—a character, be it observed, that I believe his own times to have not unfrequently exhibited. An estimate has been made, in which I entirely concur, that places the cultivated female of the middle of the seventeenth century greatly above her successors. For this fine picture of the sex we were indebted to the lives of the Hutchinsons.1 But Milton himself has left us, in immortal verse, sketches of some ladies of his acquaintance by no means inferior to the heroine of his Masque. Her, for instance, of whom he writes:

6

Thy care is fix'd, and zealously attends

To fill thy odorous lamp with deeds of light,
And hope that reaps not shame.'

And that nearer object of his admiration, who, visiting his slumbers

'Came vested all in white pure as her mind :
Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight,
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear, as in no face with more delight.'

Such we may fairly presume his Dowager Countess of Derby to have been, and such the lamented Marchioness of Winchester. Ben Jonson would supply us with other instances were they necessary upon the present occasion. Human nature is interested that the high-souled heroine of Comus should not be a creature of the fancy merely. The Lady of Comus is a high Platonist, and the monstrous rout of Čomus are received as of times purely pagan; but the close of the drama introduces us to the splendid festivity of a feudal chieftain. The heaven that had tried the youthful progeny of this noble is the Christian heaven, and their faith has been subjected to trial equally with their truth and patience. The spirit, however, quits them at last for the Gardens of Hesperus; and celestial Cupid holds his Psyche entranced until that union is permitted from which love and joy are to be born-where, again, he plainly shadows that operation of divine love upon the human soul from which eternal happiness was to proceed as the crown of terrestrial virtue.

1 See the 13th volume of The Edinburgh Review, and the beautiful article upon this subject, which contains the estimate above alluded to,

But an interest such as has been shadowed out, and a sublime and eloquent woman seen across an orchestra of fiddlers, with all the glitter of glass chandeliers, and all the vulgarity of a mixed audience as a chorus !—O no, such things are not theatrical; they belong to purer times, and the pastoral retreats of splendid rank and exalted virtue.

CHAPTER XVII

THE management of Drury Lane Theatre seemed to have no characteristic but indifference or sameness. Mrs. Siddons, in the season of 1786-87, repeated her former characters on her accustomed nights of acting, and on the 22nd of November Dodsley's Cleone was revived, and repeated on the 24th; but it then sank into its former repose, from which the maternal agonies of Mrs. Siddons (who must have been an eagle to a wren compared with the original heroine) were not mighty enough to preserve this affecting play, written by a most amiable and able man. I incline to think that even in this commercial land there is a reluctance to award the honours of letters to any of the sons of trade, however they may have been gifted by nature, cultivated by youthful or mature application. The bookseller might be considered an innovator among the makers of books. The early efforts of this pleasing writer had the honour to be patronised by Pope. Dodsley was often reminded by the petulant professors of polite letters that he had once worn a livery in the service of the Honourable Mrs. Lowther, but he soon exchanged it for that of the Muses, and honoured them by his offerings. Few men have placed upon our shelves productions of greater value than his fine collections of old plays and modern poems, with the admirable compendium of annual life called Dodsley's Register. That he should have retired from business with a handsome fortune was to be expected from the discernment of his mind and the prudence of his conduct. Nor was he parsimonious as to his authors. Mr. Burke, by the contract which I have seen, was to have had £600 for An Essay towards an Abridgment of English

History to the Reign of Queen Anne. It was stipulated, whimsically enough, that it should be printed in quarto, exactly like Jarvis's Don Quixote. Hughes, his printer, does not seem to have composed more than forty-eight pages of this work, of which Burke, however, wrote somewhere about two hundred and fifty of Jarvis's pages. I presume the appearance of Hume led Burke to view his own composition as rather oratory than history-it is a commentary upon events with which the reader is presumed to be already acquainted, and, I think, considerably resembles the Letters of Bolingbroke on History. However superior in some respects, more gorgeous even than St. John himself, imitation of that noble Lord clung to him through life, though he has spoken slightingly of him in his latter works, and thinks his master's writings have taken no hold upon his mind. For this digression, leading to such a genius as Burke, I apologise not to the admirers of Mrs. Siddons, whom that great man has immortalised by naming her with Garrick in his work on the French Revolution.

Our great actress presented her friends with Cymbeline as her first benefit, on the 29th of January, 1787. She performed Imogen in such a way as to at once satisfy the student of Shakespeare that if ever complete justice could be done to the loveliest of his female characters, that wonder was then achieved. The bad taste of former times was accustomed to lend itself to a miserable series of keen or coarse invectives against the sex. The satirist has dressed the libels in verse, and the daily delinquency of the man still dares to mutter the tuneful fragments upon the frailty of woman. But the real truth is, that absolute steadiness of affection, enduring all tests, and pardoning all neglects and even injuries, resides only in woman.

The essence of the sex, the pure and perfect chrysolite, is to be found in Shakespeare's Imogen. Nor is she a creature of the imagination. Neither is she the child alone of refinement. In humble life, and in the dangerous services of our army and navy, the village girl assumes the garb of the other sex, and fights and bleeds and dies beside the object of her untutored affection. Imogen, too, is the native of all climes.

In the first scene of the character Mrs. Siddons was fully aware of its almost infinite variety. Contempt for the affected courtesy of the Queen, the ardour of her affection for Posthumus, the delicacy of their interchange of tokens, the brutal rating of the King, answered quickly as in despair, and the perfect tone of her reply to Cymbeline's exclamation, 'What !-art thou mad?'

'Imo. Almost, Sir; heav'n restore me !-would I were

A neat-herd's daughter, and my Leonatus

Our neighbour-shepherd's son !'

All these points, with the sarcasm as to Cloten expressed in language so truly feminine, opened a delineation which continued equally true in every feature to the end—

'I would they were in Afric both together,

Myself by with a needle, that I might prick

The goer-back!'

A scene succeeds this much too short to take deep effect upon the audience, though it is beautiful in the extreme. It is on the departure of Posthumus, and between Imogen and Pisanio-positively unrivalled in ardour and delicacy.

Few people would be at a loss to conceive how finely Mrs. Siddons would receive Iachimo, when he comes over upon his villainous enterprise-her appearance, as abating, from his poisons, somewhat of her confidence in her husband, and the amazing scorn and returning reliance which compel him to change his calumnies into panegyric. Imogen is nothing like the cautious Macduff; she does not say—

Such welcome and unwelcome things at once,

'Tis hard to reconcile.'

She easily considers him to make amends for the freedom of his former speeches. Her virtue has no fierceness about it, and, knowing herself superior to all temptation, she is no longer indignant when she has brought her assailant to entertain for her a suitable respect. He comes from Posthumus, and at length speaks him truly. Her heart satisfies her reason, and his villainy immediately suggests to him a safer course. Iago himself is not so pure a rascal as Iachimo.