t a frightful undertaking for a poor girl, let
her be never so wicked!

And _the_ Lady Macbeth will never be seen again! I wish just now
that in honor of my aunt the play might be forbidden to be
performed for the next ten years. My father and myself have a
holiday at the theater--but only for the week--because of Mrs.
Siddons's death, and we are to go down to Oatlands--nobody being
there but ourselves, that is my brother and I--for the rest and
quiet and fresh air of these few days.

_Friday, June 10th._--Before three the carriage was announced, and
we started for the country. We dropped Henry at Lord Waldegrave's
and had a very pleasant drive, though the day was as various in its
moods as if we were in April instead of June. We arrived at about
six, and found Mr. C---- had been made an exception to the
"positively nobody" who was to meet us....

_Saturday, June 11th._--Read the French piece called "Une Faute,"
which half killed me with crying. It is exceedingly clever, but
altogether _too_ true, in my opinion, for real art. It is not
dramatic truth, but absolute imitation of life, and instead of the
mitigated emotion which a poetical representation of tragic events
excites, it produces a sense of positive suffering too acutely
painful for an artistic result; it is a perfectly prosaical
reproduction of the familiar vice and its inseparable misery of
modern everyday life; it wants elevation and imagination--aerial
perspective; it is close upon one, and must be agonizing to see
well acted. My studies were certainly not of the most cheerful
order, for after finishing this morbid anatomy of human hearts I
read an article in the _Phrenological Journal_ on Bouilland's
"Anatomy of the Brain," which made me feel as if my brain was stuck
full of pins and needles.

_Perhaps_ a certain amount of experience must be attained through
experiment, and if the wits of the human species are to be better
understood, governed, and preserved by the results obtained by
cutting and hacking the brains of living animals, _perhaps_ some of
our more immediate mercy is to be sacrificed to our humanity in the
lump; but if this is not the forbidden doing evil that good may
come of it, I do not know what is. One of the effects of Mr.
Bouilland's excruciating experi