to the Lord's Table because one is weak and wicked and wretched, not because one is, or even has striven to be, otherwise. A holy reverence for the holy rite is indispensable, but not, I think, such a feeling as would chill us with fear, or cast us down in despondency. The excess of our poverty and humility is our best claim to it, and therefore, though the previous "preparations," as it is rather technically called, may be otherwise beneficial, it does not seem to me necessary, much less indispensable. Our Lord did not say, "Cleanse yourselves, amend yourselves, strip yourselves of your own burdens and come to me;" but, "Come to me and I will cleanse you, I will cure you, I will help you and give you rest." It is remembering this that I venture to take the sacrament, but I know other people, and I believe my mother among them, think a much more specific preparation necessary, and I am afraid, therefore, that I might not altogether meet my mother's views in what I might say to A—— upon the subject. I wish you would tell me what your opinion and feeling is about this.

Your affectionate F. A. K.

Sunday, May 15th.—Walked home from church with Mrs. Montagu and Emily and Mrs. Procter, discussing among various things the necessity for "preparation" before taking the sacrament. I suppose the publican in the parable had not prepared his prayer, and I suppose he would have been a worthy communicant.

They came in and sat a long time with my mother talking about Sir Thomas Lawrence, of whom she spoke as a perfect riddle. I think he was a dangerous person, because his experience and genius made him delightfully attractive, and the dexterity of his flattery amounted in itself to a fine art. The talk then fell upon the possibility of friendship existing between men and women without sooner or later degenerating, on one part or the other, into love. The French rhymster sings—

"Trop tot, hélas, l'amour s'enflamme,
Et je sens qu'il est mal aisé;
Que l'ami d'une belle dame,
Ne soit un amant déguisé."

My father came in while the ladies were still here, and Mrs. Procter behaved admirably well about her husband's play....

I do think it is too bad of the management to have made use of my name in rejecting that piece, when, Heaven knows, so far from rejecting, I never even object to anything I am bidden to do; that is, never visibly or audibly....

Mrs. P—— called, and the talk became political and lugubriously desponding, and I suddenly found myself inspired with a contradictory vein of hopefulness, and became vehement in its defense. In spite of all the disastrous forebodings I constantly have, I cannot but trust that the spread of enlightenment and general progress of intelligence in the people of this country—the good judgment of those who have power and the moderation of those who desire improvement—will effect a change without a crash and achieve reform without revolution.

Wednesday, May 18th.—My mother and I started at two o'clock for Oatlands. The day was very enjoyable, for the dust and mitigated east wind were in our backs; the carriage was open, and the sun was almost too powerful, though the earth has not yet lost its first spring freshness, nor the trees, though full fledged, their early vivid green. The turf has not withered with the heat, and the hawthorn lay thick and fragrant on every hedge, like snow that the winter had forgotten to melt, and the sky above was bright and clear, and I was very happy. I had taken "The Abbot" with me, which I had never read; but my mother did not sleep, so we chatted instead of my reading. She recalled all our former times at Weybridge. It was a great pleasure to retrace this well-known road, and again to see dear old Walton Bridge and the bright, broad Thames, with the noble chestnut trees on its banks, the smooth, smiling fields stretching beyond it, and the swans riding in such happy majesty on its bosom. I really think I do deserve to live in the country, it is so delightsome to me. We reached Oatlands an hour before dinner-time and found the party just returned from riding. We sauntered through part of the grounds to the cemetery of the Duchess of York's dogs.... We had some music in the evening. Lady Francis sang and I sang, and was frightened to death, as I always am when asked to do so....

Thursday, 19th.—A bright sunny morning, the trees all bowing and bending, and the water chafing and crisping under a fresh, strong, but not cold, wind. I lost my way in the park and walked toward Walton, thinking I was going to Weybridge, but, discovering my mistake, turned about, and crossing the whole park came out upon the common and our old familiar cricketing ground. I flew along the dear old paths to our little cottage, but "Desolate was the dwelling of Morna"—the house closed, the vine torn down, the grass knee-deep, the shrubs all trailing their branches and blossoms in disorderly luxuriance on the earth, the wire fence broken down between the garden and the wood, the gate gone; the lawn was sown with wheat, and the little pine wood one tangled maze, without path, entrance, or issue. I ran up the mound to where John used to stand challenging the echo with his bugle....

O tempo passato!—the absent may return and the distant be brought near, the dead be raised and in another world rejoin us, but a day that is gone is gone, and all eternity can give us back no single minute of the past! I gathered a rose and some honeysuckle from the poor disheveled shrubs for my mother, and ran back to Oatlands to breakfast. After breakfast we went over "Hernani," with Mrs. Sullivan for prompter, and when that was over everybody went out walking; but I was too tired with my morning's tramp, and sat under a tree on the lawn reading a very good little book on the sacrament, which went over the ground of my late discussion with Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Procter on the subject of "preparation" for taking it.

After lunch there was a general preparation for riding, and just as we were all mounted it began to rain, and persevered till, in despair, Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan rode off without our promised escort. Mr. C—— arrived just as we had disequipped, and the gentlemen all dispersed. Lady Francis and I sang together for some time, and suddenly the clouds withholding their tears, she and I, in one of those instants of rapid determination which sometimes make or mar a fate, tore on our habits again, jumped on our horses, and galloped off together over the park. We had an enchanting, gray, soft afternoon, with now and then a rain-drop and sigh of wind, like the last sob of a fit of crying. The earth smelt deliriously fresh, and shone one glittering, sparkling, vivid green. Our ride was delightful, and we galloped back just in time to dress for dinner.

In the evening, sauntering on the lawn and pleasant, bright talk indoors. Lord John (the present venerable Earl Russell) would be quite charming if he wasn't so afraid of the rain. I do not think he is made of sugar, but, politically, perhaps he is the salt of the earth; he certainly succeeds in keeping himself dry.

Friday, Oatlands.—Walked out before breakfast; the night's rain had refreshed the earth and revived every growing thing, the east wind had blown itself away, and a warm, delicious western breeze came fluttering fitfully over the new-mown lawn. After breakfast we rehearsed Mr. Craven's and Captain Shelley's and my scenes in "Hernani." I think they will do very well if they do not shy at the moment of action, or rather acting. We had some music, and then the gentlemen went out shooting. I took "The Abbot" and established myself on a hay-cock, leaving Lady Francis to her own indoor devices. By and by the whole party came out, and we sat on the lawn laughing and talking till the gentlemen's carriage was announced, and our rival heroes took their departure for town, cheek by jowl, in a pretty equipage of Mr. Craven's, in the most amicable mood imaginable. As soon as they were off we mounted and rode out, past our old cottage, down by Brooklands, through the second wood, and by the Fairies' Oak. O Lord King, Lord King (we were riding through the property of the Earl of Lovelace, then Lord King), if I was one of those bishops whom you do not love, I would curse, excommunicate, and anathematize you for cutting down all those splendid trees and laying bare those deep, dark, leafy nooks, the haunts of a thousand "Midsummer Night's Dreams," to the common air and the staring sun. The sight of the dear old familiar paths brought the tears to my eyes, for, stripped and thinned of their trees and robbed of their beauty, my memory restored all their former loveliness. On we went down to Byefleet to the mill, to Langton's through the sweet, turfy meadows, by hawthorn hedges musical as sweet, over the picturesque little bridge and along that deep, dark, sleepy water flowing so silently in its sullen smoothness. On we went a long way over a wide common, where the coarse-grained peaty earth and golden glory of the flowering gorse reminded me of Suffolk's motto—

"Cloth of gold, do not despise
That thou art mix'd with cloth of frieze;
Cloth of frieze, be not too bold
That thou art mix'd with cloth of gold."

Back by St. George's Hill, snatching many a leaf and blossom as I rode to carry back to A—— mementoes of our dear Weybridge days, and so home by half-past seven, just time to dress for dinner. As we rode along, Lord Francis and I discussed poets and poetry in general—more particularly Byron, Keats, and Shelley; it was a very pretty and proper discourse for such a ride.

In the evening heard all manner of delicious ghost stories; afterward made music, Lady Francis and I trying all sorts of duets, my mother keeping up a "humming" third and Lord Francis listening and applauding with equal zeal and discretion....

Saturday, May 21st.—My brother John come home from Spain....

Sunday, 22d.—What a very odd process dreaming is! I dreamt in the night that John had come home, and flung myself out of bed in my sleep to run downstairs to him, which naturally woke me; and then I remembered that he was come home and that I had seen and welcomed him, which it seems to me I might as well have dreamed too while I was about it, and saved myself the jump out of bed. I hate dreaming; it's like being mad—having one's brain work without the control of one's will.

Dear A—— took the sacrament for the first time at the Swiss church. On my return from church in the afternoon found Sir Ralph and Lady Hamilton and Don Telesforo de Trueba. I like that young Spaniard; he's a clever man. It was such fun his telling me all the story of the Star of Seville, little imagining I had just perpetrated a five-act tragedy on that identical subject.

Tuesday, May 24th.—Drove down to Clint's studio to see Cecilia's (Siddons's) portrait. It's a pretty picture of a "fine piece of a woman," as the Italians say, but it has none of the very decided character of her face....

Wednesday, May 25th.—After dinner went over my part, dressed and set off for Bridgewater House for our dressed rehearsal of "Hernani." Found the stage in a state of unfinish, the house topsy-turvy, and every body to the right and left. Sat for an hour in the drawing-room while our very specially small and select audience arrived. Then heard Lady Francis, Henry Greville, Mrs. Bradshaw, and Mr. Mitford try their glee—one of Moore's melodies arranged for four voices—which they sang at the top of their lungs in order to hear themselves, while the carpenters and joiners hammered might and main at the other end of the gallery finishing the theater.

About nine they were getting under way, and we presently began the rehearsal. The dresses were all admirable; they (not the clothes, but the clothes pegs) were all horribly frightened. I was a little nervous and rather sad, and I felt strange among all those foolish lads, taking such immense delight in that which gives me so very little, dressing themselves up and acting. To be sure, "nothing pleaseth but rare accidents." Mr. M——, our prompter, thought fit by way of prompting to keep up a rumbling bass accompaniment to our speaking by reading every word of the play aloud, as the singers are prompted at the opera house, which did not tend much to our assistance. Everything went very smoothly till an unlucky young "mountaineer" rushed on the stage and terrified me and Hernani half to death by inarticulating some horrible intelligence of the utmost importance to us, which his fright rendered quite incomprehensible. He stood with his arms wildly spread abroad, stuttering, sputtering, madly ejaculating and gesticulating, but not one articulate word could he get out. I thought I should have exploded with laughter, but as the woman said who saw the murder, "I knew I mustn't (faint), and I didn't." With this trifling exception it all went off very well. Either I was fagged with my morning's ride or the constitution of the gallery is bad for the voice; I never felt so exhausted with the mere effort of speaking, and thought I should have died prematurely and in earnest in the last scene, I was so tired. When it was over we adjourned with Lord and Lady Francis and the whole dramatis personæ to Mrs. W——'s magnificent house and splendid supper....

While we were at table everybody suddenly stood up, my mother and myself reverently with the rest, when the whole company drank my health, and I collapsed down into my chair as red and as limp as a skein of scarlet wool, and my mother with some confusion expressed my obligation and her own surprise at the compliment. I talked a good deal to Captain Shelley, who is a nice lad, and, considering his beauty, and the admiration bestowed on him by all the fine ladies in London, remarkably unaffected. We are asked down to Oaklands again, and I hope my work at the theater will allow of my going. What a shocking mess those young gentlemen actors did make of their greenroom this evening, to be sure! rouge, swords, wine, mustaches, soda water, and cloaks strewed in every direction. I wonder what they would say to the drawing-room decorum of our Covent Garden greenroom.

Thursday, May 26th.—Tried on dresses with Mrs. Phillips, and talked all the while about the characteristics of Shakespeare's women with Mrs. Jameson, who had come to see me. I pity her from the bottom of my heart; she has a heavy burden to carry, poor woman.... Went in the evening to rather a dull dinner, after which, however, I had the pleasure of hearing Mrs. Frere sing, which she did very charmingly, and so as quite to justify her great society musical reputation. After our dinner at the F——s' we went to Mrs. W——'s evening party, where I sat alone, heard somebody sing a song, was introduced to a man, spoke incoherently to several people, got up, was much jostled in a crowd of human beings, and came home—and that's society. We are asked to a great supper at Chesterfield House, after a second representation which is to be given of "Hernani." My mother thinks it is too much exertion and dissipation for me, and as it is not a ball I do not care to go.

Friday, May 27th.—At eight o'clock drove with my mother to Bridgewater House. We went into the library, where there was nobody, and Lady Francis, Henry Greville, and Lady Charlotte came and sat with us. I was literally crying with fright. Lady Francis took me to my dressing-room, my mother rouged me, blessed me, and went off to join the audience assembled in the great gallery. I went over my part once and my room a hundred times in every direction. At nine they began; the audience very wisely were totally in the dark, which threw out the brilliantly illuminated stage to great advantage, and considering that they were the finest folk in England they behaved remarkably well—listened quietly and attentively, and applauded like Covent Garden galleries. It all went well except poor Mr. Craven's first speech, in which he got out. I don't know whether Lady L—— was among the spectators, and gave him des éblouissements. It all went off admirably, however, and oh, how glad I was when it was over!

Saturday, May 28th.—I was awakened by a basket of flowers from Cassiobury, and a letter from Theodosia. Old Foster is dead. I wish he might be buried near the cottage. I should like to know where to think of his resting-place, poor old man!...

In the evening Mrs. Jameson, the Fitzhughs, R—— P——, and a Mr. K——, a friend of John's, and sundry and several came.... We acted charades, and they all went away in high good humor.

Sunday, May 29th.—An "eternal, cursed, cold, and heavy rain," as Dante sings. My mother, A——, and I went to the Swiss church; the service is shorter and more unceremonious than I like; that sitting to sing God's praise, and standing to pray to Him, is displeasing to all my instincts of devotion.

After church my mother was reading Milton's treatise on Christian doctrine, and read portions of it aloud to me. I always feel afraid of theological or controversial writings, and yet the faith that shrinks from being touched lest it should totter is certainly not on the right foundation. I suppose we ought, on the contrary, to examine thoroughly the reason of the faith that is in us. Declining reading upon religious subjects may be prudent, but it may be indolence, cowardice, or lack of due interest in the matter. I think I must read that treatise of Milton's.

Great Russell Street, May 29th, 1831.

My dearest H——,

I have but little time for letter-writing, getting daily "deeper and deeper still" in the incessant occupations of one sort and another that crowd upon and almost overwhelm me; and now my care is not so much whether I shall have time to write you a long letter, as how I shall get leisure to write to you at all. You complain that, in spite of the present interest I profess in public affairs, I have given you no details of my opinion about them—my hopes or fears of the result of the Reform movement. I have other things that I care more to write to you about than politics, and am chary of my space, because, though I can cross my letter, I can only have one sheet of paper. "The Bill," modified as it now is, has my best prayers and wishes, for to say that the removal of certain abuses will not give the people bread which they expect is nothing against it; but, at the same time that I sincerely hope this measure will be carried, I cannot conceive what Government will do next, for though trade is at this moment prosperous, great poverty and discontent exist among large classes of the people, and as soon as these needy folk find out that Reform is really not immediate bread and cheese and beer, they will seek something else which they may imagine will be those desired items of existence, and that is what it may be difficult to give them. In the mean time party spirit here has reached a tremendous pitch; old friendships are broken up and old intimacies cease; former cordial acquaintances refuse to meet each other, houses are divided, and the dearest relations disturbed, if not destroyed. Society is become a sort of battle-field, for every man (and woman too) is nothing if not political. In fact, there really appears to be no middle or moderating party, which I think strange and to be deplored. It seems as if it were a mere struggle between the nobility and the mobility, and the middle-class—that vast body of good sense, education, and wealth, and efficient to hold the beam even between the scales—throws itself man by man into one or the other of them, and so only swells the adverse parties on each side.

Parliament meets again in a few days, and then comes the tug of war. Lord John Russell was at Oatlands while we were there, and as the Francis Egertons and their guests were all anti-Reformers, they led him rather a hard life. He bore all their attacks with great good humor, however, and with the well-satisfied smile of a man who thinks himself on the right, and knows himself on the safe side, and wisely forbore to reply to their sallies. Our visit there was delightful.

As the distance is but one and twenty miles, my mother and I posted down in the open carriage. The only guests we found on our arrival were Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan (she is a daughter of Lady Dacre's, and a charming person), Lord John Russell, and two of our corps dramatique, Mr. Craven and Captain Shelley, son of Sir John Shelley, a handsome, good-humored, pleasant young gentleman, who acts Charles V. in "Hernani." I got up very early the first morning I was there and went down before breakfast to our little old cottage. In the lane leading to it I met a poor woman who lived near us, and whom we used to employ. I spoke to her, but she did not know me again. I wonder if these four years can have changed me so much? The tiny house had not been inhabited since we lived there.... My aunt Siddons is better, and Cecy very well.

Your affectionate

F. A. K.

[The beautiful domain of Oatlands was only rented at this time by Lord Francis Egerton, who delighted so much in it that he made overtures for the purchase of it. The house was by no means a good one, though it had been the abode of royalty; but the park was charming, and the whole neighborhood, especially the wooded ranges of St. George's Hill, extremely wild and picturesque.... Lord Francis Egerton bought St. George's Hill, at the foot of which he built Hatchford, Lady Ellesmere's charming dower house and residence after his death, and the house of Oatlands became a country inn, very pleasant to those who had never known it as the house of former friends, and therefore did not meet ghosts in all its rooms and garden walks; and the park was cut up into small villa residences and rascally inclined citizen's boxes. Hatchford, the widowed home of Lady Ellesmere and burial-place of her brother, to whose memory she erected there an elaborate mausoleum, has passed out of the family possessions and become the property of strangers. One son of the house lives on St. George's Hill, and has his home where I have so often drawn rein while riding with his father and mother to look over the wild, wooded slopes to the smiling landscape stretching in sunny beauty far below us.]

Monday, May 30th. ... The Francis Egertons called, and sat a long time discussing "Hernani." ... I must record such a good pun of his, which he only, alas, dreamt. He dreamt Lord W—— came up to him, covered with gold chains and ornaments of all sorts, and that he had called him the "Chain Pier." ... In the evening to Bridgewater House. As soon as we arrived, I went to my own private room, and looked over my part. We began at nine. Our audience was larger than the last time. The play went off extremely well; we were all improved. I was very anxious to play well, for the Archbishop of York was in the front row, and he (poor gentleman!) had never had the happiness of seeing me, the play-house being forbidden ground to him. [This seems rather inconsistent, as all the lesser clergy at this time frequented the theater without fear or reproach. Dr. Hughes, the Very Reverend Prebend of St. Paul's, Milman, Harness, among our own personal friends, were there constantly, not to speak of my behind-the-scenes acquaintance, the Rev. A.F.] I should like to seduce an old Archbishop into a liking for the wickedness of my mystery, so I did my very best to edify him, according to my kind and capacity.... At the end of the play, as I lay dead on the stage, the king (Captain Shelley) was cutting three great capers, like Bayard on his field of battle, for joy his work was done, when his pretty dancing shoes attracted, in spite of my decease, my attention, and I asked, with rapidly reviving interest in existence, what they meant, on which I was informed that the supper at Mrs. Cunliffe's was indeed a ball. I jumped up from the dead, hurried off my stage robes, and hurried on my private apparel, and followed my mother into the saloon. Here I had delightful talk (though I believe I was dancing on my mind's feet all the while) with Lord John Russell, Miss Berry, Lady Charlotte Lindsay, and that charming person, James Wortley, and I got a glimpse of Lord O——'s lovely face, who is a beautiful creature. After being duly stared at by the crowds of my exalted fellow-beings who filled the room, Lady Francis said she would send them away, and we adjourned to Mrs. Cunliffe's, and had a very fine ball; that is to say, we had neither room to dance, nor space to sit, nor power to move.

"Oh, pleasure is a very pleasant thing," as Byron sings and H—— for ever says, and certainly a good ball is a pleasant thing, and in spite of the above drawbacks I was enchanted with everything. Such shoals of partners! such nice people! such perfect music! such a delightful floor! Danced till the day had one eye wide open, and then home to bed—what a good thing it is to have one under the circumstances! I hope I have not been very tipsy to-night, but it is difficult with so many stimulants to keep quite sober. Broad daylight! Six o'clock!

Tuesday, May 21st.—My feet ache so with dancing that I can hardly stand. Did not some traditional princesses of German fairyland dance their shoes and stockings to pieces?

Going into the drawing-room I found my darling Dr. Combe there, and if I had not been so tired I must have made a jump at his neck, I was so very glad to see him. He brought me a letter from Mr. Combe, whom I love only one step lower. He sat with us but a short time, and leaves town to-morrow, which I am sorry for, first, because I should like to have seen him again so very much, and next, because I should have been glad that my mother became better acquainted with the mental charms and seductions of the man whose outward appearance seems to have allayed some of her apprehensions for the safety of my heart and those of my Edinburgh cousins. Mrs. W—— called soon after. She is intent upon my acting Mlle. Mar's part in "Henri Trois." I can do nothing with any French part in Covent Garden. If they can find a theater of half that size to get it up in, well and good; but seen from a distance, which defies discrimination of objects, a thistle is as good as a rose, and in that enormous frame refinement is mere platitude, and finish of detail an unnecessary minutia.

