'tis the subject that will interest you most
of any I could find. First, then, I am very well, rather tired, and
sitting at an inn window, in a dull, dark, handsome square in
Glasgow. My fortnight in Edinburgh is over, and a short fortnight
it has been, what with rehearsals, riding, sitting for my bust, and
acting. The few hurried glimpses I have caught of my friends have
been like dreams, and now that I have parted from them, no more to
meet them there certainly, the whole seems to me like mere
bewilderment, and I repeat to myself in my thoughts, hardly
believing it, that the next time that I visit Edinburgh I shall not
find the dear companionship of my cousins nor the fond affection of
Mrs. Henry Siddons. This will be a severe loss to me; Edinburgh
will, I fear, be without its greatest charm, and it will remain to
be proved whether these lovely scenes that I have so admired and
delighted in owed all their incomparable fascination to their
intrinsic beauty, or to that most pleasurable frame of mind I
enjoyed at the same time, the consciousness of the kind regard of
the excellent human beings among whom I lived.

You will naturally expect me to say something of my theatrical
experiences in the modern Athens. Our houses have been very fine,
our audiences (as is their national nature) very cold; but upon the
whole I believe they were well pleased with us, notwithstanding the
damping influence of the newspapers, which have one and all been
unfavorable to me. The deathlike stillness of the audience, as it
afforded me neither rest nor stimulus, distressed me a good deal;
which, I think I need not tell you, the newspaper criticisms did
not. I was surprised, in reading them, to find how very generally
their strictures were confined to my external disadvantages,--my
diminutive stature and defective features; and that these far-famed
northern critics discussed these rather than what I should have
expected them to bestow their consideration upon, the dramatic
artist's conception of character, and his (or her) execution of
that conception. But had their verdicts been still more severe, I
have a sufficient consolation in two notes of Sir Walter Scott's,
written to the editor of one of the papers, Ballantyne, his own
particular friend, which the latter sent me,