criticism of her which I have been able to glean, points conclusively to the supposition that Nell Gwynne was an actress much of the Lotta type-a gay, lively little creature, full of dash and spirit in comic parts, but who failed altogether in sentiment, and in heroic tragedy was most abominable. Pepys notes that he "was most infinitely displeased with her......in a great and serious part, which she does most basely." Dryden took her measure well, probably, when he wrote the following lines for her to speak after the burlesque "business" of having stabbed herself and then come to life again:

went behind the scenes and asked for Nelly. Her stage thereafter was at Windsor Castle, her auditors the court.

London to-day is dotted with monuments, in the shape of hospitals, relief rooms, and other places of succor for the poor, which were founded by the munificence of Nell Gwynne. Naturally the poor people were fond of her, and from all the scorn and rage which were lavished on the licentious court of Charles the Second, little Nelly was ever exempt.

Crowned with bay, as indicative, perhaps, of many dramatic victories, holding a manuscript in her hand, from which she may have studied, and with her sumptuous

"I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye: dress held on her shapely neck by a price

I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly.
Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil;
I'm what I was a little harmless devil....
To tell you true, I walk because I die
Out of my calling in a tragedy."

less chain of jewels and rare pearls, sits beautiful Anne Oldfield. She went on the stage at sixteen, and though unmarried (she never married), was announced at once as Mrs. Oldfield, it being the custom, previous to the eighteenth century, to so designate both single and married women.

But in farcical characters she must have been bewitching. Pepys writes, when speaking of Dryden's play called The Maiden Queen: "There is a comical part done by Nell, which is Florimel, that I The part in which Anne Oldfield took never can hope ever to see the like done London by storm, and one with which again by man or woman. The king and her name must ever be associated in histhe Duke of York were at the play. But trionic annals, was that of Lady Betty so great a performance of a comical part Modish, in Cibber's comedy of The Carewas never, I believe, in the world before less Husband. On reading this now obsoas Nell do this, both as a mad girl, then lete play we discover the real basis of the most and best of all when she comes like a success of the actress who first appeared young gallant, and hath the motions and as Lady Betty. The part itself is most carriage of a spark the most that ever I charming, and as true to nature to-day as saw any man have. It makes me, I con- it was then. Lady Betty is what we now fess, admire her..............I kissed her, and so call "a flirt." She is tantalizing, fickle, did my wife; and a mighty pretty soul witty, provoking; but throughout all this she is." she is a dear, amiable, whole-souled, big

Talent so decided and personal attrac-hearted woman, whom to know is to love. tions so marked would win the admiration of any audience, ancient or modern, and Nelly was always devising some new grotesqueness in costume to add to the fun. In one of her parts she came on the stage unexpectedly, wearing a hat as large round as a cart-wheel, and which almost entirely hid her. This was done as a "take-off" on some pastoral play which was being performed at the rival theatre, exactly as in our theatres to-day Lotta burlesques Modjeska. Fatal or fortunate, as one looks at it from the moral or the worldly point of view, was Nelly's famous hat assumption. Her success that night with her enraptured audience exceeded any she had hitherto achieved, yet this was her last appearance upon the stage. When the curtain fell, the king

Anne Oldfield's particularly striking beauty, and, above all, her silvery melodious voice, had been much admired on the stage from the very first night of her appearance. No one considered her a great actress, however, or even a very promising one. But the instant she walked on the stage as Lady Betty Modish the world of high society, both court and aristocracy, felt that this was the embodiment of all the graces, dignity, and loveliness of their order. Never had such a woman of fashion been dreamed of on the boards. Ladies of rank went to the theatre to catch the secret of her almost queenly deportment in a character full, nevertheless, of fun and "tease." Seeing her so marvellously well adapted for the impersonation of women of high life, Cibber wrote

other similar parts for her, notably that During Mrs. Oldfield's time was seen of Lady Townley in The Provoked Hus- upon the London stage a comedian who, band-a charming comedy which has not droll enough when behind the foot-lights, even at this late day left the stage in was, away from them, the dullest dolt America, where its occasional representa- that ever breathed to follow an intellecttion will last as long as Mrs. John Drew, ual calling. Unable to read or write, he the manageress en permanence of the had married solely to get a wife to read Arch Street Theatre, Philadelphia, lives his parts aloud to him until he learned

to repeat no doubt the very traditions de- | them. So utterly incapable was he of scended from Mrs. Oldfield in the winning part of Lady Townley.