We went to the theater to see a new piece, I believe by Mrs. Norton. The pit and galleries were very indifferent; the dress circle and private boxes full of fine folk. Lady St. Maur (Georgiana Sheridan, Mrs. Norton's youngest sister, afterward Duchess of Somerset and Queen of Beauty) and her husband, with Corinne and Mr. Norton, in a box opposite ours. What a terrible piece! what atrocious situations and ferocious circumstances! tinkering, starving, hanging—like a chapter out of the Newgate Calendar. But, after all, she's in the right; she has given the public what they desire, given them what they like. Of course it made one cry horribly; but then of course one cries when one hears of people reduced by sheer craving to eat nettles and cabbage-stalks. Destitution, absolute hunger, cold and nakedness, are no more subjects for artistic representation than sickness, disease, and the real details of idiotcy, madness, and death. All art should be an idealized; elevated representation (not imitation) of nature; and when beggary and low vice are made the themes of the dramatist, as in this piece, or of the poet, as in the works of Crabbe, they seem to me to be clothing their inspirations in wood or lead, or some base material, instead of gold or ivory. The clay of the modeler is more real, but the marble of the sculptor is the clay glorified. In Crabbe's writings one has at least the comfort and consolation of a high moral sense, charming versification, and an occasional tender, exquisite expression of the beauties of nature. Our play to-night could not boast of these alleviations.

Wednesday, June 1st.—At the riding school saw Miss C——, who wants me to get the play changed at Covent Garden for this evening—"rien que cela!" What a fine thing it is to be "one of those people!" They fancy that anybody's business of any sort can be postponed to the first whim that enters their head. My mother came with Dr. Combe in the carriage to fetch me from the riding school. At home found a note from Lady Francis and the epilogue Lord Francis has written to "Hernani," which I am certainly bound to like, for it is highly complimentary to me.

I went to the real theater in the evening to do real work. The house was good, but I played like a wretch—ranted, roared, and acted altogether infamously. The fact was I was tired to death, and of course violence always has to supply the place of strength. Unluckily all the F——s were there, and I felt sorry for them. To be sure, they had never seen "The Hunchback" before, and I should think would heartily desire never to see it again; my performance was shameful.

Thursday, June 2d.—Mr. Hayter called. Lord Francis has spoken to him about the picture he wishes him to do of me, and he came to take the position, and I gave him his choice of three or four. I dare say he will make a very pretty picture. As for my likeness, that I am not hopeful about. I have gone through the operation in vain so very often. Murray has sent me some beautiful and delightful books.... A third representation of "Hernani" is called for, it seems, and, as far as I am concerned, they are welcome to it; but Lady Francis came to say that the Duchess of Gloucester wants it to be acted on the 23d, and I am afraid that will not do for my theater arrangements; they must try and have it earlier, if possible. Lady Francis has half bribed me with a ball. They want us to go down to Oatlands for Saturday and Sunday, and I hope we may be able to manage it.... After Lady F—— was gone, my mother had a visit from Mrs. B——; her manner is bad, her matter is good. She is clever and excellent, and I have a great respect for her. She interested me immensely by her account of Mrs. Fry's visits to Newgate. What a blessed, happy woman to do so much good; to be the means of comfort and consolation, perhaps of salvation, to such desolate souls! How I did honor and love what I heard of her. Mrs. B—— said Mrs. Fry would be delighted to take me with her some day when she went to the prison. My mother laughingly said she was afraid Mrs. Fry would convert me—surely not to Quakerism. I do not think I need a new faith, but power to act up to the one I profess. I need no Quaker saint to tell me I do not do that.

[I had the great honor of accompanying Mrs. Fry in one of her visits to Newgate, but from various causes received rather a painful impression instead of the very different one I had anticipated. Her divine labor of love had become famous, and fine ladies of fashion pressed eagerly to accompany her, or be present at the Newgate exhortations. The unfortunate women she addressed were ranged opposite their less excusable sister sinners of the better class, and I hardly dared to look at them, so entirely did I feel out of my place by the side of Mrs. Fry, and so sick for their degraded attitude and position. If I had been alone with them and their noble teacher I would assuredly have gone and sat down among them. On the day I was there a poor creature sat in the midst of the congregation attired differently from all the others, who was pointed out to me as being under sentence of transportation for whatever crime she committed. Altogether I felt broken-hearted for them and ashamed for us.]

My mother has had a letter from my father (he was acting in the provinces), who says he has met and shaken hands with Mr. Harris (his co-proprietor of Covent Garden, and antagonist in our ruinous lawsuit about it). I wonder what benefit is to be expected from that operation with—such a person.

Sunday, June 5th. ... On my return from afternoon service found Mr. Walpole with my mother; they amused me extremely by a conversation in which they ran over, as far as their memories would stretch (near sixty years), the various fashions and absurd modes of dress which have prevailed during that period. Toupees, fêtes, toques, bouffantes, hoops, bell hoops, sacques, polonaises, levites, and all the paraphernalia of horsehair, powder, pomatum, and pins, in the days when court beauties had their heads dressed over-night for the next day's drawing-room, and sat up in their chairs for fear of destroying the edifice by lying down. No wonder they were obliged to rouge themselves—the days when once in a fortnight was considered often enough for ridding the hair of its horrible paste of flour and grease. We are certainly cleaner than our grandmothers, and much more comfortable, though it is not so long since my own head was dressed à la giraffe, in three bows over pins half a foot high, so that I could not sit upright in the carriage without knocking against the top of it. My mother's and Mr. Walpole's recollections and descriptions were like seeing a set of historical caricatures pass before one.

Monday, June 6th.—The house was very full at the theater this evening, and Miss C—— sent me round a delicious fresh bouquet. I acted well, I think; the play was "Romeo and Juliet." It is so very pleasant to return to Shakespeare, after reciting Bianca and Isabella, etc. I reveled in the glorious poetry and the bright, throbbing reality of that Italian girl's existence; and yet Juliet is nothing like as nice as Portia—nobody is as nice as Portia. But the oftener I act Juliet the oftener I think it ought never to be acted at all, and the more absurd it seems to me to try to act it. After the play my mother sent a note with the carriage to say she would not go to the ball, so I dressed myself and drove off with my father from the theater to the Countess de S——'s. At half-past eleven the ball had not begun. Mrs. Norton was there in splendid beauty; at about half-past twelve the dancing began, and it was what is called a very fine ball. While I was dancing with Mr. C——, I saw my father talking to a handsome and very magnificent lady, who my partner told me was the Duchess of B——; after our quadrille, when I rejoined my father, he said to me, "Fanny, let me present you to ——" here he mumbled something perfectly inaudible, and I made a courtesy, and the lady smiled sweetly and said some civil things and went away. "Whose name did you mention," said I to my father, with some wickedness, "just now when you introduced me to that lady?" "Nobody's, my dear, nobody's; I haven't the remotest idea who she is." "The Duchess of B——," said I, glibly, strong in the knowledge I had just acquired from my partner. "Bless my soul!" cried the poor man, with a face of the most ludicrous dismay, "so it was! I had quite forgotten her, though she was good enough to remember me, and here I have been talking cross-questions and crooked answers to her for the last half-hour!"

Was ever any thing so terrible! I feared my poor father would go home and remain awake all night, sobbing softly to himself, like the eldest of the nine Miss Simmonses in the ridiculous novel, because in her nervous flurry at a great dinner party she had refused instead of accepting a gentleman's offer to drink wine with her. Lady G—— then came up, whom he did remember, and who was "truly gracious;" and I left him consoled, and, I hope, having forgotten his dreadful duchess again. All the world, as the saying is, was at this ball, and it certainly was a very fine assembly. We danced in a splendid room hung with tapestry—a magnificent apartment, though it seemed to me incongruous for the purpose; dim burning lights and flitting ghosts and gusts of wind and distant footfalls and sepulchral voices being the proper furniture of the "tapestried chamber," and not wax candles, to the tune of sunlight and bright eyes and dancing feet and rustling silks and gauzes and laughing voices, and all the shine and shimmer and flaunting flutter of a modern ball....

At half-past two, though the carriage had been ordered at two, my father told me he would not "spoil sport," and so angelically stayed till past four. He is the best of fathers, the most affectionate of parents, the most benevolent of men! There is a great difference between being chaperoned by one's father instead of one's mother: the latter, poor dear! never flirts, gets very sleepy and tired, and wants to go home before she comes; the former flirts and talks with all the pretty, pleasant women he meets, and does not care till what hour in the morning—a frame of mind favorable to much dancing for the youngers. After all, I had to come away in the middle of a delightful mazurka.

Tuesday, June 7th.— ... We had a very pleasant dinner at Mr. Harness's. Moore was there, but Paganini was the chief subject discussed, and we harped upon the one miraculous string he fiddles on without pauses.... After dinner I read one of Miss Mitford's hawthorny sketches out of "Our Village," which was lying on the table; they always carry one into fresh air and green fields, for which I am grateful to them.

Wednesday, June 8th.—While I was writing to H—— my mother came in and told me that Mrs. Siddons was dead. I was not surprised; she has been ill, and gradually failing for so long.... I could not be much grieved for myself, for of course I had had but little intercourse with her, though she was always very kind to me when I saw her.... She died at eight o'clock this morning—peaceably, and without suffering, and in full consciousness.... I wonder if she is gone where Milton and Shakespeare are, to whose worship she was priestess all her life—whose thoughts were her familiar thoughts, whose words were her familiar words. I wonder how much more she is allowed to know of all things now than she did while she was here. As I looked up into the bright sky to-day, while my father and mother were sadly recalling the splendor of her day of beauty and great public power, I thought of the unlimited glory she perhaps now beheld, of the greater holiness and happiness I trust she now enjoys, and said in my heart, "It must be well to be as she is." I had never thought it must be well to be as she was....

As soon as the news came my father went off to see what he could do for Cecilia, poor thing, and to bring her here, if she can be persuaded to leave Baker Street. He was not much shocked, though naturally deeply grieved by the event; my aunt has now been ill so long that any day might have brought the termination of the protracted process of her death. When he returned he said Cecilia was composed and quiet, but would not leave the house at present. I have written to Lady Francis to decline going to Oatlands, which we were to have done this week.

At dinner my father told me some of the arrangements he has made for the summer. We are to act at Bristol, Bath, Exeter, Plymouth, and Southampton. He then said, "Suppose we take steamer thence to Marseilles, and so on to Naples?" My heart jumped into my mouth at the thought; but how should I ever come back again?... Everything here is so ugly, even without comparison with that which is beautiful elsewhere; from Italy how should one come back to live in London?

Thursday, June 9th.— ... And so I am to act Lady Macbeth! I feel as if I were standing up by the great pyramid of Egypt to see how tall I am! However, it must be done; perhaps I may even do it less ill than Constance—the greater intensity of the character may perhaps render majesty less indispensable. Power (if one had enough of it) might atone for insufficient dignity. Lady Macbeth made herself a queen by dint of wickedness; Constance was royal born—a radical difference, which ought to be in my favor. But dear, dear, dear, what a frightful undertaking for a poor girl, let her be never so wicked!

And the Lady Macbeth will never be seen again! I wish just now that in honor of my aunt the play might be forbidden to be performed for the next ten years. My father and myself have a holiday at the theater—but only for the week—because of Mrs. Siddons's death, and we are to go down to Oatlands—nobody being there but ourselves, that is my brother and I—for the rest and quiet and fresh air of these few days.

Friday, June 10th.—Before three the carriage was announced, and we started for the country. We dropped Henry at Lord Waldegrave's and had a very pleasant drive, though the day was as various in its moods as if we were in April instead of June. We arrived at about six, and found Mr. C—— had been made an exception to the "positively nobody" who was to meet us....

Saturday, June 11th.—Read the French piece called "Une Faute," which half killed me with crying. It is exceedingly clever, but altogether too true, in my opinion, for real art. It is not dramatic truth, but absolute imitation of life, and instead of the mitigated emotion which a poetical representation of tragic events excites, it produces a sense of positive suffering too acutely painful for an artistic result; it is a perfectly prosaical reproduction of the familiar vice and its inseparable misery of modern everyday life; it wants elevation and imagination—aërial perspective; it is close upon one, and must be agonizing to see well acted. My studies were certainly not of the most cheerful order, for after finishing this morbid anatomy of human hearts I read an article in the Phrenological Journal on Bouilland's "Anatomy of the Brain," which made me feel as if my brain was stuck full of pins and needles.

Perhaps a certain amount of experience must be attained through experiment, and if the wits of the human species are to be better understood, governed, and preserved by the results obtained by cutting and hacking the brains of living animals, perhaps some of our more immediate mercy is to be sacrificed to our humanity in the lump; but if this is not the forbidden doing evil that good may come of it, I do not know what is. One of the effects of Mr. Bouilland's excruciating experiments on his victims was to turn me already sick and give me an agonizing pain in my brain. I hope their beneficial consequences did not end there.

I did all this reading before breakfast, and when I left my room it was still too early for any one to be up, so I set off for a run in the park. The morning was lovely, vivid, and bright, with soft shadows flitting across the sky and chasing one another over the sward, while a delicious fresh wind rustled the trees and rippled the grass; and unable to resist the temptation, bonnetless as I was, I set off at the top of my speed, running along the terrace, past the grotto, and down a path where the syringa pelted me with showers of mock-orange blossoms, till I came under some magnificent old cedars, through whose black, broad-spread wings the morning sun shone, drawing their great shadows on the sweet-smelling earth beneath them, strewed with their russet-colored shedding. I thought it looked and smelt like a Russia-leather carpet. Then I came to the brink of the water, to a little deserted fishing pavilion surrounded by a wilderness of bloom that was once a garden, and then I ran home to breakfast. After breakfast I went over the very same ground with Lady Francis, extremely demure, with my bonnet on my head and a parasol in my hand, and the utmost propriety of decorous demeanor, and said never a word of my mad morning's explorings. A girl's run and a young lady's walk are very different things, and I hold both pleasant in their way. The carriage was ordered to take my mother to Addlestone to see poor old Mrs. Whitelock, and during her absence Lady Francis and I repaired to her own private sitting-room, and we entertained each other with extracts from our respective journals. I was struck with the high esteem she expressed for Lord Carlisle; in one place in her journal she said she wished she could hope her boys would grow up as excellent men as he is, and this in spite of her party politics, for she is a Tory and he a Whig, and she is really a partisan politician.

In the afternoon, after a charming meandering ride, we determined to go to Monks Grove, the place Lady Charlotte Greville has taken on St. Anne's Hill.... In the evening we had terrifical ghost stories, which held, us fascinated till one o'clock in the morning.

"The stones done, to bed they creep,
By whispering winds soon lull'd asleep."

Sunday, June 12th.— ... It's nearly five years since I said my prayers in that dear old little Weybridge church....

On our return, as the horses are never used on Sunday, we went down to the water and got into the boat. The day was lovely, and as we glided along the bright water my mother and Lady Francis and I murmured, half voice, all sorts of musical memories, which made a nice accompaniment to Lord Francis's occasional oar-dip that just kept the boat in motion. When we landed, my mother returned to the house, and the rest of us set off for a long delightful stroll to the farm, where I saw a monstrous and most beautiful dog whom I should like to have hugged, but that he looked so grave and wise it seemed like a liberty. We walked on through a part of the park called America, because of the magnificent rhododendrons and azaleas and the general wildness of the whole. The mass was so deep one's feet sank into it; the sun, setting, threw low, slanting rays along the earth and among the old tree trunks. It was a beautiful bit of forest scenery; how like America I do not know. Upon the racecourse we emerged into a full, still afternoon atmosphere of brilliant and soft splendor; the whole park was flooded with sunshine, and little creeks of light ran here and there into the woods we had just left, touching with golden radiance a solitary tree, and glancing into leafy nooks here and there, while the mass of woodland was one deep shadow....

Much discussion as to the possibilities and probabilities of our being able to stay here another day. When we came back from our afternoon ride at near eight, found Mr. Greville and Lady Charlotte here, and a letter from my father, saying that I could be spared from my work at the theater a little longer, and promising to come down to us.... In the evening Mr. C—— and I acted some of Racine's "Andromaque" for them; my old school part of Hermione which I have not forgotten, and then two scenes from Scribe's pretty piece of "les premières Amours." He acts French capitally, and, moreover, bestowed upon me the two following ridiculous conundrum puns, for which I shall be forever grateful to him:

"Que font les Vaches à Paris?"

"Des Vaudevilles" (des Veaux de Ville).

"Quelle est la sainte qui n'a pas lesoin de Jarretières?"

"Ste. Sébastienne" (ses has se tiennent).

What absurd, funny stuff!

Tuesday, June 14th.—Gardening on the lawn—hay-making in the meadow—delightful ride in the afternoon, the beginning of which, however, was rather spoiled by some very disagreeable accounts Mr. C—— was giving us of Lord and Lady ——'s mènage. What might, could, would, or should a woman do in such a case? Endure and endure till her heart broke, I suppose. Somehow I don't think a man would have the heart to break one's heart; but, to be sure, I don't know....

We did not return home till near nine, and so, instead of dinner, all sat down to high tea, at which everybody was very cheerful and gay, and the talk very bright....

I wish I could have painted my host and hostess this morning as they stood together on the lawn; she with her beautiful baby in her arms, her bright, fair forehead and eyes contrasting so strikingly with his fine, dark head. I never saw a more charming picture. (Landseer has produced one version of it in his famous "Return from Hawking.") Are not all such groups "Holy Families"? They looked to me holy as well as handsome and happy.

Wednesday, June 15th.— ... The races in the park were to begin at one, and we wished, of course, to keep clear of them and all the gay company; so at twelve my mother and I got into the pony carriage, and drove to Addlestone to my aunt Whitelock's pretty cottage there. It rained spitefully all day, and the races and all the fine racing folk were drenched. At about six o'clock my father came from London, bringing me letters; the weather had brightened, and I took a long stroll with him till time to dress for dinner.... In the evening music and pleasant talk till one o'clock.

Thursday, June 16th.—At eight o'clock my mother and I walked with my father to meet the coach, on the top of which he left us for London. After breakfast took my mother down to my "Cedar Hall," and established her there with her fishing, and then walked up the hill to the great trees and amused myself with bending down the big branches, and, seating myself on them, let them spring up with me. Climbing trees, as poor Combe would say, excites one's "wonder" and one's "caution" very agreeably, and I like it. I took Lord Francis's translation of "Henri Trois" back to the "Cedar Hall," where my mother was still watching her float. I was a good deal struck with it. He has not finished the whole of the first act yet, but there is one scene between the Duchess of Guise and St. Megrin that I should think ought to be very effective on the stage; and I can imagine how charming Mdlle. Mars must have been in her sleep-walking gestures and intonations. The situation, which is highly dramatic, is, I think, quite new; I cannot recollect any similar one in any other play....

After lunch my mother, Lady Charlotte, and Mr. Greville drove off to Monks Grove, and we followed them on horse-back; it is a little paradise of a place, with its sunny, smooth sloping lawns and bright, sparkling piece of water, the masses of flowers blossoming in profuse beauty, and the high, overhanging, sheltering woods of St. Anne's Hill rising behind it. On our way home much talk of Naples. I might like to go there, no doubt; the question is how I should like to come back to London after Naples, and I think not at all. In the evening read the pretty French piece of "Michel et Christine" which my father had sent me.

Friday, June 17th.— ... My mother, Mr. C——, and I drove together back to town; so good-by, Oatlands.

Monday, June 20th.—Went to rehearsal at half-past ten for John Mason, who is to come out in Romeo to-night; he had caught a dreadful cold and could hardly speak, which was terribly provoking, poor fellow! After my theater rehearsal of "Romeo and Juliet" drove to Bridgewater House to rehearse "Hernani." In the evening the house was very good at Covent Garden; I played well. John Mason was suffering dreadfully from cold and hoarseness; the audience were very good-natured, however, and he got through uncommonly well. My mother said I played "beautifully," which was saying much indeed for her. I was delighted, especially as the Francis Levesons and —— were all there.

Tuesday, June 21st.—Went to Bridgewater House to rehearse. Charles Young was among our morning audience; I was so glad to see him, for dear old acquaintanceship. The king was going to the House of Parliament, and Palace Yard was thronged with people, and we sat round one of the Bridgewater House windows to see the show. At about one the royal carriages set out—such lovely cream-colored horses, with blue and silver trappings; such splendid, shining, coal-black ones, with coral-colored trappings. The equipages looked like some enchanted present in a fairy story. The king—God bless him!—cannot, I should think, have been much annoyed by the clamorous greetings of his people. I'm afraid that ominous, sullen silence is a bad sign of the times. We rehearsed very steadily. Lord Francis, who is taking the old duke's part because of Mr. St. Aubin going abroad, is much improved by some teaching Young has bestowed upon him; but still he is by no means so good as Mr. St. Aubin was....

