She is a woman of masculine abilities, tastes, and energies; fitted better for the camp than for the drawing-room, and often evincing a degree of discontent that she is not a man.  She always acts, and has seldom, except when on the stage, the tact or ability even to seem natural.  Her equestrian exhibitions in Boston and New York, during her more recent visits, illustrated the quality of her aspirations.  Every day, at a particular hour, so that a crowd might assemble to look upon the performance, her horse was brought to the front of her hotel, and when mounted, with affected difficulty, made to rear and pitch as if he never before had felt the saddle or bit, and then to dash off as if upon a race-course or to escape an avalanche.  The letters to her husband, with much tact but without any necessity displayed to the public, in her answer to his process for divorce, were admirable as compositions, and seemed to have been written in the very phrensy of passion; but their effect upon the reader was changed somewhat when he reflected that she had been sufficiently self-possessed meanwhile to make careful copies before sending them, to be exhibited, as specimens of her genius, to a mob of the pit, which never fails to recognize a point.  Indeed, in petticoats or in pantaloons, making a show of her “heart” in the publication of these letters to a gentleman whom she had treated with every species of contempt, obloquy, and insult, until she had made his home insupportable, or courting the wondering admiration of country bumpkins by unsexing herself for feats of horsemanship, or for other athletic diversions, she is always anxious to produce a sensation, anxious to stir up the gentle public to a roar.

Still, with all her infirmities of taste and temper, Mrs. Kemble is a woman of unquestionable and very decided genius; a genius frequently displayed in literature, where its growth may be traced, in prose, from her foolish “Journal in America” to her more artistic “Year of Consolation;” and in poetry, where its development is seen from its budding in “Frances the First” to its most perfect blossoming in the recent collection of her “Poems.”  As an actress, her powers and qualifications are probably greater than those of any other tragedienne now on the English stage; and her characteristics and supremacy are likely to be far more profitably as well as distinctly evinced in her “Shakspeare Readings” than in any appearance before the footlights.

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LITERATURE IN AFRICA.

The Bible has been translated into the principal language of eastern Africa, and the American Bible Society has lately received a copy of “EVANGELIO za avioondika LUCAS.  The Gospel according to St. Luke, translated into Kinika, by the Rev. JOHN LEWIS KRAPF, Phil.  Dr.; Bombay American Mission Press:  T. Graham, printer; 1848.”  The Kinika language is spoken by the tribes living south of Abyssinia, toward Zanzibar.  Dr. Krapf is a German missionary, in the service of the Church Missionary Society.  He is now in Germany for the recovery of his health.  The language resembles in some particulars the dialects used in Western Africa.  The Independent copies, as a philological curiosity, the Lord’s Prayer in Kinika: