James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

“ [115] the thick breathing orange-groves of the south; green silk and oiled parchment, for the solemn splendor of her noon of night; wooden platforms and canvas curtains, for the solid marble balconies and rich dark draperies of Juliet's sleeping chamber, that shrine of love and beauty; rouge, for the startled life-blood in the cheek of that young passionate woman; an actress, a mimicker, a sham creature, me, in fact, or any other one, for that loveliest and most wonderful conception, in which all that is true in nature and all that is exquisite in fancy are moulded into a living form! To act this! To act Romeo and Juliet Horror I horror! How I do loathe my most impotent and unpoetical craft!”

Ah I how necessary it is to know precisely in what mood, and in what circumstances, a passage was written, before we can tell how far it expresses the author's real and habitual sentiment. The sentences just quoted signify, chiefly, that she had been just playing Juliet to a most awkward and abominable Romeo. In the last scene of the play, she tells us, she was so mad with the mode in which all the other scenes had been performed, that, lying over Romeo's dead body, and fumbling for his dagger, which she could not find, she thus addressed her dead lover:--

“Why, where the devil is your dagger, Mr.--?”

In truth, she was not a little proud of her honorable and arduous vocation. She was not insensible to the magic of that art which enables an audience to forget that they are looking upon pasteboard and rouge, and to forget, also, that it is not the veritable Juliet who is moving them to rapture and to tears. Some of the best passages in Miss Kemble's diary are subtle disquisitions upon the art of acting.

She had another mishap with her Romeo at Baltimore. The play went off pretty well on this occasion, she says in her humorous way, “except that they broke one man's collar bone, and nearly dislocated a woman's shoulder, by flinging ”