of her life, did not appear eminently favourable, and which her ambition, perhaps, perceived but a weak hope of achieving with the highest degree of success. Yet, in the order of writing to which her aspirations now pointed, she knew that not the second ground merely, but the third or the fourth, was yet a high one: and that, with such a sense of greatness as then possessed her, her failure could not be inglorious. She wished most passionately, in short, to write a tragedy. The circumstances of the time concurred to favour her desire. She required some bold change in the character of her literary tasks to excite her at that period to their adequate fulfilment; and the agents and action of a tragedy seemed best of all calculated to arouse her from a state of painful self-consciousness, and transport her from the fretfulness and the littleness of actual life into the "calm pleasures and majestic pains," the interest and vastness, of the past. Above all, Mr. Macready had then, in the autumn of 1837, just commenced the working of his great practical experiment for the reformation of the stage. His devotion to a fine cause, while all could not appreciate it, demanded from those who could, proofs of sympathy and co-operation. With feelings such as these she resolved to commence; doubtful of her own powers, but sure of her advantages—conscious that she appealed, not to the great actor merely, but to the accomplished critic, and to the generous and accessible manager.

She chose a subject, new doubtless to the stage, but not strikingly fitted for it in such hands as her own—the fortunes of "Castruccio Castrucani." It was commenced and carried through, as almost all her writings were, too inconsiderately; though the