“You’ll find it all in the agony bill.”

This referred to a bill proposed by Sir Andrew Agnew, a noted Scotch Sabbatarian agitator.

To the opera to hear Grisi.  The king, William the Fourth, was in his box; also the Princess Victoria, with the Duchess of Kent.  The king tapped with his white-gloved hand on the ledge of the box when he was pleased with the singing.—­To a morning concert and heard the real Paganini.  To one of the lesser theatres and heard a monologue by the elder Mathews, who died a year or two after this time.  To another theatre, where I saw Listen in Paul Pry.  Is it not a relief that I am abstaining from description of what everybody has heard described?

To Windsor.  Machinery to the left of the road.  Recognized it instantly, by recollection of the plate in “Rees’s Cyclopedia,” as Herschel’s great telescope.—­Oxford.  Saw only its outside.  I knew no one there, and no one knew me.—­Blenheim,—­the Titians best remembered of its objects on exhibition.  The great Derby day of the Epsom races.  Went to the race with a coach-load of friends and acquaintances.  Plenipotentiary, the winner, “rode by P. Connelly.”  So says Herring’s picture of him, now before me.  Chestnut, a great “bullock” of a horse, who easily beat the twenty-two that started.  Every New England deacon ought to see one Derby day to learn what sort of a world this is he lives in.  Man is a sporting as well as a praying animal.

Stratford-on-Avon.  Emotions, but no scribbling of name on walls.—­Warwick.  The castle.  A village festival, “The Opening of the Meadows,” a true exhibition of the semi-barbarism which had come down from Saxon times.—­Yorkshire.  “The Hangman’s Stone.”  Story told in my book called the “Autocrat,” etc.  York Cathedral.—­Northumberland.  Alnwick Castle.  The figures on the walls which so frightened my man John when he ran away from Scotland in his boyhood.  Berwick-on-Tweed.  A regatta going on; a very pretty show.  Scotland.  Most to be remembered, the incomparable loveliness of Edinburgh.—­Sterling.  The view of the Links of Forth from the castle.  The whole country full of the romance of history and poetry.  Made one acquaintance in Scotland, Dr. Robert Knox, who asked my companion and myself to breakfast.  I was treated to five entertainments in Great Britain:  the breakfast just mentioned; lunch with Mrs. Macadam,—­the good old lady gave me bread, and not a stone; dinner with Mr. Vaughan; one with Mr. Stanley, the surgeon; tea with Mr. Clift,—­for all which attentions I was then and am still grateful, for they were more than I had any claim to expect.  Fascinated with Edinburgh.  Strolls by Salisbury Crag; climb to the top of Arthur’s Seat; delight of looking up at the grand old castle, of looking down on Holyrood Palace, of watching the groups on Calton Hill, wandering in the quaint old streets and sauntering on the sidewalks of the noble avenues, even at that time adding beauty to the new city.  The weeks