Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, I have seen some
of these small parts, each making two or three pages at most, copied
out in the rudest hand of the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed
a little more carefully and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies
of the establishment. But such as they were, blotted and scrawled,
as for a child's use, she kept them all; and in the zenith of her
after reputation it was a delightful sight to behold them bound up in
costliest Morocco, each single--each small part making a _book_--with
fine clasps, gilt-splashed, &c. She had conscientiously kept them
as they had been delivered to her; not a blot had been effaced
or tampered with. They were precious to her for their affecting
remembrancings. They were her principia, her rudiments; the elementary
atoms; the little steps by which she pressed forward to perfection.
"What," she would say, "could Indian rubber, or a pumice stone, have
done for these darlings?"

I am in no hurry to begin my story--indeed I have little or none to
tell--so I will just mention an observation of hers connected with
that interesting time.

Not long before she died I had been discoursing with her on the
quantity of real present emotion which a great tragic performer
experiences during acting. I ventured to think, that though in the
first instance such players must have possessed the feelings which
they so powerfully called up in others, yet by frequent repetition
those feelings must become deadened in great measure, and the
performer trust to the memory of past emotion, rather than express a
present one. She indignantly repelled the notion, that with a truly
great tragedian the operation, by which such effects were produced
upon an audience, could ever degrade itself into what was purely