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Rh daughter to see the great actress in Venice Preserved, sat with perfect composure through the first act and into the second, when he asked his daughter, "Which was the woman Siddons?" As Belvidera is the only female part in the play, she had no difficulty in answering. Nothing more occurred till the catastrophe; he then inquired, "Is this a comedy or a tragedy?" "Why, bless you, father, a tragedy." "So I thought, for I am beginning to feel a commotion." This instance was typical of the whole of the audience—and once they began to "feel a commotion," there was no longer any doubt about their expression of it. The passion, indeed, for hysterics and fainting at her performances ran into a fashionable mania. A distinguished surgeon, familiarly called "Sandy Wood," who, with his shrewd common-sense, had a way of seeing through the follies of his fashionable patients, was called from his seat in the pit, where he was to be found every evening Mrs. Siddons acted, to attend upon the hysterics of one of the excitable ladies who were tumbling around him. On his way through the crowd a friend said to him, alluding to Mrs. Siddons, "This is glorious acting, Sandy." Looking round at the fainting and screaming ladies in the boxes, Wood answered, "Yes, and a dd deal o't, too." Some verses in the Scot's Magazine give a picture of the scene, the pit being described as "all porter and pathos, all whisky and whining," while—

The enthusiasm to see her was so great, that one day there were more than 2,500 applications for about 600 seats. The oppression and heat was so great in the