A portion of the press, "to diminish the public apprehension," states that the destructive powers of Cholera have been magnified. The Medical Gazette (for June 18) observes, "There is a complete panic, and as mankind are ever prone to magnify horrors, so we trust the extent to which the disease has prevailed, as well as its rate of mortality, will be found to have been exaggerated. At Moscow, the accounts from which are more specific than those from most other places, not more than one in twenty-nine of the inhabitants suffered." Now if one in twenty-nine of the inhabitants of London suffer, the aggregate mortality will be only about FIFTY THOUSAND, a mere trifle in the national census.

The public safety demands that the English Government should dispense at this time with official imbecility, and guided by facts and experience alone, take every precautionary step while the invader is yet distant. This is the proper way to allay apprehension. The people, familiarized to the remedial preparations of a medical police, will meet the evil with coolness; but if these are postponed to the last hour, all will be confusion and despair. The plan for dividing the city into districts, and allotting houses for the reception of the sick, and for the gratuitous distribution of medicines, should be immediately drawn up. The course of medical treatment hitherto found most effectual, should be printed and circulated throughout the kingdom. In the worst form of Cholera, and under which it invariably begins its ravages, the patient's chance of recovery is lost unless medical aid be procured during the first, or generally, at farthest, the second hour of the attack. The common hospitals, therefore, are of little avail.

An example of judgment and humanity, not unworthy of imitation, has been furnished by the government of Java. When the Cholera appeared in Batavia, &c., many of the functionaries deserted Samarang, afraid of the contagion. The governor expressed his disapprobation of this conduct, and dismissed several of them by way of example to the rest. According to the Dutch paper which gives the account, "The magistrates distributed quantities of medicine among the islanders, by which many were saved." It affords me sincere pleasure to record the unequalled exertions and liberality of the East India Company's government in India, in the same cause. Immediately on the disease assuming a decidedly epidemic form, instructions were issued by the government to magistrates, in different quarters of the country, to employ native physicians at the public expense, and to station them with the necessary supplies of medicines, in the places in which their services seemed to be most wanted. Medicines were, at the same time, given for distribution to the native police-officers and respectable landholders, and to all European gentlemen, not in the service, resident in distant parts of the several districts. It would be impossible to calculate the quantity of life that was saved by the adoption of these truly paternal and humane measures.

JAMES KENNEDY, Surgeon.

Solly Terrace, Claremont Square, June 24th.

MRS. SIDDONS.

SIDDONS is no more! She lives, now, only in the history of the stage, or in the memories of those, whom the irradiations of her genius warmed and enlightened. Hard peculiarity of the actor's lot! The bursts of the orator the effusions of the poet remain. They can be written down; and kindred spirits can give them vital existence again-Ay! after the lapse of a thousand years-but there is no notation to perpetuate the workings of the actor's spirit; yet is the effect which they produce, at the time, the most powerful and unequivocal. No demonstration of applause is so convincing as that which we witness in the suffrages of a crowded theatre. The storm of greeting hands and tongues rises, and subsides is renewed-rises again and subsides again; the gratified audience still discontented with their own large measure of thanks. The actor's life is one of the greatest bustle and most intense excitation: but, once he is gone, his art is gone with him. It is a thing to be told of, but not shown-that leaves not a vestige, except in the poor mimicry of some who have witnessed its displays; and when those individuals are departed, even that is no more. Who will now give us an idea of Garrick's acting? Its effects are recorded, but who can show us what it was?— how his eye lightened, and his brow worked?-the varied passion of his flexible cheek, and the embodying of his spirit by his voice?-the eloquence of his gesture and his gait? We read of what they could achieve-but we ask ourselves in vain what kind of things they were.

Yet far is the actor's art from being a mean one. To master it to the height, it requires education-judgment-genius; and mean cannot be the art that calls for things like these. As a proof of its respectability, we would take the common consent of the enlightened and liberal, who have always vied in caressing its eminent professors. Garrick, it is true, used his pen; but Garrick's authorship would never have made him the companion of Johnson, Goldsmith, and the rest of that immortal knot. It was his acting. The acquaintance of the late John Philip Kemble was coveted by men of rank and talent; and Kean was esteemed by Lord Byron. Such things never could have occurred, had the actor's art been a thing to look down upon. Then, the difficulty of excelling in it—the few great actors whom an age produces. In Tragedy, only three illustrious names in the age that has passed-Siddons, Kemble, and Cooke. We do not mention the late Miss O'Neill, who scarcely appeared upon our boards ere she was lost to them; a woman of first rate genius in a certain line of tragedy. At present, we have only three tragic actors who stand at the head of the profession-Young, Kean, and Macready. Nor does this arise from the paucity of professors. There are hundreds and hundreds of actors. How many have we in London alone? That art cannot be a mean one, which, out of such numbers, so few can master.

