370 LETTER FROM REV. ARCHER GURNEY. [1881. est terms of admiration, poured in upon the surprised authoress from friends eminent in literature, and science, and the arts, almost all urging that these essays should be published, and followed by further studies of Shakespeare's heroines. They were then given for publication to Blackwood's Magazine. It was only to be expected that, when given to the public, they should revive vivid recollections in the minds of many-recollections of the spell under which she had erewhile so often held them by her impersonations of Shakespeare's women. Glowing tributes of gratitude for what she had been to them reached her from entire strangers, and brought with them the assurance, which her modest estimate of her own powers often made her hesitate to accept, that her influence upon the stage had worked for good. Some of these she preserved, and among them one from the Rev. Archer Gurney, which is valuable for what it tells of the impression produced by her in the days of her first youth under Mr Macready's management. Will you [he writes, April 3, 1881] allow a clergyman, who also calls himself a poet and a dramatist, to thank you for your charming and sympathetic papers on Shakespeare's heroines? The period of my youth coincides with that of your own dramatic triumphs, of which I remember many-Constance, Virginia, Lady Mabel (was it not?), heroine of the otherwise painful Patrician's Daughter, and, above all, Rosalind, so aerial, graceful, candid, sportive, chaste, and charming altogether! The ideal you have left in my mind is the sense of a singular nobility of nature, great dignity tempered by grace. Of a Siddons and O'Neill I of course know nothing, and I had not the good fortune to admire Mrs Charles Kean; but I have seen most of the chief actresses of France and Germany, the extravagantly overrated Rachel, the highly respectable Ristori, and some German actresses, who were really very sympathetic in a tender, loving, clinging way. But they all lacked the union of nobility, grace, and pathos, which I recognised in Helen Faucit. Pardon me for having said so much. I think you were slightly injured for a time by Mr Macready's strong mannerisms, especially perhaps in Virginia, but you soon rose above that. He was a wonderful Shylock (to my mind) and Henry IV., but all level speaking was sadly marred by interjections of hard breathing. Strange that he should have declined the part of Tresham in my friend Browning's lovely Blot on the Scutcheon, which he has never equalled, not even in Colombe's Birthday. Only this I will say, Mildred Tresham and Colombe are both transcripts of Helen Faucit, whose art-ideal must have penetrated the poet through and through. Encouraged by this and many similar tributes, my wife 1881.] HER LETTER ON JULIET. 371 promised Mrs S. C. Hall to write a letter to her upon Juliet. She was at work upon this when Mrs Hall died after a few days' illness. The Diary (January 31, 1881) says, “Heard in the afternoon of the death of my old, dear, and constant friend from my youth up, Mrs S. C. Hall. Did not know that she was ill. Her death, they say, was calm and painless. Her loss makes a great gap, and fills me with sorrow. Hers is the gain!" Next day, she adds, "Tried to work at my Juliet, but old thoughts come back, and fill me with regret for the dear friend who was always so kind and encouraging to me. When the letter, addressed to Mrs S. C. Hall as originally intended, was printed, it was sent to her husband, who wrote: I was not prepared to read the name I did read on the last page of the essay. I read it with mingled emotions of pride and gratitude. She [his wife] has earned this beautiful tribute from you, if strong affection, exceeding respect, and boundless admiration could earn it. From the first time she saw you, when you were a very young girl-a perilous world before you -these mingled feelings greatly attached her to you. She had natural pride in the success that hailed your progress, but, far more than that, she loved you very dearly. Far more even than that, she respected you, and saw in your triumphs the just reward of a good woman-the advocate and the possessor of goodness and virtue. I am very sure that the feelings she entertained for you, when she was in "life," she retains for you in what is wrongly called "death." In a letter from the late Mr William Black the novelist, who in his early youth had the good fortune, in Glasgow, to see my wife in Juliet, he speaks in very interesting terms of the influence it produced upon his mind and character : I was brought up among one of the very rigidest sects of Scotch Puritans, who seemed to consider the expression of affection, even between parents and children, as a sort of weakness; and your Juliet was an extraordinary revelation to me of womanly tenderness and grace and beauty and passion. It was, as I say, really a revelation; it made the world quite different; and what I owe to it in my own little bit of business, it would be difficult for me to estimate. Moreover, I have never seen anything like it since, except when I have seen yourself upon the stage; and indeed, taking your acting on the one side, and Salvini's on the other, these seem to me, in our day, to have shown to the public that particular art of which Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and the rest of them in their day, wrote, but of which nowadays I can find no other trace. CHAPTER XVII. IN the winter of 1881 my wife was much attracted by the acting of Mr Edwin Booth, who was playing a series of his chief characters at the Princess's Theatre. She liked Mr Booth himself, and he was a frequent visitor at our house. In his King Lear especially she found much to admire. Thus (February 18) she writes, "Went to see Mr Booth in King Lear. Very much pleased; it is quite his best bit of acting. The Fourth Act, mad scene, was very fine. It was indeed a treat to see such acting." Of his Othello she also thought highly. I On the 2nd of April we started for Italy, intending to go as far as Naples, but my wife's health failed on the way, and we had to be content with Turin, Genoa, Florence, Pisa, and Rome. The copious memoranda of the Diary show how carefully and critically she studied the works of art in all these places. must find room for what she says of the famous Titian in the Borghese Palace, generally known as " Sacred and Profane Love," for the sake of the ingenious suggestion it contains as to the purpose of the painter-a suggestion which found favour with more than one of our principal artists. "May 2, 1881.-Went to the Borghese Gallery. Fresh delight in the fine Titian, which they call 'Sacred and Profane Love'; but there is nothing profane about it. One figure to my mind is as sacred as the other. Look at the heads, the faces! The undraped woman's head is, in my opinion, even more chaste, if possible, than the carefully dressed figure, which has the hands gloved. The likeness is so remarkable, that I believe Titian meant both to be the same woman, showing how noble and chaste she could look under any aspect. There is a vase, a small lamp |