; the original drawings were purchased by Lord
Ellesmere. The second part assigned to me by the theater authorities was
Belvidera, in Otway's "Venice Preserved." I had never read the play
until I learned my part, nor seen it until I acted it. It is, I believe,
one of the longest female parts on the stage. But I had still my
school-girl capacity for committing quickly to memory, and learned it in
three hours. Acting it was a very different matter. I was no longer
sustained by the genius of Shakespeare, no longer stimulated by the
sublime passion and exquisite poetry. Juliet was a reality to me, a
living individual woman, whose nature I could receive, as it were, into
mine at once, without effort, comprehending and expressing it. Belvidera
seemed to me a sort of lay figure in a tragic attitude, a mere, "female
in general," without any peculiar or specific characteristics whatever;
placed as Belvidera is in the midst of sordidly painful and coarsely
agonizing circumstances, there was nothing in the part itself that
affected my feelings or excited my imagination; and the miserable
situations into which the poor creature was thrown throughout the piece
revolted me, and filled me with disgust for the men she had to do with,
without inspiring me with any sympathy for her. In this piece, too, I
came at once into the unfavorable light of full comparison with my
aunt's performance of the part, which was one of her famous ones. A
friend of hers and mine, my dear and excellent William Harness, said
that seeing me was exactly like looking at Mrs. Siddons through the
diminishing end of an opera glass. My personal likeness to her, in spite
of my diminutive size and irregular features, was striking, and of
course suggested, to those who remembered her, associations which were
fatal to my satisfactory performance of the part. I disliked the play
and the character of Belvidera, and I am sure I must have played it very
indifferently.

I remember one circumstance connected with my first performance of it
which proved how painfully the unredeemed horror and wretchedness of the
piece acted upon my nerves and imagination. In the last scene, where
poor Belvidera's brain gives way under her despair, and she fancies
herself digging for her husband in the earth, and that she at last
recovers and seizes him, I intended to utter a piercing scream; this I
had not of course rehearsed, not being able to scream deliberately in
cold blood, so that I har