ing; but can no otherwise conceive her expression of countenance, intonation, and emphasis, than by imagining, to the best of my power, how a woman of fine understanding and feeling heart would look and speak, in the circumstances in which you have placed her. If more than that could be done, Mrs. Siddons would not be, as she is, guiltless of ever overstepping the modesty of nature to produce stage-effect. Mrs. Yates continually did that; and the pathetic Mrs. Cibber had a plaintive monotony which she could not vary. But Mrs. Pritchard and Garrick were, and Mrs. Siddons is, too great and just to be peculiar." I know not whether the following poetical compliment to Mrs. Siddons is contained in Miss Seward's published poems, but the following note accompanied her sonnet; and I think it a curiosity of its kind, being a letter written by that lady, but never sent by her to the press. LETTER FROM MISS SEWARD TO MRS. SIDDONS. 66 Lichfield, Monday Night : 66 "I think myself unfortunate that impaired health generally obliges me to seek the coast at this season, when you are granted to the country, and sometimes to this neighbourhood. I have now to lament that a severe cough and inflammation on my lungs, which a fortnight ago prevented my leaving Staffordshire, form, in their yet lurking remains, a barrier to the highest gratification my heart and imagination can know. To encounter a crowded theatre during the present extreme sultriness would, disordered as I am, put my life to the hazard. Anxiously do I hope it may not prove injurious to your health amid exertions so trying. This night you represent Calista— twice, in former years, I have witnessed how exquisitely. "Ruminating this morning, in sweet and bitter thought, your matchless talents, and my seldom power of enjoying their affluence, your virtues, and my distance from their sphere of action, the lines which you will find on this paper descended from my pen. I wish they were more worthy of you; yet venture to present them to your acceptance. "If you pass through Lichfield on your return from Birmingham, I wish I might promise myself the honour of the Siddons sleeping beneath my roof. May I entreat of you, in the event of your return that way, to stop with me as many days as may be spared from the important demands upon your time. It is an honour and happiness of which I have been long desirous. Should it be possible for me to obtain it now, favour me with a line, to say when I may expect you. "With compliments to Mr. Siddons, and with every kind, good wish, I remain, "My dear madam, "Your affectionate friend "And obedient servant, "ANNA SEWARD." SONNET. SIDDONS! when first commenced thy ardent course, CHAPTER XVII. She performs in Sheridan's "Pizarro"-in "Adelaide," a Tragedy by Pye-Lady Jane, in Joanna Baillie's "De Montfort"-in Godwin's "Antonio"-in Sotheby's "Julian and Agnes"-in "The Winter's Tale"-Her danger from Fire in the Statue-scene-Visits Wales, on her way to Ireland. DURING the rest of her professional life, Mrs. Siddons appeared in no new drama that attracted crowded houses, excepting "Pizarro." The season of 1799 was an uncommonly protracted one at Drury Lane; it was not concluded till the 4th of July, and the last thirty-five nights of it were almost consecutively employed in the representation of this piece, which was adapted to the stage entirely by Sheridan, from an English translation of Kotzebue's German play. Sheridan certainly put no new laurels on his head by this adaptation, and he got no solid credit for it, except at his banker's; but he made money, for which, at that time, he was perhaps more S immediately anxious than for fame. In some particulars, it must be confessed that he has rather amended the original. He judiciously omitted the comic scene of Diego, as well as Elvira's confession of her love for Alonzo, and her reappearance in the character of a nun. His introduction of Rolla's passage across the bridge was also a strikingly improving touch. In that scene, the pencil of Lawrence has done noble justice to the form of Kemble. In adapting "Pizarro" for the stage, Sheridan, unacquainted with the original language, worked from an English paraphrase. With regard to style and imagery, he may have sometimes relieved the over-flat familiarity of the German play, but, where he found the opposite fault of turgidity, he has adhered with tolerable fidelity to the British translator. In one speech, a warrior predicts that his bones will rattle in his tomb with joy at his posthumous fame; and in the first scene of the second act, Cora talks as follows about her child acquiring the organs of mastication. "When first the white blossoms of his teeth appear, breaking the crimson buds that did enclose them." Elvira says to Pizarro, at the end of the third act, “Thou on Panama's brow didst make alliance with the raving elements, that tore the silence of that horrid night;—when thou didst follow, as thy pioneer, the crashing thunder's drift, and, stalking o'er the trembling earth, didst plant thy banner by the red volcano's mouth. Thou who, when battling on the sea, and thy brave ship was blown to splinters, wast seen, as thou didst bestride a fragment of the smoking wreck, to wave thy glittering sword above thy head, as thou wouldst defy the world in that extremity. Come, fearless man, meet and survive an injured woman's fury if thou canst." 