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tions. An incident worth recording in connection with its performance in Edinburgh recurs vividly to my remembrance. Coming into the box lobby, at the close of the play, I met Professor Wilson (Christopher North). He accosted me in his usual cordial way, and I could see he was in a state of great excitement. "We have all been wrong," he exclaimed, speaking of what he had just seen. "This is the true Lady Macbeth! Mrs Siddons has misled us." Knowing how strongly he had again and again extolled Mrs Siddons as the ideal Lady Macbeth, I could only listen in quiet surprise, as he went on, enlarging on his new view with characteristic emphasis.

The conclusion he had come to proved not to be transitory, for not long afterwards, in No. 5 of the series of papers in Blackwood's Magazine called "Dies Boreales, Christopher under Canvas," he went into an elaborate study of the play, in which his old and often expressed estimate of the character of Lady Macbeth underwent a complete change. She was no longer, in his opinion, the "fiendish woman," which Mrs Siddons conceived and portrayed, self-centred, and remorseless, to the last. The complexity of her character was there carefully worked out. The force of will that screwed her husband's courage "to the sticking place," when his will faltered in seizing the opportunity to kill Duncan, for which he had longed, the resolution that could seize the daggers, and smear the sleeping grooms with blood, contrasted with the womanly weakness that makes her faint, when Macbeth recalls, in his address to the Thanes, the picture of Duncan lying, "his silver skin laced with his golden blood"her misapprehension of Macbeth's character as "too full of the milk of human kindness," from which she is terribly awakened by his subsequent ruthless wading through blood for the purposes of his ambition, her early experience, that with "the golden round and top of sovereignty" all peace of mind by day or night was gone, told in the lines "Nought's had, all's spent," &c. -her silent shudder, when he talks of the dreams that "shake him nightly," himself unconscious and heedless of what she has begun to suffer the magnificent courage with which she goes through the trials of the banqueting scene, the hopeless sadness of her demeanour when the guests have been dismissed, and of

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the words wrung from her own woful experience, "You lack the season of all natures, sleep"-a prelude so significant of the troubled sleep-walking scene, in which she next appears,-all these features, brought out with such impressive effect by Miss Faucit, had wrought the change in Christopher North's views, which made him say, "We have all been wrong. This is the true Lady Macbeth!" Accordingly in his essay, he dwells. upon these points-but, oddly enough, forgets-for an old man's forgetfulness it must have been-to own his indebtedness for his new critical exposition to the young actress, who had struck out the reading of the character from her own unaided study of Shakespeare's text.

It was no small triumph to have shaken Professor Wilson's Tong-cherished belief, that the Lady Macbeth of Mrs Siddons was the true interpretation, and to have sent him back to his Shakespeare, to find, in a closer study of the text, the Lady Macbeth whom Miss Faucit, heedless of tradition, had found there for herself.

From Edinburgh Miss Faucit went to Glasgow, and deepened there the impression which she had left the previous year. Before quitting Scotland, she fulfilled short engagements in Perth, Dundee, and Aberdeen, where, with every disadvantage of small, ill-appointed stages, and weak companies, she seems, if one may judge from the journals of the day, to have produced effects as vivid as if she had acted under the most favourable conditions. Thus, for example, The Perth Constitutional (May 28) speaks of her :

...

In the calmer passages Miss Faucit's acting, in voice, manner, and enunciation, is delicate and refined to a degree; but in the impassioned parts her energies break forth with tremendous effect, yet so true to nature, that it is the very negation of rant. . . . Indeed, her impersonation is scarcely like acting. It is nature itself-it seems the impression of the position in which she is placed operating upon the most delicate yet subdued sensibilitiesand not a hair-breadth does her emotion or passion exceed or fall short of what we should expect to witness in a refined mind actually under the influence of the circumstances in which it is placed, and amid the associa tions connected with them. Some talented actors almost always speak, and accompany that speech by action, as if they were constantly under the impression that they are acting. Miss Faucit never does, and therefore hers is the perfection of the art.

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The same view is admirably expressed by The Aberdeen Herald (June 14): "It is not to act, but to be in earnest, that Miss Faucit comes upon the stage. It is to be, not to seem." This truth to nature was from the first, as we have seen, recognised in Miss Faucit. To express it without exaggeration or distortion was her constant aim.

Of Raphael it was said by Michael Angelo, "Non ebbe quest' arte da Natura, ma per lungo studio." Of her this was equally true; but study alone would not have perfected art, unless it had the inborn gift of fine sensibility and strong imagination to work upon. Lord Tennyson's words are surely true of all genuine art: "Perfection in art is, perhaps, sometimes more sudden than we think." Poets, painters, actors, in short, have inspirations. "But then," he continues, "the long preparation for it, the unseen germination, that is what we ignore and forget."

