Chapter XXI (10)

My father has hitherto been able to lay by nothing, and my
assistance is absolutely necessary to him, ... and as long as I can
in any way serve my father's interests by remaining in my
profession I shall do so, and must naturally look forward to a
prolonged period of my present exertions. It is useless pondering
upon this, but I have been led to do so lately from a letter which
my father received from Mr. Bartley, the stage manager of Covent
Garden, the other day, which contained the plan of a new theatrical
speculation, in which he is most anxious to engage us. I know not
how my father feels upon this subject.... I, however, am well
determined that neither Mr. L----'s opinion, nor that of the whole
world besides, should induce me to own the value of a truss of
straw in any theater. My father's whole life has been given over to
trouble and anxiety in consequence of his proprietorship and
involvement in that ruinous concern, Covent Garden; and now, when
his remaining health and strength will no more than serve to lay up
the means of subsistence when health and strength are gone, the
idea of his loading himself with such a burden of bitterness as the
proprietorship of a new theater makes me perfectly miserable. For
my own part, I am determined to own neither part nor lot in any
such venture: I will lend or give anything that I may earn to it,
and I will act, at half the price I might get elsewhere, for it, if
my father wishes me to do so; but not a demonstrable cent per cent
profit should induce me to run such a risk of cursing the day that
I was born, as to become owner of a theater. I write you all this
(and I have written more than enough about it) because it has been
lately a subject of much anxious meditation to me. The matter is at
present without settled form or plan, but the proposal of such a
scheme has caused me deep regret and anxiety.... I am going to act
to-morrow in "The Hunchback;" Thursday, Mrs. Beverley; Friday, Lady
Townley; Saturday, Juliet; Monday, Julia again; and Tuesday,
Bizarre in "The Inconstant;" which ends our engagement here. This
is pretty hard work, is it not? besides always one, and sometimes
two rehearsals of a morning.

We begin our second engagement in New York on the 7th of November.
Don't forget that the 27th of that month is my birthday, and that
if you neglect to drink my health, I shall probably die, for want
of your good wishes to keep me alive.

We act in Boston on the 3d of December; "further than that the
deponent sayeth not."

I told you in my last letter that Philadelphia was the cleanest
place in the world. The country along the banks of the Schuylkill
(one of the rivers on which it stands; the other is the Delaware)
is wild and beautiful, and the glory of the autumn woods what an
eye that hath not seen can by no manner of means conceive. I have
for the last week had my room full of the most delicious flowers
that could only be seen with us at midsummer, and here, in these
last days of autumn, they are as abundant and fragrant, and the sun
is as intensely hot and brilliant, as it should be, but never is,
with us, in the month of July....

Dall went into a Quaker's shop here the other day, when, after
waiting upon her with the utmost attention and kindness, the master
of the shop said, "And how doth Fanny? I was in hopes she might
have wanted something; we should have great pleasure in attending
upon her." Was not that nice? So to-day I went thither, and bought
myself a lovely sober-colored gown. This place, as you know, is the
headquarters of Quakerdom, and all the enchanting nosegays come
from "a Philadelphia friend," the latter word dashed under, as if
to indicate a member of the religious fraternity always called by
that kindly title here....

I think my father has some idea of bringing out "The Star of
Seville" here, and if he does I shall break my heart that it was
not brought out first in England. Emily always reproaches me with
want of patriotism. I have more than helps to make me cheerful
here, and leaving England--not home, and not you, but England,
England--for two years, seems to me now ridiculous, and fabulous,
and preposterous, and disastrous.

I have finished my first volume of Graham, and I have finished this
letter. God bless you!

Ever your affectionate
F. A. K.

PHILADELPHIA, November 2, 1832.
DEAREST H----,

I received your fifth letter to-day, and one from Dorothy, and one
from Emily Fitzhugh.... My last letter to you was a sad one, and
sad in a fashion that does not often occur to me. I was troubled
and anxious about my professional labor and its results, and that
may be called a small sadness compared with some other with which I
have lately become familiar. Of course none of these anxieties have
been removed, for some time must elapse before I can know on what
plan my father determines with regard to Mr. Bartley's proposal
about this new theater. It does not affect me personally, because I
am thoroughly determined to take no part in any speculation of the
kind; but the possibility of my father entering into any such
scheme is care enough to "kill a cat," and make a kitten miserable
besides.... In all matters, but especially in matters of business,
I hold frankness, straightforwardness, and decision as conducive to
success, as consonant with right feeling; but I think men are much
more cowardly than women, and believe a great deal more in policy,
temporizing, and expediency than we do. "Managing" is supposed to
be a feminine tendency; it has no place in my composition; perhaps
I might be the better for a little of it--but only perhaps, and
only a little.... This letter, as you will perceive by its date,
was begun on the banks of the Delaware; here we are, however, once
more in New York. It is Monday evening, the 5th of November, and
you are firing squibs and burning manikins _en action de grâces_
that the Houses of Parliament were not blown up by the Roman
Catholics, instead of living to be reformed by the Whigs, and
(peradventure) blowing up the nation.

The Presidential Election is going on here, and creates immense
excitement. General Jackson, they say, will certainly be
re-elected.

