I commit my children to your friendly protection, with a full and perfect reliance on the goodness you have always manifested towards me.
"Your ever faithful and affectionate
The mother's heart could have hardly had a foreboding of the second affliction about to fall on her then. A few weeks after she had taken her departure from Marlborough Street, Sally describes to Patty Wilkinson, who had accompanied Mrs. Siddons, picnics and parties she and her friend Dorothy Place had attended, much to their amusement and delight. The girl gives an account also of her brother Henry's marriage with Miss Murray, who, she says, "looked very beautiful in a white chip hat, with a lace cap under it, her long dark pelisse tied together with purple bows ready for travelling," and mentions how she and Dorothy "laughed uproariously" at a play they had "attended." Yet death had already laid his hand on this bright young life.
Mrs. Siddons proceeded on her melancholy journey, stopping to pay a visit to Shakespeare's house at Stratford, and thence to North Wales, where, at Conway Castle and Penman Mawr, they did the tourist business of gazing at sunsets through ruined windows, and listening to Welsh harpers harping below. "In that romantic time and place," Campbell tells us in his ambiguous way, Mrs. Siddons "honoured the humblest poet of her acquaintance by remembering him; and, let the reader blame or pardon my egotism as he may think fit, I cannot help transcribing what the Diarist adds: Mrs. Siddons said: 'I wish that Campbell were here.'"
