Tuesday, 17th.—­Went to my mother’s room before she was down, with Henry.  It is her birthday, and I carried her the black velvet dress I have got for her, with which she seemed much pleased.  Went to rehearsal at twelve.  Lord and Lady Francis were there, and we acted the whole play, of course, to please them, so that I was half dead at the end of the rehearsal.  They want us to go to Lady Charlotte’s (Greville) to-morrow.  My father said we would if we were all well and in spirits (i.e., if the play was not damped)....  I wonder how my dear old Newhaven fish-wife does.  “Eh! gude gracious, ma’am, it’s yer ain sel come back again!” Poor body!  I believe I love the very east wind that blows over the streets of Edinburgh....  After dinner Mrs. Jameson’s beautiful toy-likeness of me helped off the time delightfully till the gentlemen came up, and then helped it off delightfully till everybody went away.  What a misfortune it is to have a broken nose, like poor dear Thackeray!  He would have been positively handsome, and is positively ugly in consequence of it.  John and his friend Venables broke the bridge of Thackeray’s nose when they were schoolboys playing together.  What a mishap to befall a young lad just beginning life! [I suppose my friend Thackeray’s injury was one that did not admit a surgical remedy, but my father, late in life, fell down while skating, and broke the bridge of his nose, and Liston, the eminent surgeon, urged him extremely to let him raise it—­“build it again,” as he used to say.  My father, however, declined the operation, and not only remained with his handsome nose disfigured, but suffered a much greater inconvenience, which Liston had predicted—­very aggravated deafness in old age, from the stopping of the passages in the nose, which helped to transmit sound to the brain.] After all, I suppose, it does not much signify to a man whether he is ugly or not.  Wilkes, who was pre-eminently so, but brilliantly agreeable, used always to say that he was only half an hour behindhand with the handsomest man in England.

Wednesday, 18th.—­Went to the theater to rehearse “Katharine of Cleves;” we were kept at it till half-past two.  Drove home through the park.  The day was beautiful, but my poor father could not get released from that hateful theater, and went without his ride....  I had not felt at all nervous about to-night till the carriage came to the door, and then I turned quite faint and sick with fright.  At the theater found Madame le Beau (the forewoman of the great fashionable French milliner, Madame Devy, by whom all my dresses were made) waiting for me.  All was in darkness in my dressing-room; neither Mrs. Mitchell nor Jane were come (my two servants, or dressers, as they are called at the theater).  Presently in scuttled the former, puffing, and whimpering apologies, and presently the room was filled with the pleasant incense