Our last fortnight in Philadelphia has been one of incessant and
very hard work, rehearsing every morning and acting every night. I
rejoiced heartily when our engagement drew to a close, for I was
fairly worn out, and money bought with health is bought too dear, I
think.... I have taken some very pleasant rides during our stay in
Philadelphia; the horses are none of them properly broken for
riding, which makes it a pleasure of no small fatigue to ride them
for three or four hours. Luckily, I do not object to severe
exercise, and the weather and the country were both charming....

I am glad you have been re-reading the "Tempest." ... What
exquisite pleasure that fine creation has given me! I like it
better than any of the other plays; it is less "of the earth,
earthy" than any of the others; for though the "Midsummer Night's
Dream" is in some sort, as it were, its companion, the mortal
element in the latter poem is far less noble and lovely than in the
"Tempest." Prospero and Miranda, the dwellers on the enchanted
island, are statelier and fairer than any of the human wanderers in
the mazes of the Athenian wood. There is a deep and indescribable
melancholy to me in the "Tempest" that mingles throughout with its
beauty, and lends a special charm to it. I so often contemplate in
fancy that island, lost in the unknown seas, just in the hour of
its renewed solitude, after the departure of its "human mortal"
dwellers and visitors, when Prospero and his companions had bade
farewell to it, when Caliban was grunting and grubbing and
groveling in his favorite cave again, when Ariel was hovering like
a humming-bird over the flower draperies of the woods, where the
footprints of men were still stamped on the wet sand of the shining
shore, but their voices silent and their forms vanished, and utter
solitude, and a strange dream of the past, filling the haunts where
human life, its sin and sorrow, and joy and hope, and love and
hate, had breathed and palpitated, and were now forever gone. The
notion of that desert once, but now deserted, paradise, whose
flowers had looked up at Miranda, whose skies had shed wisdom on
Prospero, always seems to me full of melancholy. The girl's sweet
voice singing no more in the sunny, still noon, the grave, tender
converse of the father and child charming no more the solemn
eventide, the forsaken island dwells in my imagination as at once
desecrated and hallowed by its mortal sojourners; no longer savage
quite, and never to be civilized; the supernatural element
disturbed, the human element withdrawn; a sad, beautiful place,
stranger than any other in the world. Perhaps the sea went over it;
it has never been found since Shakespeare landed on it. I love that
poem beyond words....

I shall ruin you in postage; if there is any chance of that, keep
Mrs. Norton's five guineas to pay for my American epistles.

Ever your affectionate
F. A. K.

DEAREST H----,

I have received your letter, acknowledging my first to you.... As
for letters, they are like everything else we experience here,
sources of to the full as much suffering as satisfaction. Who has
not felt their whole blood run backward at sight of one of these
folded fate-bearers? I declare, breaking an envelope always has
something of the character of pulling a shower-bath string over
one's own head; I wonder anybody ever has the courage to do it....

Your dread of our finding New York quite a desert would have been
literally fulfilled had we reached it a fortnight sooner; but the
dreadful malady, the cholera, had taken its departure, and though
private bereavements and general stagnation of business rendered
the season a very unfavorable one for our experiment, yet, upon the
whole, we have every reason to be well satisfied with the result of
it, and think we did well not to postpone the beginning of our
campaign.... The first serious experiences of our youth seem to me
like the breaking asunder of some curious, beautiful, and mystical
pattern or device.... All our lives long we are more or less intent
on replacing the bright scattered fragments in their original
shape: most of us die with the bits still scattered round us--that
is to say, such of the bits as have not been ground into powder, or
soiled and defaced beyond recognition, in the life-process. The few
very wise find and place them in a coherent form at last, but it is
quite another curious, beautiful, and mystical device or pattern
from the original one.

The deaths of the young Napoleon, the Duke of Reichstadt, and
Walter Scott have excited universal interest here, naturally of a
very dissimilar kind. One's heart burns to think of that young
eagle falling like a weakly winter flower, or a faded, sickly girl,
into his untimely grave.... There was nothing for him but death. If
he had been anything, it could only have been a wild spark of the
mad meteor from which he sprang; and as Heaven in its wisdom
forbade that, I think it much of its mercy that it extinguished him
early and utterly, and did not leave him to flare and flicker and
burn himself out with foul gunpowder smoke, and smell of dead men
slain in battle, in the middle of the smoldering ashes of his
father's European empire.

My admiration and respect for Walter Scott are unbounded, and were
I the noblest, richest, and charmingest man in the world, I would
lay myself at Anne Scott's feet out of sheer love and veneration
for her father....

You ask me if I wrote anything on board ship? Nothing but odds and
ends of doggerel. Since I have been here I have written some verses
on the beautiful American autumn, which have been published with
commendation. I am thinking of writing a prose story, if ever again
I can get two minutes and a half of leisure.... Your entreaties for
minute details of our life make me sad, for how little of what we
do, be, or suffer can be conveyed to you in this miserable scrap of
paper!... Our dinner-hour is three when we are actors, five when we
are ladies and gentlemen. The food we get here in New York is very
indifferent. It was excellent in quality in Philadelphia, but
wherever we have been there is a want of niceness and refinement in
the cooking and serving everything that is very disagreeable....

