upon her the direction of her wardrobe, enriched it from her own, and made many of her dresses with her own hands.

Mrs. Siddons continues thus in her Autograph Recollections : "Mr. King, by order of Mr. Garrick, who had heard some account of me from the Aylesbury family, came to Cheltenham to see me in the Fair Penitent.' I knew neither Mr. King nor his purpose; but I shortly afterward received an invitation from Garrick himself, upon very low terms. Happy to be placed where I presumptuously augured that I should do all that I have since achieved, if I could but once gain the opportunity, I instantly paid my respects to the great man. I was at that time good-looking; and certainly, all things considered, an actress well worth my poor five pounds a week. His praises were most liberally conferred upon me; but his attentions, great and unremitting as they were, ended in worse than nothing. How was all this admiration to be accounted for, consistently with his subsequent conduct? Why, thus, I believe: He was retiring from the management of Drury Lane, and, I suppose, at that time wished to wash his hands of all its concerns and details. I moreover had served what I believe was his chief object in the exaltation of poor me, and that was the mortification and irritation of Mrs. Yates and Miss Younge, whose consequence and troublesome airs were, it must be confessed, enough to try his patience. As he had now almost withdrawn from it, the interests of the theatre grew, I suppose, rather indifferent to him. However that may have been, he always objected to my appearance in any very prominent character, telling me that the forenamed ladies would poison me if I did. I, of course, thought him not only an oracle, but my friend; and, in consequence of his advice, Portia, in the Merchant of Venice,' was fixed upon for my debut; a character in which it was not likely that I should excite any great sensation-I was, therefore, merely tolerated. The fulsome adulation that courted Garrick in the theatre cannot be imagined; and whosoever was the luckless wight who should be honoured by his distinguished and envied smiles, of course became an object of spite and malevolence. Little did I imagine that I myself was now that wretched victim. He would sometimes hand me from my own seat in the greenroom to place me next to his own. He also selected me to personate Venus, at the revival of the Jubilee.' This gained me the malicious appellation of Garrick's Venus; and the ladies who so kindly bestowed it on me rushed before me in the last scene, so that if he (Mr. Garrick) had not brought us

forward with him with his own hands, my little Cupid* and myself, whose appointed situations were in the very front of the stage, might have as well been in the Island of Paphos at that moment. Mr. Garrick would also flatter me, by sending me into one of the boxes, when he acted any of his great characters. In short, his attentions were enough to turn an older and wiser head. He promised Mr. Siddons to procure me a good engagement with the new managers, and desired him to give himself no trouble about the matter, but to put my cause entirely into his hands. He let me down, however, after all these protestations, in the most humiliating manner; and, instead of doing me common justice with those gentlemen, rather depreciated my talents. This Mr. Sheridan afterward told me; and said that, when Mrs. Abingdon heard of my impending dismissal, she told them they were all acting like fools. When the London season was over, I made an engagement at Birmingham for the ensuing summer, little doubting of my return to Drury Lane for the next winter; but while I was fulfilling my engagement at Birmingham, to my utter dismay and astonishment I received an official letter from the prompter of Drury Lane, acquainting me that my services would be no longer required. It was a stunning and cruel blow, overwhelming all my ambitious hopes, and involving peril, even to the subsistence of my helpless babes.† It was very near destroying me. My blighted prospects, indeed, induced a state of mind that preyed upon my health, and for a year and a half I was supposed to be hastening to a decline. For the sake of my poor children, however, I roused myself to shake off this despondency, and my endeavours were blessed with success, in spite of the degradation I had suffered in being banished from Drury Lane as a worthless candidate for fame and fortune."

These sentences, which were penned by Mrs. Siddons in her advanced age, show that neither a long lifetime, nor most forgiving habits of mind, had effaced the poignant feelings which this transaction had inflicted on her; and those who knew her best will have the most implicit belief in her veracity.

*This little Cupid was the subsequent autobiographer Thomas Dibdin. He told me that, as it was necessary for him to smile in the part of his godship, Mrs. Siddons kept him in humour by asking him what sort of sugar-plums he liked best, and promising him a large supply of them. After the performance she kept her word.

+ Her eldest daughter, Sarah Martha, was born at Gloucester, Nov. 5, 1775, within two months before Mrs. Siddons's first appearance in London.

Her statement, however, I think, shows that Garrick behaved to her rather like a man of the world than with absolute treachery. One traces in his conduct more of that thoughtlessness which the French call "une heureuse legéreté," than of any bad meaning. It is utterly improbable that he was ever jealous of her genius, or that he sought to keep it back from popularity, for fear of its eclipsing his own. At that time she had not risen (at least in the common opinion) to rivalship with players far inferior to Garrick. His culpability, in failing to keep his promise to Mrs. Siddons as to her engagement, cannot be very definitely measured. In leaving so complicated a concern as Drury Lane, he might be obliged to sacrifice his influence. For the fact of his having depreciated her talents to the managers, we have only the testimony of Sheridan, who probably found her mind irritated on the subject, and was a man much disposed to say to a beautiful woman whatever was likely to fall in with her prevailing mood. When Garrick ceased to be the manager of Drury Lane, he ceased to have the power of dictating engagements. Still it were to be wished that he had left the affair explained.

