lad I am I have once seen it, and can never forget it; nor the
broad, crisping Clyde, with its blossoming bean-fields, its jagged
rocks and precipices, its gray cliffs and waving woods, and the
mountain streams of clear, bright, fairy water, rushing and
rejoicing down between the hills to fling themselves into its
bosom; and Dumbarton Castle, with its snowy roses of Stuart memory!
How glad I am that I have seen it all, if I should never see it
again! And "Rob Roy" brought all this and ever so much more to my
mind. If I had been a mountaineer, how I should have loved my land!
I wish I had some blood-right to love Scotland as I do.
Unfortunately, all these associations did not reconcile me to the
cockney-Scotch of our Covent Garden actors, and Mackay's Bailie
Nicol Jarvie was not the least tender of my reminiscences. [It was
at a public dinner in Edinburgh, at which Walter Scott and Mackay
were guests, that, in referring to the admirable impersonation of
the Bailie, Scott's habitual caution with regard to the authorship
of the Waverley Novels for a moment lost its balance, and in his
warm commendation of the great comedian's performances a sentence
escaped him which appeared conclusive to many of those present, if
they were still in doubt upon the subject, that he was their
writer.] Miss Inveraretie was a cruel Diana, but who would not
be?...

_Saturday, 14th._--I rode at two with my father. Passed Tyrone
Power; what a clever, pleasant man he is; Count d'Orsay joined us;
he was riding a most beautiful mare; and then James Macdonald, _cum
multus aliis_, and I was quite dead, and almost cross, with
cold.... After dinner I came up to my room, and set to work like a
little galley slave, and by tea-time I had finished my play. "Oh,
joy forever! my task is done!" I came down rather tipsy, and
proclaimed my achievement. After tea I began copying the last act,
but my father desired me to read it to them; so, at about half-past
nine, I began. My mother cried much; what a nice woman she is! My
father, Dall, and John agreed that it was beautiful, though I
believe the two first excellent judges were fast asleep during the
latter part of the reading, which was perhaps why they liked it so
much. At the end my mother said to me, "I am proud of you, my
dear;" a