(Scott and Howard, post, I, 164). If his judgment is correct, she must have grown appreciably in physical and intellectual intensity, for she became one of the leading emotional actresses on the American stage. Towards the end of 1857 the Wallers returned to the United States, where they thereafter remained. Mrs. Waller made her début at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia on 19 October 1857, as Ophelia to the Hamlet of Mr. Waller. On the second and third nights of that engagement she acted successively Pauline and Lady Macbeth. She was described as "of stately presence, neither slender nor stout in person, and had an interesting and expressive face" (New York Dramatic Mirror, post, p. 17). The same spectator adds that she acted Lady Macbeth with an "intensity of . . . passion" that was "almost painful." Her first appearance in New York was on 5 April 1858, as Marina to her husband's Ferdinand in a new version of John Webster's tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. Thereafter she starred for some twenty years throughout the country, often with Mr. Waller as her principal associate. Among her most conspicuous characters being Queen Margaret in Richard III and Queen Katharine in Henry VIII (both in support of Edwin Booth), Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering, Nelly Brady in Edmund Falconer's The Peep O’Day, and Julia in Sheridan Knowles's The Hunchback. Though Mrs. Waller was accused of imitating the Meg Merrilies of Charlotte Cushman, she had never seen her in the part, and her Meg was an original assumption of that character. "The weird dignity of her bearing," wrote William Winter, "was impressive beyond words; there were moments, indeed, when she seemed to be a soul inspired by communion with beings of another world" (post, p. 196). She was also one of a number of actresses who seemed to take pleasure in impersonating male Shakespearean characters, among the most noteworthy of these being her interpretations of Hamlet and Iago. She closed her career as an actress in 1878 as Hester Stanhope in a modern play entitled An Open Verdict. Afterwards, like many other actors and actresses, she gave public readings from Shakespeare and other dramatists, her last noteworthy public appearance being made at Chickering Hall in New York on 1 December 1881. Mr. Waller died in 1882 and for some years thereafter she taught elocution in New York. Ill health finally compelled her