Thursday, Nov. 27th. This is my birthday--in England always one of
the gloomiest days of this gloomy month; here my windows are all
open, and the warm sun streaming in as it might on the finest of
early September days with us. I am to-day three-and-twenty. Where
is my life gone to? As the child said, "Where does the light go
when the candle is out?" ... Since last I wrote to you I have been
forty miles up the Hudson, and seen such noble waters and beautiful
hills, such glory of color and magnificent breadth in the grand
river and its autumn woods, as I cannot describe.

This is our last night but one of acting here. We play "The
Hunchback" on Saturday, and on Monday go back to Philadelphia for
three weeks; thence to Baltimore and Washington, and then return
here. I must go now and rehearse Katharine and Petruchio.

I have just finished Graham's "History," and am beginning John
Smith. By the by, a gentleman here is writing a play, in which I am
to act Pocahontas and my father Captain Smith. Come out and see it,
won't you? Good-by, dear. Think always of your affectionate

F. A. K.

December 9, 1832.
MY DEAREST H----,

I received yours of October 16th yesterday.... You are not
healthily natured enough to be inconstant. Yours is one of those
morbid organizations for whom the present never does its wholesome,
proper office of superseding the past, and your thoughts and
feelings, your whole inner life, in short, is always out of
perspective, because your background is forever your foreground,
and with you, half the time, nothing is but what is not; not in
consequence of looking forward, like Macbeth, but the reverse.... I
am delighted that you are going to Scotland to know my dear Mrs.
Harry Siddons.

Before this letter reaches you, however, you will have returned to
your castle, and your visit to Edinburgh will be over.... Mercy on
me! what disputations you and Mr. Combe will have had--on matters
physiological, psychological, phrenological, and philosophical! My
brains ache to imagine them.... Spurzheim, you know, is dead lately
in Boston. It is a matter of regret to me not to have seen him, and
his death will be a grief to the Combes, who venerate him
highly.... Making trial of people is running a foolish risk, and
they who get disappointment by it reap the most probable result
from such experiments. I am quite willing to trust my friends; God
forbid I should ever try them!...

We have not yet been to Boston, and therefore I myself know nothing
of Channing, and cannot answer your questions about him. All that I
hear inclines me to like as well as respect him. His gentleness and
kindness, his weak health, brought on by over-study, his perfect
simplicity and unaffectedness--these are the usual details that
follow any mention of him, and accord with the impression his
writings produced upon me; but of his theological treatises I know
nothing.

I am glad anything so universal as the blessed sunshine reminds you
of me, because my remembrance must be present with you almost
daily. The lights of heaven shine more glowingly here than through
the misty veils that curtain our islands. The moon and stars are
wonderfully bright, and there is an intensity, an earnestness, and
a translucent purity in the sky here that delights me.... Four
months are already gone out of the two years we are to pass out of
England. Dear England! My heart dwells with affectionate pride upon
the beauty and greatness and goodness of my own country--that
wonderful little land, that mere morsel of earth as it seems on the
map--so full of power, of wealth, of intellectual vigor and moral
worth!...

I found Graham a little too much of a Republican for me, though his
"History" seemed to me upon the whole good and very impartial. I am
now half way through Smith's "Virginia," which pleases me by its
quaint old-world style. I am myself much inclined to be in love
with Captain Smith. A man who fights three Turks and carries their
heads on his shield is to me an admirable man....

I answer the propositions in your letters in regular rotation as
they come; and so, with regard to the peaches, those that I have
tasted on this side of the Atlantic I should say were not
comparable to fine hothouse peaches in England and fine French
espalier peaches; but then the peach trees here are standard trees,
and there are whole orchards of them. Their chief merit, therefore,
is their abundance, and some of that abundance is certainly fit for
nothing but to feed pigs withal. [It is by no means a luxury to be
despised, however, to have, in the American fashion, on a hot
summer's day, a deep plate presented to you full of peaches, cut up
like apples for a pie, that have been standing in ice, and are then
snowed over with sugar and frozen cream.]

We are now in Philadelphia, whence we go to Baltimore, Washington,
and Charleston. The Southern States are at this moment in a state
of violent excitement, which seems almost to threaten a dissolution
of the Union. The tariff question is the point of disagreement; and
as the interests of the North and South are in direct opposition on
this subject, there is no foretelling the end.

Our success is very great, and we have every reason to be satisfied
with and grateful for it. Our houses are full, and eke our pockets,
and we have hitherto managed to live in tolerable privacy and very
tolerable discomfort. But I believe the western part of the country
has yet to teach us the extent of inconvenience to which travelers
in America are sometimes liable. God bless you, dearest H----.

I am, ever yours affectionately,
F. A. K.

My father and I took a moonlight walk the other night, from ten
o'clock till half-past twelve, during which we neither of us
uttered six words.

BALTIMORE, January 2, 1833.
MY DEAREST H----,

You are the first to whom I date this new year.... I told you in
one of my letters to keep the five guineas Mrs. Norton has paid you
for my scribblements to pay the postage of my letters--do so....

