evening, found herself confronted with preparations for music, and secular music, it was plain, though "sacred music was the ostensible thing." Her blood rushing to her head, she was on the point of being reminded of Elijah (see p. 350) when The Great Roscius—as he used in fun to call himself-turned round, and, like the unforgetful friend in need he always was, promptly said, "Nine, you are a Sunday woman; retire to your room— I will recall you when the music is over."

I like, also, to think of the celebrated Mr. Garrick,' fearless of looking absurd, intent only on giving pleasure, stopping, at six one evening, on his way to The Club, at Hannah's lodgings, which were in Gerrard Street too, and producing out of the coach a minced chicken in the stew-pan, hot, a canister of her favourite tea, and a pot of cream, because she was not well enough to go to Adelphi Terrace. It was the same thoughtfulness that made him read her Percy aloud one Christmas to the Althorp party, the same that made him secure Dr. Burney's promise to contribute to Dr. Goldsmith's projected Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. A man in

Garrick's position, who, besides giving away many hundreds of pounds, will carry in his carriage a stew-pan of mince to an invalid, who will make an opportunity for a comparatively unimportant lady to keep up her pious ways without embarrassment, may fairly be claimed as belonging to the band we call the salt of the earth.

Colman would never have remained so attached to Garrick, amid the inevitable jars of their mutual positions -first, dramatic collaborators and then rival Managers -had it not been for what the former, during an absence abroad, called "your kind attention to my little boy." hope you got Georgy-go-ging a good raspberry tart, and that he has been very saucy during his visit at Hampton," adds Papa. In the intervals of playing trap-ball with

"I

his host, Georgy-go-ging was tolerably saucy, as the following, from a letter from Garrick to Colman in the Irving collection, demonstrates :

"Your Sweet Boy was here yesterday . . . one stroke more of him-Mrs. Hale is with us and my wife and she were rivals for his Affections after Dinner, I ask'd him seriously, which of these Ladies he liked best, for it was necessary, that he should declare, as each had fixed their Love upon him-he roll'd his little roguish Eyes about, first on one and then the other-and to the great joy of the whole Company, he determin'd, that neither of them would do for him: upon this, I put another question to him. You are surely engag'd to Mrs. Terrel, and will marry her-I Don't know but I shall, for if I marry her, 'twill make her Young again."

So Garrick sweetened life for an anxious father slowly getting better in Paris from boils and a fever. Out of pure good nature he inserted into a play a bit of gag in commendation of the wares of one of his understrappers who was also a wine-seller, and his stage allusions to the No. 37 snuff obtainable at the Red Lion, Fleet Street, from John Hardham (who doubled his part of snuff-dealing by day, with that of being numberer at 'the House' in the evening) created a boom in that form of nicotine.

There have been two supreme pronouncements on Garrick's character. Both are printed as appendixes to this book. The sketch by Goldsmith (Appendix A) was admittedly 'retaliation,' a fact to be taken into account when we estimate its value as portraiture. Its pithy epigrams need no better corrective than the humaner and more humorous cartoon (Appendix B) Reynolds left of Garrick, realised through the eyes- those defective, deep-discerning eyes of Samuel Johnson. Other contemporary delineations of Garrick are negligible. They are mostly of the calibre of A Character of Garrick' 1 The Whitefoord Papers, edited by W. A. S. Hewins, M.A., 166, 167.

from the Whitefoord MSS., first published in 1898 in The Whitefoord Papers. A man whose highest achievement was such poor stuff as Caleb Whitefoord's crossreadings was quite incapable of seeing a composite character like Garrick's evenly and whole.

So it was with the meaner multitude who exhaled unfavourable constructions. When we have subtracted something for the temper which delights in detraction, something for sheer ignorance, and something for ineradicable prejudice against a play-actor, there is very little left. Garrick was an unpardonable enigma to

Grub Street. He was a genius with the right amount of ballast for worldly success. He belonged to the most bohemian of professions, yet kept 'the Ten Commandments and his own accounts.' No light of the Church nor guardian of the laws ever led a more respectable domestic life. His playing owed none of its verve to brandy and water. More remarkable still, he was patentee of Drury Lane without becoming a bankrupt. Everything dramatic was referred to him, everybody looked up to him. He was literally the chief magistrate of the stage, and, in eighteenth century annals, figures even more conspicuously as the able Manager than as the consummate actor.

Shortly after Garrick's death, Mrs. Garrick, in talk with Hannah More, spoke of him as having had more 'particular friends' than any man in England. Her assertion has to be accommodated to Johnson's statement that Garrick was too much diffused' for one close friendship. The plain dunstable of the matter (to quote uncle Anthony Harlowe's phrase) is that life was short and the cheerfullest man of his age' too much courted. In his situation, any man, however unwillingly, would have been obliged to allow interludes in the frequency of his meetings with any individual or

group. Johnson, who had too often weighed the living Garrick in the jewellers' scales instead of by avoirdupois, was finely inconsistent when, on leaving the first party Mrs. Garrick had given since her husband's death, he lingered by the rails of the Adelphi, and, looking across the wide river, and talking, 'in a moved sort,' of the two men who no longer dwelt in the terrace behind, Garrick and Beauclerk, murmured tenderly, "Two such friends as cannot be supplied."

It was not to be expected that the man who of all men who ever lived presented the most perfect type of the actor should be even such another as Johnson. The remark, ascribed to Gainsborough, as to his protean sitter, "He has everybody's face but his own," may be roughly applied to the whole genus, Actor. The actor's glory is impersonality, mobility, a kind of mental ficklenessall that was coarsely summarised in the sentence, “ Punch has no feelings," and it was inevitable that what suited a part should infect the whole. All artists are, in a sense, impostors, precisely because their business is to represent feeling by means of brains. It seems unsympathetic to call Garrick shallow, but shallow he certainly was compared with Johnson and Burke, as also was Reynolds. They were quite different facets of the mind of humanity. A question remains. Of Garrick's conversation it was alleged again by Johnson-that there was 'a want of sentiment in it.' Did the brilliant gifts and graces cover an inner nullity? 'What of soul was left, I wonder,' when the world was shut out, and applause had become a thing of naught? wonderful man's existence any inner springs?

Had this

Chi sa?

By Garrick's time the post-Christian era was established, and none of his bishops ever dreamt of conversing with him, at all events in their letters, on any subject beyond the panorama and shows of things.