Even in the present age, the début of an actress, having so many “lengths” to deliver in public, is reckoned one of the severest ordeals that womanly modesty can undergo. The celebrated Mrs. Siddons described it as a “fiery trial,”--a “terrible moment,”--and any play-goer who has witnessed the first appearance of a young lady on any stage will easily give credit for its agonies. The late Mrs. ---- once described to me very vividly her sufferings on a like awful occasion:--“The voice that would not come, and the tremor that would not go--the frame inclining to sink, and the head determined to swim,--the distinct consciousness of the presence of the body, with the indistinct impression of the absence of the mind. Thank Heaven,” she concluded, “that I had not to ‘extort’ the people, as Mawworm calls it, out of my own head--that I had not to furnish the speech, as well as the courage to utter it; for I protest that I could not have put together a sentence of my own, for the saving of my life!” [Illustration: A FIRST APPEARANCE ON ANY STAGE.] With such experience and impressions of the inaptitude of the sex for popular orators, my profound amazement may be conceived when on lately glancing over the columns of a morning journal, my eye was arrested by the extraordinary heading of PUBLIC MEETING OF WOMEN AGAINST THE POOR LAWS. In the first tumult of my agitation I pitched my Morning Herald, where Parson Adams threw his Æschylus, namely, behind the fire; but the very next instant, with a vague notion that it would _blow_ up, I snatched it out again. I am not certain,--being in weak health and spirits, and more than commonly nervous,--that I did not cry murder!--My first sensation, indeed, was a physical one, a complication of acuteness of earache, with the numbness of lock-jaw:--and then came the moral consciousness of some stunning domestic calamity, that seemed dilating every instant from a family into a national visitation. In fact I recollect nothing at all approaching the first bodily shock, except once, on the explosion of some neighbouring powder-mills, when a few highly condensed moments of intense silence were followed by the sudden burst of an imaginary peal, from a bell assembly of all the steeples in England; nor can I recall any experience equal to my mental horror afterwards, unless a certain delirious dream of being run away with by four gray mares, in the York mail!