The actor requires a mind of no ordinary structure. He must possess a sensitiveness that starts at the slightest movement of the imagination. Shakespeare delineates the feelings of Lear-Kean gives you those feelings themselves. The tears roll down his cheeks till you believe it is Lear himself that is shedding them, and you weep with the poor old king. The actor is the dramatist's best commentator. He shows you more of Shakespeare than all the critics. He brings out the light of a passage in a way in which Johnson, Malone, Steevens, and Pope together, could never have effected it with simple pen and ink. The actor is an artist

that paints with flesh and blood, and all the hues and spirits of human vitality. He must, moreover, be a man of superior physical qualifications -one not to pass in a crowd. Who could have looked at Kemble, and not have asked a friend, or a stander by, who he was? The same may be said of Kean, whose eye is so marking, that no man of observation could pass him and see him, without turning round. The end to which such a combination of physical and intellectual excellence is subservient, cannot be an inferior one, and ought not to be spoken of contemptuously.

But Mrs. Siddons-we are indebted to Mrs. Siddons for some of our most delightful, most cherished reminiscences. The poetry that invested that woman's personation of any character! The force that she gave to the slightest things she did things, that in the hands of a less accomplished mistress of her art, would have passed for nothing. Surely, not a few of our readers must recollect her manner of reading the letter in Macbeth. What a specimen of the histrionic art was then the reading of that letter! The look, the figure, the action, the voice!—such a combination of powers, as one would be almost tempted to deny that nature could surpass, and to doubt if she could repeat! She was, indeed, an extraordinary woman! Years have passed since her retirement from the stage. Candidate after candidate has presented herself; but, in the peculiar walk of that actress-in the towering in tragedy--in whom have we acknowledged her successor? When we, who saw her, look back upon what we saw ; while we thrill with the bare recollection of what her genius could achieve, and ask ourselves what we would not give to witness its sublime emanations again; not a hope, we confess, arises within us, that we shall ever hear the characters of Elvira, Zara, Volumnia, Queen Catherine, and Lady Macbeth alluded to, and associate with them the personation of any other performer. With less of mannerism than her distinguished brother, Mrs. Siddons had fifty times his genius. There was nothing of forcing about her. Passion, with her, rose to the topmost pitch, but never to offending, for it was genuine. It did not resemble the artificial storm got up by the machinists of the theatre. It was the tempest itself-it was the grand and liquid sea itself, put into motion, and chafed by the winds of Heaven, and tossing and resounding amidst the thunders and lightnings of Heaven. When her Elvira, about to be led out to die, denounced Pizarro, you trembled for Pizarro, not Elvira. Her Zara, threatening Alphonso, made palpable to you all that you had ever heard or fancied of the fierce and opposite extremes of passion-how the same love, that now could induce you to feed another's existence with your own, anon could strangle its object, The effortless, native dignity too, with which she personated such characters. HerVolumnia was indeed the Roman matron. It presented to you the original, as it were, of the historical portrait, which it not only vindicated from the suspicion of exaggeration, but even transcended. Her Queen Catherine was the perfect embodying of conscious royalty. Its mere my Lord Cardinal!" made Wolsey shrink into a page; while that native stateliness of soul, which, instead of bending under wrong and insult, only towers the higher—in the acting of this incomparable woman was acknowledged by the audience, no less from their own perception, than from the effect which it produces - upon the voluptuous tyrant, whose barbarity puts it to the test. But her master-piece was Lady Macbeth; not that she was less happy in her conception of the characters we have enumerated, but that there her genius had greater scope for its devolopment-and there, what powers of eulogy are adequate to do justice to her merits!

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The Lady Macbeth of Mrs. Siddons was the spirit of guilty ambition personified. An awe invested her in that part. You felt as if there was

a consciousness in the atmosphere that surrounded her, which communicated its thrill to you. There was something absolutely subduing in her presence-an overpowering something that commanded silence; or, if you spoke, prevented you from speaking above your breath. It was a thing once witnessed-never to be forgotten; more to be remembered than the most gorgeous pageant that ever signalized the triumph of human pride, or fulfilled the imaginings of human admiration. Her acting of the scene, in which Lady Macbeth rebukes her vacillating partner, and shames him into resolution; her acting in that where the murder is perpetrated-where, with unhesitating, collected step, Lady Macbeth enters the chamber of blood, to replace the daggers of the grooms, and as coolly issues from it again, as if she had but newly raised her head from the pillow of innocent sleep; her acting of the banquet scene, where Lady Macbeth's self possession is put to the severest trial—where, by the disturbed, distempered conscience of her feeble husband, she is placed on the brink, as it were, of a hideous precipice, and stands there as firm as if the airy void before and beneath her, were as solid as the footing whence she surveys it-her acting of these scenes, was a thing no more to be embodied in description, than the speed and brightness of the lightning flash, of which nothing can give you a conception except the bolt itself.

