On the whole, perhaps, it is the letters of Rachel that are the truest guide. Letters to her parents, to her sister, to her friends--if not to her lovers--to her master, Samson, on the conditions and the problems of her work--letters of gratitude, letters of regret, letters making a small gift, though refusing a great loan--these things build up gradually, on a pretty sure foundation, the edifice of Rachel’s character, as it is fitting that we should see it. Rachel’s life was in the Present. After excitement, was to come, not rest, but _le néant_. She acted in bad health as in good, chiefly to satisfy one of the deepest needs of her nature, reckless what might follow. Mrs. Siddons, when youth and impulse had left her, dragged herself somewhat unwillingly from town to town, to repair the losses of her husband--the honest and somewhat incapable gentleman who sought a refuge for rheumatism at Bath--and she undertook yet another round of engagements in order that she might provide herself with a carriage on her retirement: ‘a carriage, now become a necessity.’ As regards the society the two women cultivated and enjoyed, Mrs. Siddons liked the intellectual and ‘the great world,’ and visited it as its equal. But Rachel, in her loftiest social flights, was not so much an artist as a show. Exhibited to the mighty, and encouraged by them, and bound to behave herself in their presence--for the success of eccentricity had not then been established--she was really most at home with a few Bohemians, and with her kith and kin who lived on her. Mrs. Siddons cared for the stage much more than did Fanny Kemble. She had for it a respect which was wanting, it would seem, even in Macready’s feeling for it; yet, in a measure, she acted to live, rather than lived to act. Rachel--with the capacity for unnamed odiousness, and supported in her private life by no fine example and no noble tradition--did yet, in the main, live for the practice of her art; though its practice can hardly have been furthered by her moral deterioration, and the chaos of her later days. (_Academy_, 3rd September 1887.) JOSEPH JEFFERSON