heart, abundant and beneficent; but again, women of the temperament I have alluded to above have fountains of lovely tears behind their lovely eyes, and their weeping, which is indescribably beautiful, is comparatively painless, and yet pathetic enough to challenge tender compassion.  I have twice seen such tears shed, and never forgotten them:  once from heaven-blue eyes, and the face looked like a flower with pearly dewdrops sliding over it; and again, once from magnificent, dark, uplifted orbs, from which the falling tears looked like diamond rain-drops by moonlight.

Miss O’Neill was a supremely touching, but neither a powerful nor a passionate actress.  Personally, she was the very beau ideal of feminine weakness in its most attractive form—­delicacy.  She was tall, slender, elegantly formed, and extremely graceful; her features were regular and finely chiseled, and her hair beautiful; her eyes were too light, and her eyebrows and eyelashes too pale for expression; her voice wanted variety and brilliancy for comic intonation, but was deep and sonorous, and of a fine pathetic and tragic quality.

It was not an easy matter to find a Romeo for me, and in the emergency my father and mother even thought of my brother Henry’s trying the part.  He was in the first bloom of youth, and really might be called beautiful; and certainly, a few years later, might have been the very ideal of a Romeo.  But he looked too young for the part, as indeed he was, being three years my junior.  The overwhelming objection, however, was his own insuperable dislike to the idea of acting, and his ludicrous incapacity for assuming the faintest appearance of any sentiment.  However, he learned the words, and never shall I forget the explosion of laughter which shook my father, my mother, and myself, when, after hearing him recite the balcony scene with the most indescribable mixture of shy terror and nervous convulsions of suppressed giggling, my father threw down the book, and Henry gave vent to his feelings by clapping his elbows against his sides and bursting into a series of triumphant cock-crows—­an expression of mental relief so ludicrously in contrast with his sweet, sentimental face, and the part he had just been pretending to assume, that I thought we never should have recovered from the fits it sent us into.  We were literally all crying with laughter, and a more farcical scene cannot be imagined.  This, of course, ended all idea of that young chanticleer being my Romeo; and yet the young rascal was, or fancied he was, over head and ears in love at this very time, and an exquisite sketch Hayter had just made of him might with the utmost propriety have been sent to the exhibition with no other title than “Portrait of a Lover.”