text:  But how much of its colouring was my own! Was _I_ not _free?_ was I not _returning to England?_ was I not approaching scenes and forms and the realities of those recollections which even in the field of battle and at the foot of the scaffold had alternately cheered and pained delighted and distressed me?--yet which even with all their anxieties were dearer than the most gilded hopes of ambition