We arrived in this place on Monday, at half-past four, having left
Philadelphia at six in the morning. We have just terminated a
second engagement there very successfully. If the roads and
carriages are bad, and the land-traveling altogether detestable,
the speed, facility, and convenience of the steamboats, by which
one may really be conveyed from one end to another of this world of
vast waters, are very admirable. Vast waters indeed they are! We
came down the Delaware on Monday, and (open your Irish eyes!)
sometimes it was six, sometimes thirteen miles wide, and never
narrower than three or four miles at any part of it that we saw. So
wide an expanse of fresh running water is in itself a fine object.
We crossed the narrow neck of land between the Delaware and the
Chesapeake on a railroad with one of Stephenson's engines....

The railroad was full of knots and dots, and jolting and jumping
and bumping and thumping places. The carriages we were in held
twelve people very uncomfortably. Baltimore itself, as far as I
have seen it, strikes me as a large, rambling, red-brick village on
the outskirts of one of our manufacturing towns, Birmingham or
Manchester. It covers an immense extent of ground, but there are
great gaps and vacancies in the middle of the streets, patches of
gravely ground, parcels of meadow land, and large vacant
spaces--which will all, no doubt, be covered with buildings in good
time, for it is growing daily and hourly--but which at present give
it an untidy, unfinished, straggling appearance.

While my father and I were exploring about together yesterday, we
came to a print-shop, whose window exhibited an engraving of
Reynolds's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, and Lawrence's picture
of my uncle John in Hamlet. We stopped before them, and my father
looked with a good deal of emotion at these beautiful
representations of his beautiful kindred, and it was a sort of sad
surprise to meet them in this other world where we are wandering,
aliens and strangers.

This is the newest-looking place we have yet visited, the youngest
in appearance in this young world; and I have experienced to-day a
disagreeable instance of its immature civilization, or at any rate
its small proficiency in the elegancies of life. I wanted to ride,
but although a horse was to be found, no such thing as a
side-saddle could be procured at any livery-stable or saddler's in
the town, so I have been obliged to give up my projected exercise.

I have been to my first rehearsal here this morning, and wretched
enough all things were. I act for the first time to-morrow night
Bianca, which they have everywhere chosen for my opening part; and
it is a good one for that purpose, as I generally act and look well
in it, and it is the sort of play that all sorts of people can
comprehend. There is a foreign--I mean continental--custom here,
which is pleasant. They have a _table d'hôte_ dinner at two
o'clock, and while it is going on a very tolerable band plays all
manner of Italian airs and German waltzes, and as there is a fine
long corridor into which my room-door opens, with a window at each
end, I have a very agreeable promenade, and take my exercise to
this musical accompaniment....

I have at this moment on my table a lovely nosegay--roses,
geraniums, rare heaths, and perfect white camellias. Our windows
are all wide open; the heat is intense, and the air that comes in
at them like a sirocco. It is unusual weather for the season even
here, and very unwholesome.

In a week's time we are going on to Washington, where we shall find
dear Washington Irving, whom I think I shall embrace, for England's
sake as well as his own. We have letters to the President, to whom
we are to be presented, and to his rival, Henry Clay, and to Daniel
Webster, whom I care more to know than either of the others.

After a short stay in Washington we return here, and then back to
Philadelphia and New York, till the 20th of February, after which
we sail for Charleston. There has been, and still exists at
present, a very considerable degree of political alarm and
excitement in this country, owing to the threat of the South
Carolinians to secede from the Union if the tariff is not annulled,
and the country is in hourly expectation of being involved in a
civil war. However, the prevailing opinion among the wise seems to
be that the Northern States will be obliged to give up the tariff,
as the only means of preserving the Union; and if matters come to a
peaceable settlement, we shall proceed in February to Charleston;
if not, South Carolina will have other things to think of besides
plays and play-actors. The summer we shall probably spend in
Canada; the winter perhaps in Jamaica, to which place we have
received a most pressing invitation from Lord Mulgrave. The end of
the ensuing spring will, I trust in God, see us embarked once more
for England....

We are earning money very fast, and though I think we work too
incessantly and too hard, yet, as every night we do not act is a
certain loss of so much out of my father's pocket, I do not like to
make many objections to it, although I think it is really not
unlikely to be detrimental to his own health and strength....

I spent yesterday evening with some very pleasant people here, who
are like old-fashioned English folk, the Catons, Lady Wellesley's
father and mother. They are just now in deep mourning for Mrs.
Caton's father, the venerable Mr. Carroll, who was upward of
ninety-five years old when he died, and was the last surviving
signer of the Declaration of Independence. I saw a lovely picture
by Lawrence of the eldest of the three beautiful sisters, the
daughters of Mrs. Caton, who have all married Englishmen of rank.
[The Marchioness of Wellesley, the Duchess of Leeds, and Lady
Stafford. The fashion of marrying in England seems to be
traditional in this family. Miss McTavish, niece of these ladies,
married Mr. Charles Howard, son of the Earl of Carlisle.]

The Baltimore women are celebrated for their beauty, and I think
they are the prettiest creatures I have ever seen as far as their
faces go; but they are short and thin, and have no figures at all,
either in height or breadth, and pinch their waists and feet most
cruelly, which certainly, considering how small they are by nature,
is a work of supererogation, and does not tend to produce in them a
state of grace.... We act every night this week, and as we are
obliged to rehearse every morning, of course I have no time for any
occupations but my strictly professional ones. I do not approve of
this quantity of hard work for either my father or myself, but I do
not like to make any further protest upon the subject....

