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Updated: June 13, 2025
Kemble's ample person draped in gold-colored silk, her flowing black hair folded and braided in some large style about her head, her rich and low and exquisitely modulated voice, her queenly presence, her magnificence of self-possession all this fascinating personality made her reading memorable, and like a torch which reveals the perfect detail of great sculpture or architecture, her genius gave the whole value to every character and scene of the play.
Let me pray that I, representing the old school, may never look on the new school with the patronizing airs of "Old Fitz" and Fanny Kemble. I wish that I could see the new school of acting in Shakespeare. Shakespeare must be kept up, or we shall become a third-rate nation! Henry told me this story of Fanny Kemble's reading without a spark of ill-nature, but with many a gleam of humor.
Kemble's rendering of the poem, wonderfully correct and conscientious as a translation, is inferior in poetical merit to that of Stephens, who, as we see, instead of choosing modern words, is careful to retain many of the picturesque old rune equivalents.
This we perceive at once if we compare Stephens' four lines, beginning "Christ was on Rood tree" with Kemble's: "Christ was on the Cross but thither hastening men came from afar to the noble one." * * Poetry of the Vercelli Codex.
It told of the theft of a herd of steers from Kemble's place; the shooting of Bert Stone and the looting of Hap Smith's mail bags; the robbery of Seth Powers who left the poker table at Gold Run at two o'clock one morning with seven hundred dollars in his overalls and was found at eight o'clock beaten into unconsciousness and with his pockets turned wrong-side out; the stage robbery in which Bill Varney of Twin Dry Diggings had been killed; the robbery of Jed Macintosh in Dry Town.
She never forgot "the warm grasp of Mrs. Charles Kemble's hand, when she saw her, all life and heartiness, at her house in Soho Square, or the excellent acting of Young and Kemble and Macready, who did everything actors could do to secure success for her." "These are the things," she once wrote, "one thinks of, when sitting calm and old by the light of a country fire."
"A doctor kin give yer high ole jinks ef ye're not keerful." Martine now obeyed the instinct often so powerful in the human breast as well as in dumb animals, and sought the covert, the refuge of his home, caring little whether he was to live or die. When he saw the lighted windows of Mr. Kemble's residence, he moaned as if in physical pain.
Bæda, in his Latinised Northumbrian, calls it Vætlinga ceaster, as an alternative title with Verlama ceaster; so that it might nowadays have been familiar to us all either as Watlingchester or Verlamchester. This is one of the numerous cases where a Roman and English name lived on during the dark period side by side. In some of Mr. Kemble's charters it appears as Walinga ceaster.
Charles Dickens certainly spared none to his Readings in his conscientious endeavour to give his own imaginings visible and audible embodiment. The sincerity of his devotion to his task, when once it had been taken in hand, was in its way something remarkable. Acting of all kinds has been pronounced by Mrs. * Fanny Kemble's Journal, Vol. II. p. 130.
And then I read your note, and perceive your reading is as good as Mrs. Kemble's. Now, being modest, I always felt afraid the reason I thought you such a good reader was because I didn't know any better, but if all the world is equally ignorant, it makes it all right.... I've been intensely busy.
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