Devoted to her art, conscientious to a degree in mastering the spirit and details of her part, Mrs. Kean also possessed the personality and force to chain the attention and indelibly imprint her rendering of a part on the imagination.  When I think of the costume in which she played Hermione, it seems marvelous to me that she could have produced the impression that she did.  This seems to contradict what I have said about the magnificence of the production.  But not at all!  The designs of the dresses were purely classic; but then, as now, actors and actresses seemed unable to keep their own period and their own individuality out of the clothes directly they got them on their backs.  In some cases the original design was quite swamped.  No matter what the character that Mrs. Kean was assuming, she always used to wear her hair drawn flat over her forehead and twisted tight round her ears in a kind of circular sweep—­such as the old writing-masters used to make when they attempted an extra grand flourish.  And then the amount of petticoats she wore!  Even as Hermione she was always bunched out by layer upon layer of petticoats, in defiance of the fact that classical parts should not be dressed in a superfluity of raiment.  But if the petticoats were full of starch, the voice was full of pathos—­and the dignity, simplicity, and womanliness of Mrs. Charles Kean’s Hermione could not have been marred by a far more grotesque costume.

There is something, I suppose, in a woman’s nature which always makes her remember how she was dressed at any specially eventful moment of her life, and I can see myself, as though it were yesterday, in the little red-and-silver dress I wore as Mamilius.  Mrs. Grieve, the dresser—­“Peter Grieve-us,” as we children called her—­had pulled me into my very pink tights (they were by no means tight but very baggy, according to the pictures of me), and my mother had arranged my hair in sausage curls on each side of my head in even more perfect order and regularity than usual.  Besides my clothes, I had a beautiful “property” to be proud of.  This was a go-cart, which had been made in the theater by Mr. Bradshaw, and was an exact copy of a child’s toy as depicted on a Greek vase.  It was my duty to drag this little cart about the stage, and on the first night, when Mr. Kean as Leontes told me to “go play,” I obeyed his instructions with such vigor that I tripped over the handle and came down on my back!  A titter ran through the house, and I felt that my career as an actress was ruined forever.  Even now I remember how bitterly I wept, and how deeply humiliated I felt.  But the little incident, so mortifying to me, did not spoil my first appearance altogether. The Times of May 1, 1856, was kind enough to call me “vivacious and precocious,” and “a worthy relative of my sister Kate,” and my parents were pleased (although they would not show it too much), and Mrs. Kean gave me a pat on the back.  Father and Kate were both in the cast, too, I ought to have said, and the Queen, Prince Albert, and the Princess Royal were all in a box on the first night.