blood that stains her for ever. She is the queen no more, but an
exhausted and unhappy woman, worn down by the stings of conscience, and
with her frame dying by the disease of her soul.

But Siddons wanted the agitation, the drooping, the timidity. She looked
a living statue. She spoke with the solemn tone of a voice from a
shrine. She stood more the sepulchral avenger of regicide than the
sufferer from its convictions. Her grand voice, her fixed and marble
countenance, and her silent step, gave the impression of a supernatural
being, the genius of an ancient oracle--a tremendous Nemesis.

I have seen all the great tragedians of my day, but I have never seen an
equal to the sublime of this extraordinary actress. I have seen beauty,
youth, touching sensibility, and powerful conception; but I never saw so
complete an union of them all--and that union was the sublime.
Shakspeare must have had some such form before his mind's eye, while he
was creating the wife of Macbeth. Some magnificent and regal
countenance, some movement of native majesty, some imaginary Siddons. He
could not have gone beyond the true. She was a living Melpomene.

The business of the War-Office was not transacted in those days with the
dispatch subsequently introduced by the honest Duke of York. After a
delay of weeks I found myself still ungazetted, grew sad, angry,
impatient; and after some consideration on the various modes of getting
rid of _ennui_, which were to be found in enlisting the service of that
Great Company which extended its wings from Bombay to Bengal, as
Sheridan said, impudently enough, like the vulture covering his prey; or
in taking the chance of fortune, in the shape of cabin-boy on board one
of the thousand ships that were daily floating down the Thames, making
their way to the extremities of the earth; or in finishing my feverish