sely admiring for his nobleness; I forget everyone but Miss
Mestayer, who gave form to my conception of the tragic actress at her
highest. She had a hooked nose, a great play of nostril, a vast
protuberance of bosom and always the "crop" of close moist ringlets; I
say always, for I was to see her often again, during a much later phase,
the mid-most years of that Boston Museum which aimed at so vastly higher
a distinction than the exploded lecture-room had really done, though in
an age that snickered even abnormally low it still lacked the courage to
call itself a theatre. She must have been in comedy, which I believe she
also usefully and fearlessly practised, rather unimaginable; but there
was no one like her in the Boston time for cursing queens and
eagle-beaked mothers; the Shakespeare of the Booths and other such would
have been unproducible without her; she had a rusty, rasping, heaving
and tossing "authority" of which the bitterness is still in my ears. I
am revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after age when she had
come, comparatively speaking, into her own--the sight of her,
accidentally incurred, one tremendously hot summer night, as she slowly
moved from her lodgings or wherever, in the high Bowdoin Street region,
down to the not distant theatre from which even the temperature had
given her no reprieve; and well remember how, the queer light of my
young impression playing up again in her path, she struck me as the
very image of mere sore histrionic habit and use, a worn and weary, a
battered even though almost sordidly smoothed, _thing_ of the theatre,
very much as an old infinitely-handled and greasy violoncello of the
orchestra might have been. It was but an effect doubtless of the heat
that she scarcely seemed clad at all; slippered, shuffling and, though
somehow hatted and vaguely veiled or streamered, wrapt in a gauzy sketch
of a dressing-gown, she pointed to my extravagant attention the moral of
thankless personal service, of the reverse of the picture, of the cost
of "amusing the public" in a case of amusing it, as who should say,
every hour. And I had thrilled before her as the Countess in
"Love"--such contrasted combinations! But she carried her head very
high, as with the habit of crowns and trains and tirades--had in fact
much the air of some deposed and reduced sovereign living on a scant
allowance; so that, all invisibly and compassionately, I took off my hat
to her.

To which I must add