Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or fifteen years, can have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as Ophelia; Helena, in All’s Well that Ends Well; and Viola in this play.  Her voice had latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady melting eye, into the heart.  Her joyous parts—­in which her memory now chiefly lives—­in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones.  There is no giving an account how she delivered the disguised story of her love for Orsino.  It was no set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following line, to make up the music—­yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather read, not without its grace and beauty—­but, when she had declared her sister’s history to be a “blank,” and that she “never told her love,” there was a pause, as if the story had ended—­and then the image of the “worm in the bud” came up as a new suggestion—­and the heightened image of “Patience” still followed after that, as by some growing (and not mechanical) process, thought springing up after thought, I would almost say, as they were watered by her tears.  So in those fine lines—­

  Write loyal cantos of contemned love—­
  Hollow your name to the reverberate hills—­

there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which was to follow.  She used no rhetoric in her passion; or it was nature’s own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without rule or law.

Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the pride of her beauty, made an admirable Olivia.  She was particularly excellent in her unbending scenes in conversation with the Clown.  I have seen some Olivias—­and those very sensible actresses too—­who in these interlocutions have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and to vie conceits with him in downright emulation.  But she used him for her sport, like what he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or two with, and then to be dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady still.  She touched the imperious fantastic humour of the character with nicety.  Her fine spacious person filled the scene.

The part of Malvolio has in my judgment been so often misunderstood, and the general merits of the actor, who then played it, so unduly appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon, if I am a little prolix upon these points.

Of all the actors who flourished in my time—­a melancholy phrase if taken aright, reader—­Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy.  He had the true poetical enthusiasm—­the rarest faculty among players.  None that I remember possessed even a portion of that fine madness which he threw out in Hotspur’s famous rant about glory, or the transports of the Venetian incendiary