From my Diary.—­“Sargent’s picture is almost finished, and it is really splendid.  Burne-Jones yesterday suggested two or three alterations about the color which Sargent immediately adopted, but Burne-Jones raves about the picture.

“It (’Macbeth’) is a most tremendous success, and the last three days’ advance booking has been greater than ever was known, even at the Lyceum.  Yes, it is a success, and I am a success, which amazes me, for never did I think I should be let down so easily.  Some people hate me in it; some, Henry among them, think it my best part, and the critics differ, and discuss it hotly, which in itself is my best success of all!  Those who don’t like me in it are those who don’t want, and don’t like to read it fresh from Shakespeare, and who hold by the ‘fiend’ reading of the character....  One of the best things ever written on the subject, I think, is the essay of J. Comyns Carr.  That is as hotly discussed as the new ’Lady Mac’—­all the best people agreeing with it.  Oh, dear!  It is an exciting time!”

From a letter I wrote to my daughter, who was in Germany at the time: 

“I wish you could see my dresses.  They are superb, especially the first one:  green beetles on it, and such a cloak!  The photographs give no idea of it at all, for it is in color that it is so splendid.  The dark red hair is fine.  The whole thing is Rossetti—­rich stained-glass effects, I play some of it well, but, of course, I don’t do what I want to do yet.  Meanwhile I shall not budge an inch in the reading of it, for that I know is right.  Oh, it’s fun, but it’s precious hard work for I by no means make her a ‘gentle, lovable woman’ as some of ’em say.  That’s all pickles.  She was nothing of the sort, although she was not a fiend, and did love her husband.  I have to what is vulgarly called ‘sweat at it,’ each night.”

The few people who liked my Lady Macbeth, liked it very much.  I hope I am not vain to quote this letter from Lady Pollock: 

“...  Burne-Jones has been with me this afternoon:  he was at ‘Macbeth’ last night, and you filled his whole soul with your beauty and your poetry....  He says you were a great Scandinavian queen; that your presence, your voice, your movement made a marvelously poetic harmony; that your dress was grandly imagined and grandly worn—­and that he cannot criticize—­he can only remember.”

But Burne-Jones by this time had become one of our most ardent admirers, and was prejudiced in my favor because my acting appealed to his eye.  Still, the drama is for the eye as well as for the ear and the mind.

Very early I learned that one had best be ambitious merely to please oneself in one’s work a little—­quietly.  I coupled with this the reflection that one “gets nothing for nothing, and damned little for sixpence!”

Here I was in the very noonday of life, fresh from Lady Macbeth and still young enough to play Rosalind, suddenly called upon to play a rather uninteresting mother in “The Dead Heart.”  However, my son Teddy made his first appearance in it, and had such a big success that I soon forgot that for me the play was rather “small beer.”