an unknown sensation to us. One who saw her once act it from the side scenes, with the disillusion of red ochre, that was daubed on by her maid under his eyes; her whisper, which Christopher North eloquently termed "the escaping sighs and moans of the bared soul"; her face, the terrible mixture of hope, apprehension, and resolution, gave him a sickly feeling of reality. His tongue clave to the roof of his mouth, in spite of the evidence of his eyes that the assassination was a piece of mechanical trickery in which the paint-*pot played a conspicuous part. If a detective had made his appearance at the moment, he declares he would immediately have given himself up as particeps criminis, accessory before and after the event. The whole fiction, so inimitably played and so powerfully described, had kicked fact and reason off the throne.
But we must return to the first night. It was the 2nd of February. All the intellect and fashion of the town were present: Burke, Fox, Wyndham, Gibbon, in the front row, and, above all, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who took a particular interest in her performance of the character. He had a seat in the orchestra, where he was privileged to sit on account of his deafness. He had constantly urged her to act Lady Macbeth before, and had designed her dress for the sleep-*walking scene. Needless to say that her usual nervousness was magnified tenfold. All had declared her incapable of rendering the grander plays of Shakespeare. She had reached, they maintained, the highest point which she was capable of attaining, and her straining higher was simply presumption. She knew, therefore, that if she had been criticised before, the observations now would be much more severe. The representation of the other parts also did not satisfy
