Except when she was on the stage Mrs. Siddons was an eminently uninspired woman; and not a little of her inspiration in the theater has been credited to the superior intellect of her brother, John Philip Kemble. Rachel was intelligent, so intelligent that she was always eager to be aided by the intelligence of others. Legouvé recorded that if he gave her a suggestion, she seized on it and transmuted his copper into silver. She used to confess the immensity of her debt to Samson, a little dried up actor of “old men”; and she said once that she did not play a part half as well as she could play it, unless she had had the counsel of Samson. Even if she was a genius, she was rather a marvellous executant than a great composer; and there has been many another actress, even in our own time, who has owed a large part of her talent to the unsuspected guidance given by some one unknown to the public which pressed to applaud her. Miss Fotheringay was not intelligent like Rachel and she was far duller than Mrs. Siddons, but she had in her the essential quality. She was teachable and Little Bows taught her. He shrieked out in his cracked voice the parts, and his pupil learned them from him by rote. He indicated the attitudes, and set and moved those beautiful arms of hers.... With what indomitable patience and dulness she followed him. She knew that he made her; and she let herself be made.... She was not grateful, or ungrateful, or unkind, or ill-humored. She might not be grateful, but she knew very well who had made her; she said so simply enough, explaining why she had not earlier played the more important parts, “I didn’t take the leading business then; I wasn’t fit for it till Bows taught me.” So it was that Adrienne Lecouvreur, in the play which Scribe and Legouvé wrote for Rachel, thanked the little old prompter, Michonnet, who had taught her, “I was ungrateful in saying I had never had a teacher. There is a kind-hearted man, a sincere friend, whose counsels have always sustained me.” And Legouvé has told us that at one of the rehearsals Rachel suddenly turned from Regnier, who was the Michonnet, and knelt before Samson, who was the Duc de Bouillon, and addressed this speech directly to him. It would be interesting to know whether Thackeray ever saw ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur,’ which was produced in Paris in April, 1849, six months before ‘Pendennis’ began to appear in monthly parts. (1920) IX MARK TWAIN AND THE THEATER IX MARK TWAIN AND THE THEATER I