GLASGOW, MONDAY, June 28, 1830. 
     MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON,

I believe that you will have felt too well convinced that I had not had a moment to spare, to be surprised at my not having sooner acknowledged your very kind letter; nothing but the incessant occupation of my time would so long have prevented me from doing so, but I embrace the opportunity which the king’s death affords me of telling you how much obliged to you I was for writing to me, and writing as you did.  I have little news to return you but what concerns myself, but I shall make no coquettish excuses about that, for I really believe ’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, and where he bears such