Wednesday, 22d.—Read "La Chronique de Charles Neuf," which is very clever, but the history of that period in France is so revolting that works of fiction founded upon it are as disagreeable as the history itself. Hogarth's pictures and Le Sage's novels are masterpieces, and yet admirable only as excellent representations of what in itself is odious. However, they are satirical works, and so have their raison d'être, which I do not think a serious novel about detestable times and people has. Drove to Bridgewater House, feeling so unwell that I could scarcely stand, and was obliged to lie down till I was called to go on the stage. We had a magnificent audience—all the grandeurs in England except the King. The Queen, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland, Princess Elizabeth, Prince Leopold, the Duke of Brunswick. And lesser magnificoes the room full. Such very superior people make a dull audience, of course; the presence of royalty is always understood to bar applause, which is not etiquette when a Majesty is by. I played very ill; my voice was quite unmanageable, and broke twice, to my extreme dismay. The fact is, I am fagged half to death; but as I cannot give up my work and cannot bear to give up my play, the only wonder is that I am not fagged whole to death. Mr. Craven acted really capitally, and I wondered how he could. They put us out terribly in one scene by forgetting the bench on which I have to sit down. Hernani managed with great presence of mind and cleverness in its absence, but it spoilt our prettiest picture. After the play Lady Francis came to fetch me to be presented to the Queen; her Majesty was most gracious in her reception of me, and so were the Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Gloucester, who came and had quite a long chat with me. When I had received my dismissal from her Majesty I ran to disrobe, and returned to join the crowd in the drawing-room.... When they were all gone we adjourned to Lady Gower's—a most magnificent supper, which we enjoyed in the perfection of comfort, in a small boudoir opening into and commanding the whole length of the supper saloon. Our snuggery just held my mother, Lady Francis, myself, Charles Greville, and three of our corps dramatique, and we not only enjoyed a full view of the royal table, but what was infinitely amusing, poor Lord Francis's disconsolate countenance, which half killed us with laughing. Supper done, we all proceeded downstairs to see the Royalty depart, and looked at a fine picture of Lawrence's of that handsome creature, Lord Clanwilliam. Took leave of my friends for some months, I am sorry to say; took Mr. ——home in our carriage and set him down just at day-dawn. It was past four o'clock before I saw my bed; and the life I am leading is really enough to kill any one.

Thursday, June 23d.—Quite unwell, and in bed all day. Mrs. Jameson came and sat with me some time. We talked of marriage, and a woman's chance of happiness in giving her life into another's keeping. I said I thought if one did not expect too much one might secure a reasonably fair amount of happiness, though of course the risk one ran was immense. I never shall forget the expression of her face; it was momentary, and passed away almost immediately, but it has haunted me ever since.

Great Russell Street.

Dear Lady Dacre,

I am commissioned by my mother to request your kind permission to bring my brother to your evening party on Saturday; she hopes you will have no scruple in refusing this request, if for any reason you would rather not comply with it.... I have been thinking much about what you said to me both viva voce and in your note upon that "obnoxious word" in my play. Let me entreat you to put aside conventional regards of age and sex, which have nothing to do with works of art or literature, and view the subject without any of those considerations, which have their own proper domain, doubtless—although I think you have in this instance admitted their jurisdiction out of it.... I hope as long as I live that I shall never write anything offensive to decency or morality, or their pure source, religion; and I hope in my own manners and conversation always to preserve the decorum prescribed by society, good taste, and good feeling; but as a dramatic writer, supposing I am ever to be one, I shall have to depict men as well as women, coarse and common men as well as refined and courtly ones, and all and each, if I fulfill my task, must speak the language that their nature under their several circumstances points out as individually appropriate. But I forget that I am addressing one far better able than I am to say what belongs to all questions of poetry and art. Forgive me, my dear Lady Dacre, and allow me to add that, as when I put my play into your hands I told you that should you find it too intolerably dull and bad I would release you from your kind promise of accepting its dedication to yourself, I can only repeat my readiness to do so if upon any other ground whatever you feel reluctant to grace my title-page with your name. Pray tell me so without hesitation, as I had rather forego that honor than owe it to your courtesy without your entire good-will.

In any event pray accept my best acknowledgments for your kindness, and believe me always

Your very truly obliged

F. A. K.

This letter was written in answer to some strictures of Lady Dacre's on what appeared to her coarseness of language in my play of "The Star of Seville," which she thought unbecoming a "young lady." If I remember rightly, too, she said that the introduction of a scene in a bedchamber might be deemed objectionable. I had asked her permission to dedicate the play to her, which she had granted; and though she failed to convince me that a young-lady element had any business whatever in a play, she very kindly allowed her name to adorn the title-page of my un-young ladylike drama.

Soon after this my father and aunt and myself left London for our summer tour in the provinces, which we began at Bristol.

Monday, July 4th, Bristol.—The play was "Romeo and Juliet," and the nurse was a perfect farce in herself; she really was worth any money, and her soliloquy when she found me "up and dressed and down again," very nearly made me scream with laughter in the middle of my trance. Indeed, the whole play was probably considered an "improved version" of Shakespeare's Veronese story, both in the force and delicacy of the text. Sundry wicked words and coarse appellations were decorously dispensed with; many fine passages received judicious additions; not a few were equally judiciously omitted altogether. What a shocking hash!

Tuesday, July 5th.—After breakfast we sallied forth to the market, to my infinite delight and amusement. It is most beautifully clean; the fruit and vegetables look so pretty, and smell so sweet, and give such an idea of plentiful abundance, that it is delightful to walk about among them. Even the meat, which I am generally exceedingly averse to go near, was so beautifully and nicely arranged that it had none of its usual repulsiveness; and the sight of the whole place, and the quaint-looking rustic people, was so pleasantly envious. We stopped to gossip with a bewitching old country dame, whose market stock might have sat, with her in the middle of it, for its picture; the veal and poultry so white and delicate-looking, the bacon like striped pink and white ribbons, the butter so golden, fresh, and sweet, in a great basket trimmed round with bunches of white jasmine, the green leaves and starry blossoms and exquisite perfume making one believe that butter ought always to be served, not in a "lordly dish," but in a bower of jasmine. The good lady told us she had just come up from "the farm," and that the next time she came she would bring us some home-made bread, and that she was going back to brew and to bake. She looked so tidy and rural, and her various avocations sounded so pleasant as she spoke of them, that I felt greatly tempted to beg her to let me go with her to "the farm," which I am sure must be an enchanting place, neat and pretty, and flowery and comfortable, and full of rustic picturesqueness; and while the sun shone, I think I should like a female farmer's life amazingly. Went to the theater and rehearsed "Venice Preserved," which is an entirely different kind of thing. Charles Mason dined with us. After dinner I finished reading Miss Ferrier's novel of "Destiny," which I like very much; besides being very clever, it leaves a pleasant taste, in one's mind's mouth. Went to the theater at six; the play was "Venice Preserved," and I certainly have seldom seen a more shameful exhibition. In the first place C—— did not even know his words, and that was bad enough; but when he was out, instead of coming to a stop decently, and finishing at least with his cue, he went on extemporizing line after line, and speech after speech, of his own, by way of mending matters. I think I never saw such a performance. He stamps and bellows low down in his throat like an ill-suppressed bull; he rolls his eyes till I feel as if they were flying out of their sockets at me, and I must try and catch them. He quivers and quavers in his speech, and pulls and wrenches me so inhumanly, that what with inward laughter and extreme rage and pain, I was really all but dead in earnest at the end of the play. I acted very ill myself till the last scene, when my Jaffier having been done justice to by the Venetian Government, I was able to do justice to myself, and having gone mad, and no wonder, died rather better than I had lived through the piece.

July 6th, Bristol.—Walked out to order the horses, and afterwards went on to look at the Abbey Church. We examined one or two interesting old monuments; but were obliged to curtail our explorings, as the doors were about to be closed. We have been talking much lately of a remote possibility of going to America; and as I left this old brown pile to-day, it seemed to me curious to think of a country which has no cathedrals, no monuments of the Old Faith. How venerable, in spite of its superstitions and abuses; for its long undisputed sway over all civilized lands; for the great and good men who honored it by their lives and works—the religion of Augustine, of Bruno, Benedict, Francis d'Assisi, Francis de Sales, Fénelon, and how many more—the Christianity of Europe in its feudal, chivalrous times, those days of noble, good, as well as fierce, evil deeds and lives, the faith that kings and warriors bowed to when sovereignty was absolute and military power supreme. America has no gray abbeys, no ruined cloisters, to tell of monastic brotherhoods—the preserves of ancient historic chronicles, the guardians of the early wells and springs of classic learning and genius. In America there are no great, old, time-stained, weather-beaten, ivy-mantled churches full of tombs, such as we saw to-day, with curious carvings and quaint effigies, and where the early rulers of the land embraced the faith and received the baptism of Christ. That must be a very strange country. But they have Plymouth Rock, on the shore where the Protestant Pilgrims landed.

The horses having come to the door, we set off for our ride; our steeds were but indifferent hacks, but the road was charming, and the evening serene and pure, and I was with my father, a circumstance of enjoyment to me always. The characteristic feature of the scenery of this region is the vivid, deep-toned foliage of the hanging woods, through whose dense tufts of green, masses of gray rock and long scars of warm-colored red-brown earth appear every now and then with the most striking effect. The deep-sunk river wound itself drowsily to a silver thread at the base of steep cliffs, to the summit of which we climbed, reaching a fine level land of open downs carpeted with close, elastic turf. On we rode, up hill and down dale, through shady lanes full of the smell of lime-blossom, skirting meadows fragrant with the ripe mellow hay and honey-sweet clover, and then between plantations of aromatic, spicy fir and pine, all exhaling their perfumes under the influence of the warm sunset. At last we made a halt where the road, winding through Lord de Clifford's property, commanded an enchanting view. On our right, rolling ground rising gradually into hills, clothed to their summits with flourishing evergreens, firs, larches, laurel, arbutus—a charming variety in the monotony of green. On the farthest of these heights Blaise Castle, with two gray towers, well defined against the sky, looked from its bosky eminence over the whole domain, which spread on our left in sloping lawns, where single oaks and elms of noble size threw their shadows on the sunlit sward, which looked as if none but fairies' feet had ever pressed it. Beyond this, through breaks and frames, and arches made by the trees, the broad Severn glittered in the wavy light. It was a beautiful landscape in every direction. We returned home by sea wall and the shore of the Severn, which seemed rather bare and bleak after the soft loveliness we had just left....

Thursday, July 7th.—Went to the theater to rehearse "The Gamester." In the afternoon strolled down to the river with my father and Dall. We took boat and rowed toward the cliffs. Our time, however, was limited; and just as we reached the loveliest part of the river, we were obliged to turn home again.... At dinner, as we were talking about America, and I was expressing my disinclination ever to go thither, my father said: "If my cause (our Chancery suit) goes ill before the Lords, I think the best thing I can do will be to take ship from Liverpool and sail to the United States." I choked a little at this, but presently found voice to say, "Ebben son pronta;" but he replied, "No, that he should go alone." That you never should, my own dear father!... But I do hate the very thought of America.

Saturday, July 9th. ... In the afternoon drove out in an open carriage with Dall to Shirehampton, by the same road my father and I took in our ride the other day.

Bristol, July 10th, 1831.

My dear Mrs. Jameson,

I can neither bid you confirm nor deny any "reports you may hear," for I am in utter ignorance, I am happy to say, of the world's surmisings on my behalf, and had indeed supposed that my time for being honored by its notice in any way was pretty well past and over.

I am glad you are having rest, as you speak of it with the enjoyment which those alone who work hard are entitled to. I trust, too, that in the instance of your eyes no news is good news, for you say nothing of them, and I therefore like to hope that they have suffered you to forget them.

I'm disappointed about your Shakespeare book. I should like to have had it by my next birthday, which is the 27th of November, and to which I look forward with unusually mingled feelings. However, it cannot be helped; and I have no doubt the booksellers are right in point of fact, for we are embarked on board too troublous times to carry mere passe temps literature with us. "We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns," I am afraid, and shall find small public taste or leisure for polite letters.

I like this place very well; it is very quiet, and my life is always a happy one with my father. He always spoils me, and that is always pleasant, you know.

The Bristol people are rather in a bad state just now for our purposes, for trade here is in a very unprosperous condition; and the recent failure of many of their great mercantile houses does no good to our theatrical ones. The audiences are very pleasant, however, and the company by no means bad. We are here another week, and then take ship for Ilfracombe, and thence by land to Exeter; after that Plymouth and Southampton.... I wish I could be in London for "Anna Bolena." I cannot adequately express my admiration for Madame Pasta; I saw her in Desdemona the Saturday night on which I scrawled those few lines to you. I think if you knew how every look and tone and gesture of hers affects me, you would be satisfied. She is almost equal to an imagination; more than that I cannot say. If you rate "imagination" as I think you must, I need say nothing more. We shall certainly be back in London by the end of September, if not before. In the mean time believe me ever yours most truly,

F. A. K.

Sunday, July 10th.—My father wickedly dawdled about till we were nearly late for church, and had to scamper along the quays and up the steep street, to poor dear Dall's infinite discomfiture, who grumbled and puffed, and shuffled and shambled along, while I plunged on, breathlessly ejaculating, "It is so hateful to be late for church!" The cathedral (which I believe it is not) was quite full, but we obtained seats in the organ gallery, where we could not hear very well, but had a very fine view of the coup d'œil presented by the choir and church below us. The numerous and many-colored congregation, the white surpliced choristers, the charity-school children in their uniforms surrounding the altar, all framed in by the dark old oak screens with their quaint readings, and partially vividly illuminated by occasional gleams of strong sunlight which poured suddenly through the colored windows, presented a beautiful picture. The service was very well performed: the organ is a remarkably good one, and one or two of the boys' voices were exquisitely soft and clear. It is a fine service, and yet I do not like it by way of religious worship. It does not make me devout, in the proper form of the term; it appeals too much to my senses and my imagination; it is religion set to music and painting, and artistic religion does not suit me. The incessant passing of people through the church, too, disturbs one, and gives an unpleasant air of irreverence to the whole.... I think I might like to go to a cathedral for afternoon service, much as I like to spend my Sunday leisure in reading Milton, though I should not be satisfied to make my whole devotional exercises consist in reading "Paradise Lost." A wretchedly weak, poor sermon; how strange that such a theme should inspire nothing better than such a discourse! However, I suppose this sort of ministering is the inevitable result of a "ministry" embraced merely as a means of subsistence. No one could paint pictures or compose music, only because they wanted bread, so I do not see why any one should preach sermons fit to be heard, only because they want bread. If I was a despot, I would suppress hebdomadal writing of sermons, and people should be forbidden instead of bidden to talk nonsense upon sacred subjects.

Monday, 11th.—At night the theater was very full, and the audience pleasant. During supper my father, Charles Mason, and I had a long discussion about Kean. I cannot help thinking my father wrong about him. Kean is a man of decided genius, no matter how he neglects or abuses nature's good gift. He has it. He has the first element of all greatness—power. No taste, perhaps, and no industry, perhaps; but let his deficiencies be what they may, his faults however obvious, his conceptions however erroneous, and his characters, each considered as a whole, however imperfect, he has the one atoning faculty that compensates for everything else, that seizes, rivets, electrifies all who see and hear him, and stirs down to their very springs the passionate elements of our nature. Genius alone can do this.

As an actor, one whose efforts are the result of study, of mental research, reflection, and combination; as an intellectual anatomist, whose knowledge must dissect, and then re-form and reproduce again in beauty and harmony the image he has taken to pieces; as an artist, who is bound to conceal both the first and last processes, the dismembering of the parts and the reuniting them in a whole, and whose business is to make the most deliberate mental labor and the most studied personal effects appear the spontaneous result of unpremeditated passion and emotion (feigned passion and emotion, which are to appear real)—in capacity for all this Kean may be defective. He may not be an actor, he may not be an artist, but he is a man of genius, and instinctively with a word, a look, a gesture, tears away the veil from the heart of our common humanity, and lays it bare as it beats in every human heart, and as it throbs in his own. Kean speaks with his whole living frame to us, and every fiber of ours answers his appeal.

I do not know that I ever saw him in any character which impressed me as a whole work of art; he never seems to me to intend to be any one of his parts, but I think he intends that all his parts should be him. So it is not Othello who is driven frantic by doubt and jealousy, nor Shylock who is buying human flesh by its weight in gold, nor Sir Giles Overreach who is selling his child to hell for a few years of wealth and power; it is Kean, and in every one of his characters there is an intense personality of his own that, while one is under its influence, defies all criticism—moments of such overpowering passion, accents of such tremendous power, looks and gestures of such thrilling, piercing meaning, that the excellence of those parts of his performances more than atones for the want of greater unity in conception and smoothness in the entire execution of them.

The discussion about Kean led naturally to some talk about his most famous parts, particularly Shylock. My father's conception of Shylock seems to me less the right one than Kean's; but then, if my father took what I think the right view of the part, he would have to give up acting it. The real Shylock—that is, Shakespeare's—is a creature totally opposite in his whole organization, physical and mental, to my father's; and as my father cannot force his nature in any particular into uniformity with that of Shylock, he endeavors to persuade himself that the theory by which he tries to bring it into harmony with his individuality, and within the compass of his powers, is the right one; but I think him entirely mistaken about it. Kean did with the part exactly what my father wants to do—adapted his conceptions to his means of execution; but Kean's physical constitution was much better suited to express Shylock as Shylock should be expressed than my father's. My father attempts to make Shylock "poetical" (in the superficial sense), because that is the bias of his own mind in matters of art. Classical purity and refinement of taste are his specialties as an actor, and neither power nor intensity.

Shylock's master passion is not revenge, which is a savage, but avarice, which is a sordid motive. His hatred is inspired more by defeated hope of gain and positive losses and threatened ventures, than by the personal insults and contumely he has received.

Avarice is an absolutely base passion, and a grand poetical character cannot consistently be raised upon such a foundation, nor can a nature be at once groveling and majestic. Besides, Shakespeare has not made Shylock "poetical." The concentrated venom of his passion is prosaic in its vehement utterance—close, concise, vigorous, logical, but not imaginative; and in the scenes where his evil nature escapes the web of his cunning caution, and he is stung to fury by his complicated losses, there is intense passion but no elevation in his language.

There is a vein of humor in Shylock. A grim, bitter, sardonic flavor pervades the part, that blends naturally with the sordid thrift and shrewd, watchful, eager vigilance of the miser. It infuses a terrible grotesqueness into his rage, and curdles one's blood in the piercing, keen irony of his mocking humility to Antonio, and adds poignancy to the ferocity of his hideous revenge. This Kean rendered admirably, and in this my father entirely fails, but it is an important element of the character.

My father is hard upon Kean's defects because they are especially antagonistic to his artistic taste and tendency, but I think, too, there is a slight infusion of the vexation of unappreciated labor in my father's criticism of Kean. He forgets that power is universally felt and understood, and refinement seldom the one or the other, and for a thousand who applaud Kean's "What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?" probably not ten people are aware of his exquisite "nevertheless" in the reading of Antonio's letter. Most eyes can "see a church by daylight;" not many stop to look at the lights and shadows that are forever varying and adding to the beauty of its aspect. I wonder how, being as well aware as my father is of all the fine work that escapes the eyes of the public, he can care for this kind of thing as he does.

Tuesday, 12th.—We are having events at the theater, and not of a pleasant sort. Mr. Brunton, the manager, is in "difficulties" (civilized plural for debt), and it seems that last night during the play one of his creditors put an execution into the theater, and laid violent hands upon the receipts, which, as it was my father's benefit, rather dismayed us. So after breakfast this morning, having put out my dresses for my favorite Portia for to-night, I went to the theater to ascertain if there was to be a rehearsal or not. My father had gone in search of Mr. Brunton to see how matters could be arranged, and at all events to represent that we could not go on acting unless our money was secured to us. Charles Mason, Dall, and I in the mean time found the poor actors in the theater very much at a loss how to proceed, as it seemed extremely doubtful whether there would be any performance; so we returned home, where we found my father, who said that at all events there must be a rehearsal, for it was absolutely necessary if we did act to-night, and could do us no harm if we did not; so we repaired again to the theater, where the scattered and scared corps dramatique having been got together again, we proceeded to business.

Wednesday, 13th.—Mr. K—— called and told us that some arrangement had been made with the truculent creditor of our poor manager by which we shall not lose any more in this unlucky business. My father will be quit for about a hundred pounds. I am very sorry for Mr. Brunton, but he should not have placed us in such an uncomfortable position. My father has offered to act one night beyond our engagement for the sake, if possible, of making up to the actors the arrears of salary Mr. Brunton owes them. They are all poor, hard-working people, earning no more than the means of subsistence, and this withholding of their due falls very heavily on them.

Thursday, 14th.— ... At the theater the house was very good, and the audience very pleasant. The play was "The Provoked Husband," and I'm sure I play his provoking wife badly enough to provoke anybody; but she's not a person to my mind, which is an artistic view of the case.

[My modes of dealing with my professional duties at this very unripe stage of my career irresistibly remind me of a not very highly educated female painter who had taken it into her head to make an historical picture of Cleopatra. Sending to a friend for a few "references" upon the subject of that imperial gypsy's character and career, she sent them hastily back, saying she had relinquished her purpose, "having really no idea Cleopatra was that sort of person.">[

Friday, July 15th.—Miserrima! I have broken a looking-glass! and on Friday, too! What do I think will happen to me! Had a long talk this morning with dear Dall about my dislike to the stage. I do not think it is the acting itself that is so disagreeable to me, but the public personal exhibition, the violence done (as it seems to me) to womanly dignity and decorum in thus becoming the gaze of every eye and theme of every tongue. If my audience was reduced to my intimates and associates I should not mind it so much, I think; but I am not quite sure that I should like it then.

