How different all this matter was with Mrs. Siddons! Rachel was a Jewess, born in an inn in Switzerland, and bred in France; a Bohemian who, after twenty-four hours of enforced respectability at Windsor, ‘_avait besoin de s’encanailler_’--thirsted to be a cad again. Mrs. Siddons was an Englishwoman; even the Irish blood, not quite absent from her veins, was without influence on her personal life--we are far from saying it did not prompt her to be an artist. And not only was she an Englishwoman; she was a Kemble besides, and rigid self-control was the very watchword of the Kembles, in art and life. We are told she had ‘the gift of tears.’ It may be. Certainly she roused in others pity and passion. But when one recognises this, one may remember, too, how the methods acceptable to one age may be ineffective in another. Mrs. Siddons’s epoch was the epoch of the acceptability of Claude’s and David’s art. It was the age of firm contour in draughtsmanship, of composition in painting, of deportment in manners. In manhood, the age admired as ideal what Mr. Turveydrop, some time afterwards, only unwittingly burlesqued. The fire, and genius, and spontaneity of Rachel would speak to us to-day. Rachel gave to the most artificial of tragedy--to the tragedy which was ‘so Greek’ to its admirers, so full of Louis xiv. to ourselves--that truth which Desclée, after her, bestowed upon an incident in the Avenue du Roi de Rome--upon a passion of this morning. Should we be equally sensible to the favourite effects of Mrs. Siddons? Should we--who have passed not only through Romanticism, but into Naturalism, since her day--be impressed, genuinely or profoundly, by her Lady Macbeth, her Hermione? As regards the outer life of the two women--Sir Joshua’s ‘Tragic Muse’ and the Phèdre whom even Sarah Bernhardt, who has so much in common with her, has not been able to surpass--it was, as may be expected, essentially different. Mrs. Kennard owes something, but cannot owe very much, to the _Life_ of Mrs. Siddons by Campbell, the inefficient friend of her later years, to whom she bequeathed her memoranda, letters, and diary. Boaden’s _Life_, of which Crabb Robinson spoke as ‘one of the most worthless books of biography in existence,’ cannot have helped Mrs. Kennard much more; but she acknowledges handsomely her obligations to Mr. Percy Fitzgerald. About Rachel a whole literature has been written; yet much of it is hardly serviceable. At least one biography is avowedly hostile. Arsène Houssaye does not mean to be ill-natured, but will at all costs be amusing. Jules Janin--a man of words, so much more than of thoughts--is hopelessly fluent. He betrays the essential worthlessness of the mere ready writer.