1 If this be not bombast, what does the word mean? Sheridan was fond of borrowing, but he was a fairer dealer in metaphors than in money, and generally took the loan of the former from himself. To adorn " Pizarro," he drew largely from his own orations at Westminster Hall; and particularly from his speech on Hastings' trial. He had a personal right, no doubt, to these flowers of speech, and some of them, in their proper place, were very beautiful; but still they were flowers that scarcely bore to be transplanted, and they assorted indif ferently with the German bouquet of dramatic eloquence. So that, upon the whole perhaps, Sheridan's mutation of the piece amounted to the Irish improvement,-of turning bad into worse. Nevertheless, I cannot censure Kotzebue's "Pizarro" without qualification. It is bad, in as far as there is some fustian in the style, and outrageous sentimentality in the portraiture of character. The resolution of Rolla to stop among his enemies, though he knows that they will burn him alive, rather than kill a snoring sentinel, is extravagantly unnatural; and so are fifty other circumstances that could be pointed out. I am even free to own, that the piece, to a great extent, owed its fortune to scenery, music, and processions.* But, the more I look at Kotzebue's faults, the more I am inclined to give him credit for a certain liveliness in dealing with the fancy, that pleases us in spite of them. We all remember that "Pizarro" had an imposing effect upon every spectator, from the king to the commoner. Its attractiveness was felt universally. Nor do I believe that all the pageantry in the world could have wrought so powerfully on the senses, if the piece had not possessed something intrinsically animating. Its subject was new and peculiarly fortunate. It brought the adventures of the most romantic kingdom of Christendom into picturesque combination with the simplicity and superstitions of the transatlantic world; and gave the imagination a new and fresh empire of Paganism, with its temples, and rites, and altars, without the stale asso ciations of pedantry. I think, if Homer had lived in our own days, he would have laid his scenes in South America. At first, I believe, Mrs. Siddons by no means liked the character of the camp-follower, Elvira, but she certainly raised it into respectability; and it is remarkable that, with the exception of Mrs. Haller, she never performed any character originally that she rendered half so popular. Very different was the impression produced by the next new piece that greeted the winter of 1800, and in which our great actress bore a part; namely, the tragedy of "Adelaide," by Mr. Pye. The poet laureate's drama had not the hundredth part of the positive faults of that of Kotzebue; but it had the irredeemable negative fault of lacking interest. On the 29th of April, Mrs. Siddons performed a new part, * Cast of parts: Elvira, Mrs. Siddons; Rolla, Kemble; Alonzo, C. Kemble; Pizarro, Barrymore; Ataliba, Powell; Las Casas, J. Aickin; Orozembo, Dowton; Valverde, R. Palmer; Old Blind Man, Cory; Boy, Master Chatterley; Sentinel, Holland; Cora, Mrs. Jordan. Boaden says, in his Life of Kemble, that Sheridan was miserably anxious about the success of "Pizarro," on the night of its representation. He was sufficiently miserable about Mrs. Jordan's inability to speak a line of the part of Cora; but he also dreaded that Mrs. Siddons would not fall in with his notion of Elvira. The actress agreeably surprised him. as the Lady Jane, in Joanna Baillie's tragedy of "De Montfort." I have already adverted to the surprising fact, that dramas, which we peruse in our libraries with little interest, have sometimes been made, by fine acting, most attractive on the stage. The works of Joanna Baillie afford at least one instance of a perfectly converse nature. They will be read with pleasure as long as our language lasts, and yet they have never acquired popularity in the theatre. To account for this fact, an indiscreet admirer of this poetess would probably resort to the plausible topics of a degenerate public taste, as well as of the enormous size of our theatres, and the pageantry required for filling the stage, which, undoubtedly, diverts the mind from attention to more spiritual charms; but I have too much respect for Joanna Baillie's genius to form any estimate of it on questionable grounds. She brought to the drama a wonderful union of many precious requisites for a perfect tragic writer;-deep feeling, a picturesque imagination, and, except where theory and system misled her, a correct taste, that made her diction equally remote from the stiffness of the French, and the flaccid flatness of the German school: a better stage style than any that we have heard since the time of Shakspeare, or, at least, since that of his immediate disciples. But, to compose a tragedy that shall at once delight the lovers of poetry and the populace, is a prize in the lottery of Fame which has literally been only once drawn during the whole of the last century, and that was by the author of "Douglas." He, too, wrote several tragedies that were sheer blanks. Scott and Byron themselves both failed in dramatic composition. It is evident, therefore, that Melpomene demands on the stage something, and a good deal more than even poetical talent, rare as that is. She requires a potent and peculiar faculty for the invention of incident adapted to theatric effect;— a faculty which may often exist in those who have not been bred to the stage, but which, generally speaking, has seldom been shown by any poets who were not professional players. There are exceptions to the remark, I know, but there are not many. If Shakspeare had not been a player, he would not have been the dramatist that he is. If Joanna Baillie had known the stage practically, she would never have attached the importance which she does to the development of single passions in single tragedies; and she would have invented more stirring incidents to justify the passion of her characters, and to give them that air of fatality |