mean Davies's contemporary evidence of Mrs. Siddons's early excellence. Davies knew more of the history of the stage than any man since Colley Cibber. He had acted with the generation that preceded Garrick-through all Garrick's life-and he survived him. He had known Mrs. Oldfield, acted with Mrs. Porter, and been the judicious, though humble colleague, of Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Yates, Mrs. Crawford, and Miss Younge, the greatest (before Mrs. Siddons) heroines on the stage. His prejudices would naturally be against the young adventuress who, in his latter days, came to outshine all his old admirations. Davies published his Miscellanies in 1785, while Mrs. Siddons was in her spring; and considering his taste, his judgment, and his experience, his praise therefore would be doubly valuable. Mr. Campbell does not even allude to it, yet we pronounce it to be the best and most decisive authority that ever has been, or can be, adduced in favour of Mrs. Siddons's supremacy. Our readers will be curious to see this very striking and conclusive evidence.

'While I am writing this (1784), a great and admirable genius has struck the world with admiration. Mrs. Siddons is the lawful successor of our most perfect actresses. Much is said of old schools and new schools in acting: this lady is the great ornament of Nature's school, which will eternally be the same.'-Dram. Misc., vol. i. p. 251.

And, again,

Mrs. Siddons has, in Belvidera, as well as many other parts, not only attracted the attention, but absolutely fixed the favour of the town in her behalf. This actress, like a resistless torrent, has borne down all before her. Her merit, which is certainly very extensive in tragic characters, seems to have swallowed up all remembrance of present and past performers; but as I would not sacrifice the living to the dead, neither would I break down the statues of the honourable deceased to place their successors on their pedestals. . . . The person of Mrs. Siddons is greatly in her favour; just rising above the middle stature, she looks, walks, and moves like a woman of a superior rank. Her countenance is expressive; her eye so full of information, that the passion is told from her look before she speaks. Her voice, though not so harmonious as Mrs. Cibber's, is strong and pleasing; nor is a word lost for want of due articulation, which the comedian should always consider as his first duty, and esteem the finest conception of passion of no value without it. She excels all persons in paying attention to the business of the scene; her eye never wanders from the person she speaks to, or should look at when she is silent. Her modulation of grief, in her plaintive pronunciation of the interjection, oh! is sweetly moving, and reaches to the heart. Her madness, in Belvidera, is terribly affecting. The many accidents of spectators falling into fainting-fits in the time of her acting, bear

testimony

testimony to the effects of her exertions. She certainly does not spare herself. Neither the great nor the vulgar can say that Mrs. Siddons is not in downright earnest. The actors have assured me, that the farces, which used to raise mirth in an audience after a tragedy, now fail of that effect, from Mrs. Siddons's having so absolutely depressed the spirits of the audience, that the best comic actors cannot recall them into mirth or vivacity.'-Dram. Misc. vol. iii. p. 248-250. And again

'The expressions of anger and resentment, in the captive queen, seldom fail to excite laughter. Mrs. Porter, who was deservedly admired in Zara, and Mrs. Pritchard, her successor in that part, could not, with all their skill, prevent the risibility of the audience in this interview. Mrs. Siddons alone preserves the dignity and truth of character, unmixed with any incitement to mirth, from countenance, expression, or action.'-Ibid. pp. 350, 351.

Mr. Campbell must forgive us, but we hold that this discriminating and somewhat reluctant evidence of such a contemporary judge as Davies should be preferred to that of a thousand' dramatic critics, who never saw Mrs. Siddons in her prime, nor her greatest predecessors at all. It seems to us that the fame of Mrs. Siddons should be rested on the evidence of Davies for her earlier, and on that of Boaden for her later glories; but very little, we are sorry to say, on anything that Mr. Campbell has either written or compiled-for, of all who have handled this subject, we hold him to be indisputably the least competent as well as the most careless.

Besides Mrs. Siddons's auto-biographical Memoranda—which are generally written in a plain but often forcible, and always agreeable style, and which we should be glad to see in their natural and continuous shape-besides these, as we have already said, Mr. Campbell has given us two essays by Mrs. Siddons on the character of Lady Macbeth and Constance, of which we cannot speak with equal approbation. Mrs. Siddons seems to have been -off the stage-an indifferent critic; and when she takes to dissertation she becomes almost as verbose and turgid as Mr. Campbell himself. As we are anxious throughout this article to support our less favourable judgments by examples, we ask whether anything can be more inflated and more inane than the following passage of the remarks on the character of Lady Macbeth?'

'Macbeth's letters, which have informed his lady of the predictions of those preternatural beings who accosted him on the heath, have lighted up into daring and desperate determinations all those pernicious slumbering fires which the enemy of man is ever watchful to awaken in the bosoms of his unwary victims. To his direful suggestions she is so far from offering the least opposition, as not only

to

to yield up her soul to them, but moreover to invoke the sightless ministers of remorseless cruelty to extinguish in her breast all those compunctious visitings of nature which otherwise might have been mercifully interposed to counteract, and perhaps eventually to overcome, their unholy instigations. But having impiously delivered herself up to the excitements of hell, the pitifulness of heaven itself is withdrawn from her, and she is abandoned to the guidance of the demons whom she has invoked.'-vol. ii. pp. 11, 12.

