“On Saturday, Mrs. Siddons, about whom all the world has been talking, exposed her beautiful, adamantine, soft, and comely person, for the first time, in the Theatre Royal, Smock Alley. The house was crowded with hundreds more than it could hold, with thousands of admiring spectators that went away without a sight. She was nature itself; she was the most exquisite work of art. Several fainted, even before the curtain drew up. The fiddlers in the orchestra blubbered like hungry children crying for their bread and butter; and when the bell rang for music between the acts, the tears ran from the bassoon player’s eyes in such showers that they choked the finger-stops, and, making a spout of the instrument, poured in such a torrent upon the first fiddler’s book, that, not seeing the overture was in two sharps, the leader of the band actually played in two flats; but the sobs and sighs of the groaning audience, and the noise of the corks drawn from the smelling-bottles, prevented the mistake being discovered. The briny pond in the pit was three feet deep, and the people that were obliged to stand upon the benches, were in that position up to their ankles in tears. An Act of Parliament against her playing will certainly pass, for she has infected the volunteers, and they sit reading _The Fatal Marriage_, crying and roaring all the time. May the curses of an insulted nation pursue the gentlemen of the College, the gentlemen of the Bar, and the peers and peeresses that hissed her on the second night. True it is that Mr. Garrick never could make anything of her, and pronounced her below mediocrity; true it is the London audience did not like her; but what of that?” Her consciousness of the antagonism that existed against her in the press and amongst the public made her stay in the capital by no means either pleasant or successful, and she was glad to start with the party which Daly had got together to go the round of the country. It consisted of the manager and his future wife, Miss Barsanti, the two Kembles, Miss Younge, Digges, Miss Philipps, and Mrs. Melnotte, wife of Pratt Melnotte, of Bath celebrity. An amusing account of the tour has been left by Bernard the actor, who happened to be in Ireland at the time. The solemn Kembles certainly seem out of place in the rollicking fun, and we can imagine Mrs. Siddons’s stately disgust when a gentleman from the pit called out, “Sally, me jewel, how are you?” or, as occurred several times, when a general dance took place in the gallery as soon as the orchestra began. Mrs. Siddons does not seem to have had any occasion for changing later the first opinion she formed of the country, for we find her writing confidentially to Mr. Whalley from Cork, on the 29th of August, that she thinks the city of Dublin a sink of filthiness.