ladder conducting me to the other world," she said, sadly. Her farewell benefit took place on the 29th of June, 1812. Lady Macbeth was fitly chosen for her exit, and at the end of the sleep-walking scene, a nobly artistic audience insisted that the curtain should there fall, so that the last grand impression should not be disturbed. Yet her retirement did not make the sensation that might have been expected. As it has been before said, her powers were failing, and, privately, the public disliked her. A volume might be filled with enthusiastic descriptions of her acting by contemporary writers. None were more warm than that fine critic, Hazlitt, who wrote so much upon this favorite subject:

"The homage she has received is greater than that which is paid to queens," he said, at her farewell. "The enthusiasm she excited had something idolatrous about it; she was regarded less with admiration than with wonder, as if a being of a superior order had dropped from another sphere to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance. She raised tragedy to the skies, or brought it down from thence. It was something above Nature. We can conceive of nothing grander. She embodied to our imagination the fables of mythology, of the heroic and deified mortals of elder time. She was not less than a goddess, or than a prophetess inspired by the gods. Power was seated on her brow; passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine. She was tragedy personified. She was the stateliest ornament of the public mind. She was not only the idol of the people, she not only hushed the tumultuous shout of the pit in breathless expectation, and quenched the blaze of surrounding beauty in silent tears, but to the retired and lonely student, through long years of solitude, her face has shone as if an angel had appeared from heaven; her name has been as if a voice had opened the chambers of the human heart, or as if a trumpet had awakened the sleeping and the dead. To

have seen Mrs. Siddons was an event in every one's life; and does she think we have forgot her?"

“To see the bewildered melancholy of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep," writes Leigh Hunt, "or the widow's mute stare of perfected misery by the corpse of the gamester Beverley, two of the sublimest pieces of acting on the English stage, would argue this point [the greatness of her powers] better than a thousand critics. Mrs. Siddons has the air of never being an actress; she seems unconscious that there is a motley crowd called the pit waiting to applaud her, or that a dozen fiddlers are waiting for her exit."

It must have been a terrible renunciation to have retired from those dazzling triumphs into the monotony of private life. As she sat at home in the long evenings, she would say, "Now I used to be going to dress—now the curtain is about to rise." Her body was there, but her soul was still before the foot-lights. She played several times after her formal retirement for her brother Charles's benefit, and gave some performances at Edinburgh for her son's children. Her last appearance was in 1819, as Lady Randolph to Macready's Glenalvon. "It was not a performance," he writes in his diary, "but a mere repetition of the poet's text--no flash, no sign of her pristine, all-subduing genius." She received. the homage of the great to the last; and when she lodged in town, files of carriages were nearly all day drawn up before the door of her lodgings. She survived until the year 1831, still continuing to delight select circles, even royal ones, with her fine private readings from Shakespeare and Milton.

In 1817, warned by increasing infirmities, Kemble gave a round of his great parts-in which he continually drew six-hundred-pound houses-and made his last ap

pearance on June 23d of that year. To again quote Hazlitt:

"Mr. Kemble took his leave of the stage on Monday night in the character of Coriolanus. On his first coming forward to pronounce his farewell address, he was received with a shout like thunder; on his retiring after it the applause was long before it subsided entirely away. There is something in these partings with old public favorites exceedingly affecting. They teach us the shortness of human life, and the vanity of human pleasures. Our associations of admiration and delight with theatrical performers are among our earliest recollections, among our last regrets. They are links that connect the beginning and the end of life together; their bright and giddy career of popularity measures the arch that spans our brief existence. . . . He played the part as well as he ever did—with as much freshness and vigor. There was no abatement of spirit and energy—none of grace and dignity; his look, his action, his expression of the character, were the same as they ever werethey could not be finer."

I continue the description of the scene from Mr. Fitzgerald's biography of "The Kembles: "

"Kemble seemed to put his whole soul into the part, and, it was noticed, seemed to cast away all unfavorable checks and reserves, as though there was no further need for husbanding his strength. As he approached the last act a gloom seemed to settle down on the audience; and when, at the end, he came forward slowly 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!' and, after an interval, he went on with the remainder of his

speech... At the end he seemed to hurry over what he had to say, to be eager to finish, and withdrew with a long and lingering gaze, just as Garrick had done. Some one handed a wreath of laurel to Talma, to which was attached an inscription, bearing a request that Mr. Kemble would not retire, but would act at least a few times a year, so long as his strength would allow him. Kemble, however, had withdrawn, but the manager (Fawcett), coming out, assured them that it should be his pride to present it to Mr. Kemble. But in the green-room he received an unexpected shape of homage, for all his brother artists begged from him the various articles of his theatrical dress as memorials. Mathews obtained his sandals, Miss Bristow his pocket-handkerchief; and, when he at last withdrew from the theatre, he found the entrances lined with all the assistants and supernumeraries, waiting to give him a last greeting."

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After this a grand dinner was given in his honor at the Freemason's Tavern, Lord Holland in the chair; the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Duke of Bedford, and others of the highest nobility, together with the most eminent men in literature and art, were present. Not even Garrick had been so greatly honored. His savings had been but moderate, and soon afterward he went abroad, first to Toulouse, then to Lausanne, where he died in 1823. Once he returned to London for a short time, and from Hazlitt we obtain a last glimpse of the great actor in his decay:

"His face was as fine and as noble as ever, but he sat in a large arm-chair, bent down, dispirited, and lethargic. He spoke no word, but he sighed heavily, and, after drowsing thus for a time, went away."

It is doubtful whether, could John Kemble be revivified and brought back to the stage, he would be success

ful in the present day. We have not yet arrived at the end of the extraordinary revolution Kean's impulsive style of acting created in the dramatic art. It swept away at one blow the studied and artificial school of the Kembles, and brought us back to a more natural and impassioned style: which, however, in this eighth decade of the nineteenth century has degenerated into a bald realism, wholly devoid of poetry, passion, and artistic grace.

CHAPTER VII.

GEORGE FREDERICK COOKE.

Cooke's Youth and Struggles as a Strolling Player. He appears in London after a Professional Life of Twenty-four Years.-His Immense Success in Shylock, Sir Pertinax, Sir Giles Overreach, Richard III., Falstaff, etc.-Disgusts the London Public by his Irregularities.— Tour in America and Incidents.-Death in New York.

THERE is a striking resemblance between the genius and characters of Cooke and Edmund Kean. Both were gifted with splendid talents, that through their own vices became a curse rather than a blessing to their possessors; their style of acting was similar; most of their triumphs were secured in the same parts; both destroyed health and fortune, lost the respect of the world, and sank into utter degradation through dissipated habits; and both commonly committed acts of extravagant eccentricity, to put it in the mildest form, that it is difficult to ascribe to sane

men.

Cooke's parentage and place of birth are both doubtful; he has been claimed as an Irishman and a Scotchman,