The enthusiasm that inspired her with this strange joy, blinded her to the horrors about her; but they were intolerably agonizing to me.  The ward was filled with an effluvia that caused my heart to heave with painful qualms.  The dead were carried out, and the sick brought in, with like indifference; some were screaming with pain, others laughing from the influence of more terrible delirium; some were attended by weeping, despairing relations, others called aloud with thrilling tenderness or reproach on the friends who had deserted them, while the nurses went from bed to bed, incarnate images of despair, neglect, and death.  I gave gold to my luckless companion; I recommended her to the care of the attendants; I then hastened away; while the tormentor, the imagination, busied itself in picturing my own loved ones, stretched on such beds, attended thus.  The country afforded no such mass of horrors; solitary wretches died in the open fields; and I have found a survivor in a vacant village, contending at once with famine and disease; but the assembly of pestilence, the banqueting hall of death, was spread only in London.

I rambled on, oppressed, distracted by painful emotions—­suddenly I found myself before Drury Lane Theatre.  The play was Macbeth—­the first actor of the age was there to exert his powers to drug with irreflection the auditors; such a medicine I yearned for, so I entered.  The theatre was tolerably well filled.  Shakspeare, whose popularity was established by the approval of four centuries, had not lost his influence even at this dread period; but was still “Ut magus,” the wizard to rule our hearts and govern our imaginations.  I came in during the interval between the third and fourth act.  I looked round on the audience; the females were mostly of the lower classes, but the men were of all ranks, come hither to forget awhile the protracted scenes of wretchedness, which awaited them at their miserable homes.  The curtain drew up, and the stage presented the scene of the witches’ cave.  The wildness and supernatural machinery of Macbeth, was a pledge that it could contain little directly connected with our present circumstances.  Great pains had been taken in the scenery to give the semblance of reality to the impossible.  The extreme darkness of the stage, whose only light was received from the fire under the cauldron, joined to a kind of mist that floated about it, rendered the unearthly shapes of the witches obscure and shadowy.  It was not three decrepid old hags that bent over their pot throwing in the grim ingredients of the magic charm, but forms frightful, unreal, and fanciful.  The entrance of Hecate, and the wild music that followed, took us out of this world.  The cavern shape the stage assumed, the beetling rocks, the glare of the fire, the misty shades that crossed the scene at times, the music in harmony with all witch-like fancies, permitted the imagination to revel, without fear of contradiction, or reproof from reason or the