I wrote to my mother next day that he was “a nice, friendly old gentleman, but impressed me as one who had outlived his enthusiasms.” If I had put the truth into downright English, I should have said that the circumstance that he was enshrined in thousands of young hearts as the aged man with a sore foot propped upon a cushion, and whose big heart was a fountain of love, and his brain a store-house of tales garnered for their delectation—was of minor importance to the profit popularity had brought him. I was yet new to the world’s ways and estimate of values. The next night I saw Rachel in _Les Horaces_. I had never seen really great acting before. I had, however, read Charlotte Brontë’s incomparable portraiture, in _Villette_, of the queen of the modern stage. Having no language of my own that could depict what was done before my eyes, and uttered to my rapt soul, I drew upon obedient memory. Until that moment I had not known how faithful memory could be. In the breathless excitement of the last act of the tragedy, every word was laid ready to my hand. I seemed to read, with my subconscious perceptions, lines of palpitating light, the while my bodily sight lost not a gesture or look of the stricken tigress: “An inordinate will, convulsing a perishing mortal frame, bent it to battle with doom and death; fought every inch of ground, sold every drop of blood; resisted to the last the rape of every faculty; _would_ see, _would_ hear, _would_ breathe, _would_ live, up to, within, well-nigh _beyond_ the moment when Death says to all sense and all being—‘Thus far and no farther!’” I saw others—some said as great actors—in after years. Among them, Ristori. I do not think it was because I had seen none of them before the _Vashti_ of Charlotte Brontë’s impassioned periods flashed upon my unaccustomed sight, that I still hold her impersonation of Camille in _Les Horaces_ to be the grandest triumph of the tragedian’s art mine eyes have ever witnessed. Ristori was always the gentlewoman, born and reared, in whatever rôle she assumed. Rachel—and again I betake myself to the weird word-painting: “Evil forces bore her through the tragedy; kept up her feeble strength.... They wrote ‘HELL’ on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate, she stood.” I fancy that I must have been whispering the words as I gathered up my wraps and followed my companions out of the box. I recollect that one or two persons stared curiously at me. In the _foyer_ I was introduced to some strangers, and went through certain civil forms of speech. I did not recollect names or faces when we got back to the hotel. After I was in bed, I could not sleep for hours. But one other actor has ever wrought so mightily upon nerves and imagination. When I was forty years older I was ill for forty-eight hours after seeing Salvini as Othello.