She always said, when pictures and engravings were consulted, “Remember, this presents but one view of the person, and does not change its position:  how will this dress look when it walks, runs, rushes, kneels, sits down, falls, and turns its back?” I think an edge was added to my mother’s keen, rational, and highly artistic sense of this matter of costume because it was the special hobby of her “favorite aversion,” Mr. E——­, who had studied with great zeal and industry antiquarian questions connected with the subject of stage representations, and was perpetually suggesting to my father improvements on the old ignorant careless system which prevailed under former managements.

It is very true that, as she said, Garrick acted Macbeth in a full court suit of scarlet,—­knee-breeches, powdered wig, pigtail, and all; and Mrs. Siddons acted the Grecian Daughter in piles of powdered curls, with a forest of feathers on the top of them, high-heeled shoes, and a portentous hoop; and both made the audience believe that they looked just as they should do.  But for all that, actors and actresses who were neither Garrick nor Mrs. Siddons were not less like the parts they represented by being at least dressed as they should be; and the fine accuracy of the Shakespearean revivals of Mr. Macready and Charles Kean was in itself a great enjoyment; nobody was ever told to omit the tithing of mint and cummin, though other matters were more important; and Kean’s Othello would have been the grand performance it was, even with the advantage of Mr. Fechter’s clever and picturesque “getting up” of the play, as a frame to it; as Mademoiselle Rachel’s wonderful fainting exclamation of “Oh, mon cher Curiace!” lost none of its poignant pathos, though she knew how every fold of her drapery fell and rested on the chair on which she sank in apparent unconsciousness.  Criticising a portrait of herself in that scene, she said to the painter, “Ma robe ne fait pas ce pli la; elle fait, au contraire, celui-ci.”  The artist, inclined to defend his picture, asked her how, while she was lying with her eyes shut and feigning utter insensibility, she could possibly tell anything about the plaits of her dress.  “Allez-y-voir,” replied Rachel; and the next time she played Camille, the artist was able to convince himself by more careful observation that she was right, and that there was probably no moment of the piece at which this consummate artist was not aware of the effect produced by every line and fold of the exquisite costume, of which she had studied and prepared every detail as carefully as the wonderful movements of her graceful limbs, the intonations of her awful voice, and the changing expressions of her terribly beautiful countenance.

In later years, after I became the directress of my own stage costumes, I adopted one for Juliet, made after a beautiful design of my friend, Mrs. Jameson, which combined my mother’s sine qua non of simplicity with a form and fashion in keeping with the supposed period of the play.