II

CLIVE

‘LIVE, Sir, is a good thing to sit by: she always understands what you say.

III

Dr. Johnson

YE

ET from her eccentric disposition, strange, eccentric temper, and frank blunt manner, Mrs. Clive did not always go off with quite so much éclât in private as in public life, particularly if she happened to be crossed by that touchstone of temper, gaming. Quadrille was proposed, and all immediately took their stations. I soon observed Mrs. Clive's countenance alternately redden and turn pale. At last her Manille went, and with it the remnants of her temper. Her face was of an universal crimson, and tears of rage seemed ready to start into her eyes. At that very moment, as Satan would have it, her opponent, a dowager, whose hoary head and eyebrows were as white as those of an Albiness, triumphantly and briskly demanded payment for the two black aces. "Two black aces!" answered the enraged loser, in a voice rendered almost unintelligible by passion; "here, take the money, though instead, I wish I could give you two black eyes, you old white cat!"

THE

IV

Frederick Reynolds

HE latter part of her life she spent in retirement at Strawberry Hill, where she was a neighbour and friend to Horace Walpole, whose effeminacy she helped to keep on the alert. It always seems to us as if she had been the man of the two and he the woman.

Leigh Hunt

γου

V

never saw anything so droll as Mrs. Clive's countenance, between the heat of the summer, the pride in her legacy, and the efforts to appear concerned. Horace Walpole

Mrs. Siddons

I

WE

WE trust that we have too much good sense to attempt painting a picture of Sarah Siddons. In her youth it is said she was beautiful, even lovely, and won men's hearts as Rosalind. But beauty is a fading flower; it faded from her face ere one wrinkle had touched that fixed paleness which seldom was tinged with any colour, even in the whirlwind of passion. Light came and went across those finest features at the coming or going of each feeling and thought; but faint was the change of hue ever visible on that glorious marble. It was the magnificent countenance of an animated statue, in the stillness of its idealized beauty instinct with all the emotions of our mortal life. Idealized beauty! Did we not say that beauty had faded from her face? Yes, but it was overspread with a kindred expression, for which we withhold the name only because it seemed more divine, inspiring awe that overpowered while it mingled with delight, more than regal-say rather, immortal. Such an image surely had never before trod, nor ever again will tread, the enchanted floor. In all stateliest shows of waking woe she dwindled the stateliest into insignificance; her majesty made others mean; in her sunlike light all stars "paled their in

effectual fires." But none knew the troubled grandeur of guilt till they saw her in Lady Macbeth, walking in her sleep, and as she wrung her hands, striving in vain to wash from her the engrained murder, "Not all the perfumes of Arabia could sweeten this little hand!" The whisper came as from the hollow grave; and more hideously haunted than ever was the hollow grave, seemed then to be the cell of her heart! Shakspeare's self had learned something then from a sight of Siddons.

THE

II

John Wilson

HE homage she has received is greater than that which is paid to Queens. The enthusiasm she excited had something idolatrous about it; she was regarded less with admiration than with wonder, as if a being of a superior order had dropped from another sphere to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance. She raised Tragedy to the skies, or brought it down from thence. It was something above nature. We can conceive of nothing grander. She embodied to our imagination the fables of mythology, of the heroic and deified mortals of elder time. She was not less than a goddess, or than a prophetess inspired by the gods. Power was seated on her brow, passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine. She was Tragedy personified. She was the stateliest ornament of the public mind. She was not only the idol of the people, she not only hushed the tumultuous shouts of the pit in breathless expectation, and quenched the blaze of surrounding beauty in silent tears, but to the retired and lonely student, through long years of solitude, her face has shone as if an eye had appeared from heaven; her name has been as if a voice had opened the chambers of the human heart, or as if

a trumpet had awakened the sleeping and the dead. To have seen Mrs. Siddons was an event in every one's life. W. Hazlitt

Mrs. Jordan

THER

HERE was one comic actress, who was Nature herself in one of her most genial forms. This was Mrs. Jordan; who, though she was neither beautiful, nor handsome, nor even pretty, nor accomplished, nor “a lady,” nor anything conventional or comme il faut whatsoever, yet was so pleasant, so cordial, so natural, so full of spirits, so healthily constituted in mind and body, had such a shapely leg withal, so charming a voice, and such a happy and happy-making expression of countenance, that she appeared something superior to all those requirements of acceptability, and to hold a patent from Nature herself for our delight and good opinion. It is creditable to the feelings of society in general, that allowances are made for the temptations to which the stage exposes the sex; and in Mrs. Jordan's case these were not diminished by a sense of the like consideration due to princely restrictions, and to the manifest domestic dispositions of more parties than one. But she made even Methodists love her. . . . Mrs. Jordan was inimitable in exemplifying the consequences of too much restraint in ill-educated Country Girls, in Romps, in Hoydens, and in Wards on whom the mercenary have designs. She wore a bib and tucker and pinafore, with a bouncing propriety, fit to make the boldest spectator alarmed at the idea of bringing such a household responsibility on his shoulders. To see her when thus attired shed blubbering tears for some disappointment,

́and eat all the while a great thick slice of bread and butter, weeping, and moaning, and munching, and eyeing at every bite the part she meant to bite next, was a lesson against will and appetite worth a hundred sermons of our friends on board the hoy; and, on the other hand, they could assuredly have done and said nothing at all calculated to make such an impression in favour of amiableness as she did, when she acted in gentle, generous, and confiding characters. The way in which she would take a friend by the cheek and kiss her, or make up a quarrel with a lover, or coax a guardian into good-humour, or sing (without accompaniment) the song

of Since then I'm doom'd," or "In the dead of the night," trusting, as she had a right to do, and as the house wished her to do, to the sole effect of her sweet, mellow, and loving voice-the reader will pardon me, but tears of pleasure and regret come into my eyes at the recollection, as if she personified whatsoever was happy at that period of life, and which has gone like herself. The very sound of the little familiar word bud from her lips (the abbreviation of husband), as she packed it closer, as it were, in the utterance, and pouted it up with fondness in the man's face, taking him at the same time by the chin, was a whole concentrated world of the power of loving.

Leigh Hunt

Mrs. Sheridan

I

HER exquisite and delicate loveliness, all the more

fascinating for the tender sadness which seemed, as a contemporary describes it, to project over her the