I heard Mrs. Siddons read at her town-house a portion of _Henry VIII_. I was more struck and delighted than I ever was with any reading in my life. This is feebly expressing what I felt. I felt that I had never before fully understood, or sufficiently admired, Shakespeare, or known the full powers of the human voice and the English language. Queen Katherine was a character peculiarly suited to her time of life and to reading. There was nothing that required gesture or vehemence incompatible with the sitting attitude. The composure and dignity, and the sort of suppressed feeling, and touches, not bursts of tenderness, of matronly, not youthful tenderness, were all favourable to the general effect. I quite forgot to applaud—I thought she was what she appeared. The illusion was perfect, till it was interrupted by a hint from her daughter or niece, I forget which, that Mrs. Siddons would be encouraged by having some demonstration given of our feelings. I then expressed my admiration, but the charm was broken. Maria Edgeworth seems to have remained friends with Mrs. Siddons, but her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, hopelessly offended her the first time he met her:— “Madam,” he said, “I think I saw you perform Millamant five-and-thirty years ago.” “Pardon me, Sir.” “Oh, then it was forty years ago. I recollect it.” “You will excuse me, Sir, I never played Millamant.” “Oh, but I recollect it.”’ “I think,” she said, stiffly turning to Rogers, “it is time for me to change my place,” and rising with much haughtiness she moved away. Many amusing stories were current of the dramatic manner which she imported into daily life. Her question, in the tragic tones of Lady Macbeth, to the over-awed draper as she bought a piece of coloured print, “Will it wash?” The solemn reply to the Scotch provost, “Beef cannot be too salt for me, my Lord”; and “I asked for water, Boy; you’ve brought me beer.” Lord Beaconsfield told a story of his father, Isaac Disraeli, returning home after a visit to London, and declaring that the event that had made most impression on him was hearing Mrs. Siddons say, “The Ripstone Pippin is the finest apple in the world.” Moore says he remembered how proud he was of going to Lady Mount Edgcumbe’s suppers after the opera. It was at one of these, sitting between Mrs. Siddons and Lady Castlereagh, he heard for the first time the voice of the former (never having met her before) transferred to the ordinary things of the world, and the solemn words in her most tragic tone, “I do love ale dearly.” Sidney Smith also describes her as “stabbing the potatoes”; and it is said that on hearing of the sudden death of an acquaintance, who had been “found dead in his bureau,” she understood the latter word to mean a piece of furniture, and exclaimed, “Poor man! How gat he there?”