Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/101

78 Marie Stuart there was a question as to which was the greater queen; but when Mary Stuart receives her death sentence there was no doubt. Such a creature ruled heaven as well as earth, and human misfortunes assumed their appropriate place beneath her real exaltation. And yet this part was not Rachel's greatest triumph. She reigns in memory as Camille, the Roman sister.

Soon after the departure of Rachel, Fanny Kemble began a course of readings in New York. This gifted niece of Mrs. Siddons gave us all the great Kemble traditions, and her voice, a miracle of expressive music, added the final charm. It was a message from Shakespeare.

I liked her best in the Tempest, as the contrast of Ariel and Caliban is so extraordinary. The majestic poetry, and, again, the broad humor of the minor characters, especially of the, drunken Trinculo, afforded her all the sweep and scope she needed for her tremendous powers. She absolutely reeled in the scene with Trinculo. Her Caliban was immense.

She was very grand in Measure for Measure and Cymbeline, two plays with which I had not been familiar. And oh! how great in Macbeth and King Lear! The latter was almost too much. It gave me a headache. I^m not sure I would like to see it again.

I heard Thackeray's first series of lectures in New York on "The Four Georges"; but I was not destined to know him until he came the second time, in 1855. America had welcomed him as the author of Punch's Prize Novelists and of Vanity Fair, which reached us about 1849. The enthusiastic regard of Charlotte Brontë for Mr. Thackeray, who spoke of him as the "first social regenerate of the day, the one who should restore to