Will mingle mercy with His dread survey,
     And give us strength life's future page to write
In characters as pure as mortal may?
     Yea, we will trust Him, bidding heart and eye,
Forsake the past, and look up faithfully.

OLD STORIES RE-TOLD.
THEATRICAL FAREWELLS. GARRICK AND
SIDDONS.
I. DAVID GARRICK.

AT the beginning of 1776, theatrical London
was both startled and distressed to hear rumours
clear and confident in the clubs and in the park,
louder and more certain in the green-rooms, of
Garrick's intention to leave the stage, where he
had so long reigned the delight and wonder of
the age, and the emperor of all hearts.

It had long been known that Barry's rivalry
(Barry was the most ardent and tender of
Romeos) had compelled the great actor to exertions
far beyond his strength. The death of his
energetic coadjutor, Mr. Lacy, the joint patentee of
Drury Lane, had also thrown upon Garrick a
burden too great for him to bear. From 1773 (the
date of Mr. Lacy's death), he had almost
abandoned Bosworth Field, Dover cliff, and the
gloomy fortress at Dunsinane, for his even more
congenial haunts in the wainscoted drawing-
rooms and palace ante-chambers of comedy,
where, aided by charming Mrs. Abington, the best
would-be fine lady ever seen on the boards, he
still bantered as Benedict, mounted the ladder
as Ranger, blustered as Don Felix, or became
a mean and exquisite gull as Abel Drugger.

In January, 1776, appeared a poor farce of
Colman's, called The Spleen, or Islington Spa,
meant to ridicule the affectations of would-be
fashionable citizens, who, discontented with
their own snug independence, had vainly tried
to turn a Pentonville chalybeate into the centre
of a second city of Bath. The piece ran for a
fortnight only. In the prologue, written by
Garrick with his usual neatness and vivacity,
public allusion was first made to the intended
retirement of the author. After describing the
restless cit, who, envious of Lord Flimsy and
the Maccaronis, retires to his villa at Islington,
and, among his leaden gods and box-tree
peacocks, sighs for the merry bustle of Butcher-
row, the writer says:

The master of this shop, too, seeks repose,
Sells off his stock-in-trade his verse and prose,
His dagger, buskins, thunder, lightning, and old
clothes.

Garrick was already preparing for that solemn
last scene of all

     That ends this strange, eventful history.

A few days after the appearance of The Spa,
Garrick produced the farce of Bon Ton. He
had written this satire of the follies imported
from France, as a present for his favourite
actor, King, who appeared in it, together with
arch Mrs. Abington and sensible Miss Pope.

The versatile genius who had first appeared
on the stage at Ipswich in 1741 as Aboan, in
Southern's Oronoko, Sir Harry Wildair, and
Harlequin, was about to close his triumphs,
and leave his mimic world.

He was rich, he was famous; the wise, the
learned, and the beautiful crowded to his almost
royal levees still:

     Superfluous lagged the veteran on the stage.

The call-boy now spoke with a hollow and
warning voice, and the prompter was old age.
It had been a long phantasmagoric life of
pleasure and success since, as a trim lad of
eighteen, he and his strange, clever, unsuccessful
schoolmaster had set out from Lichfield to try
their fortunes in London. A long procession of
years had passed before him since in
Goodman's Fields he first defied the rivalry of
Macklin, Quin, and Cibber, and set Mrs. Clive,
Mrs. Pritchard, and Mrs. Woffington talking
of the clever young man with the large dark
eyes, who had been praised by Lord Orrery,
and who had even drawn the great Mr. Pope
from Twickenham. Hogarth, too, was full of
admiration. The string of the "quality"
carriages had reached from Temple Bar to the
little theatre. The mad king, the generous
hero, the butterfly rake, the honest farmer, the
maddened tyrant, had all changed at last into
the one final character of the almost worn-out
old man. Those great elastic eyebrows had lost
their spring; the subtle mouth its magic power;
those supernatural eyes their hidden fire and
sunshine; age, cruel age, had disenchanted that
gifted face, which, had so well mimicked all
the passions of our species; the voice, once
clear as a clarion, melodious as a flute, varied
as the note of a mocking-bird, was fast sinking
to childish treble. All London felt keenly what
a source of pleasure was henceforth to be closed
to them. Garrick's parsimony and nervous
vanity were now forgotten, his virtues and
genius better remembered. His Brute and
Bayes, his Lear and Richard, his Kitely and
Drugger, had been the friends of the town for
years, and the most intellectual men had spent
their most innocent and happiest hours in their
society.

That Garrick felt intense pain at the thought
of this impending parting there can be no doubt.
He was like the sleeping knight in Tasso's
enchanted garden of Armida, now at last to be
roughly awoke and expelled from the golden
world of dreams. The stage crown was to be
laid down, the stage sceptre to be given to
other hands. The painted forests of Arden were
to be quitted, the dim magic light of the
darkened stage, the pasteboard fortresses, and
Richard's royal couch, were to be seen no more;
red fire was no longer to glare upon him; stage
jewels were to be laid aside. He was to go
forth in his old age into the cold, garish, prosaic
outer world, and to leave his courtiers and
armies, his conspirators and peasants, to be
governed by another. Like Caliban, he must
almost have wept to "dream again."

Shakespeare himself had a deep sense of the