Good-by, dearest H----.
I am ever your affectionate
F. A. K.

TO MRS. JAMESON.

BALTIMORE, January 11, 1833.

Thank you across the sea, dear Mrs. Jameson, for your letter of the
1st of November. I had been wondering, but the day before it
reached me, whether you had ever received one I wrote to you on my
first arrival in New York, or whether you were accusing me of
neglect, ingratitude, forgetfulness, and all the turpitudes that
the delay of a letter sometimes causes folk to give other folk
credit for. My occupations are incessant, or rather, I should say,
my occupation, for to my sorrow I have but one. 'Tis not with me
now as in the fortunate days when, after six rehearsals, a piece
ran, as the saying is, twenty nights, leaving me all the mornings
and three evenings in the week at my own disposal. Here we rush
from place to place, at each place have to drill a new set of
actors, and every night to act a different play; so that my days
are passed in dawdling about cold, dark stages, with blundering
actors who have not even had the conscience to study the words of
their parts, all the morning. All the afternoon I pin up ribbons
and feathers and flowers, and sort out theatrical adornments, and
all the evening I enchant audiences, prompt my fellow-mimes, and
wish it had pleased Heaven to make me a cabbage in a corner of a
Christian kitchen-garden in--well, say Hertfordshire, or any other
county of England; I am not particular as to the precise spot....
Whenever I can I get on horseback; it is the only pleasure I have
in this world; for my dancing days are drawing to a close. But I
mean to ride as long as I have a hand to hold a rein, or a leg to
put over a pommel. By the by, I ought to beg your pardon for the
last sentence; I ought to have said a foot to put into a stirrup;
for if you are not ashamed of having legs you ought to be--at
least, we are in this country, and never mention, or give the
slightest token of having such things, except by wearing very short
petticoats, which we don't consider objectionable.... I am glad you
have furbished up and completed your little room, because it is a
sign you mean to stay where you are, and I like to know where to
find you in my imagination.... I have just seen dear Washington
Irving, and it required all my sense of decent decorum to prevent
my throwing my arms round his neck, he looked so like a bit of
home, England.

You will be glad to hear that we are thriving, in body and estate.
We are all well, and our work is very successful. The people flock
to see us, and nothing can exceed the kindness which we meet with
everywhere and from everybody.... I read nothing whatever since I
am in this blessed land. The only books I have accomplished getting
through have been Graham's "History of North America,"
Knickerbocker's "History of New York," which nearly killed me with
laughing; "Contarini Fleming," which is very affected and very
clever; sundry cantos of Dante, sundry plays of Shakespeare, sundry
American poems [which are very good], and old Captain John Smith's
quaint "History of Virginia." As fast as I gather my wits together
for any steady occupation, I am whisked off to some new place, and
do not recover from one journey before I have to take another. The
roads here shake one's body, soul, thoughts, opinions, and
principles all to pieces; I assure you they are wicked roads.

Our theater, Covent Garden, is, we understand, going to the dogs. I
cannot help it any more, that is certain, and feel about that as
about all things that have had their day--it must go. Taglioni is
like a dream, and you must not abuse Mademoiselle Mars to me. I
never saw her but twice--in "L'Ecole des Vieillards" and
"Valérie"--and I thought her perfection in both.... If I do not
leave off, you will be blind for the next fortnight with reading
this crossed letter. I wish you success most heartily in all you
undertake, and am truly and faithfully yours,

FANNY KEMBLE.

[Washington Irving was intimately acquainted with my father and mother, and a most kind and condescending friend to me. He often told me that when first he went to England, long before authorship or celebrity had dawned upon him, he was a member of a New York commercial house, on whose affairs he was sent to Europe. It was when he was a mere obscure young man of business in London that he had been introduced to my mother, whose cordial kindness to him in his foreign isolation seemed to have made a profound impression on him; for when I knew him, in the days of his great literary celebrity and social success, he often referred to it with the warmest expressions of gratitude. I think, of all the distinguished persons I have known, he was one of the least affected by the adulation and admiration of society. He remained quite unchanged by his extreme social popularity. Simple, unaffected, unconstrained, genial, kindly, and good, he seemed so entirely to forget his own celebrity, that one almost forgot it too in talking to him. I remember his coming, the day after my first appearance at Covent Garden, to see us, and congratulated my parents on the success of that terrible experiment. I, who was always delighted to see him, ran to fetch the pretty new watch I had received from my father the night before, and displayed its beauties with an eager desire for his admiration of them. He took it and slowly turned it about, commending its fine workmanship and pretty enamel and jewelry; then putting it to his ear, with a most mischievous look of affected surprise, he exclaimed, as one does to a child's watch, "Why, it goes, I declare!"