At the theater the house was very full, and the audience particularly amiable. In the interval between the fourth and fifth acts Charles Mason made a speech to them, informing them of Mr. Brunton's distress, and our intention of acting for him on Monday. They applauded very much, and I hope they will do more, and come. My part of the charity is certainly not small; to be pulled and pushed and dragged hither and thither, and generally "knocked about," as the miserable Belvidera, for three mortal hours, is a sacrifice of self which my conscience bears me witness is laudable. I would much rather pay with my purse than my person in this case. Unfortunately, je n'ai pas de quoi.

Sunday, July 17th.—To Redcliffe Church with my father and Dall. What a beautiful old building it is!... What a sermon! Has the truth, as our Church holds it, no fitter expounders than such a preacher? Are these its stays, props, and pillars—teachers to guide, enlighten, and instruct people as cultivated and intelligent as the people of this country on the most momentous of all subjects? Are these the sort of adversaries to oppose to men like Channing? As for not going to church because of bad or foolish sermons, that is quite another matter, though I not unfrequently hear that reason assigned for staying away. One goes to church to say one's prayers, and not to hear more or less fine discourses; one goes because it is one's duty, and a delight and comfort, and a quite distinct duty and delight from that of private prayer. A good sermon, Heaven knows, is a rare blessing to be thankful for, but if one went to church only in the expectation of that blessing, one might stay away most Sundays in the year.

[My youthful scorn of "poor preaching" reminds me of what I once heard Edward Everett say, who, before becoming his country's "Minister," in the diplomatic sense of the word, had been a powerful and eloquent Unitarian preacher: "I hear a good deal of criticism upon sermons which are supposed to be religious or moral exhortations, not intellectual exercises. I dare say many sermons are not first rate, but moderate good preaching is not a bad thing, and pretty poor preaching is better than most men's practice.">[

Monday, July 18th.—The theater was crowded to-night, which delighted me. It is pleasant to see malicious and evil actions produce such a result. I was very nervous and excited, and nearly went into hysterics over one small incident of the evening. At the close of the first separation scene—the play was "Venice Preserved"—when Jaffier is carried out by the nape of the neck by Pierre, and Belvidera extracted on the other side in the arms (and iron ones they were) of Bedamar, the audience of course were affected, harrowed, overcome by the poignant pathos of the situation. Charles looked woebegone. I called upon him in tones of the most piercing anguish (an agony not entirely feigned, as my bruises can bear witness). The curtain descended slowly amidst sympathetic sobs and silence—the musicians themselves, deeply moved, no doubt, with the sorrows of the scene, mournfully resumed their fiddles, and struck up "ti ti tum tiddle un ti tum ti"—the jolliest jig you ever heard. The bathos was irresistible; we behind the scenes, the principal sufferers (perhaps) in the night's performance, were instantly comforted, and all but shouted with laughter. I hope the audience were equally revived by this grotesque sudden cheering of their spirits. After the tragedy a Bristolian Paganini performed a concerto on one string. Dall declares that the whole orchestra played the whole time—but some sounds reached me in my dressing-room that were decidedly unique more ways than one, not at all unlike our favorite French fantasia—"Complainte d'un cochon au lait qui rêve." But the audience were transported; they clapped and the fiddle squeaked, they shouted and the fiddle squealed, they hurrahed and the fiddle uttered three terrific screams, and it was over and Paganini is done for—here, at any rate. He need never show face or fiddle here; he hasn't a string (even one) left to his bow in Bristol. "So Orpheus fiddled," etc.

Tuesday, July 19th.—Dinner-party at the —— which ought to have been chronicled by Jane Austen. I sat by a gentleman who talked to me of the hanging gardens of Semiramis and what might have been cultivated therein (hemp perhaps), then of the derivation of languages—he still kept among roots—and finally of tea, which he told me he was endeavoring to grow on the Welsh mountains. Some of the table-talk deserved printing verbatim, only it was almost too good to be true, or at any rate believed.

Wednesday, July 20th.—Charles Mason came after breakfast, and told us that there was some chance of poor Mr. Brunton's getting out of prison (into which his creditor has thrust him), for that the latter had been so universally scouted for his harsh proceeding that he probably would be shamed into liberating him.

We shall not leave Bristol to-day. The wind is contrary and the weather quite unfavorable for a party of pleasure, which our trip by sea to Ilfracombe was to be. It's very disagreeable living half in one's trunks and traveling-bags, as this sort of uncertainty compels one to do. I studied Dante, wrote verses and sketched, and tried to be busy; but a defeated departure leaves one's mind and thoughts only half unpacked, and I felt idle and unsettled, though I worked at "The Star of Seville" till dinner-time.

After dinner I studied politics in the Examiner and read an article on Cobbett, which made me laugh, and the motto to which might have been "Malvolio, thou art sick of self-conceit." ...

Thursday, July 21st.—At dinner a discussion, suggested by Mr. D——'s conduct to Mr. Brunton, on the subject of returning evil for evil, and the difficulty of not doing so, if not deliberately and in deed, upon impulse and by thought. Nothing is easier in such matters than to say what one would do, and nothing, I suppose, more difficult than to do what one should do. So God keep us all from convenient opportunities of revenging ourselves....

[Occasionally one hears in the streets voices in which the making of a fortune lies, and when one remembers what fortunes some voices have commanded, it seems bitterly cruel to think of such a possession begging its bread for want of the chance that might have made it available by culture. A woman, some years ago, used to sing at night in the neighborhood of St. James's Street, whose voice was so exquisite, so powerful, sweet, and thrilling, a mezzo soprano of such pure tone and vibrating quality, that Lady Essex, my sister, and myself, at different times, struck by the woman's magnificent gift and miserable position, had her into our houses, to hear her sing and see if nothing could be done to give her the full use of her noble natural endowment. She was a plain young woman of about thirty, tolerably decently dressed, and with a quiet, simple manner. She said her husband was a house-paperer in a small way, and when he was out of employment she used to go out in the evening and see what her singing would bring her. Poor thing! it was impossible to do anything for her; she was too old to learn or unlearn anything. No training could have corrected the low cockney vulgarity and coarse, ignorant indistinctness and incorrectness of her enunciation. And so in after years, as I returned repeatedly to England, after longer or shorter intervals of time, and always inhabited the same neighborhood in London, I still continued to hear, on dark drizzly evenings (and never without a thrill of poignant pain and pity) this angel's voice wandering in the muddy streets, its perfect, round, smooth edge becoming by degrees blunted and broken, its tones rough and coarse and harsh, some of the notes fading into feeble indistinctness—the fine, bold, true intonation hiding its tremulous uncertainty in trills and quavers, alternating with pitiful husky coughing, while every now and then one or two lovely, rich, pathetic notes, surviving ruin, recalled the early sweetness and power of the original instrument. The idea of what that woman's voice might have been to her used to haunt me.

It was hearing Rachel singing (barefoot) in the streets of Paris that Jules Janin's attention was first excited by her. Her singing, as I heard it on the stage in the drinking song of the extraordinary piece called "Valeria," in which she played two parts, was really nothing more than a chanting in the deep contralto of her speaking voice, and could hardly pass for a musical performance at all, any more than her wonderful uttering of the "Marseillaise," with which she made the women's blood run cold, and the men's hair stand on end, and everybody's flesh creep.

My sister and I used often to plan an expedition of street-singing for the purpose of seeing how much we could collect in that way for some charity. We were to put ourselves in "poor and mean attire"—I do not know that we were to "smirch our faces" with brown paint; we thought large battered poke-bonnets would answer the purpose, and, thus disguised, we were to go the rounds of the club windows, my father walking at a discreet distance for our protection on one side of the street, and our formidable pirate friend Trelawney on the other. We never carried out this project, though I have no doubt it would have brought us a very pretty penny for any endowment we might have wished to make.]

Friday, July 22d.—Long and edifying talk with dear Dall upon my prospects in marrying. "While you remain single," says she, "and choose to work, your fortune is an independent and ample one; as soon as you marry, there's no such thing. Your position in society," says she, "is both a pleasanter and more distinguished one than your birth or real station entitles you to; but that also is the result of your professional exertions, and might, and probably would, alter for the worse if you left the stage; for, after all, it is mere frivolous fashionable popularity." I ought to have got up and made her a courtesy for that. So that it seems I have fortune and fame (such as it is)—positive real advantages, which I cannot give with myself, and which I cease to own when I give myself away, which certainly makes my marrying any one or any one marrying me rather a solemn consideration; for I lose everything, and my marryee gains nothing in a worldly point of view—says she—and it's incontrovertible and not pleasant. So I took up Dante, and read about devils boiled in pitch, which refreshed my imagination and cheered my spirits very much.

[How far my ingenious mind was from foreseeing the days when men of high rank and social station would marry singers, dancers, and actresses, and be condescending enough to let their wives continue to earn their bread by public exhibition, and even to appropriate the proceeds of their theatrical labors! I have not yet made up my mind whether, in these cases, the gentleman ought not to take his wife's name in private, as a compensation for her not taking his in public. Poor Miss Paton's noble husband was the only Englishman, that I know of, who committed that act of self-effacement. To go much further back in dramatic and social history, the old, accomplished, mad Earl of Peterborough married the famous singer Anastasia Robinson, and refused to acknowledge the fact till her death. To be sure, this was a more cowardly, but a less dirty meanness. He withheld his name from her, but did not take her money.]

It is settled now that we go to Exeter by coach, and now that we have given up our pretty sea trip to Ilfracombe, the weather has become lovely—perverse creature!—but I am glad we are going away in every way.

Saturday, Bristol, July 23d. ... We started at eight, and taking the whole coach to ourselves as we do, I think traveling by a public conveyance the best mode of getting over the road. They run so rapidly; there is so little time lost, and so much trouble with one's luggage saved. The morning was gray and soft and promised a fine day, but broke its promise at the end of our second stage, and began to pelt with rain, which it continued to do the live-long blessed day. We could see, however, that the country we were passing through was charming. One or two of the cottages by the roadside, half-smothered in vine and honeysuckle, reminded me of Lady Juliana,[B] who, when she said she could live in a desert with her lover, thought that it was a "sort of place full of roses." ... These laborers' cottages were certainly the poor dwellings of very poor people, but there was nothing unsightly, repulsive, or squalid about them—on the contrary, a look of order, of tidy neatness about the little houses, that added the peculiarly English element of comfort and cleanliness to the picturesqueness of their fragrant festoons of flowery drapery, hung over them by the sweet season. The little plots of flower-garden one mass of rich color; the tiny strip of kitchen-garden, well stocked and trimly kept, beside it; the thriving fruitful orchard stretching round the whole; and beyond, the rich cultivated land rolling its waving corn-fields, already tawny and sunburnt, in mellow contrast with the smooth green pasturages, with their deep-shadowed trees and bordering lines of ivied hawthorn hedgerows, marking boundary-lines of division without marring the general prospect—a lovely landscape that sang aloud of plenty, industry, and thrift. I wonder if any country is more blessed of God than this precious little England? I think it is like one of its own fair, nobly blooming, vigorous women; her temper—that's the climate—not perfection, to be sure (but, after all, the old praise of it is true; it admits of more constant and regular out-of-door exercise than any other); the religion it professes, pure; the morality it practises, pure, probably by comparison with that of other powerful and wealthy nations. Oh, I trust that neither reform nor its extreme, revolution, will have power to injure this healthily, heartily constituted land....

[B] In Miss Ferrie's novel, "Marriage."

Exeter, July 24th, 1831.

Dearest H——,

We arrived here last night, or rather evening, at half-past six o'clock, and I found your letter, which, having waited for me, shall not wait for my answer....

Thank you for John's translation of the German song, the original of which I know and like very much. The thoughts it suggested to you must constantly arise in all of us. I believe that in these matters I feel all that you do, but not with the same intensity. To adore is most natural to the mind contemplating beauty, might, and majesty beyond its own powers; to implore is most natural to the heart oppressed with suffering, or agitated with hopes that it cannot accomplish, or fears from which it cannot escape. The difference between natural and revealed religion is that the one worships the loveliness and power it perceives, and the other the goodness, mercy, and truth in which it believes. The one prays for exemption from pain and enjoyment of happiness for body and mind in this present existence; the other for deliverance from spiritual evils, or the possession of spiritual graces, by which the soul is fitted for that better life toward which it tends....

I do not think "Juliet" has written to you hitherto, and I am rather affronted at your calling me so. I have little or no sympathy with, though much compassion for, that Veronese young person.... There is but one sentiment of hers that I can quote with entire self-application, and that is—

"I have no joy of this contract to-night;
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden."

In spite of which the foolish child immediately secures her lover's word, appoints the time for meeting, and makes every arrangement for following up the declaration she thought too sudden by its as sudden execution. Poor Juliet! I am very sorry for her, but do not like to be called after her, and do not think I am like her. I have been working very hard every day since you left Bristol (my belief is that Juliet was very idle). I am sorry to say I find my playing very hard work; but easy work, if there is such a thing, would not be best for me just now.

Yours ever,

F. A. K.

Sunday, Exeter.—To church with Dall and my father, a blessing that I can never enjoy in London, where he is all but stared out of countenance if he shows his countenance in a church, and it requires more devotion to the deed than I fear he possesses to encounter the annoyance attendant upon it. We heard an excellent sermon, earnest, sober, simple, which I was especially grateful for on my father's account. Women don't mind bad preaching; they have a general taste for sermons, and, like children with sweeties, will swallow bad ones if they cannot get good. "We have a natural turn for religion," as A.F. said of me; but men, I think, get a not unnatural turn against it when they hear it ill advocated....

The day has been lovely, and from my perch among the clouds here I am looking down upon a lovely view. Following the irregular line of buildings of the street, the eye suddenly becomes embowered in a thick rich valley of foliage, beyond which a hill rises, whose sides are covered with ripening corn-fields, meadows of vivid green, and fields where the rich red color of the earth contrasts beautifully with the fresh hedgerows and tall, dark elm trees, whose shadows have stretched themselves for evening rest down in the low rosy sunset. It is all still and bright, and the Sabbath bells come up to me over it all with intermitting sweetness, like snatches of an interrupted angels' chorus, floating hither and thither about the earth.

Monday.—We contrived to get some saddle-horses, and rode out into the beautiful country round Exeter, but the preface to our poem was rather dry prose. We rode for about an hour between powdery hedges all smothered in dust, up the steepest of hills, and under the hottest of suns; but we had our reward when we halted at the top, and looked down upon a magnificent panorama of land and water, hill and dale, broad smiling meadows, and dark shadowy woodland—a vast expanse of various beauty, over which the eye wandered and paused in slow contentment. As we came leisurely down the opposite side of the hill, we met a gypsy woman, and I reined up my horse and listened to my fortune: "I have a friend abroad who is very fond of me." I hope so. "I have a relation far abroad who is very fond of me too." I know so. "I shall live long." More is the pity. "I shall marry and have three children." Quite enough. "I shall take easily to love, but it will not break my heart." I am glad to hear that. "I shall cross the sea before I see London again." Ah! I am afraid not. "The end of my summer will be happier than its beginning"—and that may very easily be. For that I gave my prophetess a shilling. Oh, Zingarella! my blessing on your black eyes and red-brown cheeks! May you have spoken true!...

Meantime, my companions, my father and Mr. Kean, were discussing the fortunes of Poland. If I were a man, with a hundred thousand pounds at my disposal, I would raise a regiment and join the Poles. The Russians have been beaten again, which is good hearing. Is it possible this cause should fall to the earth? On our way home, had a nice smooth, long canter by the river-side. We turned off our road to visit a pretty property of Mr. F——'s, the house half-way up a hill, prettily seated among pleasant woods. We galloped up some fields above it to the brow of the rise, and had three mouthfuls of delicious fresh breeze, and a magnificent view of Exeter and the surrounding country.... After dinner, off to the theater; it was my benefit, "The Gamester." The house was very full, and I played and looked well; but what a Stukely! I was afraid my eyes would scarcely answer my purpose, but that I should have been obliged to "employer l'effort de mon bras" to keep him at a proper distance. What ruffianly wooing! and not one of the actors knew their parts. Stukely said to me in his love-speech, "Time has not gathered the roses from your cheeks, though often washed them." I had heard of Time as the thinner of people's hair, but never as the washer of their faces.

Sunday, July 31st.—Went to church, to St. Sidwell's.... We had another good sermon; that preacher must be a good man, and I should like to know him....

Our dinner-party this evening was like nothing but a chapter out of one of Miss Austen's novels. What wonderful books those are! She must have written down the very conversations she heard verbatim, to have made them so like, which is Irish.... How many things one ought to die of and doesn't! That dinner did come to an end. In the drawing-room afterward, in spite of the dreadful heat, two fair female friends actually divided one chair between them; I expected to see them run into one every minute, and kept speculating then which they would be, till the idea fascinated me like a thing in a nightmare. As we were taking our departure, and had got half way down the stairs, a general rush was made at us, and an attempt, upon some pretext, to get us back into that dreadful drawing-room. I thought of Malebranche hooking the miserable souls that tried to escape back again into the boiling pitch. But we got away and safe home, and leave Exeter to-morrow.

Exeter, July 31, 1831.

Dearest H——,

I am content to be whatever does not militate against your affection for me.... I had a long letter from dear A——, a day ago, from Weybridge. She is quite well, and says my mother is as happy as the day is long, now she is once more in her beloved haunts. I love Weybridge too very much.... It seems to me that memory is the special organ of pain, for even when it recalls our pleasures, it recalls only the past, and half their sweetness becomes bitter in the process. I have a tenacious and acute memory, and, as the phrenologists affirm, no hope, and feel disposed to lament that, not having both, I have either. The one seems the necessary counterpoise of the other; the one is the source of most of the pain, as the other is of most of the pleasure, which we derive from the things that are not; and I feel daily more and more my deficiency in the more cheerful attribute....

You have been to the Opera, and seen what even one's imagination does not shrug its shoulders at; I mean Madame Pasta. I admire her perfectly, and she seems to me perfect. How I wish I had been with you! And yet I cannot fancy you in the Opera House; it is a sort of atmosphere that I find it difficult to think of your breathing.... I wish you had not asked me to write verses for you upon that picture of Haydon's "Bonaparte at St. Helena." Of course, I know it familiarly through the engraving, and, in spite of its sunshine, what a shudder and chill it sends to one's heart! It is very striking, but I have neither the strength nor concentrativeness requisite for writing upon it. The simplicity of its effect is what makes it so fine; and any poetry written upon it would probably fail to be as simple, and therefore as powerful, as itself. I cannot even promise you to attempt it, but if ever I fall in with a suitable frame of mind for so bold an experiment, I will remember you and the rocks of St. Helena. "My lady" (an Italian portrait on which I had written some verses) "Mia Donna," or "Madonna," more properly to speak, was a most beautiful Italian portrait that I saw, not in Augustin's gallery, but in a small collection of pictures belonging to Mr. Day, and exhibited at the Egyptian Hall. Sir Thomas Lawrence told me when I described it to him, that he thought it was a painting of Giordano's. It was a lovely face, not youthful in its character of beauty; there is a calm seriousness about the brow and forehead, a clear, intellectual severity about the eye, and a sweet, still placidity round the mouth, that united, to my fancy, all the elements of beauty, physical, mental, and moral. What an incomparable friend that woman must have been! Why is it that we rejoice that a soul fit for heaven is constrained to tarry here, but that, in truth, the fittest for this is also the fittest for that life? For it seems to me more natural not to wish to detain the bright spirit from its brighter home, and not to sorrow at the decree which calls it hence to perfect its excellence in higher spheres of duty....

I think a blight of uncertainty must have pervaded the atmosphere when I was born, and penetrated, not certainly my nature, but my whole earthly destiny, with its influence; from my plans and projects for to-morrow on to those of next year, all is mist and indistinct indecision. I suppose it is the trial that suits my temper least, and therefore fits it best. It surely is that which "willfulness, conceit, and egotism" find hardest to endure. Yesterday I determined so far to escape from, or cheat, my destiny as to have a peep into futurity by the help of a gypsy. Riding with my father, and the whole hour, time, day, and scene, were in admirable harmony: the dark, sunburnt face, with its bright, laughing eyes and coal-black curls and flashing teeth; the old gateway against which she was leaning; the blue summer sky and sunny road skirted with golden corn-fields—the whole picture in which she was set was charming.

"I know it is a sin to be a mocker;"

and I am sure I need not tell you that I am sincerely grateful for all the kindness and civility that is bestowed upon us wherever we go.... What with riding, rehearsing, and acting, my days are completely filled. We start for Plymouth to-morrow at eight, and act "Romeo and Juliet" in the evening, which is rather laborious work. We play there every night next week. When next I write I will tell you of our further plans, which are at this moment still uncertain....

Affectionately yours,

F. A. K.

[These were the days before railroads had run everything and everybody up to London. There were still to be found then, in various parts of England, life that was peculiar and provincial, and manners that had in them a character of their own and a stamp of originality that had often quite as much to attract as to repel. Men and women are, of course, still the same that sat to that enchanting painter, Jane Austen, but the whole form and color and outward framing and various countenance of their lives have merged its distinctiveness in a commonplace conformity to universal custom; and in regard to the more superficial subjects of her fine and gentle satire, if she were to return among us she would find half her occupation gone.]

