The average profit would have been about £25 a night. From Dublin she returned to London, and acted her second season there; it was even more brilliant than her first, and rendered noteworthy both by her first appearance with her brother, John Kemble, in _The Gamester_, who from that time frequently acted with her, and by her acting of Isabella in _Measure for Measure_, in which part she made her first success in a Shakespearean character in London. She looked the novice of St. Clare to perfection. In the spring she made her way northwards to keep her engagement with the Edinburgh manager, and on Saturday, 22nd May, 1784, she appeared on the stage of the Royalty Theatre, in Belvidera. The well-known impassibility of the Edinburgh audience affected Mrs. Siddons with an intolerable sense of depression. After some of her grandest outbursts of passion, to which no expression of applause had responded, exhausted and breathless, she would pant out in despair, under her breath, “Stupid people, stupid people!” This habitual reserve she soon found, however, gave way at times to very violent exhibitions of enthusiasm, the more fervent from its general expression—once, indeed, the whole of the sleep-walking scene in _Macbeth_ was so vehemently applauded that, contrary to all rule, she had to go over it a second time before the piece was allowed to proceed. Afterwards, when by these ebullitions of real feeling she had proved her audience’s appreciation, she could afford to tell stories of their stolidity when she first appeared amongst them. The second night, disheartened at the cold reception of her most thrilling passages, after one desperate effort she paused for a reply. It came at last, when the silence was broken by a single voice exclaiming, “That’s no bad!” a tribute which was the signal for unbounded applause. One venerable old gentleman, who was taken by his daughter to see the great actress in _Venice Preserved_, sat with perfect composure through the first act and into the second, when he asked his daughter, “Which was the woman Siddons?” As Belvidera is the only female part in the play, she had no difficulty in answering. Nothing more occurred till the catastrophe; he then inquired, “Is this a comedy or a tragedy?” “Why, bless you, father, a tragedy.” “So I thought, for I am beginning to feel a commotion.” This instance was typical of the whole of the audience—and once they began to “feel a commotion,” there was no longer any doubt about their expression of it. The passion, indeed, for hysterics and fainting at her performances ran into a fashionable mania. A distinguished surgeon, familiarly called “Sandy Wood,” who, with his shrewd common-sense, had a way of seeing through the follies of his fashionable patients, was called from his seat in the pit, where he was to be found every evening Mrs. Siddons acted, to attend upon the hysterics of one of the excitable ladies who were tumbling around him. On his way through the crowd a