t closes.

"Thus with a kiss I die,"
"Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead,"

are full enough of bitter-sweet despair for the last chords of that
ineffable, passionate strain--the swoon of sorrow ending that brief,
palpitating ecstasy, the proper, dirge-like close to that triumphant
hymn of love and youth and beauty. All the frantic rushing and tortured
writhing and uproar of noisy anguish of the usual stage ending seemed
utter desecration to me; but Garrick was an actor, the first of actors,
and his death-scene of the lovers and ending of the play is much more
theatrically effective than Shakespeare's.

The report of my approaching appearance on the stage excited a good deal
of interest among the acquaintances and friends of my family, and
occasioned a renewal of cordial relations which had formerly existed,
but ceased for some time, between Sir Thomas Lawrence and my father and
mother.

Lawrence's enthusiastic admiration for my uncle John and Mrs. Siddons,
testified by the numerous striking portraits in which he has recorded
their personal beauty and dramatic picturesqueness, led to a most
intimate and close friendship between the great painter and the eminent
actors, and, subsequently, to very painful circumstances, which
estranged him for years from all our family, and forbade all renewal of
the relations between himself and Mrs. Siddons which had been so cruelly
interrupted.

While frequenting her house upon terms of the most affectionate
intimacy, he proposed to her eldest daughter, my cousin Sarah, and was
accepted by her. Before long, however, he became deeply dejected, moody,
restless, and evidently extremely and unaccountably wretched. Violent
scenes of the most painful emotion, of which the cause was inexplicable
and incomprehensible, took place repeatedly between himself and Mrs.
Siddons, to whom he finally, in a paroxysm of self-abandoned misery,
confessed that he had mistaken his own feelings, and that her younger
daughter, and not the elder, was the real object of his affection, and
ended by imploring permission to transfer his addresses from the one to
the other sister. How this extraordinary change was accomplished I know
not; but only that it took place, and that Maria Siddons became engaged
to her sister's faithless lover. To neither of them, however was he
destined ever to be united; they were both exceedingly delicate young
women, with a tendency to consumption, whic