NOTES OF AN ARTIST. 553 



MRS. SIDDONS. Some few years ago I met H returning from his 

 first visit to Mrs. Siddons. lie appeared quite abstracted acknowledg- 

 ing that the presence of the threat actress had awed him. " She is a 

 grand creature/' said he. " I felt as if I had been ushered before a supe- 

 rior being. Her house seemed the very temple of the Tragic muse. I 

 found her sitting in a large room with a female attendant behind her. A 

 breadth of space around allowed her figure its full importance ; ample 

 folds of drapery, and a large chair, gave the composition its complete ef- 

 fect. I was so full of the Tragic Muse when I entered, that my mind 

 was impressed by what I saw as by a picture. The charm was by no 

 means dissolved when she spoke, her voice being in perfect unison 

 with her dignified mien : she talked as if accustomed to command, 

 and yet there was no semblance of affectation in all this ; one took it 

 for granted it was her nature to be grand and dignified in the most 

 ideal sense. In the course of conversation, she gave me an account 

 of her first appearance on the London Stage she was sleepless, she 

 said, for many nights previously in a state of desperate tranquillity" 



A short time after this I again met my friend, who told me he had 

 recently attended one of Siddons' morning readings of Shakspeare. 

 The room was excessively crowded, and hot to suffocation. In order 

 to obtain a little air, he squeezed himself a passage to the door, and 

 with considerable difficulty gained the top of the stairs, his mind 

 being deeply impressed by an appalling scene from Macbeth which 

 had just been recited. As he stood cooling himself above a crowd of 

 lacqueys in the hall, he heard the vulgar discordant voice of his own 

 man thus addressing a servant of the house and jarring with the 

 distant solemn tones of the great actress : " Why, Tom, your missis 

 is a tuning her old pipes as lustily as ever !" 



The contrast struck H as forcibly as Shakspeare's Porter entering 

 after the murder of Duncan. In nature we are constantly meeting 

 with these violent confluences of the awful and the absurd, the pa- 

 thetic and the laughable. The following circumstance is recalled to 

 my memory by the observation just made. The friends of a dying 

 person, myself among the number, had called in the spiritual aid of 

 a dissenting minister. By the fire, wrapped in many folds of cloth- 

 ing, in an easy chair, lay the pale patient; in the centre of the cham- 

 ber was a small round pillar and claw table, on which were some re- 

 freshments. The clerical gentleman, a short punchy man with large 

 cheeks, small eyes, and fat hands, approached the table, produced 

 from his pocket a small Bible, kneeled down, and began to pray. 

 After rather a long ejaculatory address, as I turned round to re-pos- 

 sess my seat, my eye fell upon the minister, who seemed to be a sort 

 of person that, like Gibbon, required some assistance to rise when in 

 a state of genuflexion. For the purpose of facilitating the recovery 

 of his feet, he laid his fists on the edge of the little round table, 

 which, not being constructed to bear so unequal a weight, tilted over, 

 allowing the whole set of decanters, plates, glasses, biscuits, sand- 

 wiches, &c, to fall in a shower upon the fat person of our clerical 

 friend who was actually rolling on the floor. Notwithstanding the 

 solemnity of my previous thoughts, the ludicrous contrast so far mas- 

 tered me that my whole frame shook and my eyes swam with sup- 

 pressed laughter. 



M. M. No. 89. 3 R 



