trickery of the stage; there needed no sceptred pall-no sweeping train, nor any of the gorgeous accompaniments of tragedy :-SHE was Tragedy! When in reading Macbeth she said, “give me the daggers!" they gleamed before our eyes. The witch scenes in the same play she rendered awfully terrific by the magic of looks and tones; she invested the weird sisters with all their own infernal fascinations; they were the serious, poetical, tragical personages which the poet intended them to be, and the wild grotesque horror of their enchantments made the blood curdle. When, in King John, she came to the passage beginning—

"If the midnight bell,

Did with his iron tongue and brazen note," &c. I remember I felt every drop of blood pause, and then run backwards through my veins with an overpowering awe and horror. No scenic representation I ever witnessed produced the hundredth part of the effect of her reading Hamlet. This tragedy was the triumph of her art. Hamlet and his mother, Polonius, Ophelia, were all there before us. Those who ever heard her give Ophelia's reply to Hamlet,

Hamlet. I loved you not.

Ophelia. I was the more deceived!

and the lines

And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows, &c.

will never forget their exquisite pathos. What a revelation of love and woe was there!-the very heart seemed to break upon the utterance.

Lear was another of her grandest efforts; but her rare talent was not confined to tragedy; none could exceed her in the power to conceive and render witty and humourous character. I thought I had never understood or felt the comic force of such parts as Polonius, Lucio, Gratiano, and Shakspeare's clowns, till I heard the dialogue from her lips: and to hear her read the Merchant of Venice and As You Like It, was hardly a less perfect treat than to hear her read Macbeth.

The following short extract from a letter of Mrs. Joanna Baillie, dated about a year before the death of Mrs. Siddons will, I am persuaded, be read with a double interest, for her sake who penned it, not less than hers who is the subject of it.

"The most agreeable thing I have to begin

with, is a visit we paid last week to Mrs. Siddons. We had met her at dinner at Mr. Rogers's a few days before, and she kindly asked us, our host and his sister, the Thursday following; an invitation which we gladly accepted, though we expected to see much decay in her powers of expression, and consequently to have our pleasure mingled with pain. Judge then of our delight when we heard her read the best scenes of Hamlet, with expression of countenance, voice, and action, that would have done honour to her best days! She was before us as an unconquerable creature, over whose astonishing gifts of nature time had no power.* She complained of her voice, which she said was not obedient to her will; but it appeared to my ear to be peculiarly true to nature, and the more so, because it had lost that deep solemnity of tone which she, perhaps, had considered as an excellence. I thought I could trace in the pity and tenderness, mixed with her awe of the ghost, the natural feelings of one who had lost dear friends, and expected to go to them soon; and her

"For time hath laid his hand so gently on her
As he too had been awed."

DE MONTFORT.

reading of that scene, (the noblest which dramatic art ever atchieved,) went to my heart as it had never done before. At the end, Mr. Rogers very justly said, 'Oh, that we could have assembled a company of young people to witness this, that they might have conveyed the memory of it down to another generation!' In short, we left her full of admiration, as well as of gratitude, that she had made such an exertion to gratify so small an audience; for, exclusive of her own family, we were but five."

She continued to exercise her power of reading and reciting long after the date of this letter, even till within a few days of her death, although her health had long been in a declining state.* She died at length on the 8th of June, 1831, after a few hours of acute suffering. She had lived nearly seventy-six years, of which forty-six were spent in the constant presence and service of the public. She was an honour to her profession, which was more honoured and honourable in her person and family than it ever was before, or will be hereafter, till the

The last play she read aloud was Henry V. only ten days before she died.

stage becomes something very different from what it now is.

And, since it has pleased some writers, (who apparently knew as little of her real situation as of her real character,) to lament over the misfortune of this celebrated woman, in having survived all her children, &c. &c. it may be interesting to add that, a short time before her death, she was seated in a room in her own house, when about thirty of her young relatives, children, grand-children, nephews and nieces, were assembled, and looked on while they were dancing, with great and evident pleasure: and that her surviving daughter, Cecilia Siddons,* who had been, for many years, the inseparable friend and companion of her mother, attended upon her with truly filial devotion and reverence to the last moment of existence. Her admirers may, therefore, console themselves with the idea that in "love, obedience, troops of friends," as well as affluence and fame, she had "all that should accompany old age." She died full of years and honours; having enjoyed, in her long life, as much glory and

* Now Mrs. George Combe.