assive ear--

"Are you a _man_?
This is the very painting of your fear!
This is the air-drawn dagger, which, you said,
Led you to Duncan!--
Why do you make such faces? When all's done,
_You look but on a stool_!"

In those accents all else was forgotten.

But her sleep-walking scene! When shall we see its "second or its
similar?" Nothing so solemn, nothing so awful, was ever seen upon the
stage. Yet it had one fault--it was too awful. She more resembled a
majestic shade rising from the tomb than a living woman, however
disturbed by wild fear and lofty passion. It is a remarkable instance of
the genius of Shakspeare, that he here found the means of giving a human
interest to a being whom he had almost exalted to the "bad eminence" of
a magnificent fiend. In this famous soliloquy, the thoughts which once
filled and fired her have totally vanished. Ambition has died; remorse
lives in its place. The diadem has disappeared; she thinks only of the
blood that stains her for ever. She is the queen no more, but an
exhausted and unhappy woman, worn down by the stings of conscience, and
with her frame dying by the disease of her soul.

But Siddons wanted the agitation, the drooping, the timidity. She looked
a living statue. She spoke with the solemn tone of a voice from a
shrine. She stood more the sepulchral avenger of regicide than the
sufferer from its convictions. Her grand voice, her fixed and marble
countenance, and her silent step, gave the impression of a supernatural
being, the genius of an ancient oracle--a tremendous Nemesis.

I have seen all the great tragedians of my day, but I have never seen an
equal to the sublime of this extraordinary actress. I have seen beauty,
youth, touching sensibility, and powerful conception; but I never saw so
complete an union of them all--and that union was the sublime.
Shakspeare must have had some such form before his mind's eye, while he
was creating the wife of Macbeth. Some magnificent and regal
countenance, some movement of native majesty, some imaginary Siddons. He
could not have gone beyond the true. She was a living Melpomene.

The business of the War-Office was not transacted in those days with the
dispatch subsequently introduced by the honest Duke of York. After a
delay of weeks I found myself still ungazetted, grew sad, angry,
impatient; and after some consideration on the various modes of getting
rid of _ennui_, which were to be found in