Before taking her summer holiday, Miss Faucit played in Manchester for the first time, beginning on the 14th of July. This was the forerunner of many visits, at each of which she was made more and more welcome, and found more cordial recognition and subtler critical appreciation. Of the latter quality the following passage from The Manchester Times, on her first visit, was an encouraging foretaste. In it the writer obviously draws upon his remembrance of her acting, as he had seen it at Drury Lane.

Miss Faucit's nature is not so much that of a woman, as that of WOMAN. She infuses, so to speak, the personality of the feminine character into every delineation. In every embodiment she seems to raise the veil from a shrined feeling in her individual heart. The range is certainly wide, which includes equally the Antigone of two thousand years ago, and the heartbreaking pangs of contemporary suffering, and makes both equally idealwhich places the hand of a Rosalind in that of an Imogen-which shows the sweet sisterhood in contrast of a Beatrice and a Juliet-which artlessly pleads in Desdemona, pierces in the accusing agony of Constance, or freezes in the ominous terseness of Lady Macbeth.

L

CHAPTER IX.

HOWEVER fêted and idolised elsewhere she might be, Miss Faucit always yearned towards the London audience, who had cheered her earliest efforts, and had never wavered in their faith in her. Accordingly, although overweighted with prospective engagements for the provinces, she yielded to Mr Webster's request, that she would appear for twelve nights at the Haymarket Theatre. The engagement opened on the 20th of October with The Lady of Lyons. Her Pauline had lost none of its attraction for the London public. On the contrary, they found it had gained greatly in the qualities for which they had long admired it; and at the close of the play, according to the Morning Chronicle, she appeared "in obedience to the repeated calls of the audience, when she was greeted with a shower of bouquets, and all the usual honours." The Atheneum (October 25) notes that the removal from the predominating influence of Mr Macready had been of essential benefit to her, adding-"High as was our previous opinion of her, our present estimate of her histrionic talent stands rather in contrast than in comparison with the past; for such is the change of style that, with the same person, she is another actress. She has evidently been taught by self-dependence to think, to feel, to act for herself." There was no one now to be continually telling her that "she was quite mistaken in her conceptions," and that by attending to his "direction she might ultimately hope to excel. Of her Pauline the same critic remarks, that she has not only "learned to correct the author's mistakes in execution, but to supply his deficiencies of conception. She rightly conceives that the character is but a sketch, to be filled up by the genius of the performer, and has

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studied the appropriate by-play with a fidelity and fulness of which we have few examples. She has aimed at the ideal of the character, and has reached it,—so successfully indeed, as to demonstrate that she has now assumed an independent position on the national stage, and is entitled to keep it. To point out the beauties of her playing were to go through every scene of the drama, and to discriminate between what the author has not done, and what the actress supplies."

It is interesting to note how her early friends, Mr and Mrs S. C. Hall, were impressed by the advance she had made in her art. Mrs Hall writes (November 18):

MY DEAR HELEN,-I cannot tell you how you fascinated us last night. Carter said this morning, when he was going to his chambers, that he would write and thank you, and truly you deserve our thanks. I never felt so much intense pleasure in my life at any performance.

May God protect and bless you! You are gifted far, far above all I know, but I love you more, for that I know you capable of generous acts and right noble deeds. You have, to my knowledge, more than once had the prayers of the afflicted, whom your bounty relieved silently, and you little thought it would be told-even to me. God bless you! Your very affectionate, ANNA MARIA HALL.

The same day Mr Hall wrote:

MY DEAR MISS HELEN,-I never until last night regretted my having ceased to be a public critic, for I should have rejoiced to give to the public even a small portion of the true and unmixed enjoyment I derived from your representation of Pauline; and I cannot forego the pleasure of communicating this feeling to you, trusting you will pardon my presumption.

I have not seen you act for about three years, and I had not seen you in this character since the memorable evening when you made it your own. I was prepared for that improvement which results from time and study, but I certainly was not prepared to find it so great. I cannot conceive a finer, purer, or more accurate personification; I cannot believe that acting has ever surpassed it. It was in all respects admirable, carrying away the auditor, or rather the spectator, for your expression, the expression both of face and figure, effected fully as much as the intonations of your rich and melodious voice. Your tenderness was truth itself; your passion a very reality.

To say that it moved me deeply and excited me powerfully is saying little -except that the admission comes from one whose business has been the very reverse of that which teaches to be "pleased we know not why, and care not wherefore." I thank you, therefore, for a most intellectual treat— I may safely say, the truest treat I have ever enjoyed in a theatre. Permit me to subscribe myself your sincere friend and fervent admirer,

S. C. HALL.