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was deep, clear, and mellow, capable of the most forcible exertion, but, in ordinary speaking, "gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman!" She, however, owed comparatively little to physical qualifications; there was nothing in her face, voice, or person, sufficiently striking to have obtruded her into notice, or to have been a factitious substitute for other requisites. Her external advantages were merely the medium through which her internal powers displayed their refulgence, without obstruction or refraction (with the exception hereafter to be stated); they were the passive instruments, which her powerful and delicate sensibility wielded with the utmost propriety, ease, and effect. Her excellence (unrivalled by any actress since Mrs. Siddons) consisted in truth of nature and force of passion. Her correctness did not seem the effect of art or study, but of instinctive sympathy, of a conformity of mind and disposition to the character she was playing, as if she had unconsciously become the very person. There were no catching lights, no pointed hits, no theatrical tricks, no female arts resorted to, in her best or general style of acting; there was a singleness, an entireness, and harmony in it, that gave it a double charm as well as a double power. It rested on the centre of its own feelings. Her style of acting was smooth, round, polished, and classical, like a marble statue; self-supported and self-involved; owing its resemblance to life to the truth of imitation, not to startling movements and restless contortion, but returning continually within the softened line of beauty and nature. Her manner was, in this respect, the opposite of Mr. Kean's, of whom no man can say (either in a good or in a bad sense) that he is like a marble statue, but of whom it may be said, with some appearance of truth, that he is like a paste-board figure,

the little, uncouth, disproportioned parts of which children pull awry, twitch, and jerk about in fifty odd and unaccountable directions, to laugh at-or, like the mock figure of harlequin, that is stuck against the wall, and pulled in pieces, and fastened together again, with twenty idle, pantomimic, eccentric absurdities! Or he seems to have St. Anthony's fire in his veins, St. Vitus's dance in his limbs, and a devil tugging at every part-one shrugging his shoulders, another wagging his head, another hobbling in his legs, another tapping his breast; one straining his voice till it is ready to crack, another suddenly, and surprisingly, dropping it down into an inaudible whisper, which is made distinct and clear by the bravos in the pit, and the shouts of the gallery. There was not any of this paltry patch-work, these vulgar snatches at applause, these stops, and starts, and breaks, in Miss O'Neill's performance, which was sober, sedate, and free from pretence and mummery. We regret her loss the more, and fear we shall have to regret it more deeply every day. In a word, Mr. Kean's acting is like an anarchy of the passions, in which each upstart humour, or frenzy of the moment, is struggling to get violent possession of some bit or corner of his fiery soul and pigmy body--to jostle out, and lord it over the rest of the rabble of short-lived and furious purposes. Miss O'Neill seemed perfect mistress of her own thoughts, and if she was not indeed the rightful queen of tragedy, she had at least all the decorum, grace, and self-possession of one of the Maids of Honour waiting around its throne. Miss O'Neill might have played to the greatest advantage in one of the tragedies of Sophocles, which are the perfection of the stately, elegant, and simple drama of the Greeks : we cannot conceive of Mr. Kean making a part of any

such classical group. Perhaps, however, we may magnify his defects in this particular, as we have been accused of over-rating his general merits. We do not think it an easy matter "to praise him or blame him too much." We have never heard anything to alter the opinion we always entertained of him; he can only do it himself—by his own acting. While we owe it to him to speak largely of his genius and his powers, we owe it to the public to protest against the eccentricities of the one, or the abuses of the other.

To return from this digression. With all the purity and simplicity, Miss O'Neill possessed the utmost force of tragedy. Her soul was like the sea-calm, beautiful, smiling, smooth, and yielding; but the storm of adversity lashed it into foam, laid bare its centre, or heaved its billows against the skies. She could repose on gentleness, or dissolve in tenderness, and at the same time give herself up to all the agonies of woe. She could express fond affection, pity, rage, despair, madness. She felt all these passions in their simple and undefinable elements only. She felt them as a woman—as a mistress, as a wife, a mother, or a friend. She seemed to have the most exquisite sense of the pressure of those soft ties that were woven round her heart, and that bound her to her place in society; and the rending them asunder appeared to give a proportionable revulsion to her frame, and disorder to her thoughts. There was nothing in her acting of a preternatural or ideal cast, that could lift the mind. above mortality, or might be fancied to descend from another sphere. But she gave the full, the true, and unalloyed expression to all that is common, obvious, and heartfelt in the charities of private life, and in the conflict of female virtue and attachment with the hardest trials

and intolerable griefs. She did not work herself up to the extremity of passion by questioning with her own thoughts, or raise herself above circumstances by ascending the platform of imagination, or arm herself against fate by strengthening her will to meet it; no, she yielded to calamity, she gave herself up entire, and with entire devotion, to her unconquerable despair; it was the tide of anguish swelling in her own breast that overflowed to the breasts of the audience, and filled their eyes with tears, as the loud torrent projects itself from the cliff to the abyss below, and bears everything before it in its resistless course. The source of her command over public sympathy lay, in short, in the intense conception and unrestrained expression of what she and every other woman of natural sensibility would feel in given circumstances, in which she and every other woman was liable to be placed. Her Belvidera, Isabella, Mrs. Beverley, &c., were all characters of this strictly feminine class of heroines, and she played them to the life. They were made of softness and suffering. We recollect the first time we saw her in Belvidera, when the manner in which she threw herself into the arms of Jaffier, before they part, was as if her heart would have leaped out of her bosom if she had not done so. It staggered the spectator like a blow. Again, her first meeting with Biron, in Isabella, was no less admirable and impressive. She looked at, she saw, she knew him; her surprise, her joy, were painted in her face, and woke every nerve to rapture. She seemed to have perfected all that her heart could do. But the sudden alteration of her look and manner, the shuddering and recoil within herself, when she recovers from her surprise and recollects her situation, married to another-at once on the verge of ecstacy and

perdition-baffled description, and threw all that she had before done into the shade-"like to another morn, risen on mid noon." We could mention many other instances, but they are still too fresh in the memory of our readers to make it necessary. It must be confessed, as perhaps the only drawback on Miss O'Neill's merit, or on the pleasure derived from seeing her, that she sometimes carried the expression of grief, or agony of mind, to a degree of physical horror that could hardly be borne. Her shrieks, in the concluding scenes of some of her parts, were like those of mandrakes, and you stopped your ears against them; her looks were of "moody madness, laughing wild, amidst severest woe," and you turned your eyes from them, for they seemed to sear like the lightning. Her eye-balls rolled in her head, her words rattled in her throat. This was carrying reality too far. The sufferings of the body are no longer proper for dramatic exhibition when they become objects of painful attention in themselves, and are not merely indicative of what passes in the mind-comments and interpreters of the moral scene within. The effect was the more ungrateful, from the very contrast (as we before hinted) between this lady's form and delicate complexion, and the violent conflict into which she was thrown. She seemed like the little flower, not the knotted oak, contending with the pitiless storm. There appeared no reason why she should "mar that whiter skin of hers than snow, or monumental alabaster," or rend and dishevel, with ruthless hand, those graceful locks, fairer than the opening day. But these were faults arising from pushing truth and nature to an excess; and we should, at present, be glad to see "the best virtues" of others make even an approach to them. Her common style of speaking had a certain mild and

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