re devotion to one object quite incompatible with the
constancy professed and promised to his English mistress.

Probably aware that every effort would, till the last, be made by Lord
F----'s family to detach them from each other, bound by her promise to
hold no intercourse with him, but determined to take the verdict of her
fate from no one but himself, Miss O'Neill obtained a brief leave of
absence from her theatrical duties, went with her brother and sister to
Calais, whence she travelled alone to Paris (poor, fair Juliet! when I
think of her, not as I ever knew her, but such as I know she must then
have been, no more pathetic image presents itself to my mind), and took
effectual measures to ascertain beyond all shadow of doubt the bitter
truth of the evil reports of her fickle lover's mode of life. His
devotion to one lady, the more respectable form of infidelity which must
inevitably have canceled their contract of love, was not indeed true,
and probably the story had been fabricated because the mere general
accusation of profligacy might easily have been turned into an appeal to
her mercy, as the result of reckless despondency and of his utter
separation from her; and a woman in her circumstances might not have
been hard to find who would have persuaded herself that she might
overlook "all that," reclaim her lover, and be an Earl's wife. Miss
O'Neill rejoined her family at Calais, wrote to Lord F----'s father, the
Earl of E----, her final and irrevocable rejection of his son's suit,
fell ill of love and sorrow, and lay for some space between life and
death for the sake of her unworthy lover; rallied bravely, recovered,
resumed her work,--her sway over thousands of human hearts,--and, after
lapse of healing and forgiving and forgetting time, married Sir William
Wrixon Becher.

The peculiar excellence of her acting lay in the expression of pathos,
sorrow, anguish,--the sentimental and suffering element of tragedy. She
was expressly devised for a representative victim; she had, too, a rare
endowment for her special range of characters, in an easily excited,
superficial sensibility, which caused her to cry, as she once said to
me, "buckets full," and enabled her to exercise the (to most men)
irresistible influence of a beautiful woman in tears. The power (or
weakness) of abundant weeping without disfigurement is an attribute of
deficient rather than excessive feeling. In such persons the tears are
poured from their c