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