and monotonous in style; when she appeared for the last time in 1817, as Lady Randolph, no spark of that superlative genius, over which Hazlitt rhapsodised, lit up the performance.1

Wonderful stories are told of her power over the spectators. Macready relates that when she played Aspasia in Tamburlaine, after seeing her lover strangled before her eyes, so terrible was her agony as she fell lifeless upon the stage, that the audience believed she was really dead, and only the assurances of the manager could pacify them. One night Charles Young was playing Beverley to her Mrs. Beverley in The Gamester, and in the great scene was so overwhelmed by her pathos that he could not speak. Unto the last she received the homage of the great; even the Duke of Wellington attended her receptions, and carriages were drawn up before her door nearly all day long.

At Covent Garden, on October 6th, 1814, her successor to the robe of Melpomene, Miss O'Neill, from Dublin, made her first appearance in London as Juliet, and at once achieved an enormous success. Macready, in his Reminiscences, tells us of her artless unconsciousness, her freedom from affectation, her fervid Italian passion in the balcony scene, and adds, "Throughout my whole experience, hers was the only representation of Juliet I have ever seen.” Hazlitt writes: "Her highest effort, perhaps, was in portraying tremulous joy, a rapture bordering on frenzy, an inspiration of delight, portentous of sudden and fearful disaster. We never remember to have been more delighted by her acting than when we had seen her in Isabella, at the return of Biron, clasp him in wild rapture, forgetting her dreadful

1 See Macready's Reminiscences.

condition,' gaze on him with eyes lit up with strange fire, and reply to his question by laughter in which horror and transport mingled." In tenderness and pathos she is said to have equalled Mrs. Siddons in her early days; but she had never the ideality, never rose to the sublimity of that marvellous actress in pure tragedy. Her stage career was very short; in 1819 she married Sir William Wrixon Beecher, and retired from the stage.

Miss

In that same year the beautiful Maria Foote, then only sixteen, was introduced to the London public on these boards, as Amanthis in The Child of Nature, but did not create any particular impression. It was not until she brought her breach of promise case against "Pea Green" Hayne that she became the rage. Foote seems to have been rather a very excellent amateur than an actress; it was said of her that she danced and sang more like a highly accomplished lady than a professional. Mrs. Bancroft has given us some very interesting glimpses of the once popular favourite in her last days, in On and Off the Stage. "I was never a great actress," she used to say, "though people thought me fascinating, and I suppose I was." And no doubt it was that innate fascination in which lay the secret of her charm. She was the original Virginia in Virginius, and Macready highly commends her performance of the character. As everyone knows, she married the eccentric Lord Petersham, afterwards Earl of Harrington.

On September 16th, 1816, William Charles Macready made his first bow to a London audience upon these boards as Orestes in Ambrose Philips's Distressed Mother. Though well received, he created no sensa

1 Biron is Isabella's husband, but, believing him dead, she has married Villeroy.

tion, and his progress in public favour was not rapid, for he had two formidable rivals in the theatre, Charles Young and Charles Kemble, who divided the principal tragic parts between them, and Macready was for some years relegated to a series of melodramatic heroes, such as Gambia in The Slave, and Rob Roy, varied by repulsive villains, such as Pescara in Shiel's Apostate, and Wallenberg in Maturin's Manuel.

In less than a year after Macready's début, on June 29th, 1817, John Philip Kemble bade farewell to the footlights in his greatest character, Coriolanus. And never did he play the part more grandly. “As he approached the last act," writes Mr. Fitzgerald, in his book on the Kembles, "a gloom seemed to settle down. on the audience; and when at the end he came slowly forward to make his address, he was greeted with a shout like thunder of 'No farewell!' It was long before he could obtain silence, or could control his feelings sufficiently to speak. At last he faltered out, 'I have now appeared before you for the last time this night closes my professional life.' At this a tremendous tumult broke out, with cries of 'No, no!' . . . At the end he withdrew with a long and lingering gaze, just as Garrick had done." Unlike Mrs. Siddons, he retained all his grandeur to the last, and seems to have retired in the ripe autumn of his powers. A grand dinner was given in his honour, at which Lord Holland took the chair, and the Duke of Bedford, the Marquis of Lansdowne, and others of the highest nobility, together with the most eminent men connected with literature and art, were present. Indeed, not even Garrick left the stage with such éclat as attended the retirement of "the noblest Roman of them all."1

1For a full appreciation of Kemble's acting, see pp. 148-9.