Monday, August 1st.—I got some books while waiting for the coach, and we started at half-past eight. The heat was intolerable and the dust suffocating, but the country through which we passed was lovely. For a long time we drove along the brow of a steep hill. The valley was all glorious with the harvest: corn-fields with the red-gold billows yet untouched by the sickle; others full of sunburnt reapers sweeping down the ripe ears; others, again, silent and deserted, with the tawny sheaves standing, bound and dry, upon the bristling stubble, on the ground over which they rippled and nodded yesterday, a great rolling sea of burnished grain. All over the sunny landscape peace and prosperity smiled, and gray-steepled churches and red-roofed villages, embowered in thick protecting shade, seemed to beckon the eye to rest as it wandered over the charming prospect. The white-walled mansions of the lords of the land glittered from the verdant shelter of their surrounding plantations, and the thirsty cattle, beautiful in color and in grouping, stood in pools in the deeper parts of the brooks, where some giant tree threw its shadow over the water and the smooth sheltered sward round its feet. In spite of this charming prospect I was very sad, and the purple heather bordering the road, with its thick tufts, kept suggesting Weybridge and the hours I had lately spent there so happily.... To shake myself I took up "Adam Blair;" and, good gracious! what a shaking it did give me! What a horrible book! And how could D—— have recommended me to read it? It is a very fine and powerful piece of work, no doubt; but I turned from it with infinite relief to "Quentin Durward." Walter Scott is quite exciting enough for wholesome pleasure; there is no poison in anything that he has ever written: for how many hours of harmless happiness the world may bless him!

At Totnes we got out of the coach to shake ourselves, for we were absolute dust-heaps, and then resumed our powdery way, and reached Plymouth at about four o'clock. As we walked up toward our lodgings, we were met by Mr. Brunton, with the pleasing intelligence that those we had bespoken had been let, by some mistake, to another family. Dusty, dreary, and disconsolate, I sat down on the stairs which were to have been ours, while Dall upbraided the hostess of the house, and my father did what was more to the purpose—posted off to find other apartments for us; no easy matter, for the town is crammed to overflowing. In the mean time a little blue-eyed fairy, of about two years old, came and made friends with me, and I presently had her fast asleep in my lap. After carrying my prize into an empty room, and sitting by it for nearly half an hour while it slept the sleep of the blessed, I was called away from this very new interest, for my father had succeeded in finding house-room for us, and I had yet all my preparations to make for the evening.

The theater is a beautiful building for its purpose, of a perfectly discreet size, neither too large nor too small, of a very elegant shape, and capitally constructed for the voice. The house was very full; the play, "Romeo and Juliet." I played abominably ill, and did not like my audience, who must have been very good-natured if they liked me.

Tuesday, August 2d.—Rose at seven, and went off down to the sea, and that was delightful. In the evening the play was "Venice Preserved." I acted very well, notwithstanding that I had to prompt my Jaffier through every scene, not only as to words, but position on the stage, and "business," as it is called. How unprincipled and ungentlemanlike this is! The house was very fine, and a pleasanter audience than the first night. Found a letter from Mrs. Jameson after the play, with an account of Pasta's "Anna Bolena." How I wish I could see it!

Wednesday, August 3d.—Rose at seven, and went down to the sea to bathe. The tide was out, and I had to wait till the nymphs had filled my bath-tub.... At the theater in the evening, the play was "The Stranger." The house not so good as last night, and the audience were disagreeably noisy....

Thursday, August 4th.—They will not let me take my sea-bath every morning; they say it makes me too weak. Do they mean in the head, I wonder?... "Let the sanguine then take warning, and the disheartened take courage, for to every hope and every fear, to every joy and every sorrow, there comes a last day," which is but a didactic form of dear Mademoiselle Descuillier's conjuring of our impatiences: "Cela viendra, ma chère, cela viendra, car tout vient dans ce monde; cela passera, ma chère, cela passera, car tout passe dans ce monde." ... I finished my drawing, and copied some of "The Star of Seville." I wonder if it will ever be acted? I think I should like to see a play of mine acted. In the evening at the theater, the play was "Isabella." The house was very full, and I played well. The wretched manager will not afford us a green baize for our tragedies, and we faint and fall and die upon bare boards, and my unhappy elbows are bruised black and blue with their carpetless stage, barbarians that they be!

Friday, August 5th.—Down to the sea at seven o'clock; the tide was far out, the lead-colored strand, without its bright foam-fringes, looked bleak and dreary; it was not expected to be batheable till eleven, and as I had not breakfasted, I could not wait till then. Lingered on the shore, as Tom Tug says, thinking of nothing at all, but inhaling the fresh air and delicious sea-smell. I stood and watched a party of pleasure put off from the shore, consisting of a basket of fuel, two baskets of provisions, a cross-looking, thin, withered, bony woman, wrapped in a large shawl, and with boots thick enough to have kept her dry if she had walked through the sea from Plymouth to Mount Edgecombe. Her tête-à-tête companion was a short, thick, squat, stumpy, dumpy, dumpling of a man, in a round jacket, and very tight striped trousers. "Sure such a pair were never seen." The sour she, stepped into their small boat first, but as soon as her fat playfellow seated himself by her, the poor little cockle-shell dipped so with the increased weight that the tail of the cross-shawl hung deep in the water. I called after them, and they rectified the accident without sending me back a "Thank you." I love the manners of my country-folk, they are so unsophisticated with civility.

At the theater the play was "The Gamester," for my benefit, and the house was very fine. My father played magnificently; I "not even excellent well, but only so-so." The actors none of them knew their parts, abominable persons; and as for Stukely—well! Mdlle. Dumesnil, in her great, furious scene in Hermione, ended her imprecations against Orestes by spitting in her handkerchief and throwing it in his face. The handkerchief spoils the frenzy. I wonder if it ever occurred to Mrs. Siddons so to wind up her abuse of Austria in "King John." By the by, it was when asked to give his opinion of the comparative merits of Clairon and Dumesnil, that Garrick said, "Mdlle. Clairon was the greatest actress of the age, but that for Mdlle. Dumesnil he was not aware that he had seen her, but only Phedre, Rodogund, and Hermione, when she did them." After the play the audience clamored for my father. He thought that "l'envie leur en passerait;" and not being in a very good humor, he declined appearing. The uproar went on, the overture to the farce was inaudible, and the curtain drew up amid the deafening shouts of "Kemble! Kemble!"—they would not suffer the poor farçeurs to go on, even in dumb show. I was at the side scene, and thought it really a pity not to put an end to all the fuss; so I went to my father, who was standing at the stage door in the street, and requested him to stop the disturbance by coming forward at once. He turned round, and without saying anything but "Tu me le conseilles," walked straight upon the stage, and addressed the audience as follows: "Ladies and gentlemen, I had left the theater when word was brought to me that you had done me the honor to call for me; as I conclude you have done so merely in conformity to a custom which is becoming the fashion of calling for certain performers after the play, I can only say, ladies and gentlemen, that I enter my protest against such a custom. It is a foreign fashion, and we are Englishmen; therefore I protest against it. I will take my leave of you by parodying Mercutio's words: Ladies and gentlemen, bon soir; there's a French salutation for you." So saying he walked off the stage, leaving the audience rather surprised; and so was I. I think he is laboring under an incipient bilious attack.

We had a long discussion to-day as to the possibility of women being good dramatic writers. I think it so impossible that I actually believe their physical organization is against it; and, after all, it is great nonsense saying that intellect is of no sex. The brain is, of course, of the same sex as the rest of the creature; besides, the original feminine nature, the whole of our training and education, our inevitable ignorance of common life and general human nature, and the various experience of existence, from which we are debarred with the most sedulous care, is insuperably against it. Perhaps some of the manly, wicked Queens Semiramis, Cleopatra, could have written plays; but they lived their tragedies instead of writing them.

Saturday, August 6th.—After breakfast our excellent architect came to fetch us for our expedition to the breakwater. My father complained of being dreadfully bilious, a bad preparation for the purpose. I wanted to stay at home with him, or at all events to put off the party for an hour or two; but he would not hear of either plan. So as soon as I was ready we set off. We walked first to the M——s', and then proceeded in a body to the shore, where a Government boat was waiting for us; and what a cargo we were, to be sure! My father, certainly no feather; our worthy friend, who must weigh eighteen stone, if a pound; Mr. and Mrs. W——, thinnish bodies; but her friend, Dall, and myself decidedly thickish ones; then the pilot, a gaunt, square Scotchman; and four stout sailors. The gallant little craft courtesied and courtesied as she received us, one by one, and at length, when we were all fairly and pretty closely packed, she put off, and breasted the water bravely, rising and dancing on the back of the waves like a dolphin. I should have enjoyed it but for my father's ghastly face of utter misery. The day was dull, the sky and sea lead-colored, the brown coast by degrees lost its distinctness, and became covered with a dark haze that seemed to blend everything into a still, stony, threatening iron-gray mass. The wind rose, the sea became inky black and swelled into heavy ridges, which made our little vessel dip deep and spring high, as she toiled forward; and then down came the rain—such tremendous rain! Cloaks, shawls, and umbrellas were speedily produced; but we were two miles from shore, between the rising sea and the falling clouds, sick, wet, squeezed. Oh the delights of that party of pleasure! My father looked cadaverous, Dall was portentously silent, I shut my eyes and tried to sleep, being in that state when to see, or hear, or speak, or be spoken to, is equally fatal. At length we reached the foot of the breakwater, and I sprang out of the boat, too happy to touch the stable rock. The rain literally fell in sheets from the sky, and the wind blew half a hurricane; but I was on firm ground, and taking off my bonnet, which only served the purpose of a water-spout down my back, I ran, while Mr. M——, holding my arm, strode along the mighty water-based road, while the angry sea, turning up black caldrons full of boiling foam, dashed them upon the barrier man has raised against its fury in magnificent, solemn wrath. This breakwater is a noble work; the daring of the conception, its vast size and strength, and the utility of its purpose, are alike admirable. We do these things and die; we ride upon the air and water, we guide the lightning and we bridle the sea, we borrow the swiftness of the wind and the fine subtlety of the fire; we lord it in this universe of ours for a day, and then our bodies are devoured by these material slaves we have controlled, and helplessly mingle their dust with the elements that have obeyed our will, who reabsorb the garment of our soul when that has fled—whither?

The rain continuing to fall in torrents, and my father being wretchedly unwell, we gave up our purpose of visiting Mount Edgecombe, and returned to Plymouth. The sea was horribly rough, even inside the breakwater; but I shut my eyes that I might not see how we heaved, and sang that I might not think how sick I was: and so we reached shore, and I ran up and down the steep beach while the rest were disembarking, and the wind soon dried my light muslin clothes. The other poor things continued drenched till we reached home. After a good rest, we went to our dinner at Mr. W——'s; my father was all right again, and our party, that had separated in such dismal plight, met again very pleasantly in the evening. Mr. W—— got quite tipsy with talking, an accident not uncommon with eager, excitable men, and all but overwhelmed me with an argument about dramatic writing, in which he was wrong from beginning to end.... We leave Plymouth to-morrow.

Sunday, August 7th.—Started for Exeter at seven, and slept nearly the whole way by little bits; between each nap getting glimpses of the pleasant land that blended for a moment with my hazy, dream-like thoughts, and then faded away before my closing eyes. One patch of moorland that I woke to see was lovely—all purple heather and golden gorse; nature's royal mantle thrown, it is true, over a barren soil, whose gray, cold, rifted ridges of rock contrasted beautifully with its splendid clothing. We got to Exeter at two o'clock, and I was thankful to rest the rest of the day.

Monday, August 8th.—I read old Biagio's preface to Dante, which, from its amazing classicality, is almost as difficult as the crabbed old Florentine's own writing. Worked at a rather elaborate sketch tolerably successfully, and was charmingly interrupted by having our landlady's pretty little child brought in to me. She is a beautiful baby, but will be troublesome enough by and by.... At the theater the house was very good; I played tolerably well upon the whole, but felt so fagged and faint toward the end of the play that I could hardly stand.

Tuesday, August 9th.—I sometimes wish I was a stone, a tree, some senseless, soulless, irresponsible thing; that ebbing sea rolling before me, its restlessness is obedience to the law of its nature, not striving against it, neither is it "the miserable life in it" urging it to ceaseless turmoil and agitation. We dined early, and then started for Dorchester, which we reached at half-past ten, after a most fatiguing journey. It was a still, gray day, an atmosphere and light I like; there is a clearness about it that is pleasanter sometimes than the dazzle of sunshine. Some of the country we drove through was charming, particularly the vale of Honiton.... I have an immense bedroom here; a whole army of ghosts might lodge in it. I hope, if there are any, they will be civil, well-behaved, and, above all, invisible.

Wednesday, August 10th. ... At ten o'clock we started for Weymouth, where we arrived in the course of an hour, and found it basking on the edge of a lovely summer sea, with a dozen varying zones of color streaking its rippling surface; from the deep, dark purple heaving against the horizon to the delicate pearl-edged, glassy golden-green that spreads its transparent sheets over the sparkling sand of the beach. The bold chalky cliffs of the shore send back the burning sunlight with blinding brightness, and stretch away as far as eye can follow in hazy outlines, that glimmer faintly through the shimmering mist. It is all very beautiful.... I got ready my things for the theater, ... and when I got there I was amused and amazed at its absurdly small proportions; it is a perfect doll's playhouse, and until I saw that my father really could stand upon the stage, I thought that I should fill it entirely by myself. How well I remember all the droll stories my mother used to tell about old King George III. and Queen Charlotte, who had a passion for Weymouth, and used to come to the funny little theater here constantly; and how the princesses used to dress her out in their own finery for some of her parts. [I long possessed a very perfect coral necklace of magnificent single beads given to my mother on one of these occasions by the Princess Amelia.] The play was "Romeo and Juliet," and our masquerade scene was in the height of the modern fashion, for there was literally not room to stir; and what between my nurse and my father I suffered very nearly total eclipse, besides much danger of being knocked down each time either of them moved. In the balcony, besides me, there was a cloud, which occasionally interfered with my hair, and I think must have made my face appear to the audience like a chin and mouth speaking out of the sky. To be sure, this inconvenient scenic decoration made rather more appropriate the lines which Shakespeare wrote (only unfortunately Romeo never speaks them), "Two of the stars," etc. I acted very well, but was so dreadfully tired at the end of the play that they were obliged to carry me up to my dressing-room, where I all but fainted away; in spite of which, as I got out of the carriage at the door of our lodging, hearing the dear voice of the sea calling me, I tried to persuade Dall to come down to it with me; but she, thinking I had had enough of emotion and exertion, made me go in and eat my supper and go to bed, which was detestable on her part, and so I told her, which she didn't mind in the least.

Thursday, August 11th.—A kind and courteous and most courtly old Mr. M—— called upon us, to entreat that we would dine with him during our stay in Weymouth; but it is really impossible, with all our hard work, to do society duty too, so I begged permission to decline. After he was gone we walked down to the pier, and took boat and rowed to Portland. The sky was cloudless, and the sea without a wave, and through its dark-blue transparent roofing we saw clearly the bottom, one forest of soft, undulating weeds, which, catching the sunlight through the crystal-clear water, looked like golden woods of some enchanted world within its depths; and it looks just as weird and lovely when folks go drowning down there, only they don't see it. I sang Mrs. Hemans's "What hid'st thou in thy treasure-caves and cells?" and sang and sang till, after rowing for an hour over the hardly heaving, smooth surface, we reached the foot of the barren stone called Portland. We landed, and Dall remained on the beach while my father and I toiled up the steep ascent. The sun's rays fell perpendicularly on our heads, the short, close grass which clothed the burning, stony soil was as slippery as glass with the heat, and I have seldom had a harder piece of exercise than climbing that rock, from the summit of which one wide expanse of dazzling water and glaring white cliffs, that scorched one's eyeballs, was all we had for our reward. To be sure, exertion is a pleasure in itself, and when one's strength serves one's courage, the greater the exertion the greater the pleasure. We saw below us a railroad cut in the rock to convey the huge masses of stone from the famous quarries down to the shore. The descent looked almost vertical, and we watched two immense loads go slowly down by means of a huge cylinder and chains, which looked as if the world might hang upon them in safety. I lay down on the summit of the rock while my father went off exploring further, and the perfect stillness of the solitude was like a spell. There was not a sound of life but the low, drowsy humming of the bees in the stone-rooted tufts of fragrant thyme. On our return we had to run down the steep, slippery slopes, striking our feet hard to the earth to avoid falling; firm walking footing there was none. When we joined Dall we found, to our utter dismay, that it was five o'clock; we bundled ourselves pêle-mêle into the boat and bade the boatman row, row, for dear life; but while we were indulging in the picturesque he had been indulging in fourpenny, which made him very talkative, and his tongue went faster than his arms. I longed for John to make our boat fly over the smooth, burnished sea; the oars came out of the water like long bars of diamond dropping gold. We touched shore just at six, swallowed three mouthfuls of dinner, and off to the theater. The play was "Venice Preserved." I dressed as quick as lightning, and was ready in time. The house was not very good, and I am sure I should have wondered if it had been, when the moon is just rising over the fresh tide that is filling the basin, and a delicious salt breeze blows along the beach, and the stars are lighting their lamps in heaven; and surely nobody but those who cannot help it would be breathing the gas and smoke and vile atmosphere of the playhouse. I played well, and when we came home ran down and stood a few minutes by the sea; but the moon had set, and the dark palpitating water only reflected the long line of lights from the houses all along the curving shore.

Friday, August 12th, Portsmouth.— ... The hotel where we are staying is quite a fine house, and the Assembly balls used to be held here, and so there is a fine large "dancing-hall deserted" of which I avail myself as a music-room, having entire and solitary possession of it and a piano.... At the theater the house was good, and I played well....

Monday, August 15th, Southampton.—After breakfast practised till eleven, and then went to rehearsal; after which Emily Fitzhugh came for me, and we drove out to Bannisters. Poor Mrs. Fitzhugh was quite overcome at seeing my father, whom she has not seen since Mrs. Siddons's death; we left her with him to talk over Campbell's application to her for my aunt's letters. He has behaved badly about the whole business, and I hope Mrs. Fitzhugh will not let him have them.... When we came in I went and looked at Lawrence's picture of my aunt in the dining-room (now in the National Gallery; it was painted for Mrs. Fitzhugh). It is a fine rich piece of coloring, but there is a want of ease and grace in the figure, and of life in the countenance, and altogether I thought it looked like a handsome dark cow in a coral necklace. O ox-eyed Juno! forgive the thought.... At the theater the house was good; the play was "Romeo and Juliet," and I played well. While I was changing my dress for the tomb scene—putting on my grave-clothes, in fact—I had desired my door to be shut, for I hate that lugubrious funeral-dirge. How I do hate, and have always hated, that stage funeral business, which I never see without a cold shudder at its awful unfitness. I can't conceive how that death's pageant was ever tolerated in a theater. [I think Mrs. Bellamy, in her "Memoirs," mentions that it was first introduced as a piece of new sensation when she and Garrick were dividing the town with the efforts of their rival managership.] At present the pretext for it is to give the necessary time for setting the churchyard scene and for Juliet to change her dress, which she has no business to do according to the text, for it expressly says that she shall be buried in all her finest attire, according to her country's custom. In spite of which I was always arrayed in long white muslin draperies and veils, with my head bound up, corpse fashion, and lying, as my aunt had stretched me, on the black bier in the vault, with all my white folds drawn like carved stone robes along my figure and round my feet, with my hands folded and my eyes shut. I have had some bad nervous minutes, sometimes fancying, "Suppose I should really die while I am lying here, making believe to be dead!" and imagining the surprise and dismay of my Romeo when I didn't get up; and at others fighting hard against heavy drowsiness of over-fatigue, lest I should be fast asleep, if not dead, when it came to my turn to speak—though I might have depended upon the furious bursting open of the doors of the vault for my timely waking. Talking over this with Mrs. Fitzhugh one day she told me a comical incident of the stage life of her friend, the fascinating Miss Farren. The devotion of the Earl of Derby to her, which preceded for a long time the death of Lady Derby, from whom he was separated, and his marriage to Miss Farren, made him a frequent visitor behind the scenes on the nights of her performance. One evening, in the famous scene in Joseph Surface's library in "The School for Scandal," when Lady Teazle is imprisoned behind the screen, Miss Farren, fatigued with standing, and chilled with the dreadful draughts of the stage, had sent for an armchair and her furs, and when this critical moment arrived, and the screen was overturned, she was revealed, in her sable muff and tippet, entirely absorbed in an eager conversation with Lord Derby, who was leaning over the back of her chair.

Tuesday, 16th, Southampton.—After breakfast walked down to the city wall, which has remnants of great antiquity they say, as old as the Danes, one bit being still heroically called "Canute's Castle."

Wednesday, August 17th.—Went to the theater, and rehearsed "The Stranger." On my return found Emily waiting for me, and drove with her to Bannisters.... In the evening, at the theater, the house was very good, but I played only so-so, and not at all excellent well....

