CHAPTER VII.

Mrs. Abington.-Her Lady Betty Modish.-Lillo.-Comedy of Reparation. Mrs. Cargill, lost in the Pacquet, returning from India.-Details of that Event.-Mrs. Siddons in the Countess of Salisbury.-Hall Hartshorn, whether the real Author of that Play.-Her next choice, Thompson's Sigismunda.-The Prologue to this Play examined.—Mrs. Siddons's performance of the Heroine, its Beauties.-Exhibition of her Portrait in the Tragic Muse.-Mr. Kemble never sat to Sir Joshua Reynolds.—Compared at that time with his Sister.-His Habits and Studies.-Love of Accuracy.-Macnally's Robin Hood.-Commemoration of Han-. del.-Cowper's Censure Controverted.-Ardour of Mrs. Siddons.--Mrs. Abington.-Lord Mansfield.-Macklin.The great Decision as to the Rights of Audience and Actor.

MRS. Abington, after the Christmas holidays, made her first appearance for the season in Lady Betty Modish, in the Careless Husband. In my opinion nothing in the art ever went beyond this performance. It is not a little singular, that this great actress never should have excited an imitator. Of all the Lady Bettys of the time, no one reminded me that she had ever seen her act or heard her speak; and this, by the way, is a solitary instance. Every other excellent performer was admired and copied by the juvenile candidate for fame. Her taste, her ease, her grace, her point, her humour, were unattainable.

On the 10th of February, Lillo's most horrible tragedy of the Fatal Curiosity was brought out, augmented by Mr. Mackenzie in a style sufficiently similar. Henderson and Mrs. Stephen Kemble rendered the audience completely miserable.

Miles Peter Andrews, more fashionable as a writer of Epilogues for the plays of others, than for his own comedies, produced at Drury Lane, on the 14th of February, a play called Reparation. This reparation is the legal marriage, in the fifth act, of a most amiable woman, who had been the victim of a pretended marriage, before the commencement of the play. Mrs. Siddons conferred the said character upon Miss Farren, who struggled through five acts of

very heavy and disgusting incidents: the author was too fond of dishonourable attachments; for that to which I have alluded was not the only one in the play. Among a crowd of indiscretions, the author had the folly to allude to what was at that time called back stairs influence. In other words, his majesty's change of his confidential servants. The expressions used begat a contest, and the author did not suffer by his own explosion, which, considering his profession, a gunpowder merchant, was beyond all reasonable calculation. Perhaps his politics saved his play.

Captain Topham wrote both prologue and epilogue, replete with the usual points of the time; and, indeed, they are by no means unentertaining, the taste for mature beauty-the luxuries of debate-the India Interest-Pacchierotti-Vestris-the dieu-and the dogs of the dance.

About the end of the month of February, Mrs. Cargill perished off Scilly, in the Nancy pacquet, returning from the East Indies. She was the original Clara in the Duenna; was a very delightful singer, and one of the most captivating women of her time: but the head was not strong enough to regulate the conduct of the charmer, and she occasionally filled the page of scandal.

It may, perhaps, be proper to exhibit a fuller account of her conduct, and her fate, for the chance of recalling others to a just sense of their danger.

This lovely creature was found floating, in her chemise, as she had lain in her bed, and in her arms, inseparably clasped, the infant of which she had been delivered. The maternal instinct had not yielded even to death itself.

By a very early display of vocal and even comic talent, she had become an amazing favourite with the public. She increased in beauty as she advanced in her profession, and became an object of attraction to the dissolute. She at length eloped from her father's house, and I well knew the man who triumphed in her seduction. Her maiden name was Brown, and her father was a respectable tradesman, who was made miserable by her indiscretion. At length, tired even of disorder, she married; but her choice was, as might be expected, little advantageous to her; and she became a voluntary exile, in consequence, from her native land, and arrived in India, with a view to professional exertion, in a country that has wealth, at all events, to lavish upon amusement. acted at Bombay several nights, with such a company as could be got together, and even went so far as to try the Grecian Daughter for her own benefit. It was solely for her own benefit, for she was totally inadequate to such a charac

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ter. Her Eliza, in the Flitch of Bacon, a little reconciled the spectators to a temperature that was insufferable. The tickets had been put as high as two guineas each, and five hundred persons were too closely collected together.

The India Company, it appeared, had instructed the Council to send her back to Europe; but her residence in India would have been connived at, and she might have acquired an immense fortune, if she would have proceeded to Bengal ; but her attachment to captain Haldane seemed then to supersede every other consideration, and she determined to return with him to England. On the 20th of September, she acted again Maria in the Citizen, and her former part in the Flitch of Bacon. Her attraction was unbounded.

