_Monday, August 15th, Southampton._--After breakfast practised till
eleven, and then went to rehearsal; after which Emily Fitzhugh came
for me, and we drove out to Bannisters. Poor Mrs. Fitzhugh was
quite overcome at seeing my father, whom she has not seen since
Mrs. Siddons's death; we left her with him to talk over Campbell's
application to her for my aunt's letters. He has behaved badly
about the whole business, and I hope Mrs. Fitzhugh will not let him
have them.... When we came in I went and looked at Lawrence's
picture of my aunt in the dining-room (now in the National Gallery;
it was painted for Mrs. Fitzhugh). It is a fine rich piece of
coloring, but there is a want of ease and grace in the figure, and
of life in the countenance, and altogether I thought it looked like
a handsome dark cow in a coral necklace. O ox-eyed Juno! forgive
the thought.... At the theater the house was good; the play was
"Romeo and Juliet," and I played well. While I was changing my
dress for the tomb scene--putting on my grave-clothes, in fact--I
had desired my door to be shut, for I hate that lugubrious
funeral-dirge. How I do hate, and have always hated, that stage
funeral business, which I never see without a cold shudder at its
awful unfitness. I can't conceive how that death's pageant was ever
tolerated in a theater. [I think Mrs. Bellamy, in her "Memoirs,"
mentions that it was first introduced as a piece of new sensation
when she and Garrick were dividing the town with the efforts of
their rival managership.] At present the pretext for it is to give
the necessary time for setting the churchyard scene and for Juliet
to change her dress, which she has no business to do according to
the text, for it expressly says that she shall be buried in all her
finest attire, according to her country's custom. In spite of which
I was always arrayed in long white muslin draperies and veils, with
my head bound up, corpse fashion, and lying, as my aunt had
stretched me, on the black bier in the vault, with all my white
folds drawn like carved stone robes along my figure and round my
feet, with my hands folded and my eyes shut. I have had some bad
nervous minutes, sometimes fancying, "Suppose I should really die
while I am lying here, making believe to be dead!" and imagining