ve womanhood, without one touch of
wantonness or guile. It presented a woman innately good and radiantly
lovely, who amid severest trials spontaneously and unconsciously acted
with the ingenuous grace of childhood, the grandest generosity, the most
constant spirit. The essence of Imogen's nature is fidelity. Faithful to
love, even till death, she is yet more faithful to honour. Her scorn of
falsehood is overwhelming; but she resents no injury, harbours no
resentment, feels no spite, murmurs at no misfortune. From every blow of
evil she recovers with a gentle patience that is infinitely pathetic.
Passionate and acutely sensitive, she yet seems never to think of
antagonising her affliction or to falter in her unconscious fortitude.
She has no reproach--but only a grieved submission--for the husband who
has wronged her by his suspicions and has doomed her to death. She
thinks only of him, not of herself, when she beholds him, as she
supposes, dead at her side; but even then she will submit and
endure--she will but "weep and sigh" and say twice o'er "a century of
prayers." She is only sorry for the woman who was her deadly enemy and
who hated her for her goodness--so often the incitement of mortal
hatred. She loses without a pang the heirship to a kingdom. An ideal
thus poised in goodness and radiant in beauty might well have
sustained--as undoubtedly it did sustain--the inspiration of
Shakespeare.

Adelaide Neilson, with her uncommon graces of person, found it easy to
make the chamber scene and the cave scenes pictorial and charming. Her
ingenuous trepidation and her pretty wiles, as Fidele, in the cave,
were finely harmonious with the character and arose from it like odour
from a flower. The innocence, the glee, the feminine desire to please,
the pensive grace, the fear, the weakness, and the artless simplicity
made up a state of gracious fascination. It was, however, in the revolt
against Iachimo's perfidy, in the fall before Pisanio's fatal
disclosure, and in the frenzy over the supposed death of Leonatus that
the actress put forth electrical power and showed how strong emotion,
acting through the imagination, can transfigure the being and give to
love or sorrow a monumental semblance and an everlasting voice. The
power was harmonious with the individuality and did not mar its grace.
There was a perfect preservation of sustained identity, and this was
expressed with such a sweet elocution and such an airy freedom of
mo