The Argosy — page 384: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Iwo Women of Letters of the Last Century. 363 dramatic school of the eighteenth century ; though not destitute of tenderness and power it is long-winded, declamatory, and deficient in the first essentials of the drama, action and situation. The next year, still under the tuition of her friend, she produced a second tragedy: ‘‘The Fatal Falsehood,” but it did not attain the success of ‘‘ Percy.” Every trifle that now came from her pen was eagerly caught up; as an instance, an ode upon Garrick’s dog, Dragon, after a large circulation in manuscript, was printed and a thousand copies were sold in a week. Garrick’s death, in 1778, was probably the greatest affliction that ever fell upon her placid life. One of her letters contains a very touch- ing description of the sad event. In another she says: “I went yesterday with the Wilmots to pay a visit to the coffin. The last time the same party met in that room was ¢éo see him perform Macbeth. He changed so soon he was obliged to be soldered up. What would I have given for a sight of his face.” She seems to have entertained more than a friendship for the great actor—it was rather a platonic love. From the time of his death she grew more serious; there 1s no longer the same vivacity of feeling in her letters. In one, dated 17709, she says: “My way of life is very different from what it used to be; you must not, therefore, expect much entertainment from my letters.” Drawn thither by affectionate remembrances, she spent many suc- ceeding winters with the widow of her dear friend, at Hampton. But oh, how changed was the old place from what it had been in the old days, when it was the resort of all that was noble and brilliant in society, and was rendered the brightest house in all England by the wit and inexhaustible variety of its master. A second Hamlet might have soliloquised in these deserted chambers, using the words that had so often fallen from the great actor’s own lips: ‘‘ Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?” What a contrast to such scenes is afforded in this passage from one of her letters: ‘“‘ We,” she and Mrs. Garrick, ‘‘never see a human face but each other’s. ‘Though in such deep retirement I am never dull, because I am not reduced to the fatigue of entertaining drones, or of being obliged to listen to them. We dress like a couple of Scaramouches, dispute like a couple of Jesuits, eat like a couple of aldermen, walk like a couple of porters, and read as much as any two doctors of either University. I wish,” she says in another place, “‘ the fatal twentieth was wellover. I dread the anniversary of that day.” She never entered a theatre after Garrick’s death, not even to see Mrs. Siddons in the height of her popularity personate the part of Alwina. She would not have her memories of the greatest actor con- fused by those of any inferior performer ; and, as it has been before intimated, her views of life yearly grew more narrow and austere. For several years, however, she spent several months among the cliques COnniiclooolks (CO)