corrupters of mankind, seem to have depraved her. I shal be glad to see her again. Mrs. Siddons and I talked of plays, and she told me her intention of exhibiting this winter the characters of Constance, Katharine, and Isabella, in Shakespeare.'

When Mrs. Siddons came into the room there happened to be no chair ready for her. 'Madam,' said Johnson, with a smile, 'you who so often occasion a want of seats to other people will the more easily excuse the want of one yourself." He inquired with which of Shakespeare's characters she was most pleased? Upon her answering that she thought the character of Queen Katharine, in Henry the Eighth, the most natural-'I think so too, Madam,' said he; and whenever you perform it, I will once more hobble out to the theatre myself.'

Little as the Doctor could either see or hear in a theatre, I regret that he did not witness the performance of Katharine by Mrs. Siddons. Johnson had told her that "her great predecessor, Mrs. Pritchard, was in common life a vulgar idiot, who used to talk of her "gownd"; but that on the stage she seemed to be inspired by gentility and understanding.' Inspiration indeed! unless we are to suppose that in private she condescended to slip-slop, and erred, not from ignorance, but carelessness and habit. I have known great knowledge, oddly enough, tinged by early laxity of pronunciation. The reader may reflect how often, from those who must be aware of the true word, he has heard a pantomime called pantomine.

CHAPTER XIII

THE reader will have observed the peculiar attention paid to Mrs. Siddons last season by their Majesties, who made a point of seeing her in all the characters which she had sustained. The honour of such patronage, so marked and persevering, was reserved for our great actress exclusively. A royal command introduced her second season in the character of Isabella. The late King was an excellent judge of acting, and might be said to be well studied in the respective schools of Quin and of Garrick. He here found the dignified declamation of the old school combined with the exquisite pathos of the new. I cannot doubt, however, that it was the exact propriety of her utterance that led to the appointment of Mrs. Siddons to be reading preceptress to the Princesses.

The honours paid by all ranks to the delightful ornament of the stage kept, however, in due bounds; the enthusiasm. neither became fanatical nor profane-it placed a few indifferent pictures and worse likenesses upon the walls of our dwelling-houses, was most free and bounteous in presents of various kinds; but it stopped on this side idolatry, and the drama yielded the votive palm to speculative politics.

The Republicans of the City, I remember, did not rest here as to the historian Catherine Macaulay. She could discover that the prelates of Charles the First paid him an impious flattery.' But I heard of no protest from the modern Clio, when her high priest, Dr. Wilson, set up her statue in the parish church of St. Stephen, Walbrook; the fierce Moloch of regicide in the very sanctuary of mercy.

'Within his sanctuary itself their shrines
Abominations-and with cursed things
His holy rites and solemn feasts profan'd,'
Paradise Lost.

But our doting Doctor did still more: he dedicated a temple to his idol, for her residence, not to her memory, and presented to her a mansion called Alfred House. (Alfred, a patriot certainly, but unluckily a king.) He furnished it with splendour, supplied a long retinue of servants, and stored the library with the literature of freedom. At Alfred House she was enthroned on her returning birthdays, and incensed by odes recited by gentlemen, and medals presented by our Doctor himself. But one little speck presented itself to the eye; the celestial Dr. Graham had restored the fair historian to health, and was, therefore, allowed to lay at her feet a copy of his modest works. He approached, it appears, on her weak side, for she finished by marrying his brother. The reverend Doctor, as is usual in these cases of literary devotion, 'breathed one sigh of ineffectual tenderness,' and set himself with reluctance entirely at liberty.

The attentions paid to Mrs. Siddons, as they were reasonable and temperate, were quite unexceptionable and more lasting.

Of her performances now, it is only necessary to repeat the order in which they succeeded each other; namely, Shore, Euphrasia, Calista, and Belvidera, and to add that her attraction did not in the least decline; and that the rival theatre, by whatever talents supported, and great indeed they were, was doomed to see a long and unbroken line of splendid carriages, in a sort of birthday procession, slowly pass the foot of Bow Street, which lent its space, too, at the close of the night to the noble vehicles of those who were at the other theatre.

In the midst of these triumphs, I will not omit to mention one opportunity afforded Miss E. Kemble of acting Rosalind, on the 16th of October. Lee Lewes wanted to play Touchstone, in humble imitation of Woodward, but the result, I believe, never transpired; and as to the lovely Rosalind, she was smothered, whatever power she possessed,

except when Kemble himself called upon her in the Black Prince, and the New Way to Pay Old Debts. Her elder sister kept her rank, but did not extend her range, by acting with Mrs. Siddons in Alicia and Almeria.

Mrs. Siddons had hitherto left Shakespeare untouched, and the first character which she acted was selected as affording some relief to her frame, really exhausted by the dreadful fatigues she had undergone, with no other intermission than was afforded by her travelling from place to place. However honourable to her, the intimacies she was compelled to cultivate with the noble, the polite, or the learned of the sister kingdoms called for no slight efforts of those spirits which, had it been practicable, should all have been reserved for the theatre. The part, therefore, thus considerately chosen was Isabella in Measure for Measure, which she acted for the first time in London on Monday, the 3d of November.

They who judged only by the bustle and noise, the rage or protracted sufferings of a heroine, considered Isabella to call for something less than the powers of this actress. But if measure is to be given for measure, what lower talent could possibly express this 'ensky'd and sainted virgin,' whose inborn purity creates a dignity beyond that of power, and a logic so firm and convincing that it even hides, at times, the poetical beauties of its own diction? The moral energy of Isabella is, perhaps, unequalled in the volumes of Shakespeare. Portia's solemn eulogy upon mercy is nothing to the truly dramatic charm of what follows:

'O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

Could great men thunder

As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet;

For every pelting, petty officer

Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder.-

Merciful heaven!

Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt

Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak

Than the soft myrtle: But man, proud man,

Dress'd in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.'

The Duke in this play is a character of great moral wisdom, and Shakespeare had, from the beginning, determined to unite him suitably to Isabel. But lest so much staid gravity and wisdom should be thought_too aged for such a purpose, he makes, in the very outset, Friar Thomas throw out a suspicion that his very retirement has love for its motive. This the Duke disclaims in good set terms'Duke. No! holy father; throw away that thought: Believe not that the dribbling dart of love

Can pierce a complete bosom.'

He yields at last to a wisdom and virtue fully proved, and worthy of the throne. The poet, at the close of the play, touches the subject very guardedly—

'Dear Isabel,

I have a motion much imports your good;
Whereto if you'll a willing ear incline

What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.'

It was at one time a good deal the fashion to end all comedies with a 'Call in the fiddles,' or a 'Strike up, pipers,' -and our modern stage cooks could not permit Shakespeare to remain at the close the master of his own creatures. See how awfully it is now managed.

'For thee, sweet saint,-if for a brother sav'd,

From that most holy shrine thou wert devote to,
Thou deign to spare some portion of thy love,
Thy duke, thy friar, tempts thee from thy vow.'

And then we have the 'spirit shining in its right orb,' blessing in course both prince and people,' and a royal maxim to boot

'To rule ourselves, before we rule mankind :'

all which may, perhaps, come from the Muse of Charles. Gildon, but really is not worth inquiry.

I take the liberty to smile at the stage discovery of the Duke in the last scene of this play, with all his regal paraphernalia, with difficulty concealed under the outstretched garments of the friar-as if it was not the man who was recognised but the clothes. At this rate, let the machinist also contrive for him a portable chair of state which may safely be hooded with the robes, and a small