if it had been the dead body of her child.

Sir Adam Ferguson is a delightful person, whose quick, bustling
manner forms a striking contrast to Walter Scott's quiet tone of
voice and deliberate enunciation I have also made acquaintance with
Jeffrey, who came and called upon us the other morning, and, I
hear, like some of his fellow-townsmen, complains piteously that I
am not prettier. Indeed, I am very sorry for it, and I heartily
wish I were; but I did not think him handsome either, and I wonder
why he is not handsomer? though I don't care so much about his want
of beauty as he seems to do about mine. But I am running on at a
tremendous rate, and quite forget that I have traveled upward of
forty miles to-day, and that I promised my mother, whenever I
could, to go to bed early. Good-by, my dear Mrs. Jameson. I hope
you will be able to make out this scrawl, and to decipher that I am
yours affectionately,

F. A. KEMBLE.

Of the proverbial frigidity of the Edinburgh public I had been
forewarned, and of its probably disheartening effect upon myself. Mrs.
Harry Siddons had often told me of the intolerable sense of depression
with which it affected Mrs. Siddons, who, she said, after some of her
grandest outbursts of passion, to which not a single expression of
applause or sympathy had responded, exhausted and breathless with the
effort she had made, would pant out in despair, under her breath,
"Stupid people, stupid people!" Stupid, however, they undoubtedly were
not, though, as undoubtedly, their want of excitability and
demonstrativeness diminished their own pleasure by communicating itself
to the great actress and partially paralyzing her powers. That this
habitual reserve sometimes gave way to very violent exhibitions of
enthusiasm, the more fervent from its general repression, there is no
doubt; and I think it was in Edinburgh that my friend, Mr. Harness, told
me the whole of the sleep-walking scene in "Macbeth" had once been so
vehemently encored that my aunt was literally obliged to go over it a
second time, before the piece was allowed to proceed.

Scott's opinion of my acting, which would, of course, have been very
valuable to me, let it have been what it would, was written to his
friend and editor (_eheu!_), Ballantyne, who was also the editor of one
of the principal Edinburgh papers, in