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128 accuracy with which somnambulists perform all the acts of waking persons.

"The scene, of course, was acted as I had myself conceived it, and the innovation, as Mr. Sheridan called it, was received with approbation. Mr. Sheridan himself came to me after the play, and most ingenuously congratulated me on my obstinacy."

Let us try to recall the vision of Mrs. Siddons as she acted Lady Macbeth that night. It was in 1785. She was thirty years of age. The "timid tottering girl," who had first appeared as Portia on that stage, was now a queenly woman, in the full meridian of her stately beauty. Success had developed her intellectually and physically, and she walked the stage in the plenitude of her power, almost like some superhuman being.

Her dress in the first and second acts was a heavy black robe, with a broad border, which ran from her shoulders down to her feet, of the most vivid crimson, over which fell a long white veil. In the third she changed this costume for another black dress, with great gold bands lacing it across, and gold ornaments round her neck and in her hair. Both of these dresses strike us as being "stagey," but she never had the art of dressing herself; so great, however, was her power, that all minor accessories of dress and scenery were forgotten. For the sleep-walking scene Sir Joshua had designed clouds of white drapery swathing the pale drawn face; they lent an appalling weirdness to her appearance, whilst the glassy stare she managed to throw into her eyes completed the horror.

The audience were spellbound; they only saw that woe-worn face, and heard that voice, broken with agony and remorse. It was a night of nights, for her