d,
which begins this season to look the whimsical, gay, odd
cabin, that we had chalked out. I have been obliged to
relinquish Stark's plan, which was greatly too expensive. So
I have made the old farmhouse my _corps de logis_, with some
outlying places for kitchen, laundry, and two spare
bedrooms, which run along the east wall of the farm-court,
not without some picturesque effect. A perforated cross, the
spoils of the old kirk of Galashiels, decorates an advanced
door, and looks very well. This little sly bit of sacrilege
has given our spare rooms the name of _the chapel_. I
earnestly invite you to a _pew_ there, which you will find
as commodious for the purpose of a nap as you have ever
experienced when, under the guidance of old Mrs. Smollett,
you were led to St. George's, Edinburgh.

I have been recommending to John Kemble (I dare say without
any chance of success) to peruse a MS. Tragedy of Maturin's
author of Montorio: it is one of those things which will
either succeed greatly or be damned gloriously, for its
merits are marked, deep, and striking, and its faults of a
nature obnoxious to ridicule. He had our old friend Satan
(none of your sneaking St. John Street devils, but the
arch-fiend himself) brought on the stage bodily. I believe I
have exorcised the foul fiend--for, though in reading he was
a most terrible fellow, I feared for his reception in
public. The last act is ill contrived. He piddles (so to
speak) through a cullender, and divides the whole horrors of
the catastrophe (though God wot there are enough of them)
into a kind of drippity-droppity of four or five scenes,
instead of inundating the audience with them at once in the
finale, with a grand "_gardez l'eau_." With all this, which
I should say had I written the thing myself, it is grand and
powerful; the language most animated and poetical; and the
characters {p.008} sketched with a masterly enthusiasm.
Many thanks for Captain Richard Falconer.[3] To your
kindness I owe the two books in the world I most longed to
see, not so much for their intrinsic merits, as because they
bring back with vivid associations the sentiments of my
childhood--I might almost say infancy. Nothing ever
disturbed my feelings more than when, sitting by the old oak
table, m