Roy,” and I was sorry that I did, for it gave me such a home-sick longing for Edinburgh, and the lovely sea-shore out by Cramond, and the sunny coast of Fife.  How all my delightful, girlish, solitary rambles came back to me!  Why do such pleasant times ever pass? or why do they ever come?  The Scotch airs set me crying with all the recollections they awakened.  In spite, moreover, of my knowing every plank and pulley, and scene-shifter and carpenter behind those scenes, here was I crying at this Scotch melodrama, feeling my heart puff out my chest for “Rob Roy,” though Mr Ward is, alas! my acquaintance, and I know when he leaves the stage he goes and laughs and takes snuff in the green room.  How I did cry at the Coronach and Helen Macgregor, though I know Mrs. Lovell is thinking of her baby, and the chorus-singers of their suppers.  How I did long to see Loch Lomond and its broad, deep, calm waters once more, and those lovely green hills, and the fir forests so fragrant in the sun, and that dark mountain well, Loch Long, with its rocky cliffs along whose dizzy edge I used to dream I was running in a whirlwind; the little bays where the sun touched the water as it soaked into cushions of thick, starry moss, and the great tufts of purple heather all vibrating with tawny bees!  Beautiful wilderness! how glad I am I have once seen it, and can never forget it; nor the broad, crisping Clyde, with its blossoming bean-fields, its jagged rocks and precipices, its gray cliffs and waving woods, and the mountain streams of clear, bright, fairy water, rushing and rejoicing down between the hills to fling themselves into its bosom; and Dumbarton Castle, with its snowy roses of Stuart memory!  How glad I am that I have seen it all, if I should never see it again!  And “Rob Roy” brought all this and ever so much more to my mind.  If I had been a mountaineer, how I should have loved my land!  I wish I had some blood-right to love Scotland as I do.  Unfortunately, all these associations did not reconcile me to the cockney-Scotch of our Covent Garden actors, and Mackay’s Bailie Nicol Jarvie was not the least tender of my reminiscences. [It was at a public dinner in Edinburgh, at which Walter Scott and Mackay were guests, that, in referring to the admirable impersonation of the Bailie, Scott’s habitual caution with regard to the authorship of the Waverley Novels for a moment lost its balance, and in his warm commendation of the great comedian’s performances a sentence escaped him which appeared conclusive to many of those present, if they were still in doubt upon the subject, that he was their writer.] Miss Inveraretie was a cruel Diana, but who would not be?...

Saturday, 14th.—­I rode at two with my father.  Passed Tyrone Power; what a clever, pleasant man he is; Count d’Orsay joined us; he was riding a most beautiful mare; and then James Macdonald, cum multus aliis, and I was quite dead, and almost cross, with cold....  After dinner I came up to my room, and set to work