but by no means as convenient or
capacious as our old rumble. Oh, these vanities! How we sacrifice
everything to them!

_Thursday, 2d._ ... Rode out with my father. The whole world was
abroad in the sunshine, like so many flies. My mother was walking
with John and Henry, and Henry Greville. I should like to tell him
two words of my mind on the subject of lending "Notre Dame de
Paris" about to women. At any rate, we vulgar females are not as
much accustomed to mental dram-drinking as his fine-lady friends,
and don't stand that sort of thing so well.... In the evening we
went to the theater to see "The Haunted Tower." Youth and first
impressions are wonderful magicians. (I forget whether the music of
this piece was by Storace or Michael Kelly.) This was an opera
which I had heard my father and mother talk of forever. I went full
of expectation accordingly, and was entirely disappointed. The
meagerness and triteness of the music and piece astonished me.
After the full orchestral accompaniments, the richly harmonized
concerted pieces and exquisite melodies lavished on us in our
modern operas, these simple airs and their choruses and mean
finales produce an effect from their poverty of absolute musical
starvation.

GREAT RUSSELL STREET, January 31, 1832.
MY DEAREST H---- G----,

You are coming to England, and you will certainly not do so again
without coming to us. My father and mother, you know, speak by me
when I assure you that a visit from you would give us all the
greatest pleasure.... Do not come late in the season to us, because
at present we do not know whether June or July may take us out of
town.... With my scheme of going to America, I think I can look the
future courageously in the face. It is something to hold one's
fortune in one's own hands; if the worst comes to the worst it is
but another year's drudgery, and the whereabouts really matters
little.... We hear that the cholera is in Edinburgh. I cannot help
thinking with the deepest anxiety of those I love there, and I
imagine with sorrow that beautiful, noble city, those breezy hills,
those fresh, sea-weedy shores and coasts breathed upon by that dire
pestilence. The city of the winds, where the purifying currents of
keen air sweep through every