Thursday, August 18th.—While I was practising I came across that pretty piece of ballad pathos, "The Banks of Allan Water," and sang myself into sobbing. Luckily I was interrupted by Dall and my father, who came in with a little girl, poor unfortunate! whose father had brought her to show how well she deserved an engagement at Covent Garden. She sat down to the piano at his desire, and panted through the great cavatina in the "Gazza Ladra." Poor little thing! I never heard or saw anything that so thoroughly impressed me with the brutal ignorance of our people; for there is scarcely an Englishman of that man's condition, situated as he is, who would not have done the same thing. A child of barely ten years old made to sing her lungs away for four hours every day, when it is not possible yet to know what the character and qualities of her voice will be, or even if she will have any voice at all. Wasting her health and strength in attempting "The Soldier Tired" and "Di piacer," it really was pitiful. We gave her plenty of kind words and compliments, and sundry pieces of advice to him, which he will not take, and in a few months no doubt we shall hear of little Miss H—— singing away as a prodigy, and in a few years the voice, health, and strength will all be gone, and probably the poor little life itself have been worn out of its fragile case. Stupid barbarian! After rehearsal drove to Bannisters.... In the evening, at the theater, the play was "The Provoked Husband." The house was very full; I played fairly well. I was rather tired, and Lady Townley's bones ached, for I had been taking a rowing lesson from Emily, and supplied my want of skill, tyro fashion, with a deal of unnecessary effort.

Friday, August 19th.— ... It sometimes occurs to me that our spirits, when dwelling with the utmost intensity of longing upon those who are distant from us, must create in them some perception, some consciousness of our spiritual presence, so that not by the absent whom I love thinking of me, but by my thinking of them, they must receive some intimation of the vividness with which my soul sees and feels them. It seems to me as if my earnest desire and thought must not bring those they dwell on to me, but render me in some way perceptible, if not absolutely visible, to them.

"Though thou see me not pass by,
Thou shalt feel me with thine eye."

I fancy I must create my own image to their senses by the clinging passion with which my thoughts dwell on them. And yet it would be rather fearful if one were thus subject, not only to the disordered action of one's own imagination, but to the ungoverned imaginations of others; and so, upon the whole, I don't believe people would be allowed to pester other people with their presence only by dint of thinking hard enough and long enough about them. It would be intolerable, and yet I have sometimes fancied I was thinking myself visible to some one.... In the evening, at the theater, the house was very good; the play was "The Gamester," and I played very ill. I felt fagged to death; my work tires me, and I am growing old.

Saturday, 20th.—At Bannisters all the morning. Emily gave me two charming Italian songlets, and then they drove us down to Southampton. At the theater this evening the house was all but empty, owing to some stupid blunder in the advertisement. The play was "The School for Scandal," and I played well.... To-morrow I shall be at home once more in smoky London.

Southampton, August 19, 1831.

My dearest H——,

I do not like to defer answering you any longer, though I am not very fit to write, for I am half blind with crying, and have a torturing side-ache, the results of bodily fatigue and nervous anxiety; but if I do not write to you to-night I know not when I shall be able to do so, for I shall have to rehearse every morning and to act every night, and I expect the intermediate hours will be spent on the road to and from Bannisters, the Fitzhughs' place near here. I have been traveling ever since half-past eight to-day, and, have hardly been three hours out of the coach which brought us from Weymouth, where we have been acting for the last week. Your letter followed me from Plymouth, and right glad I was to get it.... I do not know what I can write you of if not myself, and I dare say, after all, my thoughts are more amusing to you, or rather, perhaps, more useful, in your processes of observing and studying human nature in general, through my individual case, than if I wrote you word what plays we had been acting, etc., etc.... To meet pain, no matter how severe, the mind girds up its loins, and finds a sort of strength of resistance in its endurance, which is a species of activity. To endure helplessly prolonged suspense is another matter quite, and a far heavier demand upon all patient power than is in one....

So you have seen the railroad; I am so glad you have seen that magnificent invention. I wish I had been on it with you. I wish you had seen Stephenson; you would have delighted in him, I am sure. The hope of meeting him again is one of the greatest pleasures Liverpool holds out to me.... With regard to what are called "fine people," and liking their society better than that of "not fine people," I suppose a good many tolerable reasons might be adduced by persons who have that preference. They do not often say very wise or very witty things, I dare say; but neither do they tread on one's feet or poke their elbows into one's side (figuratively speaking) in their conversation, or commit the numerous solecisms of manner of less well-bred people. For myself, my social position does not entitle me to mix with the superior class of human beings generally designated as "fine people." My father's indolence renders their society an irksome exertion to him, and my mother's pride always induces her to hang back rather than to make advances to anybody. We are none of us, therefore, inclined to be very keen tuft-hunters. But for these very reasons, if "fine people" seek me, it is a decided compliment, by which my vanity is flattered. A person with less of that quality might be quite indifferent to their notice, but I think their society, as far as I have had any opportunity of observing it, has certain positive merits, which attract me irrespectively of the gratification of my vanity. Genius and pre-eminent power of intellect, of course, belong to no class, and one would naturally prefer the society of any individual who possessed these to that of the King of England (who, by the by, is not, I believe, particularly brilliant). I would rather pass a day with Stephenson than with Lord Alvanley, though the one is a coal-digger by birth, who occasionally murders the king's English, and the other is the keenest wit and one of the finest gentlemen about town. But Stephenson's attributes of genius, industry, mental power, and perseverance are his individually, while Lord Alvanley's gifts and graces (his wit, indeed, excepted) are, in good measure, those of his whole social set. Moreover, in the common superficial intercourse of society, the minds and morals of those you meet are really not what you come in contact with half the time, while from their manners there is, of course, no escape; and therefore those persons may well be preferred as temporary associates whose manners are most refined, easy, and unconstrained, as I think those of so-called "fine people" are. Originality and power of intellect belong to no class, but with information, cultivation, and the mental advantages derived from education, "fine people" are perhaps rather better endowed, as a class, than others. Their lavish means for obtaining instruction, and their facilities for traveling, if they are but moderately endowed by nature and moderately inclined to profit by them, certainly enable them to see, hear, and know more of the surface of things than others. This is, no doubt, a merely superficial superiority; but I suppose that there are not many people, and certainly no class of people, high, low, or of any degree, who go much below surfaces.... If you knew how, long after I have passed it, the color of a tuft of heather, or the smell of a branch of honeysuckle by the roadside, haunts my imagination, and how many suggestions of beauty and sensations of pleasure flow from this small spring of memory, even after the lapse of weeks and months, you would understand what I am going to say, which perhaps may appear rather absurd without such a knowledge of my impressions. I think I like fine places better than "fine people;" but then one accepts, as it were, the latter for the former, and the effect of the one, to a certain degree, affects one's impressions of the other. A great ball at Devonshire House, for instance, with its splendor, its brilliancy, its beauty, and magnificence of all sorts, remains in one's mind with the enchantment of a live chapter of the "Arabian Nights;" and I think one's imagination is still more impressed with the fine residences of "fine people" in the country, where historical and poetical associations combine with all the refinements of luxurious civilization and all the most exquisitely cultivated beauties of nature to produce an effect which, to a certain degree, frames their possessors to great advantage, and invests them with a charm which is really not theirs; and if they are only tolerably in harmony with the places where they live, they appear charming too. I believe the pleasure and delight I take in the music, the lights, the wreaths, and mirrors of a splendid ball-room, and the love I have for the smooth lawns, bright waters, and lordly oaks of a fine domain, would disgracefully influence my impressions of the people I met amongst them. Still, I humbly trust I do not like any of my friends, fine or coarse, only for their belongings, though my intercourse with the first gratifies my love of luxury and excites what my Edinburgh friends call my ideality. I don't think, however. I ever could like anybody, of any kind whatever, that I could not heartily respect, let their intellectual gifts, elegance, or refinement of manners be what they might. Good-by, dearest H——.

Ever your affectionate

F. A. K.

Great Russell Street, October 3, 1831.

My dearest H——,

I received your last letter on Thursday morning, and as I read it exclaimed, "We shall be able to go to her!" and passed it to Dall, who seemed to think there was no reason why we should not, when my father said he was afraid it could not be managed, as the theater, upon second arrangements, would require me before this month was over. It seems to me that, instead of one disappointment, I have had twenty about coming to you, dear H——, and the last has fairly broken the poor camel's back. My father promised to see what could be done for me, and to get me spared as long as possible; but the final arrangement is, that on the 24th I shall have to act Queen Katharine, for which, certainly, a week of daily rehearsals will be barely sufficient preparation. This, you see, will leave me hardly time enough to stay at Ardgillan to warrant the fatigue and expense of the journey. I am afraid it would be neither reasonable nor right to spend nearly a week in traveling and the money it must cost, to pass a fortnight with you.... Give my love to your sister, and tell her how willingly I would have accepted her hospitality had circumstances permitted it; but "circumstances," of which we are so apt to complain, may, perhaps, at some future time, allow me to be once more her guest. The course of events is, after all, far more impartial than, in moments of disappointment, we are apt to admit, and quite as often procures us unexpected and unthought-of pleasures as defeats those we had proposed for ourselves. Pazienza! Dear Dall, who, I see, has produced her invariable impression upon your mind, bids me thank you for the kind things you say of her, at the same time that she says, "though they are undeserved, she is thankful for the affection that dictates them." She is excellent. You bid me tell you of my father, and how his health and spirits continue to struggle against his exertions and anxieties: tolerably well, thank God! I sometimes think they have the properties of that palm tree which is said to grow under the pressure of immense weights. He looks very well, and, except the annoyances of his position in the theater, has rather less cause for depression than for some time past. Though we have not yet obtained our "decree," we understand that the Lord Chancellor says openly that we shall get it, so that uncertainty of the issue no longer aggravates the wearisome delays of this unlucky appeal.... I need not tell you what my feeling about acting Queen Katharine is; you, who know how conscious I am of my own deficiencies for such an undertaking, will easily conceive my distress at having such a task assigned me. Dall, who entirely agrees with me about it, wishes me to remonstrate upon the subject, but that I will not do. I am in that theater to earn my living by serving its interests, and if I was desired to act Harlequin, for those two purposes, should feel bound to do so. But I cannot help thinking the management short-sighted. I think their real interest, as far as I am concerned, which they overlook for some immediate tangible advantage, is not to destroy my popularity by putting me into parts which I must play ill, and not to take from my future career characters which require physical as well as mental maturity, and which would be my natural resources when I no longer become Juliet and her youthful sisters of the drama. But of course they know their own affairs, and I am not the manager of the theater. Those who have its direction, I suppose, make the best use they can of their instruments.

[My performance of Queen Katharine was not condemned as an absolute failure only because the public in general didn't care about it, and the friends and well-wishers of the theater were determined not to consider it one. But as I myself remember it, it deserved to be called nothing else; it was a school-girl's performance, tame, feeble, and ineffective, entirely wanting in the weight and dignity indispensable for the part, and must sorely have tried the patience and forbearance of such of my spectators as were fortunate and unfortunate enough to remember my aunt; one of whom, her enthusiastic admirer, and my excellent friend, Mr. Harness, said that seeing me in that dress was like looking at Mrs. Siddons through the diminishing end of an opera-glass: I should think my acting of the part must have borne much the same proportion to hers. I was dressed for the trial scene in imitation of the famous picture by Harlow, and of course must have recalled, in the most provoking and absurd manner, the great actress whom I resembled so little and so much. In truth, I could hardly sustain the weight of velvet and ermine in which I was robed, and to which my small girlish figure was as little adapted as my dramatic powers were to the matronly dignity of the character. I cannot but think that if I might have dressed the part as Queen Katharine really dressed herself, and been allowed to look as like as I could to the little dark, hard-favored woman Holbein painted, it would have been better than to challenge such a physical as well as dramatic comparison by the imitation of my aunt's costume in the part. Englishmen of her day will never believe that Katharine of Arragon could have looked otherwise than Mrs. Siddons did in Shakespeare's play of "Henry VIII.;" but nothing could in truth be more unlike the historical woman than the tall, large, bare-armed, white-necked, Juno-eyed, ermine-robed ideal of queenship of the English stage. That quintessence of religious, conscientious bigotry and royal Spanish pride is given, both in the portraits of contemporary painters and in Shakespeare's delineation of her; the splendid magnificence of my aunt's person and dress, as delineated in Harlow's picture, has no affinity whatever to the real woman's figure, or costume, or character.]

Great Russell Street, October 12, 1831.

Dearest H——,

I received my book and your letter very safely about a week ago, and would have written to say so sooner, but have been much occupied with one thing and another that has prevented me. So you are beaten, vieilles perukes that you are! not by one or two, but by forty-one; and your bones are all the likelier to ache, and I am not at all sorry. Think of Brougham going down on his marrow-bones (there can be none in them, though), and adjuring the Lords, con quella voce! e quel viso! to pass the Bill, like good boys, and remember the schoolmaster, who surely, when he is at home, cannot be said to be abroad. A good coup de théâtre is not an easy thing, and requires a good deal of tact and skill. I cannot help thinking there must have been something grotesque in this performance of Brougham's, as when Liston turned tragedian and recited Collins's "Ode to the Passions" in a green coat and top boots. The excitement, however, was tremendous; the House thronged to suffocation; as many people crammed into impossible space as the angels in the famous Needle-point controversy. Lady Glengall declares that she sat for four hours on an iron bar. I think this universal political effervescence has got into my head. And what will you do now? You cannot create forty-one Peers; the whole Book of Genesis affords no precedent. I suppose Parliament will be prorogued, ministers will go out, a "cloth of gold" and "cloth of frieze" Government, with Brougham and Wellington brought together into it, will be cobbled, and a new Bill, which will set the teeth of the Lords so badly on edge, will be concocted, which the people will accept rather than nothing, if they are taken in the right way. That, I suppose, is what you Whigs will do; for an adverse majority of forty-one must be turned somehow or other, as it can hardly be gone straight at by folks who mean to keep on the box, or hold the reins, or carry the coach to the end of the journey....

I do not know at all how I should like to live in a palace; I am furiously fond of magnificence and splendor, and not unreasonably, seeing that I was born in a palace, with a sapphire ceiling hung with golden lamps, and velvet floors all embroidered with sweet-smelling, lovely-colored flowers, and walls of veined marble and precious, sparkling stones. I almost doubt if any mere royal palace would be good enough for me, or answer my turn. I should like all the people in the world to be as beautiful as angels, and go about crowned with glory and clothed with light (dear me, how very different they are!); but failing all that I should like in the way of enormously beautiful things, I pick up and treasure like a baby all the little broken bits of splendor and sumptuousness, and thank Heaven that their number and gradations are infinite, from the rainbow that the sun spans the heavens with, to the fine, small jewel drawn from the bowels of the earth to glitter on a lady's neck....

My dearest H——, I wish I were with you with all my heart, but, as if to diminish my regret by putting the thing still further beyond the region of possibility, I act next Monday the 17th, instead of the 24th. (They say "a miss is as good as a mile;" why does it always seem so much worse, then?) I begin with Belvidera, and have already begun my cares and woes and tribulations about lilac satins and silver tissues, etc., etc. Young is engaged with us, and plays Pierre, and my father Giaffir, which will be very dreadful for me; I do not know how I shall be able to bear all his wretchedness as well as my own. To be a good politician one ought to have, as it were, only one eye for truth; I do not at all mean to be single-eyed in the good sense of the word, but to be incapable of seeing more than one side of every question: one sees a part so much more strongly when one does not see the whole of a matter, and though a statesman may need a hundred eyes, I maintain that a party politician is the better for having only one. Restricted vision is good for work, too; people who see far and wide can seldom be very hopeful, I should think, and hope is the very essence of working courage. The matter in hand should always, if possible, be the great matter to those who have to carry it through, and though broad brains may be the best for conceiving, narrow ones are, perhaps, the best for working with.

Thank you for your quotation from Sir Humphry Davy; it did me good, and even made me better for five minutes; and your Irish letter, which interested me extremely. "Walking the world." What a sad and touching expression; and how well it describes a broken and desponding spirit! And yet what else are we all doing, in soul if not in body? Is not that solitary, wandering feeling the very essence of our existence here?

You ask if the interests of the theater and mine are not identical? No, I think not. The management seems to me like our Governments for some time past, to be actuated by mere considerations of temporary expediency; that which serves a momentary purpose is all they consider. But it stands to reason that if they make me play parts in which I must fail, my London popularity must decrease, and with it my provincial profits; and that, of course, is a serious thing. In short, dear H——, where success means bread and butter, failure means dry bread, or none; and I hate the last, I believe, less than the first, though, as I never tried starvation, perhaps dry bread is nicer....

The excitement about the Bill is rising instead of subsiding. The shops are all shut, and the people meeting in every direction; the windows of Apsley House have been smashed, and Wellington's statue (the Achilles in the Park) pelted and threatened to be pulled down. They say that Nottingham and Belvoir Castles are burnt down. All this is bad, and bodes, I fear, worse. Good-by, dear.

Your affectionate

F. A. K.

Thursday, August 22d.—I read some of "Cibber's Lives." I should like to read a well-written French life of Alin Chartier, Louis XI.'s ugly secretary, whose mouth Queen Margaret kissed while he was sleeping, "parce qu'elle avait dit de si belles choses." In the life, or rather the death, of Sackville, he notes his sitting up till eleven at night as a manifest waste of human existence. It is near two in the morning as I am now writing, but people's notions change as to time as well as other things. We don't dine at twelve any more. Macdonald, the sculptor, dined with us; I like him for dear Scotland's sake, and the blessed time I passed there. After the gentlemen came up into the drawing-room, Nourrit, the great French tenor, sang delightfully for us; Adelaide sang and played, and Nourrit made her try a charming duet from the "Dame Blanche," which I accompanied, and was frightened to death for self and sister. Macdonald wants to make a statue of me in "The Grecian Daughter," at the moment of veiling the face: he is right. An interval of some time elapsed, in which I did not keep my journal regularly. I had a long visit from my friend Miss S——. The lawsuit about the theater continued, the affairs of the concern becoming more and more involved in difficulties every day; and my father, worried almost to death with anxiety, vexation, and hard work, had a serious illness.

Saturday, November 25th.—My father was not quite so well this morning. I took Dr. Wilson home in the carriage; he talked a great deal about this horrible burking business (a series of atrocious murders committed by two wretches of the names of Burk and Bishop, for the purpose of obtaining, for the corpses of their victims, the price paid by the Edinburgh surgeons for subjects for dissection; the mode of death inflicted by these men came to be designated by the name of the more hardened murderer as burking).

I called at Fozzard's for the boys, and set them down at Angelo's (a famous school for fencing, boxing, and single-stick, where my brothers took lessons in those polite exercises). In the evening, at the theater, dear Charles Young played "The Stranger" for the last time; the house was very full, and I played very ill. After the play Young was enthusiastically called for. I have finished "Tennant's Tour in Greece," which I rather liked. I have been reading "Bonaparte's Letters to Joséphine;" the vague and doubting spirit which once or twice throws its wavering shadow across his thoughts, startles one in contrast with the habitual tone of the mind, which assuredly ne doubtait de rien, especially of what his own power of will could accomplish. The affection he expresses for his wife is sometimes almost poetical from its intensity, in spite of the grossness of his language. He seems to have believed in nothing but volition, and that volition is in itself, perhaps, a mere form of faith. It's a dangerous worship, for the devil in that shape does obey so long and so well before he claims his due; so much is achieved precisely by that belief in what can be achieved; the last round of the ladder, somehow or other, however, always seems to break down at last, and then I doubt if the people who fall from it can all declare, as Holcroft did when he fell from his horse, and, as his surgeon assured him, broke his ribs, that he was positive he had not, because in falling he had exerted the energy of will, and could not therefore have broken his bones.

Sunday, 29th.—The great good fortune of a good sermon at church. After church Mrs. Jameson, John Mason, and Mr. Loudham called; the latter said he had good news about that fatal theater of ours, for that Mr. Harris seemed to be inclined to come into some accommodation, and so perhaps this cancer of a Chancery suit may stop eating our lives away. Oh dear! I am afraid this is too good news to be true. I went to my father's room and sat by him for a long time, and talked about the horse I had bought for him; and there he lies in his bed, and God knows when he will even be able to walk again.

Monday, 30th.—I went to rehearsal. It seems that the managers and proprietors (of course not my poor father) had summoned a meeting of all the actors to try and induce them to accept for the present a reduced rate of salary till the theater can be in some measure relieved of its most pressing difficulties. I knew nothing of this, and, finding them all very solemnly assembled in the greenroom, asked them cheerfully why they were all there, which must have struck them strangely enough. I dare say they do not know how little I know, or wish to know, about this disastrous concern. On my return home, I heard that Dr. Watson had seen my father, and requested that Dr. Wilson might be sent for. They fear inflammation of the lungs; he has gone to the very limit of his tether, for had he continued fagging a night or two longer the effects might have been fatal. Poor, poor father!...

Lady Francis and Mrs. Sullivan called in the afternoon; I was feeling miserable, and exhausted with my rehearsal. In the evening I helped my mother to move all the furniture, which I think is nothing in the world but a restless indication of her anxiety about my father; it is the fourth time since she same back from the country.

Tuesday, December 1st.— ... It seems that in the arrangement, whatever it may be, which has taken place between the actors and the management, Mr. Harley and Mr. Egerton are the only ones who have declined the proposed accommodation. Young has behaved like an angel, offering to play for nothing till Christmas; how kind and liberal he is! Mr. Abbott, Mr. Duraset, Mr. Ward, and all the others, have been as considerate and generous as possible. But the thing is doomed, and will go to the ground, in spite of every effort that can be made to stave the ruin off.

