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How well I remember all the discussions of those prolonged, repeated, anxious, careful rehearsals, and the comical despair of which Miss Paton, the heroine of the opera, was the occasion to all concerned, by the curious absence of dramatic congruity of gesture and action which she contrived to combine with the most brilliant and expressive rendering of the music.
But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives. From Pope, she learnt to censure those who "bear about the mockery of woe." From Gray, that
Trollope's "Gemma" is an instance in point, where every one will feel that the spectacle of the heroine going seasick to death, owing to the administration of tartar emetic, is as disgusting and inartistic a method as fiction presents. Why not have made it croton oil?
Her personality fails to detach itself from the romance of her biography by any salient qualities. But Webster, with true playwright's instinct, casts aside historical doubts, and delineates in his heroine a woman of a very marked and terrible nature. Hard as adamant, uncompromising, ruthless, Vittoria follows ambition as the loadstar of her life.
They cheered her, for they saw before them a young heroine, victorious, beloved, ideal. But when Myra called at Hester Street, a week later, Rhona's mother had something else to say. "Rhona? Well, you had ought to seen her when we first landed! Ah! she was a beauty, my Rhona such cheeks, such hair, such eyes laughing all the time. But now ach!" She sighed dreadfully. "So it goes.
Sometimes, however, as in the tale of Hasan, the species is left undescribed. Among the Eskimo the heroine is vaguely referred to as a sea-fowl. The Kurds have a strange tale of a bird they call the Bird Simer. His daughter has been ensnared by a giant when she and three other birds were out flying; but she is at length rescued by two heroes, one of whom she weds.
At the door of the cab she tried to make her take more money, and our heroine had an odd sense that if the vehicle had not rolled away she would have thrust into her hand a keepsake for Captain Crispin. Her nervousness itself had led her to come too early to the station, and it seemed to her that she had already waited long.
After a lapse of half a century, he is writing this paragraph with a pain that would induce him to cancel it, were it not still more painful to have it believed that one whom he regarded with a reverence that surpassed the love of a brother was converted by him into the heroine of a work of fiction.
And it would have been hard to tell which was the heroine of the occasion, Primrose or Polly. And, oh, the verses that were made! some halting and some having altogether too many feet. There were dancing and jollity and every room was crowded. They had coaxed Betty to stay and she was very charming; quite too young, everybody said, to be a widow with two babies.
‘A Member strongly deprecating the use of all the other books mentioned, suggested that Jack and Jill might perhaps be exempted from the general censure, inasmuch as the hero and heroine, in the very outset of the tale, were depicted as going up a hill to fetch a pail of water, which was a laborious and useful occupation,—supposing the family linen was being washed, for instance.
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