for the tranquillity of the country, the storm has blown over for
the present. Everything is quiet again in London and promises to
remain so, and there seems to be a sort of "drawing of a long
breath" sensation in the state of the public mind, though I cannot
myself help thinking not only that we have been, but that we still
are, on the eve of some great crisis.

Mrs. Haller is going on very well; it is well spoken of, I am told,
and upon the whole it seems to have done me credit, though I am
surprised it has, for there is nothing in the part that gives me
the least satisfaction. My next character, I hear, is to be of a
very different order of frailty--Calista, in "The Fair Penitent."
However odious both play and part are, there are powerful
situations in it, and many opportunities for fine acting, but I am
afraid I am quite unequal to such a _turpissime_ termagant, with
whom my aunt did such tremendous things.

My performance of "The Fair Penitent" was entirely ineffective, and did
neither me nor the theater any service; the play itself is a feeble
adaptation of Massinger's powerful drama of "The Fatal Dowry," and, as
generally happens with such attempts to fit our old plays to our modern
stage, the fundamentally objectionable nature of the story could not be
reformed without much of the vigorous and terrible effect of the
original treatment evaporating in the refining process. Mr. Macready
revived Massinger's fine play with considerable success, but both the
matter and the manner of our dramatic ancestors is too robust for the
audiences of our day, who nevertheless will go and see "Diane de Lys,"
by a French company of actors, without wincing. Of Mrs. Siddons's Mrs.
Haller, one of her admirers once told me that her majestic and imposing
person, and the commanding character of her beauty, militated against
her effect in the part. "No man, alive or dead," said he, "would have
dared to take a liberty with her; wicked she might be, but weak she
could not be, and when she told the story of her ill-conduct in the
play, nobody believed her." While another of her devotees, speaking of
"The Fair Penitent," said that it was worth sitting out the piece for
her scene with Romont alone, and to see "such a splendid animal in such
a magnificent rage."

CHAPTER XVIII.

My friend left us after a visit of a few weeks, taking my sister to
Ireland with her