To my great regret and loss, I saw Mademoiselle Mars only in two parts, when, in the autumn of her beauty and powers, she played a short engagement in London. The grace, the charm, the loveliness, which she retained far into middle age, were, even in their decline, enough to justify all that her admirers said of her early incomparable fascination. Her figure had grown large and her face become round, and lost their fine outline and proportion; but the exquisite taste of her dress and graceful dignity of her deportment, and sweet radiance of her expressive countenance, were still indescribably charming; and the voice, unrivaled in its fresh melodious brilliancy, and the pure and perfect enunciation, were unimpaired, and sounded like the clear liquid utterance of a young girl of sixteen. Her Celimène and her Elmire I never had the good fortune to see, but can imagine, from her performance of the heroine in Casimir de la Vigne's capital play of "L'Ecole des Vieillards," how well she must have deserved her unrivaled reputation in those parts.

It is remarkable that one of the most striking points in Madame d'Orval was suggested by herself to the author. De la Vigne, according to the frequent usage of French authors, was reading his piece to the great actress, upon whom its success was mainly to depend, and when he came to the scene where the offended but unjustly suspicious husband recounts to his wife the details of his duel with the young duke whose attentions to her had excited his jealousy, and that when, full of the tenderest anxiety for his safety, she flies to meet him, and is repulsed by the bitter irony of his speech, beginning, "Rassurez-vous, madame, le duc n'est point blessé," Mademoiselle Mars, having listened in silence till the end of D'Orval's speech, exclaimed, "Mais, quoi! je ne dis rien, elle ne dit rien!" De la Vigne, who had made the young woman listen in speechless anguish to the bitter and unjust reproach conveyed by her husband's first words and his subsequent account of the duel, said, in some surprise at Mademoiselle Mars' suggestion, "Mais quoi encore--que peut-elle dire? que voudriez-vous qu'elle dise?" "Ah, quelquechose!" cried Mademoiselle Mars, clasping her hands in the imagined distress of the situation; "rien--deuxmots seulement. 'Ah, monsieur!' quand il dit, 'Rassurez-vous, madame, le duc n'est point blessé.'" "Eh bien! dites, dites comme cela," cried De la Vigne, amazed at all the expression the exquisite voice and face had given to the two words. And so the scene was altered, and the long recital of D'Orval was broken by the reproachful "Ah, monsieur!" of his wife, and seldom has the utterance of such an insignificant exclamation affected those who heard it so keenly. For myself, I never can forget the sudden, burning blush that spread tingling to my shoulders at all the shame and mortification and anguish conveyed in the pathetic protest of that "Ah, monsieur!" of Mademoiselle Mars.

Dr. Gueneau de Mussy, who knew her well, and used to see her very frequently in her later years of retirement from the stage, told me that he had often heard her read, among other things, the whole play of "Le Tartuffe," and that the coarse flippancy of the honest-hearted Dorinne, and the stupid stolidity of the dupe Orgon, and the vulgar, gross, sensual hypocrisy of the Tartuffe, were all rendered by her with the same incomparable truth and effect as her own famous part of the heroine of the piece, Elmire. On one of the very last occasions of her appearing before her own Parisian audience, when she had passed the limit at which it was possible for a woman of her advanced age to assume the appearance of youth, the part she was playing requiring that she should exclaim "Je suis jeune! je suis jolie!" a loud, solitary hiss protested against the assertion with bitter significance. After an instant's consternation, which held both the actors and audience silent, she added, with the exquisite grace and dignity which survived the youth and beauty to which she could no longer even pretend, "Je suis Mademoiselle Mars!" and the whole house broke out in acclamations, and rang with the applause due to what the incomparable artiste still was and the memory of all that she had been.]

NEW YORK, February 21, 1833.

It is a long time since I have written to you, my dearest H----....
My work is incessant, ... and there is no end to the breathless
hurry of occupation we pass our days in. Here is already a break
since I began this letter, for we are now in Philadelphia, on our
way to Washington, and it is Thursday, the 3d of March.... It has
been matter of serious regret to me that I have not, from the very
first day of my becoming a worker for wages, looked more into the
details of my earnings and spendings. I have felt this particularly
lately from circumstances relative to V----'s position, which is a
very sad one, from which I have been very anxious to relieve
her.... All I know at present is, that since we have been here in
America our earnings have already been sufficient to enable us to
live in tolerably decent comfort on the Continent.... Do you know,
dearest H----, that it is not impossible that I may never return to
England to reside there. See it again, I will, please God to grant
me life and eyes, but the state of my father's property in Covent
Garden is such that it seems more than likely that he may never be
able to return to England without risking the little which these
last toilsome years will have enabled him to earn for the support
of his own and my mother's old age. He will be compelled, in all
likelihood, to settle and die abroad, as my uncle John did, by the
liabilities of that ruinous possession of theirs, the first theater
of London. When first my father communicated this chance to me, and
expressed his determination, should the affairs of the theater
remain in their present situation, to buy a small farm in Normandy,
and go and live there, my heart sank terribly. This was very
different from my girlish dream of a life of lonely independence
among the Alps, or by the Mediterranean; and the idea of living
entirely out of England seems to me now very sad for all of us....
However, there are earth and skies out of England. What does Imogen
say?--

"I prithee think, there's livers out of Britain;"

and if God vouchsafe me my faculties, and I can bid farewell to
this life of distasteful toil, I have visions of studies and
pursuits which I think might make existence very happy in a farm in
Normandy, though such might not have been my own choice.... What
special inquiries did you wish me to make about General Washington?
I was, when at Washington, within fifteen miles of Mount Vernon,
his home and burying-place, but could not make time to go thither.
I have one of his autograph letters, and if there be any indication
of character in handwriting--which I hope to goodness there is
not--it certainly exists in his, for a firmer, clearer, and fairer
hand I never saw--an excellent, honest handwriting. His likeness
confronts one at every corner here; not only at every street
corner, where he lends his countenance to the frequenters of
drinking-houses, but over every chimney-piece in every
sitting-room. He is like the frogs of the old Egyptian plague,
except that they were in the king's chamber, where he was too good
a Republican ever to have been.

