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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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