Fanny Kemble, the niece of Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble,
and daughter of Charles Kemble, died last Sunday night in London, at the age of eighty-three. She was not a great actress herself, but she was full of enthusiasm and poetical feeling, and her few published poems show a good deal of intensity of passion and vivacity of expression. She married a Southern planter, Mr. Pierce Butler ; but it was not a happy union, for she was a devotee of liberty and he a slave-holder with the usual prejudices and some of the failings of the class, and she obtained a divorce. When she returned to the stage, she did not regain her early popularity, and she was better known in England by her Shakespeare readings and her lively reminiscences than by her rather limited powers as an actress. She was full of a rather noble ideality. And the aspiration of one of her poems, "Better be cheated to the last, than lose the blessed hope of truth," was certainly fulfilled in her life, though it was rather at first than at last that she had many painful illusions to undergo.
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