Mr. Boaden, in his Life of our great actress, asserts, that some years previous to her debut on the London boards, she made a private application to Garrick, as manager of Drury Lane, soliciting first his judgment, and secondly his protection. She repeated, according to Mr. Boaden, some of the speeches of "Jane Shore" before the manager. "He seemed highly pleased with her elocution and deportment, wondered how she could have got rid of the provincial ti-tum-ti, but regretted he could do nothing for her, and wished her a good morning."

I have strong doubts with regard to this anecdote. The scene of it is laid in London; and I have heard Mrs. Siddons herself say, that she never was in London before her invitation from Garrick, in 1775. At the time alleged, she was in the family of the Greatheeds, and the surviving members of that family have no recollection either of Mrs. Siddons's having left them, or of their having removed from Guy's Cliff, during her abode with them.

It was on Friday, the 29th of December, 1775, that Mrs. Siddons made her first appearance on the London boards, in the character of Portia, in the "Merchant of Venice." She was announced merely as a young lady, whose performances had met with great applause. The part of Portia was manifestly too gay for Mrs. Siddons under the appalling ordeal of a first appearance in London. She played it, to be sure, many

years afterward with very fair success; but that was when her triumphs had given her strength. The nobleness of her form, and the energy of her acting, made her appear constitutionally strong; but she was far from being so, and her nerves were of the most delicate texture. By looking at the note appended to page 35, it will be seen that her health could not now be very robust. She had thus to throw the first die for her fame in a sprightly and half-comic part, under disadvantages both physical and moral.

The great obstacle to the early development of her powers, I have heard Mrs. Siddons declare, was timidity. The following critique on her first appearance at Drury Lane will exemplify the truth of this acknowledgment, though it equally convicts the vile newspaper critic of insensibility to the real cause of her failure in the part. The scribbler acknowledges that she delivered the great speech to Shylock with the most critical propriety, though he had not the charity to ascribe her tremulous tones to diffidence, the most pardonable of all faults, because the most indicative of sensibility. In describing her appearance, the newsman says, "On before us tottered, rather than walked, a very pretty, delicate, fragile-looking young creature, dressed in a most unbecoming manner, in a faded salmoncoloured sack and coat, and uncertain whereabouts to fix either her eyes or her feet. She spoke in a broken, tremulous tone; and at the close of a sentence her words generally lapsed into a horrid whisper, that was absolutely inaudible. After her first exit, the buzzing comment went round the pit generally. She certainly is very pretty, but then how awkward, and what a shocking dresser! Towards the famous trial-scene, she became more collected, and delivered the great speech to Shylock with the most critical propriety, but still with a faintness of utterance which seemed the result rather of internal physical weakness than of a deficiency of spirit or feeling. Altogether, the impression made upon the audience by this first effort was of the most negative nature.'

She repeated the character of Portia a few nights afterward, but with no greater effect. She then waited until the 13th of January, 1776, for one of the ladies collegiate, in Ben Jonson's "Epicone," which had been restored to the stage by Colman,

Soon after, in the same season, she acted a part, of trifling moment, in an opera, called "The Blackamoor Washed White." The author of this opera, Henry Bate, was a clergyman, who had a living near Chelmsford, in Essex. He produced "Henry and Emma," an interlude, which was acted at

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Covent Garden in 1774; and "The Rival Candidates," a comic opera, which came out at Drury Lane, with approbation; but his third piece, in which Mrs. Siddons performed, was coldly received, lived only three nights, and was never printed.

On the 17th of February, 1776, Mrs. Siddons performed in Mrs. Cowley's comedy of "The Runaway," which was acted for seventeen nights consecutively. The "Runaway" is not the best of Mrs. Cowley's comedies; but it is by no means contemptible. Her "Belle's Stratagem" is her chef d'œuvre; and I would recommend to those who despise her as a Della Cruscan poetess to read that comedy. A recognition of her merits as a comic writer is the more due to her, that they were forgotten by the world in her latter years, when the author of the "Baviad" and "Mæviad" lashed her under her assumed name of Anna Matilda. I must acknowledge, to be sure, that nothing but sheer infatuation can account for the authoress of the "Belle's Stratagem" having obscured a fair reputation by printing cartloads of Della Cruscan rhymes. As a matter of taste, she deserved admonition: but her sex and her services to literature ought to have screened her from gross vituperation. Gifford abused his power. The public were thankful to him for writing down such nuisances as Williams, the selfstyled Anthony Pasquin, an impudent fellow to whom many of the artists and players of London actually paid black mail in order to be saved from his scurrility. This was performing a public duty. But he was too savage on the tinsel school; for the feeble Della Cruscans would have died without a public execution. Besides, it would have been but justice on the part of Gifford to have blended his censure of Mrs. Cowley's Della Cruscanism with a full acknowledgment of her better works.*

* I never saw this authoress but once, and that was some thirty years ago, in a bookseller's shop. An old lady came in, who, I was told, was the Della Cruscan Anna Matilda. She inquired about the sale of her last poem, "The Siege of Acre." I have since learned that she was at that time in good circumstances, and cherished by many friends; but, either from my fancy picturing the prints of Gifford's satire in her furrowed countenance, or that she was in uncommonly bad spirits, she seemed to me the most forlorn being I had ever seen. When the bookseller told her that he had only sold fifteen copies of her "Siege of Acre," her chagrin was manifest. After she was gone, the bibliopolist informed us that he had actually disposed of only three copies, but could not find in his heart to mortify her with the strict truth. I was told, however, that Mrs. Cowley had written the "Belle's Stratagem." I went home, and read it; and Letitia Hardy cured me of my contemptuous compassion for an excellent comic authoress.