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—­aerial 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