I am amused at your summing up your account of the restless and
perturbed state of poor Ireland by saying, "After all, I believe
America is the land of peace and quiet." It seems to me, who am
here, that everything at this moment threatens change and
disintegration in this country. It is impossible to imagine more
menacing elements of discord and disunion than those which exist in
the opposite and antagonistic interests of its southern and
northern provinces, and the anomalous mixture of aristocratic
feeling and democratic institutions.... God bless you, my dear
H----. I will write to you soon again; if possible, before the
breathing-time this snow-storm is giving us is over.

Ever affectionately yours,
F. A. K.

NEW YORK, April 3, 1833.
MY DEAREST H----,

... I am working very hard, what with rehearsing, acting, studying
new parts, devising new dresses, and attending--which, of course, I
am obliged also to do--to the claims of the society in which we are
living, and my time is so full that I barely contrive to fulfill
all my duties and answer all the claims made upon me.... The spring
is in the sky, and in the air her soft smile and sweet breath are
gladdening the world; but the process of vegetation is much later
in beginning, and much more rapid in its operations when they do
begin here, than with us. Though the last three days have been as
hot as our midsummer weather, the trees are yet leafless and
budless--as dry and unpromising-looking as they were in mid-winter;
and, indeed, the transition from winter to summer is almost
instantaneous here. The spring does not stand coaxing and beckoning
the shy summer to the woods and fields as in our country, but while
winter yet seems lord of the ascendant, and his white robes are
still covering land and water, suddenly the summer looks down upon
the earth from the cloudless sky, and, as by magic, the ice melts,
the snow evaporates, the trees are clothed with green, the woods
are full of flowers, and the whole world breaks out into a
hallelujah of warmth, beauty, and blossoming like mid-July in our
deliberate climate. This again lasts, as it were, but a day; the
sun presently becomes so powerful that the world withers away under
the intense heat, the flowers and shrubs fade, and instead of
screening and refreshing the earth, are themselves scorched and
parched with the glaring fierceness of the sky; the ground cracks,
the watercourses dry up, the rivers shrink in their beds, and every
human creature that can flies from the lowlands and the cities to
go up into the north or to the mountains to find breath, shelter,
and refreshment from the sultry curse. Then comes the autumn, and
that is most glorious; not soft and sad as ours, but to the very
threshold of winter bright, warm, lovely, and gorgeous. Two seasons
remain to our earthly year, remembrances, I think, of Paradise; the
spring in Italy, and autumn in America....

You ask me how I "fit in" to my American audiences? Why, very
kindly indeed. At first they seemed to me rather cold, and I felt
this more with regard to my father than myself, but I think they
have grown to like us; I certainly have grown to like them, and
their applause satisfies me amply.... I heard yesterday of one of
Sir Thomas Lawrence's prints of me which was carried by a peddler
beyond the Alleghany Mountains [the Alleghany Mountains then were
further than the Rocky Mountains are now from the Atlantic
seaboard], and bought at an egregious price by a young engineer,
who with fifteen others went out there upon some railroad
construction business, were bidding for it at auction in that
wilderness, where they themselves were gazed at, as prodigies of
strange civilization, by the half-savage inhabitants of the region.
That touched and pleased me very much.... We are going to act here
till the 12th of this month, when we go to Boston, where we shall
remain for a month; after which we return here for a week, and then
proceed to Philadelphia by the 1st of June, where we intend closing
our professional labors for the summer. Thence we shall probably go
to Niagara and the Canadas. My father has talked of spending a
little quiet time in Rhode Island, where the weather is cool and we
might recruit a little; but there does not seem much certainty
about our plans at present. In the autumn we shall begin our
progress toward New Orleans, where we shall probably winter, and
act our way back here by the spring, when I hope and trust we shall
return to England.... The book of Harriet Martineau's which you
bade me read is delightful. I have not quite finished it yet, for I
have scarcely any time at all for reading; for want of the habit of
thinking and reading on such subjects I find the political economy
a little stiff now and then, though the clearness and simplicity
with which it is treated in this story are admirable. I did not
know that I was supposed to be the original of Letitia.... God
bless you, my dearest H----.

I am ever your most affectionate,
F. A. K.

"For Each and for All" was, I think, the name of the volume taken from Miss Martineau's admirable series of political economy tales, which my friend, Miss S----, sent me. The heroine of the story is a young actress, and Miss Martineau once told me that she had derived some slight suggestion of the character from me.

