Probably aware that every effort would, till the last, be made by Lord F——­’s family to detach them from each other, bound by her promise to hold no intercourse with him, but determined to take the verdict of her fate from no one but himself, Miss O’Neill obtained a brief leave of absence from her theatrical duties, went with her brother and sister to Calais, whence she travelled alone to Paris (poor, fair Juliet! when I think of her, not as I ever knew her, but such as I know she must then have been, no more pathetic image presents itself to my mind), and took effectual measures to ascertain beyond all shadow of doubt the bitter truth of the evil reports of her fickle lover’s mode of life.  His devotion to one lady, the more respectable form of infidelity which must inevitably have canceled their contract of love, was not indeed true, and probably the story had been fabricated because the mere general accusation of profligacy might easily have been turned into an appeal to her mercy, as the result of reckless despondency and of his utter separation from her; and a woman in her circumstances might not have been hard to find who would have persuaded herself that she might overlook “all that,” reclaim her lover, and be an Earl’s wife.  Miss O’Neill rejoined her family at Calais, wrote to Lord F——­’s father, the Earl of E——­, her final and irrevocable rejection of his son’s suit, fell ill of love and sorrow, and lay for some space between life and death for the sake of her unworthy lover; rallied bravely, recovered, resumed her work,—­her sway over thousands of human hearts,—­and, after lapse of healing and forgiving and forgetting time, married Sir William Wrixon Becher.

The peculiar excellence of her acting lay in the expression of pathos, sorrow, anguish,—­the sentimental and suffering element of tragedy.  She was expressly devised for a representative victim; she had, too, a rare endowment for her special range of characters, in an easily excited, superficial sensibility, which caused her to cry, as she once said to me, “buckets full,” and enabled her to exercise the (to most men) irresistible influence of a beautiful woman in tears.  The power (or weakness) of abundant weeping without disfigurement is an attribute of deficient rather than excessive feeling.  In such persons the tears are poured from their crystal cups without muscular distortion of the rest of the face.  In proportion to the violence or depth of emotion, and the acute or profound sensibility of the temperament, is the disturbance of the countenance.  In sensitive organizations, the muscles round the nostrils and lips quiver and are distorted, the throat and temples swell, and a grimace, which but for its miserable significance would be grotesque, convulses the whole face.  Men’s tears always seem to me as if they were pumped up from their heels, and strained through every drop of blood in their veins; women’s, to start as under a knife stroke, direct with a gush from their