In studying the annals of genius, it is interesting to observe how circumstances working from within force it on and bring it to completion, how circumstances working from without mould it into form, tempering the fine metal until it is supple and adaptable, but breaking the inferior metal by the sheer weight of their inexorable pressure. Had Mrs. Siddons remained the brilliant, beautiful girl, with life undimmed by clouds, without experience of the bitterness and sorrow of life, she never could have acted Lady Macbeth. In her impetuous indignation at first, she herself said that never again would “she present herself before that audience that had treated her so savagely”; but the greater spirit within reasserted itself, and her genius emerged from the trial strengthened and expanded by a larger range of emotion and experience. With her increased knowledge of life, the actress was enabled to form a more vivid conception of the character. She was naturally intensely masterful, determined, and ambitious, undaunted in peril. She had toiled, and attained the highest point of her ambition. She had known the incentives of distinction, worldly power, applause, yet she remained a woman, passionate and wayward in her affections to the last; and this is the view, seen through the medium of her own character, that she took of Lady Macbeth, and it was through her lofty impersonation of ambition in its highest and most sublimated form that she moved her audience to terror, and by this womanly tenderness that she moved them to sympathy and pity for the murderess of Banquo. Mrs. Siddons had studied the part of Lady Macbeth when little more than a girl. She gives us a graphic account of the first time she learnt it for the purposes of stage representation:—