ad known. She loved to describe John Kemble, Mrs.
Siddons, Miss O'Neill, and Edmund Kean, as they were wont to electrify
the town. Elliston was a great favorite, and she had as many good things
to tell of him as Elia ever had. One autumn afternoon she related all
the circumstances attending the "first play" she ever saw,--which, by
the way, was a tragedy enacted in a barn somewhere in the little town of
Alresford, where she was born. The winking candles dividing the stage
from the audience, she used to say, were winking now in her memory,
although fifty years had elapsed since her father took her, a child of
four years, to see "Othello." Her talent at mimicry made her always most
interesting, when she spoke of Munden and his pleasant absurdities on
the stage. For Bannister, Johnstone, Fawcett, and Emery she had a most
exquisite relish, and she said they had made comedy to her a living art
full of laughter and tears. Her passion for the stage, and overclouded
prospects for the future, led her in early youth to write a play. She
had already written a considerable number of verses which had been
printed, and were honored by being severely castigated by Gifford in the
"Quarterly."

"I didn't mind the great reviewer's blows at all," she used to say. "My
poems had been republished in America; and Coleridge had prophesied that
I should one day write a tragedy."

Talfourd was then, though a young man, a most excellent critic, and lent
a helping hand to the young authoress. Her anxieties attending the first
representation of her play at Covent Garden she was always fond of
relating, and in such a manner that we who listened fell into such
boisterous merriment with her, that I have known carriages stop in front
of her window, and their inmates put out anxiously inquiring heads, to
learn, if possible, what it all meant inside the cottage.

She never forgot "the warm grasp of Mrs. Charles Kemble's hand, when she
saw her, all life and heartiness, at her house in Soho Square,--or the
excellent acting of Young and Kemble and Macready, who did everything
actors could do to secure success for her."

"These are the things," she once wrote, "one thinks of, when sitting
calm and old by the light of a country fire."

The comic and the grotesque that were mingled up with her first
experiences of the stage as a dramatic author were inimitably rendered
by herself, whenever she sat down to relate the story of that visit to
London for the p