of the stage. She had for some time been
wishing to realise ten thousand pounds, and
escape the fatigues of her profession. Latterly
her enunciation had grown too slow, her straining
for effect too visible. Yet there were regrets
that she whispered to herself and bosom friends.
To Mrs. Piozzi she said:

"This last season of my acting I feel as if I
were mounting the first step of a ladder
conducting me to the other world."

She did her best, however, to make her sunset
a tropical one; for she performed fifty-seven
times in her last season, and in fourteen
favourite characters: Lady Macbeth, Mrs.
Beverley, Lady Constance, Elvira, Euphrasia,
Queen Katharine, Isabella (Fatal Marriage),
Isabella (Measure for Measure), Belvidera,
Hermione, Volumnia, and Mrs. Haller.

She chose for her final play Macbeth; the
Thane's dark and dangerous wife being one of
her greatest triumphs, although play-goers
asserted that Mrs. Pritchard had had more dignity
and more compass, strength, and melody of
voice. In the sleeping-scene the older critics
claimed for Mrs. Pritchard sighs of deeper
agony, and a voice more sleepy and more
articulate. Yet was her acting divine. She moved
like a prophetess; her beautiful face was the
interpreter of a noble mind. She moved like a
queen, and spoke like a Pythoness. As Hazlitt
says finely: "The enthusiasm she excited had
something idolatrous about it. We can
conceive nothing grander. She embodied, to our
imagination, the fables of mythology of the
heroic and deified mortals of elder time. She
was not less than a goddess or than a prophetess
inspired by the gods. Power was seated on her
brow; passion radiated from her breast as from
a shrine. She was Tragedy personified." The
public was gazing for the last time on her who,
as Campbell said, had "increased the heart's
capacity for tender, intense, and lofty feelings."

On the farewell night, her old inspiration
seemed to have returned. She was supernatural
from the moment she instilled into the chieftain's
ear the first poisonous thought of evil till the
time when, a mere wreck of remorse and
disappointed ambition, a miserable queen, she
moved like a phantom of the night, muttering
fragments of her dreams all pervaded by the
one racking thought. Her eyes were open, but
they were consciousless and blank. The soul
was absent, and in torture. When she rubbed
her thin white hands in horrible remembrance
of the blood that had once bathed them, the
house shuddered with an ague fit of horror and
of pity.

At the close of this scene the applause was
frantic and ungovernable. Many persons stood
upon the benches and, dreading an anti-climax,
shouted requests that the performance might
close when Mrs. Siddons left the stage. An
actor then came forward and at once promised
that this wish should be complied with.

The curtain was dropped for twenty minutes,
then rose, and discovered Mrs. Siddons, dressed
simply in white, sitting at a table. She came
forward through a tornado of applause, which
prevented her speaking for some time. When
the lull spread, she moved forward in her own
queenly way, and delivered the following
address, written for her by her nephew, Mr.
Horace Twiss:

Who has not felt, how growing use endears
The fond remembrance of our former years?
Who has not sigh'd, when doom'd to leave at last
The hopes of youth, the habits of the past,
The thousand ties and interests, that impart
A second nature to the human heart,
And, wreathing round it close, like tendrils, climb
Blooming in age, and sanctified by time?

Yes! at this moment crowd upon my mind
Scenes-of bright days for ever left behind,
Bewildering visions of enraptured youth,
When hope and fancy wore the hues of truth,
And long-forgotten years, that almost seem
The faded traces of a morning dream!
Sweet are those mournful thoughts: for they
     renew
The pleasing sense of all I owe to you,
For each inspiring smile, and soothing tear—
For those full honours of my long career,
That cheer'd my earliest hope, and chased my latest
     fear!

And though, for me, those tears shall flow no
     more,
And the warm sunshine of your smile is o'er,—
Though the bright beams are fading fast away
That shone unclouded through my summer day,—
Yet, grateful Memory shall reflect their light
O'er the dim shadows of the coming night,
And lend to later life a softer tone,
A moonlight tint—a lustre of her own.

Judges and friends! to whom the magic strain
Of Nature's feeling never spoke in vain,
Perhaps your hearts, when years have glided by,
And past emotions wake a fleeting sigh,
May think on her, whose lips have pour'd so long
The charmed sorrows of your Shakespeare's
     song:—
On her, who parting to return no more,
Is now the mourner she but seem'd before,—
Herself subdued, resigns the melting spell,
And breathes, with swelling heart, her long, her last
     Farewell!

Towards the close of the address Mrs. Siddons
became much agitated, and when, after some
pauses, it ended, Kemble, in his grand Roman
way, came and led his sister from the stage amid
whirlwinds of applause.

Poor Mrs. Siddons! She had had a grand
career of almost unalloyed triumph; but still
calumny had often stung her. The misdoings
of a bad sister, who had had read lectures at
Dr. Graham's quack Temple of Health, and
afterwards tried to poison herself in Westminster
Abbey, were all laid at her door. She was
also accused of mean thrift, and of allowing
her old father to become a petitioner for alms.

These slanders were, we have every reason to
believe, utterly untrue. Mrs. Siddons, to judge
from her letters, and the accounts of her intimate
friends, seems to have been a high-minded,