But the scene where Lady Macbeth walks and talks in her sleep.-We could have pitied the murderess that looked upon Mrs. Siddons in that scene! The ghastly group that enter the tent and surround the couch of Richard, bring not a tithe of the horror with them, that waited upon that woman, as Lady Macbeth, walking in her sleep. Though pit, galleries, and boxes were crowded to suffocation, still the damp of the grave seemed about you. There were the hush and the chill of the charnel house at midnight. You had a feeling as if you, and the medical attendant, and the lady in waiting, were alone with her. Your flesh crept, and your breathing thickened. You felt the tenaciousness of the spot which she was trying to rub out upon her hand; the scent of blood became palpable; while the sigh of her remorse seemed to rise from her heart, as from an indescribable abyss of misery and despair!

Such is a brief sketch of our departed Queen of Tragedy! But few of us, comparatively speaking, were her contemporaries; she can scarcely be remembered by many individuals who have seen their five and thirtieth year; yet has her death occasioned a stir and a regret in the general mind. A public funeral has been demanded for her. Her own wish, we understand, as well as that of her daughter and relatives was, that her obsequies should be perfectly private. What a sensation her dispearance from among us would have occasioned twenty years ago. A hundred mourners would have followed her coffin then, for every one that would have attended it now.

For our parts we bow to the word power-not in the physical or political, but in the intellectual application of the term. That which sways us without laying a hand upon us-commands us, without coercing our free will. We honoured Mrs. Siddons while living. We revere her memory. We do not look down upon her profession. It was her merit and her glory to have been an actress; and as an actress we say of her, that-A GREAT SPIRIT IS DEPARTED

POLAND AND THE FAMILY SYSTEM.

THE noble stand which Poland has made and continues to make against her savage oppressors, has not only baffled the calculations of mere tacticians, but has outstripped the hopes of the warmest friends of its sacred cause. With no allies but God and Justice, and the sympathies of every uncorrupted heart, its illustrious people, amidst want, pestilence, and barbarian outrage, have foiled the undivided efforts of perhaps the first military power in the world. Nor has their moderation been less conspicuous than their valour. In their appeal to Europe, they have demanded nothing calculated to compromise the security of existing governments.

But Russia neither will nor can abandon her purpose-fresh masses of serfs will fill up the gaps of slaughter-and Paskewitch may prove a more formidable leader than the intemperate Zabalkanski. Shall it then be endured, that after the diversified horrors of the past months of warfare, the revolting drama of 1794 is to be reacted in the face of Christendom? -Shall the detested Constantine again enter Warsaw, like Suwarrow, over the smouldering ruins of dwellings drenched in the blood of their inhabitants?

Humanity answers no!--but there is an authority which, deeming itself paramount to humanity, looks with indifference or impatience, to the black result. Four families, associated by a unity of interest, hold the continent as their domain, and regard the smallest extension of popular rights, as an unpardonable interference with their hereditary property in the souls and bodies of their subjects. The family of Holstein-Gottorp, sways Russia,-of Hapsburg, Austria-of Hohenzollern, Prussia,-of Bourbon, France, Spain, and the Two Sicilies. Matrimonial ties have connected the sovereigns of Prussia, Russia, and the Netherlands-of Spain, Sardinia, and the Two Sicilies-the petty States of Italy are under Austrian thraldom. Since the downfall of Napoleon, the crowned heads of the Continent have fraternized against freedom and mankind.— The partition of Poland presented the first specimen of such a flagitious confederacy, and the system was formally completed and avowed at the Congress of Vienna. It was practically developed in the Austrian crusades against Italian independence, and the Angouleme campaign in the Peninsula. To the principles of the Holy Alliance, may be attributed the hollow peace that has prevailed in the leading States of Europe for the last sixteen years. Despots may disagree, but they fear to come to extremities with each other, lest the result should tend to the aggrandizement of the common enemy. Their controversies are decided on paperthe sword is reserved for insurgent patriotism, and however much Austria may dislike and dread the growing greatness of her Northern neighbour, she dislikes and dreads still more the rise of liberty, and the progress of free opinions.

It is impossible that this state of affairs can be of long duration. No diplomatic conclave can perpetuate the reign of delusion. Men are rapidly discarding the degrading idea, that they must only draw their breath and move their limbs, by sufferance of those who occupy a chair of state, and gird their brows with a yellow bauble. We feel safe in the prediction, that before ten years shall elapse, there will be no such monster in existence, as an irresponsible chief magistrate, permitted to play at football with the happiness of millions. It will be considered as absurd to idolize the persons to whom nations entrust the superintend