rushes about the stage he should lose his balance and fall; as indeed he once did, to my unspeakable distress, in the play of “The Grecian Daughter,” in which he enacted my husband, Phocion, and flying to embrace me, after a period of painful and eventful separation, he completely overbalanced himself, and swinging round with me in his arms, we both came to the ground together.  “Oh, Mr. Abbot!” was all I could ejaculate; he, poor man, literally pale green with dismay, picked me up in profound silence, and the audience kindly covered our confusion, and comforted us by vehement applause, not, indeed, unmixed with laughter.  But my friends and admirers were none the more his after that exploit; and I remained in mortal dread of his stage embraces for ever after, steadying myself carefully on my feet, and bracing my whole figure to “stand fast,” whenever he made the smallest affectionate approach toward me.  It is not often that such a piece of awkwardness as this is perpetrated on the stage, but dramatic heroines are nevertheless liable to sundry disagreeable difficulties of a very unromantic nature.  If a gentleman in a ball-room places his hand round a lady’s waist to waltz with her, she can, without any shock to the “situation,” beg him to release the end spray of her flowery garland, or the floating ribbons of her head-dress, which he may have imprisoned; but in the middle of a scene of tragedy grief or horror, of the unreality of which, by dint of the effort of your imagination, you are no longer conscious, to be obliged to say, in your distraction, to your distracted partner in woe, “Please lift your arm from my waist, you are pulling my head down backwards,” is a distraction, too, of its kind.

The only occasion on which I ever acted Juliet to a Romeo who looked the part was one when Miss Ellen Tree sustained it.  The acting of Romeo, or any other man’s part by a woman (in spite of Mrs. Siddons’s Hamlet), is, in my judgment, contrary to every artistic and perhaps natural propriety, but I cannot deny that the stature “more than common tall,” and the beautiful face, of which the fine features were too marked in their classical regularity to look feeble or even effeminate, of my fair female lover made her physically an appropriate representative of Romeo.  Miss Ellen Tree looked beautiful and not unmanly in the part; she was broad-shouldered as well as tall, and her long limbs had the fine proportions of the huntress Diana; altogether, she made a very “pretty fellow,” as the saying was formerly, as all who saw her in her graceful performance of Talfourd’s “Ion” will testify; but assumption of that character, which in its ideal classical purity is almost without sex, was less open to objection than that of the fighting young Veronese noble of the fourteenth century.  She fenced very well, however, and acquitted herself quite manfully in her duel with Tybalt; the only hitch in the usual “business” of the part was between herself and me, and I do not