For a long time Mrs. Oldfield declined to appear in tragedy, deeming herself unsuited to that line; but at length she was prevailed upon to play Jane Shore (she was the original in this part), and was highly successful in that as well as many other tragic heroines. She died in 1730. Pope satirizes the description given of her winding-sheet finery. Peers bore her coffin to Jerusalem Chamber. She is buried in the cloisters of Westminster.

seeing the point of a joke that to impute to him the perpetration of one was considered a capital joke in itself. This was the man whose name is now a household word-Joe Miller. The Jest Book which bears his name is supposed to have been a compilation of current witticisms put together by John Motley, a contemporary dramatist.

"Clear stage, every body!" The prompter's well-known cry, and clap of hands for "rise of curtain," may be appropriately repeated here, for now springs

from obscurity into the greatest renown an actor ever enjoyed, that most wonderful stage performer known to the annals of the world-David Garrick. If Garrick's death, as Johnson said, eclipsed the gayety of nations, what a wonderful sensation must his dramatic birth have created! But there is no need of surmise on this point; the record of his amazing career from first to last is all before us. No histrionic existence ever equalled Garrick's before his time or since, nor is it likely ever to have a parallel.

Garrick's progenitor was an expatriated Frenchman, Monsieur Garrigues, who had been driven to England by the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and intermarryings before David's birth bestowed upon the versatile histrion an equal quantity of Irish, French, and English bloodundoubtedly a better mixture than any brewed in the witches' caldron in Macbeth for the right production of a marvellous Protean actor. In the early days of his boyhood David Garrick was thrown into a position of strange interest, and his childish letters of the time, preserved at the South Kensington Museum, are in themselves proof enough that their writer was no ordinary boy.

and listen to the pedagogue declaiming the long-winded speeches of his dull tragedy Irene; and to see him, in his excitement at his own grandiloquence, tucking in the bedclothes as if he were already in bed, must have been fun. He little dreamed that the theatrical manager who was to produce this mass of dreary verbiage was the vivacious young gentleman to whom he was teaching a little Latin and less Greek. Solely out of friendship for his old tutor, Garrick, when lessee of Drury Lane, produced Irene, and forced it to a run of nine nights, so as to give some profit to the author. The selfish old scholar, however, was, so far from being grateful, very much incensed, and attributed the failure of the piece to every cause but its own unattractiveness.

It is the story of Garrick's instantaneous success in the part of Richard III. which has driven, and still continues to drive, so many undrilled, stage - struck youths behind the foot-lights, there to find a mortifying, ludicrous, and absurd defeat. The night of October 19, 1741, was indeed a momentous one in stage annals; nevertheless, the bill which announced that the part of Richard III. would be played by "A Young Gentleman who never Appeared on Any Stage" was not characterized by that spirit of veracity which usually pervades play-bill literature.

Under the assumed name of Lydgate, Garrick had had some considerable experience in the provinces as an actor, but he had never played Richard. What a revolution he created! In ten minutes' time he had overturned the whole fabric of dramatic tradition, swept away forev

His father was a captain in the British service, who, ordered to Gibraltar, left his wife and family in England to endure the direst penury. David, only twelve years old, seems by common consent to have at once become the head of the family. He it is who carries on the correspondence with the absent officer, detailing the sufferings they are enduring at home from insufficient food, patched clothes, the threats of duns, the falling away of for-er the mouthings, struttings, and absurd mer friends. The poverty he suffered in boyhood produced a lasting effect on David Garrick's character: through life he was thrifty, and when he died he left a fortune of one hundred thousand pounds. His careful habits, however, brought down upon him from his enemies-notably Samuel Foote the slur of meanness; but the records of his generosity, and, indeed, lavish liberality, are too numerous for Foote's charge to be much cared for.

Another matter of interest connected with Garrick's youth is that he was a pupil of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and one of the standard amusements of the three scholars who composed Dr. Johnson's entire academy was to creep up to his door of an evening, peep through the key-hole,

and unnatural pomposities of the various Richards who had trod the stage ever since Shakspeare's day. Every line, every word, uttered by Richard, the tradition of the stage until Garrick came required to be drawled out with a certain rising inflection here, a falling one there, a movement of the left hand this way, the right hand that way, until an exasperatingly unnatural model was attained. The first line spoken by Garrick, as he came on for the famous soliloquy, showed that "here was a man." That is the best criticism: the auditors saw a living Richard before them, from the inception of his guilty plan to win the crown till the moment of his agonizing defeat and death, his wild, chaotic rage in the tent scene

stirring them as never acting had done | upper galleries by the prodigious crowds before. The rapid and imperious order, who rushed to see him generated an epi"Off with his head!" the sly, cruel, crafty demic, which was known as the Garrick comment, with bitter smile and rubbing fever. of hands-"So much for Buckingham!" Garrick's first love episode was amusthe angry dashing away of the prayer- ing. He tumbled head over ears in love