In his later days Charles Kemble was afflicted with deafness, so complete that he could not hear the pealing thunder, but could fancy it was in the air; for, as he once remarked amid the crash, "I feel it in my knees!" It was, perhaps, this affliction which occasionally gave him that look of fixed melancholy which he occasionally wore. Of anecdotes of his later time, there are few known to me of any interest, except the following, which I cull from the _Athenæum_. It is in reference to his son, Mr. J. M. Kemble's Lectures at Cambridge, _On the History of the English Language_, which were unsuccessful. "After making a good deal to do about them," says the correspondent of the _Athenæum_, "he obtained the use of the Divinity School to lecture in, and it was pretty well crowded at the first lecture; but the lecture itself was such a sickener, and so unintelligible, that at the second, myself, and I think two others, formed the whole audience. The appearance was so absurdly ridiculous in the large room, that Kemble gave notice, in announcing the day of his third lecture, that in future he should deliver them at his own private apartments. Meanwhile his father, Charles Kemble, the actor, came to see him, and on the day fixed for the third lecture, nobody was there to hear him but his said father and I; upon which, when we had waited in vain nearly an hour for an increase of audience, I moved, and his father seconded the proposal, that instead of inflicting the lecture upon us two, the lecturer should send into Trinity College buttery, as it was then the hour it was open, and procure a quantity of ale and cheese, for the excellence of both which Trinity College was celebrated, and with the aid of these we passed the afternoon. Such was the end of Kemble's lectures." Rogers has left in his _Table Talk_ some record of the Kembles, which, as coming from an eye and ear witness, may find admission here. From this we learn that Mrs. Siddons, to whom he had been telling an anecdote showing that, when Lawrence gained a medal at the Society of Arts, his brothers and sisters were jealous of him, remarked:--"Alas! after _I_ became celebrated, none of my sisters loved me as they did before!" And then, when a grand public dinner was given to John Kemble on his quitting the stage, the great actress said to the poet, "Well, perhaps, in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this." "She alluded," says Rogers, "to the comparatively little sensation which had been produced by her own retirement from the boards; and, doubtless, she was a far, far greater performer than John Kemble."