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