He is still in Germany, very happy and very metaphysical; should we obtain this living, however, I suppose he would return immediately.  Independently of my wish to see him again, I shall be glad when he leaves Germany I think; but I have not time for what I think about Germany to-day, and you must be rather tired of

Yours most affectionately,
F. A. K.

Mr. Hayter’s graceful sketches of me in Juliet were lithographed and published with Mrs. Jameson’s beautifully written but too flattering notice of my performance; the original drawings were purchased by Lord Ellesmere.  The second part assigned to me by the theater authorities was Belvidera, in Otway’s “Venice Preserved.”  I had never read the play until I learned my part, nor seen it until I acted it.  It is, I believe, one of the longest female parts on the stage.  But I had still my school-girl capacity for committing quickly to memory, and learned it in three hours.  Acting it was a very different matter.  I was no longer sustained by the genius of Shakespeare, no longer stimulated by the sublime passion and exquisite poetry.  Juliet was a reality to me, a living individual woman, whose nature I could receive, as it were, into mine at once, without effort, comprehending and expressing it.  Belvidera seemed to me a sort of lay figure in a tragic attitude, a mere, “female in general,” without any peculiar or specific characteristics whatever; placed as Belvidera is in the midst of sordidly painful and coarsely agonizing circumstances, there was nothing in the part itself that affected my feelings or excited my imagination; and the miserable situations into which the poor creature was thrown throughout the piece revolted me, and filled me with disgust for the men she had to do with, without inspiring me with any sympathy for her.  In this piece, too, I came at once into the unfavorable light of full comparison with my aunt’s performance of the part, which was one of her famous ones.  A friend of hers and mine, my dear and excellent William Harness, said that seeing me was exactly like looking at Mrs. Siddons through the diminishing end of an opera glass.  My personal likeness to her, in spite of my diminutive size and irregular features, was striking, and of course suggested, to those who remembered her, associations which were fatal to my satisfactory performance of the part.  I disliked the play and the character of Belvidera, and I am sure I must have played it very indifferently.

I remember one circumstance connected with my first performance of it which proved how painfully the unredeemed horror and wretchedness of the piece acted upon my nerves and imagination.  In the last scene, where poor Belvidera’s brain gives way under her despair, and she fancies herself digging for her husband in the earth, and that she at last recovers and seizes him, I intended to utter a piercing scream; this I had not of course rehearsed, not being able to scream deliberately in cold blood, so that I hardly knew, myself, what manner of utterance I should find for my madness.  But when the evening came, I uttered shriek after shriek without stopping, and rushing off the stage ran all round the back of the scenes, and was pursuing my way, perfectly unconscious of what I was doing, down the stairs that led out into the street, when I was captured and brought back to my dressing-room and my senses.