I was greeted this morning, when I came down to breakfast, with a question that surprised and amused we very much. "Pray, Fanny," said John, "did you ever thank Mr. Bacon (one of the editors of the Times) for his book (the "Life of Francis I." which Mr. Bacon had been kind enough to send me); for here is a very abusive critique in to-day's Times of the play last night." "Well," thought I, "that's a comical sequitur, and a fine estimate of criticism;" but the conclusion was droller still. I had not forgotten to thank the friendly author for his book, nor had he written the article in question; but it seems a young gentleman, much in love with Miss Phillips (a promising and very handsome young actress at Drury Lane), had found pulling me to pieces the easiest way of showing his admiration for her. That is not a very exalted style of criticism either, but it is just as well that one should occasionally know what the praise and blame one receives may be worth. It seems that when it was determined that Miss Sheriff should come out, Mr. Welsh, whose pupil she was, made a great feast, and invited two-and-twenty gentlemen connected with the press to a private hearing of her.... In the evening, we all went to hear her, being every way much interested in her success. John and Henry went into the front of the house; my mother, Dr. Moore (the Rev. Dr. Moore, a great friend of my father and mother's), and myself, went up to our own box. The house was crammed, the pit one black, crowded mass. Poor child! I turned as cold as ice as the symphony of "Fair Aurora" (the opera was "Artaxerxes") began, and she came forward with Mr. Wilson. The bravos, the clapping, the noise, the great sound of popular excitement overpowering in all its manifestations; and the contrast between the sense of power conveyed by the acclamations of a great concourse of people, and the weakness of the individual object of that demonstration, gave me the strangest sensation when I remembered my own experience, which I had not seen. When I saw the thousands of eyes of that crowded pitful of men, and heard their stormy acclamations, and then looked at the fragile, helpless, pretty young creature standing before them trembling with terror, and all woman's fear and shame in such an unnatural position, I more than ever marveled how I, or any woman, could ever have ventured on so terrible a trial, or survived the venture. It seemed to me as if the mere gaze of all that multitude must melt the slight figure away like a wreath of vapor in the sun, or shrivel it up like a scrap of silver paper before a blazing fire. It made poor Dr. Moore and myself both cry, but there was a deal more sympathy in my tears than in his; for I had known the dizzy terror of that moment, had felt the ground slide from under my feet and the whole air become a sea of fiery rings before my swimming eyes. Besides my fellow-feeling for her actual agony, I had one for what her after trials may be, and I hoped for her that she might be able to see the truth of all things in the midst of all things false; and then, if she takes pleasure in her gilded toys, she will not have too bitter a heartache when they are broken. She sang well, and soon recovered from her fright, which, even from the first, did not affect her voice. She is rather pretty, but does not walk or move gracefully; she was well dressed, all but her hair, which was dressed in the present frizzy French fashion, and looked ridiculous for Mandane. Her singing was good, of a good style; I do not mean only that she sang "Fly, soft ideas, fly," and "Monster away!" and "The Soldier Tired," brilliantly, because they do not test the best singing, but the soave sostenuto of her "If e'er the cruel tyrant love," and "Let not rage thy bosom firing," were specimens of the best and most difficult school of singing. They were flowing, smooth, soft, and sweet, without trick or device of mere florid ornamentation, and were as intrinsically good in her execution as they are admirable in that peculiar style of composition. Her shake is not genuine, and some of her rapid descending scales want finish and accuracy; her use of her arms and her gestures were very pretty and graceful, and we were all greatly pleased with her. Braham was magnificently great, in spite of his inches. What a noble artist he is! and with what wonderful vigor he acts through his singing! being no actor at all the moment he stops singing. Wilson sang out of tune; the music is not in his voice, and he was frightened. Miss Cawse was rather a dumpy Artaxerxes, which is an impertinent remark for me to make; she has a beautiful contralto voice. The opera went off brilliantly, and after it the audience called for "God Save the King," which was performed. Paganini was in the box opposite to us; what a cadaverous-looking creature he is! Came home and saw my father, and gave him the report of Miss Sheriff's success....

Friday, December 2d.— ... I went to see Cecilia Siddons; I thought her looking aged and thin, and Mrs. Wilkinson (Mrs. Siddons's companion for many years previous to her death) looking sad and ill too. They have both lost the one idea of their whole lives.

Saturday, 3d.— ... It seems the doctors recommend my father's going to Brighton. I was urging him to do so this morning.... After tea I looked on the map for Rhodez, the scene of that horrible Fualdes tragedy (a murder the commission of which involved some singular and terribly dramatic incidents). I read Daru's "History of Venice" till bedtime.

Sunday, December 4th.— ... My father, for the first time this fortnight, was able to dine with us. After dinner I read the whole trial of Bishop and Williams, and their confession. My mother is reading aloud to us Lord Edward Fitzgerald's Life.

Great Russell Street, December 4, 1831.

Dear H——,

It is at the sensible hour of a quarter-past twelve at night that I begin this immense sheet of paper, and with the sensible purpose of filling it before I go to bed.... What an unsatisfactory invention letter-writing is, to be sure; and yet there is none better for the purpose. When you asked me so affectionately in your letter whether I was going to bed, I concluded naturally that you were writing to me instead of doing so yourself; but I received the letter at half-past nine in the morning, when I was getting ready to ride. This sort of epistolary cross-questions and crooked answers is sometimes droll, but oftener sad: we weep with those who did weep, when they have dried their eyes; and rejoice with those who did rejoice, but the corners of whose mouths are already drawn down for crying, while we fancy we are smiling sympathetically with them.... You ask me how the world goes with me, and I can only say round, as I suppose it does with everybody. All goes on precisely as usual with me; my life is exceedingly uniform, and it is seldom that anything occurs to disturb its monotonous routine. My dear father, thank Heaven, is better, but still very weak, and I fear it will be yet some time before he recovers his strength. He came down to dinner to-day for the first time in this fortnight; indeed, it is only since the day before yesterday that he has left his bed; but I trust that this attack will serve him for a long time, and that with rest and quiet he will regain his strength.

I am really glad my aunt Kemble is better, though I remember having some not unpleasant ideas as to how, if she were not, you would go to Leamington to nurse her, and so come on and stay with us in London; but I cannot wish it at the price of her prolonged indisposition, poor woman!... I am sorry to say my father is pronounced worse to-day; he has a bad side-ache, and they are applying mustard poultices to overcome it. There is some apprehension of a return of fever. This is a real and terrible anxiety, dear H——. The theater, too, is going on very ill, and he is unable to give it any assistance; and for the same reason I can do nothing for it, for all my plays require him, except Isabella and Fazio, and these are worn threadbare. It is all very gloomy; but, however, time doth not stand still, and will some day come to the end of the journey with us.... You say Undine reminds you of me.... The feeling of an existence more closely allied to the elements of the material universe than even we acknowledge our dust-formed bodies to be, possesses me sometimes almost like a little bit of magnus; bright colors, fleeting lights and shadows, flowers, and above all water, the pure, sparkling, harmonious, powerful element, excite in me a feeling of intimate fellowship, of love, almost greater than any human companionship does. Perhaps, after all, I am only an animated morsel of my palace, this wonderful, beautiful world. Do you not believe in numberless, invisible existences, filling up the vast intermediate distance between God and ourselves, in the lonely and lovely haunts of nature and her more awful and gloomy recesses? It seems as if one must be surrounded by them; I do not mean to the point of merely suggesting the vague "suppose?" that, I should think, must visit every mind; but rather like a consciousness, a conviction, amounting almost to certainty, only short of seeing and hearing. How well I remember in that cedar hall at Oatlands, the sort of invisible presence I used to feel pervading the place. It was a large circle of huge cedar trees in a remote part of the grounds; the paths that led to it were wild and tangled; the fairest flower, the foxglove, grew in tall clumps among the foliage of the thickets and shrubberies that divided the lawn into undulating glades of turf all round it; a sheet of water in which there was a rapid current—I am not sure that it was not the river—ran close by, and the whole place used to affect my imagination in the weirdest way, as the habitation of invisible presences of some strange supernatural order. As the evening came on, I used frequently to go there by myself, leaving our gentlemen at table, and my mother and Lady Francis in the drawing-room. How I flew along by the syringa bushes, brushing their white fragrant blossoms down in showers as I ran, till I came to that dark cedar hall, with its circle of giant trees, whose wide-sweeping branches spread, at it were, a halo of darkness all round it! Through the space at the top, like the open dome of some great circular temple, such as the Pantheon of Rome, the violet-colored sky and its starry worlds looked down. Sometimes the pure radiant moon and one fair attendant star would seem to pause above me in the dark framework of the great tree-tops. That place seemed peopled with spirits to me; and while I was there I had the intensest delight in the sort of all but conscious certainty that it was so. Curiously enough, I never remember feeling the slightest nervousness while I was there, but rather an immense excitement in the idea of such invisible companionship; but as soon as I had emerged from the magic circle of the huge black cedar trees, all my fair visions vanished, and, as though under a spell, I felt perfectly possessed with terror, and rushed home again like the wind, fancying I heard following footsteps all the way I went. The moon seemed to swing to and fro in the sky, and every twisted tree and fantastic shadow that lay in my path made me start aside like a shying horse. I could have fancied they made grimaces and gestures at me, like the rocks and roots in Retsch's etchings of the Brocken; and I used to reach the house with cheeks flaming with nervous excitement, and my heart thumping a great deal more with fear than with my wild run home; and then I walked with the utmost external composure of demure propriety into the drawing-room, as who should say, "Thy servant went no whither," to any inquiry that might be made as to my absence....

It seems to me that you would be a poet but for your analyzing, dissecting, inquiring, and doubting mental tendency. Your truth is not a matter of intuition, but of demonstration; and when you get beyond demonstrability, then nothing remains to you but doubt.... God bless you, dear!

I am yours ever affectionately,

F. A. K.

Monday, December 5th.— ... My father is worse again to-day. Ohimé! His state is most precarious, and this relapse very alarming. It is dreadful to see him drag himself about, and hear his feeble voice. Oh, my dear, dear Father! Heaven preserve you to us!

Tuesday, 6th.—My father is much worse. How terrible this is!... Dall met me on the stairs this morning, and gave me a miserable account of him; he had just been bled, and that had somewhat relieved him. I went and sat with him while my mother drove out in the carriage. I stayed a long while with him, and he seemed a little better.... My father's two doctors have returned again, and paid him two visits daily. I read Daru all the evening.

Wednesday, 7th.— ... So I am to play Belvidera on Monday, and Bianca on Wednesday. That will be hard work; Bianca is terrible.

Thursday, 8th.— ... My dear father is beginning to gain strength once more, thank Heaven! I received a letter from Lady Francis about the play (a translation of the French piece of "Henri Trois," by Lord Francis, the production of which at Covent Garden is being postponed in consequence of my father's illness). Poor people! I am sorry for their disappointment.... I devised and tried on a new dress for Bianca; it will be very splendid, but I am afraid I shall look like a metal woman, a golden image. [The dress in question was entirely made of gold tissue; and one evening a man in the pit exclaimed to a friend of mine sitting by him, "Oh! doesn't she look like a splendid gold pheasant?" the possibility of which comparison had not occurred to me, not being a sportsman.]

Friday, 9th.— ... I went with my mother to the theater to hear "Fra Diavolo," with which, and Miss Sheriff's singing in it, we were delighted.

Saturday, 10th.— ... We had a talk about the fashion of southern countries of serenading, which I am very glad is not an English fashion. Music, as long as I am awake, is a pure and perfect delight to me, but to be wakened out of my sleep by music is to wake in a spasm of nervous terror, shaking from head to foot, and sick at my stomach, with indescribable fear and dismay; certainly no less agreeable effect could possibly be contemplated by the gallantry of a serenading admirer, so I am glad our admirers do not serenade us English girls. This picturesque practice prevails all through the United States, where the dry brilliancy of the climate and skies is favorable to the paying and receiving this melodious homage, and where musical bands, sometimes numbering fifty, are marshaled by personal or political admirers, under the balconies of reigning beauties or would-be-reigning public men. My total ignorance of this prevailing practice in the United States led to a very prosaic demonstration of gratitude on my part toward my first serenaders; for I opened my window and rewarded them with a dollar, which one of the recipients informed me he should always keep, to my no small confusion, not knowing the nature of my gratuitous indulgence, and that, like my Lady Greensleeves in the old English ballad, "My music still to play and sing" would be, while I remained in America, a disinterested demonstration of the devotion of my friends.... My poor mother is in the deepest distress about my father. Inflammation of the lungs is dreaded, and he is spitting blood. I felt as if I were turning to stone as I heard it. I came up to my own room and cried most bitterly for a long time. In the afternoon I was allowed to go in and see my father; but I was so overcome that, as I stooped to kiss his hand, I was almost suffocated with suppressed sobs. I did control myself, however, sufficiently to be able to sit by him for a while with tolerable composure. Cecilia and Mrs. Wilkinson called, and were very kind and affectionate to me. They brought news that Harry Siddons had arrived in India and been sent off to Delhi. My brother Henry, poor child, came and lay on the sofa in my room, and we cried together almost through the whole afternoon, in spite of our efforts to comfort each other. My heart dies away when I think of my dear father.... I got a very kind and affectionate letter from Lady Francis; she wants us very much to go again to Oatlands. After all, perhaps it would not be so sad there as I think, though it must appear changed enough in some respects, if not in all. Everything is winter now, within and without me; and when I was last there it was summer, in my heart and over all the earth. My cedar palace is there still, and to that I should bring more change than I should find. Poor Undine! how often I think of that true story. When I went to the theater my heart really sickened at my work; my eyes smarted, and my voice was broken, with my whole day's crying. The house seemed good; I played ill, and felt very ill. Lord M—— was in the stage-box, which annoyed me. I hate to have my society acquaintance close to me while I am acting. The play was "Venice Preserved." After I came home I saw my father, who is a little better; but now Henry is quite unwell, and I am in a high fever—I suppose with all this wretchedness and exertion.

Thursday, 13th.—My father has passed a quieter night, thank God. I went to Fozzard's riding-school with John, and tried a hot little hunter that they want to persuade Lady Chesterfield to ride—a very pretty creature, but quite too eager for the school. While I was riding Lady Grey came in, very much frightened, upon her horse, which was rather fresh. She took Gazelle, which I was riding, and I rode her horse tame for her. It is very odd that, riding as well as she does, she should be so miserably nervous on horseback.... I drove to Mrs. Mayo's, who impressed and affected me very much. Those magnificent eyes of hers are becoming dim; she is growing blind, with eyes like dark suns. I could not help expressing the deep concern I felt for such a calamity. She replied that doubtless it was a trial, but that she saw many others afflicted with dispensations so much heavier than her own, that she was content. To grow blind contentedly is to be very brave and good, and I admired and loved her even more than I did before. When I came home, I went and sat with my father. He has decided that we shall not go to Oatlands, and I am hardly sorry for it.

Friday, 14th.—Went over my part for to-night.... Victoire came with me to the theater instead of Dall, whose whole time is taken up attending on my father. The house was bad, and I thought I acted very ill, though Victoire and John, who was in the front, said I did not. Henry Greville was in the boxes, and to my surprise went from them to the pit, though I ought not to have been surprised, for, for such a fine gentleman, he is a very sensible man. Colonel and Lady C. Cavendish were in the orchestra, and how I did wish them further. I do so wonder, in the middle of my stage despair, what business my drawing-room acquaintances have sitting staring at it. My dress was beautiful. As for the audience, I do not know what ailed them, but they seemed to have agreed together only to applaud at the end of the scenes, so that I got no resting interruptions, and was half dead with fatigue at the end of the play. I read Daru's "Venice" between the scenes, and saw my father for a few minutes after I came home.

Thursday, 15th.—Had a delightful long letter from H——, who is a poet without the jingle.... Another physician is to be called in for my father. Oh, my dear father! Mr. Bartley was with him about this horrible theater business.... My mother went in the evening with John to hear Miss Sheriff in Polly. It is her first night in "The Beggar's Opera," and my father wished to know how it went. I stayed at home with poor Henry, and after tea sat with my father till bedtime.

Friday, 16th.—Went to the theater at eleven, and rehearsed Isabella in the saloon, the stage being occupied with a rehearsal of the pantomime. When my rehearsal was over, the carriage not being come, I went down to see what they were doing. There was poor Farleigh, nose and all (a worthy, amiable man, and excellent comic character, with a huge excrescence of a nose), qui se déménait like one frantic; huge Mr. Stansbury, with a fiddle in his hand, dancing, singing, prompting, and swearing; the whole corps de ballet attitudinizing in muddy shoes and poke-bonnets, and the columbine, in dirty stockings and a mob-cap, ogling the harlequin in a striped shirt and dusty trousers. What a wrong side to the show the audience will see!

My father is better, thank God! After dinner sat with poor Henry till time to go to the theater. Played Isabella. House bad. I played well; I always do to an empty house (this was my invariable experience both in my acting and reading performances, and I came to the conclusion that as my spirits were not affected by a small audience, they, on the contrary, were exhilarated by the effect upon my lungs and voice of a comparatively cool and free atmosphere). I read Daru between my scenes; I find it immensely interesting.... I read Niccolini's "Giovanni di Procida," but did not like it very much; I thought it dull and heavy, and not up to the mark of such a very fine subject.

Saturday, 17th.— ... My father, thank God, appears much better.... I have christened the pretty mare I have bought "Donna Sol," in honor of my part in "Hernani." In the evening I read Daru, and wrote a few lines of "The Star of Seville;" but I hate it, and the whole thing is as dead as ditch-water.

Sunday, 18th.—To church.... After I came home I went and sat with my father. Poor fellow! he is really better; I thank God inexpressibly!

Great Russell Street, December 18.

Dear H——,

I have had time to write neither long nor short letters for the last week; Mr. Young's engagement being at an end, I have been called back to my work, and have had to rehearse, and to act, and to be much too busy to write to you until to-day, when I have caught up all my arrears.

My father, thank God, is once more recovering, but we have twice been alarmed at such sudden relapses that we hardly dare venture to hope he is really convalescent. Inflammation on the lungs has, it seems, been going on for a considerable time, and though they think now that it has entirely subsided, yet, as the least exertion or exposure may bring it on again, we are watching him like the apples of our eyes. He has not yet left his bed, to which he has now been confined more than a month....

The exertion I have been obliged to make when leaving him to go and act, was so full of misery and dread lest I should find him worse, perhaps dead, on my return, that no words can describe what I have suffered at that dreadful theater. Thank God, however, he is now certainly better, out of present danger, and I trust and pray will soon be beyond any danger of a relapse. Anything like Dall's incessant and unwearied care and tenderness you cannot imagine. Night and day she has watched and waited on him, and I think she must have sunk under all the fatigue she has undergone but for the untiring goodness and kindness of heart that has supported her under it all. She is invaluable to us all, and every day adds to her claims upon our love and gratitude....

In the passage you quote from Godwin, he seems to think a friend of more use in reproving what is evil in us than I believe is really the case. Do you think our faults and follies can ever be more effectually sifted, analyzed, and condemned by another than by our own conscience? I do not think if one could put one's heart into one's friends' hand that they could detect one defect or evil quality that had not been marked and acknowledged in the depths of one's own consciousness. Do you suppose people shrink more from the censure of others than from self-condemnation? I find it difficult to think so.... You appear to me always to wish to submit your faith to a process which invariably breaks your apparatus and leaves you very much dissatisfied, with your faith still a simple element in you, in spite of your endeavors to analyze or decompose it. Are not, after all, our convictions our only steadfastly grounded faith? I do not mean conviction wrought out in the loom of logical argument, where one's understanding must have shuttled backward and forward through every thread a thousand times before the woof is completed, but the spiritual convictions, the intuitions of our souls, that lie upon their surface like direct reflections from heaven, distinct and beautiful enough for reverent contemplation, but a curious search into whose nature would, at any rate temporarily, blur and dissipate and destroy....

The sense of power which man cannot control is one thing that makes the sea such a delightful object of contemplation; the huge white main, and deep, tremendous voice of the vast creature over which man's daring and his knowledge give him but such imperfect mastery, suggest images of strength which are full of sublime fascination as one stands on the shore, looking at the vasty deep, and remembers how precarious and uncertain is man's dominion over it, and how God alone rules and governs it. It is impossible not to rejoice in the great sense of its huge power and freedom, even though their manifestations toward men are so often terrible and destructive.... Oh yes, indeed, I, like Wallenstein, have faith in the "strong hours," and hold their influence the more efficacious that we seldom think of resisting it; or, if we do, are seldom successful in the attempt....

The theater is going on very ill, but negotiations are pending between the partners, which it is hoped may eventually terminate in some arrangement with the creditors about the property. I have been acting Bianca again; I certainly am not jealous, and cannot imagine being so, any more of my husband than of my friend. I doubt if I have the power of loving which produces jealousy, in spite of which that part tries me dreadfully. I can conceive no torment comparable to that passion, which, however, I think is foreign to my own nature. I am reading Daru's "History of Venice," and am rather disappointed in the entertainment I expected to derive from it. It is a pretty long undertaking, too.... Remember me to all your people; and since you will have it that I am twin-sister to a fountain, remember me to my cousin, the dear little spring in the dell, which I love the more that it sometimes reflects your face and figure, as well as the fairies who dance round it by night. Do you hear that poor Lord Grey is said to be haunted by a vision of Lord Castlereagh's head? It sounds like a temptation of the devil to scare him into cutting his throat. Lord Brougham and the Duke of Wellington seem to me the only two men likely to keep their heads in these times of infinite political perturbation; but the one is made of steel, and the other of india-rubber.

