her own original composition, are all matters of too late occurrence to
need recapitulation.

She is a woman of masculine abilities, tastes, and energies; fitted
better for the camp than for the drawing-room, and often evincing a
degree of discontent that she is not a man. She always _acts_, and has
seldom, except when on the stage, the tact or ability even to seem
natural. Her equestrian exhibitions in Boston and New York, during her
more recent visits, illustrated the quality of her aspirations. Every
day, at a particular hour, so that a crowd might assemble to look upon
the performance, her horse was brought to the front of her hotel, and
when mounted, with affected difficulty, made to rear and pitch as if he
never before had felt the saddle or bit, and then to dash off as if upon
a race-course or to escape an avalanche. The letters to her husband, with
much tact but without any necessity displayed to the public, in her
answer to his process for divorce, were admirable as compositions, and
seemed to have been written in the very phrensy of passion; but their
effect upon the reader was changed somewhat when he reflected that she
had been sufficiently self-possessed meanwhile to make _careful copies_
before sending them, to be exhibited, as specimens of her genius, to a
mob of the pit, which never fails to recognize a _point_. Indeed, in
petticoats or in pantaloons, making a show of her "heart" in the
publication of these letters to a gentleman whom she had treated with
every species of contempt, obloquy, and insult, until she had made his
home insupportable, or courting the wondering admiration of country
bumpkins by unsexing herself for feats of horsemanship, or for other
athletic diversions, she is always anxious to produce a sensation,
anxious to stir up the gentle public to a roar.

Still, with all her infirmities of taste and temper, Mrs. Kemble is a