ll I could
ejaculate; he, poor man, literally pale green with dismay, picked me up
in profound silence, and the audience kindly covered our confusion, and
comforted us by vehement applause, not, indeed, unmixed with laughter.
But my friends and admirers were none the more his after that exploit;
and I remained in mortal dread of his stage embraces for ever after,
steadying myself carefully on my feet, and bracing my whole figure to
"stand fast," whenever he made the smallest affectionate approach toward
me. It is not often that such a piece of awkwardness as this is
perpetrated on the stage, but dramatic heroines are nevertheless liable
to sundry disagreeable difficulties of a very unromantic nature. If a
gentleman in a ball-room places his hand round a lady's waist to waltz
with her, she can, without any shock to the "situation," beg him to
release the end spray of her flowery garland, or the floating ribbons of
her head-dress, which he may have imprisoned; but in the middle of a
scene of tragedy grief or horror, of the unreality of which, by dint of
the effort of your imagination, you are no longer conscious, to be
obliged to say, in your distraction, to your distracted partner in woe,
"Please lift your arm from my waist, you are pulling my head down
backwards," is a distraction, too, of its kind.

The only occasion on which I ever acted Juliet to a Romeo who looked the
part was one when Miss Ellen Tree sustained it. The acting of Romeo, or
any other man's part by a woman (in spite of Mrs. Siddons's Hamlet), is,
in my judgment, contrary to every artistic and perhaps natural
propriety, but I cannot deny that the stature "more than common tall,"
and the beautiful face, of which the fine features were too marked in
their classical regularity to look feeble or even effeminate, of my fair
female lover made her physically an appropriate representative of Romeo.
Miss Ellen Tree looked beautiful and not unmanly in the part; she was
broad-shouldered as well as tall, and her long limbs had the fine
proportions of the huntress Diana; altogether, she made a very "pretty
fellow," as the saying was formerly, as all who saw her in her graceful
performance of Talfourd's "Ion" will testify; but assumption of that
character, which in its ideal classical purity is almost without sex,
was less open to objection than that of the fighting young Veronese
noble of the fourteenth century. She fenced very well, however, and
acquitted herself q