Yours, dearest, always,

F. A. K.

Monday, 19th.—Went to Fozzard's, and had a pleasant, gossiping ride with Lady Grey and Miss Cavendish. While I was still riding, the Duchess of Kent and our little queen that is to be came down into the school; I was presented to them at their desire, and thought Princess Victoria a very unaffected, bright-looking girl. Fozzard made me gallop round; I think he is rather proud of showing me off.... My father is not so well again to-day. How dreadful these alternations are! I read Daru all the afternoon, and then sang in my own room to amuse Henry, till dinner-time. Colonel Bailey sent me the mare's saddle and bridle, and after dinner the boys put them on a chair for me, and gave me an absurd make-believe ride.

Wednesday, 21st—Dear Mr. Harness called, and I received him. He tells me that at the theater they want to do his tragedy ("The Wife of Antwerp," was, I think, the name of the piece) without my father; but this seems to me really sheer madness. The play is a pretty, interesting, well-written piece, and, well propped and sustained, may perhaps succeed for a few nights, but as to throwing the whole weight, or rather weakness of it, upon my shoulders, or any one pair of shoulders, it is folly to think of it. It is not a powerful sort of monologue like "Fazio," where the interest centres in one person and one passion, and therefore if that character is well sustained the rest can shift for itself. It is no such matter; it is a play of incident and not of character, and must be played by people and not one person. What terrible bad management! But, poor people! what can they do, with my father lying disabled there? If it was not for their complete disregard for their own interest, I should be inclined to quarrel with them for the way in which they are ruining mine; and I sincerely hope, for the sake of everybody concerned, that Mr. Harness will resist this senseless proposition.

I went with John in the afternoon to Angerstein's Gallery (M. Angerstein's fine collection of pictures was not then incorporated in the National Gallery, of which it subsequently became so important a portion); there are some new pictures there. Unluckily, we had only an hour to stay, but I brought away a great deal with me for so short a time. Among the additions was a very singular old painting, "The Holy Family," by one of the earliest masters, whose name I forget, not being familiar with it. I looked long at the glorious Titian, the "Bacchus and Ariadne," which always reminds me of—

"Whence come ye, jolly Satyrs, whence come ye?
Like to a moving vintage down they came."

One of the most famous pictures here is "Our Saviour disputing with the Doctors," by Leonardo da Vinci. I hardly ever receive pleasure from his pictures; there is a mannerism in all that I have seen that is positively disagreeable to me. How the later artists lost the simple secret of earnest vigor of their predecessors, while gaining in everything that was not that! Grace, finish, refinement, accuracy of drawing, richness of coloring, all that merely tended towards perfection and execution, while the simplicity and single-heartedness of conception died away more and more. All art seems by degrees to outgrow its strength, and certainly in painting the archaic cradle touches one's imagination as neither the graceful youth nor mature manhood do. "Le mieux c'est l'ennemi du bien" in nothing more than the progress of art after a certain period of its development, and when its mere mechanism is best understood, and applied in the most masterly manner. The spirit has tarried behind, and we have to return to seek it among the earlier days, when the genius of man was like a giant, rude, naked, and savage, but vigorous and free—unadorned indeed, but also untrammeled. Only a certain proportion of excellence is allowed to our race, but that is granted; and let us stretch it, expand it, roll and beat it out as we will, it is still but the same square inch made thin to cover a greater surface. For one good we still must yield another; we have no gain that is not loss, no acquisition but surrender, "exchange" which may perhaps be "no robbery," though quantity does seem a poor substitute for quality in matters of beauty. I wish I had lived in the times when the ore lay in the ingot (and had been one of the few who owned a nugget), instead of in these times of universal gold-leaf, glitter without weight, and shining shallowness of mere surface. Vigor is better than refinement, and to create better than to improve, and to conceive better than to combine. I wonder if the world, or rather the human mind, will ever really grow decrepit, and the fountain of beauty in men's souls run dry to the dregs; or will the manifestations only change, and the eternal spirit reveal itself in other ways?...

On our way home I had a long and interesting talk with John about the different forms of religious faith into which the gradual development of the human mind has successively expanded; each, of course, being the result of that very development, acting on the original necessity to believe in and worship and obey something higher and better than itself, implanted in our nature. It seems strange that he has a leaning to Roman Catholicism, which I have not. Our Protestant profession appears to me the purest creed—form—that Christianity has yet arrived at; but, I suppose, a less spiritual one, or perhaps I should say external accompaniments, affecting more palpably the senses and imagination, are wholesome and necessary to the cultivation and preservation of the religious sentiment in some minds. Catholicism was the faith of the chivalrous times, of the poetical times, of times when the creative faculty of man poured forth in since unknown abundance masterpieces of every kind of beauty, as manifestations of the pious and devout enthusiasm. Protestantism is undoubtedly the faith of these times; a denying faith, a rejecting creed, a questioning belief, its evil seems essentially to coincide with the worst tendency of the present age, but its good seems to me positive and unconditional, independent of time or circumstance; the best, in that kind, that the believing necessity in our nature has yet attained. Rightly understood and lived up to, the only service of God which is intellectual freedom, as all His service, lived up to, under what creed soever, is moral freedom. And it is in some sort in spite of myself that I say this, for my fancy delights in all the devout and poetical legendary conceptions which the stern hand of reason has stripped from our altars.

I found a letter at home from Emily Fitzhugh; she writes me word she has been revising my aunt Siddons's letters; thence an endless discussion as to the nature of genius, what it is. I suppose really nothing but the creative power, and so it remains a question if the greatest actor can properly be said to possess it. Again, how far does the masterly filling out of an inferior conception by a superior execution of it, such as really great actors frequently present, fall short of creative power, properly so called? Is it a thing positive, of individual inherent quality, or comparative, and composed of mere respective quantity? Can its manifestation be partial, and restricted to one faculty, or must it be a pervading influence, permeating the whole mind? Certainly Mrs. Siddons was what we call a great dramatic genius, and off the stage gave not the slightest indication of unusual intellectual capacity of any sort. Kean, the only actor whose performances have ever realized to me my idea of the effect tragic acting ought to produce, acted part of his parts rather than ever a whole character, and a work of genius should at least show unity of conception. My father, whose fulfilling of a particular range of characters is as nearly as possible perfect, wants depth and power, and power seems to me the core, the very marrow, so to speak, of genius; and if it is not genius that gave incomparable majesty and terror to my aunt's Lady Macbeth, and to Kean's Othello incomparable pathos and passion, and to my father's Benedict incomparable spirit and grace, what is it? Mere talent carried beyond a certain point? If so, where does the one begin and the other end? Or is genius a precious, inconvertible, intellectual metal, of which some people have a grain and a half, and some only half a grain?... There is dreadful news from Spain, and I fear it is too true. Torrijos has made another attempt. Oh, how thankful we must be that John is returned to us!

Great Russell Street, Monday, December 23.

Dear Mrs. Jameson,

I owe you many excuses for not having sooner acknowledged your letter, but you may have seen by the papers that we have been bringing out a new piece, and that is always, while it goes on, an engrossing of time and attention paramount to all other claims. It is a play of Lord Francis Leveson's, and I know you will be glad to hear that it has been successful and is likely to prove serviceable to the theater. Another reason, too, for my silence is, that I have been working very hard at "The Star of Seville," which, I am thankful to say, has at length reached its completion. I have sent it to the theater upon approbation, in the usual routine of business; and am waiting very patiently the decision of the management on its fitness or unfitness for their purposes.

I know not whether your party at Teddesley are good thermometers, by which to judge of the state of political feeling here in London, but at this moment the rumor is rife that the Ministry dare not make the new batch of Peers, cannot carry the Bill, and must resign. To whom? is the next question, and it seems a difficult one to answer. One hardly sees, looking round the political ranks, who are to be the men to come forward and take up this tangled skein effectually. I write with rather a sympathetic leaning toward the Tory side of this Reform question, and do not know whether in so doing I am affronting you or not. In any case, I imagine, there can be but one opinion as to the difficulty, and even danger, of the present position of public affairs and public temper with regard to them.

Do you not soon think of returning to Town? or are you so well pleased with your present abode as to prolong your visit? London is particularly full, I think, for the time of year, and people are meeting in smaller numbers and a more sociable and agreeable way than they do later in the season. I was at two parties last week, each time, I am ashamed to say, after acting. I can't say that I find society pleasant; it reminds me a good deal of a "Conversation Cards," the insipid flippancy, of whose questions and answers seems to me to survive in these meetings, miscalled occasionally conversaziones. Dancing appears to me rational, and indeed highly intellectual, in comparison with such talk; and that I am as fond of as ever, but that has not begun yet, and I find these soirées causantes drearily unedifying.

Talking of stupid parties, your beautiful little picture of me and my various costumes helped away two hours of such intolerably dull people here the other night; I assure you we all voted you devout thanks on the occasion.... We are all tolerably well; my father is gradually recovering his strength, and though after such an attack as his has been the progress must of necessity be slow, we are inclined to hope, from that very circumstance, that it will be the more sure.... If you do not return soon, perhaps I shall hear from you again; pray recollect that it will give me great pleasure to do so, and that I am very sincerely yours,

F. A. K.

I dressed my Juliet the last time I acted it, exactly after your little sketch of her....

Thursday.—Worked at "The Star of Seville." In the evening the play was "Isabella;" the house very bad. I played very well. The Rajah Ramahun Roy was in the Duke of Devonshire's box, and went into fits of crying, poor man!

Friday, 23d.—It is all too true; John has had a letter from Spain; they have all been taken and shot. I felt frozen when I heard the terrible news. Poor Torrijos! And yet I suppose it is better so: he would only have lived to bitter disappointment, and the despairing conviction that the spirit he appealed to did not animate one human being in his deplorable and degenerate land. A young Englishman, of the name of Boyd, John's sometime friend and companion, was taken and shot with the rest: it choked me to think of his parents, his brothers and sisters. Surely God has been most merciful to us in sparing us such an anguish, and bringing our wanderer home before this day of doom. How I thought of Richard Trench and his people! John did not seem to me to be violently affected, though his first exclamation was one of sharp and bitter pain: I suppose he must, long ere this, have felt that there could be no other end to this utterly hopeless attempt.... In the afternoon I called on Mrs. Norton, who is always to me astonishingly beautiful. The baby was asleep, and so I could not see it, but Spencer has grown into a very fine child.

Monday, 26th.—Went to see how the pantomime did. I did not think it very amusing, but there was an enchanting little girl (Miss Poole) who did Tom Thumb, and whose attitudes in her armor were most of them copied from the antique, and really beautiful. Poor dear, bright little thing!

My father was in bed when we returned; I went and saw him for a minute, to tell him how the pantomime had succeeded; it ended with some wonderful tight-rope dancing by an exceedingly steady, graceful man; but it turned me perfectly sick, and I hate all those sort of things.

Thursday, 29th.—After dinner worked at "The Star of Seville." I really wonder I have the patience to go on with it, it is such heavy trash. After tea my father begged me to sing to him. I am always horribly frightened at singing before my mother; I cannot bear to distress her accurate ear with my unsteady intonation, and the more I think of it, the colder my hands grow and the hotter my face, the huskier my voice and the flatter my notes; I bungle over accompaniments that I have at my fingers' ends, and forget words I know as well as my alphabet; in short, I feel like a wretch, and I sing like a wretch, and I make wretched all my hearers. My mother's own nervous terror when she had to sing on the stage, as a young woman, was excessive, as she has often told me; and her mother repeatedly but vainly endeavored to bribe her with the promise of a guinea if she would sing as well in public any of the songs that she sang perfectly well at home. I sang for some time, and by degrees got more courage, till at last I managed to sing tolerably in tune. My mother says I have more voice than A——. I am sorry to hear her voice has grown thin—that sweet, melodious voice I did so love to listen to; but perhaps it will recover its tone.

Wednesday, 28th.—My dear, dear father came down to breakfast, looking horribly thin and pale, poor fellow! but, thank God, he was able to come once more among us. I am to act Euphrasia on Monday; how I do hate it! Monday week my father talks of resuming his work again with Mercutio. Dear me! how happy I shall be! once more speaking the love poetry of Juliet after all these "meaner beauties of the night" that I have been executing ever since he has been ill. Juliet did very right to die; she would have become Bianca when once she was Mrs. Romeo Montague.... I wrote to Lady Francis about "Katharine of Cleves," (Lord Francis's translation of "Henri Trois"), who is once more beginning to lift up her head. My father thinks it may be done on Wednesday week.... It is now determined that Henry should go into the army, and my mother wants me to besiege Sir John through Lady Macdonald (the general's general) about a commission for him. In the evening, not having to be anybody tragical or heroical, I indulged in my own character, and had a regular game of romps with the boys; my pensive public would not have believed its eyes if it could have seen me with my hair all disheveled, not because of my woes, but because of riotous fun, jumping over chairs and sofas, and dodging behind curtains and under tables to escape from my pursuers. "Is that Miss Kemble?" as poor Mr. Bacon involuntarily exclaimed the first time he saw me.

Great Russell Street, December 29, 1831.

My dearest H——,

You shall not entreat in vain, neither shall you have a short answer because you have an immediate one.... I should not have answered you so instantaneously, but that my last account of my dear father was so bad that I cannot delay telling you how much better he is, and how grateful we all are for his restoration to health. He is released from his bed, of which he must be heartily sick, and comes down to breakfast at the usual time: of course he is still weak and low, and wretchedly thin, but we trust a little time will bring back good spirits and good looks, though after such a terrible attack I fear it will be long before his constitution recovers its former strength, if indeed it ever does. He talks of resuming his labors at the theater next Monday week. Oh! my dear H——, what a dreadful season of anxiety this has been! but, thank God, it is past.

I had intended that this letter should go to you to-day, but you will forgive the delay of a day in my finishing it when I tell you that I have some hope of its producing a commission for Henry. Sir John Macdonald, at whose house you dined in the summer with my mother, is now adjutant-general, and I know not what besides; and after my mother and myself had expended all our eloquence in winding up my father's mind to resolve upon the army as Henry's profession, she thought the next best thing I could do would be to attack Lady Macdonald and secure the general's interest. They happened to call this afternoon, and your letter, my dear H——, has been left unfinished till past post-time, while I was soliciting this favor, which I have every hope we shall obtain. Lady Macdonald is extremely kind and good-natured, and I am sure will exert herself to serve us, and if this can be accomplished I shall be haunted by one anxiety the less.

Henry is too young and too handsome to be doing nothing but lounging about the streets of London, and even if he should be ordered to the Indies, it is something to feel that he is no longer aimless and objectless in life—a mere squanderer of time, without interest, stake, or duty, in this existence. I am sure this news will pacify you, and atone for the day's delay in this letter reaching you.

[My youngest brother Henry had a passionate desire to be a sailor, and never exhibited the slightest inclination for any other career. Admiral Lake, who was a very kind friend of my father's and mother's, knowing this to be the lad's bent, offered, on one occasion, to take charge of him, and have him trained for his profession under his own supervision. Such, however, was my mother's horror of the sea, and dread of losing her darling, if she surrendered him to be carried from her to Nova Scotia, whither I think Admiral Lake was bound when he offered to take my brother with him, that she induced my father to decline this most friendly and advantageous offer. Henry never after that exhibited the slightest preference for any other profession, and always said, "They may put me at a plow-tail if they like." He went through Westminster School, after a previous training at Bury St. Edmunds, not otherwise than creditably; but a very modest estimate of his own capacity made him beg not to be sent to Cambridge, where he said he was sure he should only waste money, and do himself and us no credit. (The bitter disappointment of my brother John's failure there had made a deep impression upon him.) Finally it was decided that he should go into the army, and the friendly interest of Sir John Macdonald and the liberal price Mr. Murray gave me for my play of "Francis I." enabled me to get him a commission; it was the time when they were still purchasable. My poor mother, unable to refuse her consent to this second favorable opportunity of starting him in life, acquiesced in his military, though she had thwarted his naval, career, and was well content to see her boy-ensign sent over with his troops to Ireland. But from Ireland his regiment was ordered to the West Indies, and after his departure thither she never again saw him in her life.]

I think it would be a wise thing if I were to go to America and work till I have made 10,000l., then return to England and go the round of the provinces, and act for a few nights' leave-taking in London. Prudence would then, perhaps, find less difficulty in adjusting my plans for the future. That is what I think would be well for me to do, supposing all things remain as they are and God preserves my health and strength. It will not do to verify all Poitier's lugubrious congratulation to his children in the Vaudeville on their marriage:

"Ji! Ji! mariez-vous,
Mettez-vous dans la misère!
Ji! Ji! mariez-vous,
Mettez-vous la corde au cou."

... Jealousy, surely, is a disposition to suspect and take umbrage where there is no cause for suspicion or offense, which, to say the least of it, is very unreasonable; but that a woman should break her heart because her husband does love another woman better than her, seems to me natural enough, and with regard to Bianca, her provocations certainly warranted a very rational amount of misery; and though, had she not been a woman of violent passions and a jealous temperament, she probably would not have taken the means she did of resenting Fazio's treatment of her, it appears to me that nothing but divine assistance and the strongest religious principle could preserve one under such circumstances from despair, madness, suicide, perhaps; hardly, however, the murder of one's husband. But assassinating other people seems a much more common mode of relieving their feelings among Italians than destroying themselves, which is rather a northern way of meeting, I should say of avoiding, difficulties.

I have had a holiday this week, and every now and then have written a word or two of "La Estrella;" it will never be done, and when it is it will be the horridest trash that ever was done; but I will let you have the pleasure of reading it, I promise you. On Monday I play that favorite detestation of mine, Euphrasia; the Monday after that my father hopes to be able for Mercutio, and I return to Juliet. By the by, you say Bianca is my best part, and I think my Juliet is better; I am not sure that there is not some kindred in the characters. We are going to bring out a play of Lord Francis', translated from the French, a sort of melodrama in blank verse, in which I have to act a part that I cannot do the least in the world, but of course that doesn't signify.

["Katharine of Cleves," translated from the French play of "Henri Trois et sa Cour," and made the subject of one of Mr. Barham's inimitably comical poems in the "Ingoldsby Legends." Mdlle. Mars acted the part of the heroine in Paris, and it was one of several semi-tragical characters, in which, at the end of her great theatrical career, she reaped fresh laurels in an entirely new field, and showed the world that she might have been one of the best serious, not to say tragic, actresses of the French stage, as well as its one unrivaled female comedian.]

We have spent a wretched Christmas, as you may suppose; a house with its head sick all but to death, and all its members smitten with the direst anxiety, is not the place for a merry one. God bless you, my dear, and send you years of peace of mind and health of body! this is, I suppose, what we mean when we wish for happiness here, either for ourselves or others. Give my love and kindest good wishes to your people.

Have you seen in the papers that poor Torrijos and his little band, consisting of sixty men, several of whom John knew well, have been lured into the interior of Spain, and there taken prisoners and shot? This news has shocked us all dreadfully, especially poor John. You may imagine how grateful we are that he is now among us, instead of having fallen a victim to his chimerical enthusiasm. I hardly know how to deplore the event for Torrijos himself: death has spared him the bitter disappointment of at last being convinced that the people he would have made free are willing slaves, and that the time when Spain is to lift herself up from the dust has not yet come.

I went the other day with John to the Angerstein Gallery.... The delight I find in a fine painting is one of the greatest and most enduring pleasures I have; my mind retains the impression so long and so very vividly.... Good-by, my dearest H——.

Ever affectionately yours,

F. A. K.

Saturday, 31st.—After breakfast went to the theater to rehearse "The Grecian Daughter," and Mr. Ward, for whom the rehearsal was principally given, never came till it was over. Pleasant creature!...

The day seemed beautifully fine, and my father and mother took, a drive, while Henry and I rode, that my father might see the horse I had bought for him; but it was bitterly cold, and I could not make my mare trot, so she cantered and I froze. Mr. Power was there, on that lovely horse of his. I think the Park will become bad company, it is so full of the player folk. Frederick Byng called, and I like him, so I went and sat with him and my father and mother in the library till time to dress for dinner. After dinner wrote "The Star of Seville." I have got into conceit with it again, and so poor, dear, unfortunate Dall coming in while I was working at it, I seized hold of her, like the Ancient Mariner of the miserable "Wedding Guest," and compelled her, in spite of her outcries, to sit down, and then, though she very wisely went fast asleep, I read it to her till tea-time.

My mother wished to sit up and see the New Year in, and so we played quadrille till they sat down to supper, which had been ordered for the vigil, and I went fast asleep. At twelve o'clock kisses and good wishes went round, and we were all very merry, in spite of which I once or twice felt a sudden rush of hot tears into my eyes. All the hours of last year are gone, standing at the bar of Heaven, our witnesses or accusers: the evil done, the good left undone, the opportunities vouchsafed and neglected, the warnings given and unheeded, the talents lent and unworthily or not employed, they are gone from us for ever! forever! and we make merry over the flight of Time! O Time! our dearest friend! how is it that we part so carelessly from you, who never can return to us?... A New Year....