She was, however, another Manon L'Escaut, and the Abbe Prevost might have drawn his heroine from Mrs. Cargill. She was preparing to run from the very man, for whom fortune honourably acquired was a cheap and vulgar sacrifice. Before leaving Madras, her protector had been invited to dine with a large party at captain Dempster's; but entertaining some doubt of the syren's fidelity, he commanded a trusty servant to pay particular attention to her conduct. As he was sitting down to dinner, his suspicions were confirmed; intelligence was brought to him, that an elopement was certainly in agitation. He quitted the room abruptly, and found the fair deceiver just on the point of stepping into a carriage, that had been prepared to receive her by Mr. L., a writer in the company's service. She promised every thing for the future, and he forgave her levity. A confidential friend of his received her in a sort of honourable custody, and in a few days they sailed together in the Nancy pacquet for Europe, which was lost off Scilly, as has been related. Her body' had been seven days under water. Her remains were buried at Scilly, by a private gentleman, at his own expense; and at his charge were interred fourteen of her fellow sufferers and two infants. He caused as accurate descriptions as could be taken of the bodies to be drawn upon the spot, and carried a copy of them to London himself, to assist the friends of the parties in ascertaining their loss.

This melancholy expiation of all her errors left a tender regret for her loss, which outlived the usual duration of such tributes to the public favourites.

Some difficulty seemed to be felt by the management of Drury Lane Theatre to diversify the performances of Mrs. Siddons. She acted three times the Countess of Salisbury, in Hall Hartshorn's tragedy so called: and certainly she played the character very finely; but this gentleman had not

the powers which such an actress required. However, whatever were his powers, they were singularly questioned. The celebrated Dr. Leland was suspected to have assisted him in the composition of the present, his only tragedy. But one proof that he was not the real author of the play, is extremely curious. An acquaintance complimented him upon the happy manner in which he had appropriated a speech from Homer-it is in the seventeenth book, and contains an allusion to Andromache's unarming Hector on his return from battle. Mr. Hartshorn denied that he had drawn any part of his materials from Homer; and this it seems was an identical passage. It was therefore inferred, that, not knowing what his own play contained, he could not have been the author. But the true inference was, that so natural a circumstance, as a wife's aiding to unarm her hero, would occur to every author writing on such a subject; and the expressions are so remote, as to have nothing in common. Surely a man must be very ambitious of detecting plagiarism, and uncommonly doubtful of modern talent, who could so reason upon a very trite passage, written too by a gentleman who had been educated by Dr. Leland.

The next choice for Mrs. Siddons was Sigismunda, in Thomson's Tancred and Sigismunda. I cannot think that even this was a happy one. Perhaps something more than youthful passion was always inferred from the considerate grandeur of her general manner, and the mature intelligence of her expression. But the play offered a variety of a gentle and pleasing character. Garrick, too, had been fond of the part of Tancred, and every body loved the author of the Sea

sons.

The prologue to this play merits particular notice, for it expresses the author's own notions of the stage, at the time he wrote-what it had escaped from, and what he hoped might yet render it a source of elegant and rational amusement. He considered the stage to be then chaste and corrected that no tinsel arts would longer conceal the want of genuine nature: the spell of the magician was dissolved, and that wand was broken, which used to waft you over sea and land: fairies and demons, the light and heavy troops of superstition, had faded from the view, and the ghost was bound in chains, that were never at curfew time to be again broken. Nor was the mere mortal bustle of the old stage allowed to these most rational times. The close-wedged battle was to be fought no longer by the prompter's troops: the awful senate itself could seldom be convened; the yawning fathers were condemned to nod behind the scenes. Nor did the mo

dern reformers show more forbearance as to the diction of poetry: the glittering false sublime was in course rejected by taste so pure; maids could not sigh in metaphor, nor die in rhyme. Rant was tumbled from his beloved gallery throne: descriptions, dreams, and even similies were abandoned.

But they still hoped to catch the lightning of Shakspeare's sublimity, or his deep knowledge of the human heart; the tender wo of Otway, and the pomp and golden lines of Rowe. The critic hazards but little who shall assert, that to an age, which banishes so much, little of what remained would be attainable. From Thomson's times to the present, even Rowe had neither been equalled nor approached. But as those critical days had really refined themselves out of all amusement, some of the proscribed powers have by degrees returned to their old stations, reinforced by superior machinery, and the most costly decoration. We at least can make up a show, and prefer it to barren declamation in the style of French tragedy.

Tancred and Sigismunda is the only play by Thomson, that is even occasionally heard upon the modern stage. There are some contrasts of feeling, of which Mrs. Siddons availed herself. There is no doubt, however, that her few words upon the introduction of Osmond, at the close of the third act, equalled any effort of this great actress. The deliquium which overpowered her senses, so accurately given, and the surprising grace of the address upon her recovery, "Forgive my weakness," it is impossible to omit, in this record of beauties, that can never be described. It was by no means so difficult to manage the interview of explanation with Tancred, after she is the wife of Osmond. The last strange and somewhat indecorous intrusion of the king into her private apartment-the apostrophe to the scene of repose itself; and Tancred's entrance by the "secret way which his love had formerly contrived," for the purpose of passing their hours in vows of everlasting affection, excite a something of the risible in the grosser moderns, little accustomed to such cloistered purity. The death from the sword of Osmond is, however, the most natural occurrence in the world, and one of the most affecting; inasmuch as Sigismunda perishes for an imagined dereliction of her conjugal duties, at the very moment that she gives the brightest proof, that they overbalance in her breast the ardent passion she yet feels for Tancred.

At this time, that admirable judge of art, Mr. Burke, was a frequent attendant upon Mrs. Siddons. He was present at the Sigismunda, and led the applause with the usual ar