NEW YORK, Friday, April 10, 1833.
MY DEAREST H----,

... On Monday last I acted Lady Macbeth; on Tuesday, Lady Townley;
on Wednesday, Belvidera; and last night, Portia, and Mary Copp in
"Charles II." This is pretty hard work. To-morrow we start for
Boston, which we shall reach on Sunday, and Monday our work begins
there.... I think four nights a week as much as either my father or
myself ought to work, and as much as we really can work profitably,
the rest being money taken from our capital--_i.e._, our health.
But in Boston we shall act for three weeks or a month every night
but the Saturdays. [The days when four or five performances a week
were considered a sufficient exertion for popular actors or singers
are far enough in the past, and now there seems to be no limit to
the capacity of such artists for earning money by the exercise of
their talents. Five and six performances a week are the normal
number now expected from great European stars, or rather those
which great European stars expect to give and to be paid for. Their
health is one invariable sacrifice to this over-work, and their
artistic excellence a still more grievous one. It has been asked
why artists invariably return to Europe comparatively coarse and
vulgar in the style of their performances, and the result is
attributed to the want of refined taste and critical judgment of
the American audiences--in my opinion very unjustly, for if want of
knowledge and nice perception in the public induces carelessness
and indifference in performers, the grasping greed of gain and
incessant over-exertion, mental and physical, for the sake of
satisfying it, is a far more certain cause of artistic
deterioration. During Madame Ristori's last visit to America, I
went to see a morning performance of "Elizabeta d'Inglterra" by
her. Arriving at the theater half an hour before the time announced
for the performance, I found notices affixed to the entrances,
stating that the beginning was unavoidably delayed by Madame
Ristori's non-arrival. The crowd of expectant spectators occupied
their seats and bore this prolonged postponement with
American--_i.e._, unrivaled--patience, good-temper, and civility.
We were encouraged by two or three pieces of information from some
official personage, who from the stage assured us that the moment
Madame Ristori arrived (she was coming by railroad from Baltimore)
the play should begin. Then came a telegram, she was coming; then
an announcement, she was come; and driving from the terminus
straight to the theater, tired and harassed herself with the delay,
she dressed herself and appeared before her audience, went through
a part of extraordinary length and difficulty and exertion--almost,
indeed, a monologue--including the intolerable fatigue and hurry of
four or five entire changes of costume, and as the curtain dropped
rushed off to disrobe and catch a train to New York, where she was
to act the next morning, if not the evening, of that same day. I
had seen Madame Ristori in this part in England, and was shocked at
the great difference in the merit of her performance. Every
particle of careful elaboration and fine detail of workmanship was
gone; the business of the piece was hurried through, with
reference, of course, only to the time in which it could be
achieved; and of Madame Ristori's once fine delineation of the
character, which, when I first saw it, atoned for the little merit
of the piece itself, nothing remained but the broad claptrap points
in the several principal situations, made coarse, and not nearly
even as striking, by the absence of due preparation and working up
to them, the careless rendering of everything else, and the
slurring over of the finer minutiæ and more delicate indications of
the whole character. It was a very sad spectacle to me.]

Besides your letter, the poor old _Pacific_ (the ship that brought
us to America) brought me something else to-day. While Washington
Irving was sitting with me, a message came from the mate of the
_Pacific_ with a large box of mould for me. I had it brought in,
and asking Irving if he knew what it was, "A bit of the old soil,"
said he; and that it was.... Washington Irving was sure to have
guessed right as to my treasure, and I was not ashamed to greet it
with tears before him.... He is so sensible, sound, and
straightforward in his way of seeing everything, and at the same
time so full of hopefulness, so simple, unaffected, true, and good,
that it is a privilege to converse with him, for which one is the
wiser, the happier and the better....

Here is Monday, April 15th, Boston, my dear H----. We arrived here
yesterday evening, and in the course of this morning I have already
received fourteen visitors, all of whom I shall have to go and
waste my time with in return for their kind waste of theirs upon
me.... To-morrow I begin my work with "Fazio" and go to a party
afterward....

Tuesday, 16th.

... This morning I have been to rehearsal, and out shopping, and
received crowds of strangers who come and call upon us.... To-night
I make my first appearance here in "Fazio," and we hear the theater
will be crammed, and I am going to a party after that dreadful
play; not by way of delight, but of duty, and a severe one it will
be. To-morrow I act Mrs. Haller, Thursday Lady Teazle, and Friday
Bianca again; Saturday is a blessed holiday.... I have finished
Smith's "Virginia," which I found rather tiresome toward the end. I
have finished Harriet Martineau's political-economy story, which I
liked exceedingly. I am reading a small volume of Brewster's on
"Natural Magic," which entertains me very much; but I am dreadfully
cramped for time, and my poor mind goes like a half-tended garden,
which every now and then makes me feel sad.

You would have been pleased, dear H----, if you had heard
Washington Irving's answer to me the other day when, in talking
with him of my profession and my distaste for it, I complained of
the little leisure it left me for study and improving myself, for
reading, writing, and the occupations that were congenial to me.
"Well," he said, "you are living, you are seeing men and things,
you are seeing the world, you are acquiring materials and heaping
together observations and experience and wisdom, and by and by,
when with fame you have acquired independence and retire from these
labors, you will begin another and a brighter course with matured
powers. I know of no one whose life has such a promise in it as
yours." Oh! H----, I almost felt hopeful while he spoke so to
me....