s herself "a great king's
daughter," therein recalling those august and piteous words of
Shakespeare's Katharine:--

"We are a Queen, or long have thought so, certain
The daughter of a king."

Poor old Antigonus, in his final soliloquy, recounting the vision of
Hermione that had come upon him in the night, declares her to be a woman
royal and grand not by descent only but by nature:--

"I never saw a vessel of like sorrow,
So filled and so becoming. In pure white robes,
Like very sanctity, she did approach."

That image Mary Anderson embodied, and therefore the ideal of
Shakespeare was made a living thing--that glorious ideal, in shaping
which the great poet "from all that are took something good, to make a
perfect woman." Toward Polixenes, in the first scene, her manner was
wholly gracious, delicately playful, innocently kind, and purely frail.
Her quiet archness at the question, "Will you go yet?" struck exactly
the right key of Hermione's mood. With the baby prince Mamillius her
frolic and banter, affectionate, free, and gay, were in a happy vein of
feeling and humour. Her simple dignity, restraining both resentment and
grief, in face of the injurious reproaches of Leontes, was entirely
noble and right, and the pathetic words, "I never wished to see you
sorry, now I trust I shall," could not have been spoken with more depth
and intensity of grieved affection than were felt in her composed yet
tremulous voice. The entrance, at the trial scene, was made with the
stateliness natural to a queenly woman, and yet with a touch of
pathos--the cold patience of despair. The delivery of Hermione's
defensive speeches was profoundly earnest and touching. The simple cry
of the mother's breaking heart, and the action of veiling her face and
falling like one dead, upon the announcement of the prince's death, were
perfect denotements of the collapse of a grief-stricken woman. The skill
with which the actress, in the monument scene--which is all repose and
no movement--contrived nevertheless to invest Hermione with steady
vitality of action, and to imbue the crisis with a feverish air of
suspense, was in a high degree significant of the personality of genius.
For such a performance of Hermione Shakespeare himself has provided the
sufficient summary and encomium:--

"Women will love her, that she is a woman
More worth than any man; men that she is
The rarest of all women."

It is one thing to sa