about graves, with the long grass upon them, and weather-worn
epitaphs, and dry bones of people who made noise enough in their
day, but now can only clatter, clatter, clatter, when the sexton's
spade disturbs them. Were it only possible to find out who are alive
and who dead, it would contribute infinitely to my peace of mind.
Every day of my life somebody comes and stares me in the face whom I
had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men, and trusted
nevermore to be pestered with the sight or sound of him. For
instance, going to Drury Lane Theatre a few evenings since, up rose
before me, in the ghost of Hamlet's father, the bodily presence of
the elder Kean, who did die, or ought to have died, in some drunken
fit or other, so long ago that his fame is scarcely traditionary
now. His powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself
than the ghost of the Danish king.

In the stage-box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and among
them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a
profile--for I did not see her front face--that stamped itself into
my brain as a seal impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture with
which she took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs. Siddons.
Her brother, John Kemble, sat behind,--a brokendown figure, but
still with a kingly majesty about him. In lieu of all former
achievements, Nature enables him to look the part of Lear far better
than in the meridian of his genius. Charles Matthews was likewise
there; but a paralytic affection has distorted his once mobile
countenance into a most disagreeable one-sidedness, from which he
could no more wrench it into proper form than he could rearrange the
face of the great globe itself. It looks as if, for the joke's sake,
the poor man had twisted his features into an expression at once the
most ludicrous and horrible that he could contrive, and at that very