It was during one of her later engagements in London that she conceived the ambition of playing the sleep-walking scene from _Macbeth_ in the English language, and she asked me, with one or two other critics, to come to her house in order that we might correct any errors of pronunciation which her performance might betray. It was in a little drawing-room somewhere down in South Belgravia that we sat and listened to her as, in her ordinary every-day garb, she acted the scene; and I do not think there was one of us who was not so entirely absorbed in the beauty and power of the impersonation as not completely to forget the special mission upon which we had been summoned. It was only afterwards--when, recalling us to our task, she sat in our midst and quietly read the words over again--that we discovered she blundered in one particular, and in one particular only. When she came to the line, “Not all the perfumes of Arabia,” it seemed impossible for her tongue, “hung,” as Sala used to say of his own, “in a southern belfry,” not to give an absolutely equal emphasis to each separate syllable of the final word. There was no other fault to find, and when afterwards, encouraged by our praise, she gave the performance in the theatre, its effect was deeply impressive. A little later, on my recommendation, she read, in English, Webster’s tragedy of _The Duchess of Malfi_, and at the time she was so keenly impressed with the beauty of the character, as set in its lurid frame, that she entertained the project of having a version of the play made for her in Italian. As I walked away from her house that day with John Oxenford, he was recalling to me some of his earlier experiences as dramatic critic of the _Times_. In those later days he had allowed himself to become little more than a good-natured chronicler of the narrative underlying each play as it was presented, and rarely elected to be critical or censorious, whether of the qualities of the dramatist and still less of the manner in which the actors acquitted themselves. In the discharge of this function, however, he had no equal. There was no one on the Press at that time who could, with such grace or in so narrow a compass, set forth the story of the plot of the drama under consideration. But some of us, who brought to our work the greater keenness of youth, were disposed to reproach him with the unvarying good-nature which governed his appreciation of the art of the time.