uld escape the
reproach of imitation. Her version was full of electric touches
and rapid alternations of feeling, but at times it bordered on the
sensational and extravagant. Her fiery vehemence was often felt to be
inconsistent with the tenderness of the heroine. The critics, while
admitting the varied and original beauties of her reading, were yet
severe in their condemnation of some of its features. Mme. Malibran,
however, urged that her action was what she would have manifested in the
actual situations. "I remember once," says the Countess De Merlin, "a
friend advised her not to make _Otello_ pursue her so long when he was
about to kill her. Her answer was: 'You are right; it is not elegant, I
admit; but, when once I fairly enter into my character, I never think of
effects, but imagine myself actually the person I represent. I can
assure you that in the last scene of Desdemona I often feel as if I were
really about to be murdered, and act accordingly.' Donzelli used to be
much annoyed by Mme. Malibran not determining beforehand how he was to
seize her; she often gave him a regular chase. Though he was one of the
best-tempered men in the world, I recollect him one evening being
seriously angry. Desdemona had, according to custom, repeatedly escaped
from his grasp; in pursuing her, he stumbled, and slightly wounded
himself with the dagger he brandished. It was the only time I ever saw
him in a passion."

She next appeared successively as _Rosina, Ni-netta, and Tancredi_,
winning fresh laurels in them all, not only by her superb skill in
vocalizing, but by her versatility of dramatic conception and the ease
with which she entered into the most opposite phases of feeling
and motive. She covered Rossini's elaborate fioriture with a fresh
profusion of ornament, but always with a dexterity which saved it from
the reproach of being overladen. She performed _Semiramide_ with Mme.
Pisaroni, and played Zerlina to Sontag's _Donna Anna_. Her habit of
treating such dramatic parts as _Ninetta, Zerlina_, and _Amina_ was the
occasion of keen controversy among the critics of the time. Entirely
averse to the conventional method of idealizing the character of the
country girl out of all semblance to nature, Malibran was essentially
realistic in preserving the rusticity, awkwardness, and _naivete_ of
peasant-life. One critic argued: "It is by no means rare to discover in
the humblest walk of life an inborn grace and delicacy of Nature's