e this is! The house was very fine, and a pleasanter
audience than the first night. Found a letter from Mrs. Jameson
after the play, with an account of Pasta's "Anna Bolena." How I
wish I could see it!

_Wednesday, August 3d._--Rose at seven, and went down to the sea to
bathe. The tide was out, and I had to wait till the nymphs had
filled my bath-tub.... At the theater in the evening, the play was
"The Stranger." The house not so good as last night, and the
audience were disagreeably noisy....

_Thursday, August 4th._--They will not let me take my sea-bath
every morning; they say it makes me too weak. Do they mean in the
head, I wonder?... "Let the sanguine then take warning, and the
disheartened take courage, for to every hope and every fear, to
every joy and every sorrow, there comes a last day," which is but a
didactic form of dear Mademoiselle Descuillier's conjuring of our
impatiences: "Cela viendra, ma chere, cela viendra, car tout vient
dans ce monde; cela passera, ma chere, cela passera, car tout passe
dans ce monde." ... I finished my drawing, and copied some of "The
Star of Seville." I wonder if it will ever be acted? I think I
should like to see a play of mine acted. In the evening at the
theater, the play was "Isabella." The house was very full, and I
played well. The wretched manager will not afford us a green baize
for our tragedies, and we faint and fall and die upon bare boards,
and my unhappy elbows are bruised black and blue with their
carpetless stage, barbarians that they be!

_Friday, August 5th._--Down to the sea at seven o'clock; the tide
was far out, the lead-colored strand, without its bright
foam-fringes, looked bleak and dreary; it was not expected to be
batheable till eleven, and as I had not breakfasted, I could not
wait till then. Lingered on the shore, as Tom Tug says, thinking of
nothing at all, but inhaling the fresh air and delicious sea-smell.
I stood and watched a party of pleasure put off from the shore,
consisting of a basket of fuel, two baskets of provisions, a
cross-looking, thin, withered, bony woman, wrapped in a large
shawl, and with boots thick enough to have kept her dry if she had
walked through the sea from Plymouth to Mount Edgecombe. Her
_tete-a-tete_ companion was a short, thick, squat, stum