This really seems to us King Cambyses' vein.' Indeed, though Mrs. Siddons's personal memoranda and her letters are tolerably easy and natural, it is quite clear that, like Mdlle. Clairon, she was apt to bring into private life too much of the pomp of the stage. Mr. Campbell gives a pleasant instance of this, which every one who ever saw Mrs. Siddons in private could parallel by some similar anecdote :

'From intense devotion to her profession she derived a peculiarity of manner, of which I have the fullest belief she was not in the least conscious, unless reminded of it;-I mean the habit of attaching dramatic tones and emphasis to commonplace colloquial subjects. She went, for instance, one day, into a shop at Bath, and, after bargaining for some calico, and hearing the mercer pour forth an hundred commendations of the cloth, she put the question to him, "But will it wash?" in a manner so electrifying as to make the poor shopman start back from his counter. I once told her this anecdote about herself, and she laughed at it heartily, saying, "Witness truth, I never meant to be tragical." —vol. ii. pp. 392, 393. Mr. Campbell adds a remark-the only one that we recollect in his whole work which unites novelty with justness :--

'This singularity made her manner susceptible of caricature. I know not what others felt, but I own that I loved her all the better for this unconscious solemnity of manner; for, independently of its being blended with habitual kindness to her friends, and giving, odd as it may seem, a zest to the humour of her familiar conversation, it always struck me as a token of her simplicity. In point of fact, a manner in itself artificial, sprung out of the naïveté of her character. -vol. ii. p. 393.

He might have added that Mr. Kemble had something of the same peculiarity, and that, so far from appearing affected, it certainly gave an additional air of naïveté and simplicity to his conversation and manners.

One or two anecdotes of Mrs. Siddons's first appearances on the Edinburgh boards are the best supplied to these pages by Mr. Campbell himself. There is something very touching in the following trait of simplicity :

Among the veriest vulgar of Scotland, Mrs. Siddons had now her devoted worshippers. A poor serving-girl, with a basket of greens

on

on her arm, one day stopt near her, in the High-Street of Edinburgh, and, hearing her speak, said, "Ah! weel do I ken that sweet voice, that made me greet sae sair the streen.'

-p. 257.

The next is sufficiently characteristic of mine own romantic town':

'I remember Mrs. Siddons describing to me the same scene of her probation on the Edinburgh boards with no small humour. The grave attention of my Scottish countrymen, and their canny reservation of praise till they were sure she deserved it, she said, had wellnigh worn out her patience. She had been used to speak to animated clay; but she now felt as if she had been speaking to stones. Successive flashes of her elocution, that had always been sure to electrify the south, fell in vain on those northern flints. At last, as I well remember, she told me she coiled up her powers to the most emphatic possible utterance of one passage, having previously vowed in her heart, that if this could not touch the Scotch, she would never again cross the Tweed.* When it was finished, she paused, and looked to the audience. The deep silence was broken only by a single voice exclaiming, “That's no bad!" This ludicrous parsimony of praise convulsed the Edinburgh audience with laughter. But the laugh was followed by such thunders of applause, that, amidst her stunned and nervous agitation, she was not without fears of the galleries coming down.'-Ibid. p. 260.

We conclude what we have to say of this extraordinary woman by expressing our deliberate and well-considered opinion that she was the greatest tragic actress that ever lived; that, at the several periods of her life, she played the appropriate characters with the greatest individual excellence; and that she carried and maintained a general superiority both of mind and manner, higher, farther, and longer than any other woman was ever able to attain. Her personal character, in a station so liable to suspicion-it would be perhaps a vulgar error to call it temptation-was not only blameless but exemplary, and in private life she was as good and as amiable as in her public profession she was transcendently great. Can we say more ?

One concluding word to Mr. Campbell.-We fear that he will be dissatisfied with our criticism, because we know how hard it is to induce a man to be dissatisfied with himself; but, as we have not made a single stricture without having produced the evidence on which it is founded, we fearlessly appeal to our readers-nay, we should almost venture to appeal to Mr. Campbell himselfwhether the instances and examples we have produced do not

*We once heard Mrs. Siddons give what Mr. Campbell may think a very prosaic account of the beneficial influence of cheers on a player. Some one remarked, They give one heart ;'—' Aye,' said she, and they do what is still better-they give one breath.'

amply

amply justify the observations which it has been our painful duty to make. It is not given to any man to excel in all the walks of literature: Mr. Campbell is a distinguished poet-he has written a very popular poem, and several memorable odes; he is a man of undoubted genius-and he may well afford, without any diminution of his real and merited fame, to be recorded as, in every sense of the word,-supposing him to have actually written the book which bears his name-the worst theatrical historian we have ever read.

ART. V. -Mischief. Section First, 1830; Section Second, 1834. pp. 94.

8vo.

London.

THIS production is trifling in bulk; and among its contents there are worse things than mere trifling-some very heavy attempts at humour, interspersed with ungenerous sarcasm-and several passages of culpable indelicacy. These last, however, occur in the first section, which was printed three years agoand as they are apologized for in the preface to the second, we need not allow them to prevent us from now acknowledging that the author, amidst all his levities, as well as dulnesses, has exhibited some specimens of true poetical excellence. He appears to us to have no requisite for satire his wit is always clumsy and nothing can be more unfortunate than his efforts to blend the ludicrous and the serious after the fashion of Don Juan. But we think it worth while to assure him of our conviction, that if he were to drop all notions of merriment, and treat with zeal and devotion a theme of serious interest upon a considerable scale, we have no doubt whatever that he might raise himself to no unenviable place in contemporary literature. He would himself, we dare say, think it very absurd were we to bestow much of our space upon his Mischief; he must feel that he has as yet played with his strength, and asserted no adequate claim upon detailed criticism.

His object appears to be neither more nor less than to illustrate the very recondite fact that errors of a certain sort are visited, among the highest classes of society, with stern and fatal severity upon yielding woman, while hardly an affectation of rebuke falls to the share of the betrayer, man. This is the everlasting theme of our novelists of fashionable life-and of their management of it we, and all the rest of the world, are now heartily weary: but our author has brought out his contrasts briefly and potently, and perhaps the grace and energy of his stanzas may arrest attention in some quarters. We would more particularly recommend them to

the