absence her powers had matured, and her success was instant and indisputable. In the next three weeks, she repeated the part eight times; and on Oct. 30, she appeared in the 'Grecian Daughter.' Then she was seen as Jane Shore, and as Belvidere (in 'Venice Preserved'). In these she sustained and deepened the impression she had made as Isabella; they were all pathetic and tear-compelling characters, and never before had their tragic force been so well revealed. She became the social, as well as the theatrical, celebrity of the hour. She acted eighty nights in that season, and fifty-three in the next, appearing in a greater variety of plays, including two of Shakspere's, 'Measure for Measure' and 'King John,' in which she was Isabella and Constance. During this second season, Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her as the Tragic Muse. "When I attended him for the first sitting," she wrote, (Campbell, i. 242) "after more gratifying encomiums than I can now repeat, he took me by the hand, saying 'Ascend your undisputed throne, and graciously bestow upon me some good idea of the Tragic Muse.' I walked up the steps, and instantly seated myself in the

attitude in which the Tragic Muse now appears. This idea satisfied him so well, that without one moment's hesitation he determined not to alter it." When the picture was finisht, he told her that the colors would remain unfaded as long as the canvas would keep them together, gallantly adding, “And, to confirm my opinion, here is my name; for I have resolved to go down to posterity on the hem of your garment:"-it is to be noted that Sir Joshua seldom signed his pictures. When Garrick's 'Jubilee' was revived, which was a sort of pageant or procession of the whole company, in the costumes of the chief Shaksperean characters-not wholly unlike the cérémonie still seen on set occasions at the Théatre Français-Mrs. Siddons was drawn in a car as the Tragic Muse.

In the succeeding seasons, she appeared as Lady Macbeth, as Queen Katharine and as Volumnia to the Coriolanus of John Kemble. In the winter of 1789-90, she withdrew from Drury Lane, and acted only occasionally in the provinces. While she was in Birmingham, she was asked to buy a stucco bust of herself; it could not have been a striking likeness, as the shopman did not rec

ognize her. The actress could not help thinking she could do better; and from that time on, she busied herself with sculpture, as Mélingue and Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt have done in our day, and as Mr. Jefferson amused himself with painting. In the Dyce Library at South Kensington, there is her own bust of herself. No doubt the study of sculpture was of use to her, altho her attitudes had always been statuesque. She told Lord Lansdowne, so Moore records, "that the first thing that suggested to her the mode of expressing intensity of feeling, was the position of some of the Egyptian statues, with the arms close down by the side, and the hands clencht." Campbell was with her when she first visited the Louvre and saw the Apollo Belvidere; she remained a long time before the statue, and said, at last, "What a great idea it gives us of God, to think that he has made a human being capable of fashioning so divine a form!" She played Hermione in the 'Winter's Tale,' March 25, 1802, and, in the great scene, as Campbell says, "lookt the statue, even to literal illusion; and, whilst its drapery hid her lower limbs, it showed a beauty of head,

neck, shoulders and arms, that Praxiteles might have studied." Boaden declares, that upon "the magical words, pronounced by Pauline, 'Music, awake her: strike!' the sudden action of the head, absolutely startled, as tho such a miracle had really vivified the marble."

In 1803, John Kemble bought one-sixth of Covent Garden theater, and Mrs. Siddons and Charles Kemble joined him. She acted at Covent Garden every season until 1812, when on June 29, she took her farewell in a poetic address, written by her nephew, Horace Twiss. She had been acting in London, at the head of the profession, for thirty years. At intervals she was seen again on the stage at benefit performances; between 1813 and 1819, she acted perhaps twenty times in London and Edinburgh. These occasions were probably a welcome relief to the monotony of her retirement. Fanny Kemble declared that "the vapid vacuity of the last years of my aunt Siddons' life, had made a profound impression upon me,-her apparent deafness and indifference to everything, which I attributed (unjustly, perhaps) less to her advanced age and impaired

powers than to what I supposed the withering and drying influence of the overstimulating atmosphere of emotion, excitement, and admiration in which she had passed her life," ('Records of a Girlhood,' p. 223). She died May 31, 1831, in London, at the age of seventy-six.

Mrs. Siddons was probably the greatest actress the world has ever seen. Her voice was rich and warm and free from the weakness which kept John Kemble constantly on his guard; Erskine said that he had studied her cadences and intonation, and that to the harmony of her periods and pronunciation he was indebted for his best displays. Boaden declares that there never was a better stage figure than hers. She was strong, supple, graceful and easy in her person. Her face was "so thoroly harmonized when quiescent and so expressive when impassioned that most people think her more beautiful than she is." Altho she had humor in private life, she failed to reveal it on the stage; her comedy was not mirthful. And she seems to have been a little lacking in variety. But these trifles were all that detracted from her perfection. In youth she