Lindley, and retired to his pretty and tranquil
villa at Hampton. He died on January 20,
1779, at his house, No. 5, Adelphi-terrace. He
was buried grandly in the Abbey—a fitting
place for the grave of so wonderful a man.
Years afterwards, Dr. Johnson and Boswell
were one evening, in the summer evening
stillness, looking over the rails of Adelphi-terrace
at the Thames flowing below them, dark, silent,
and mysterious as Lethe. After an interval of
thoughtful silence, Boswell said:

"I was thinking just then of two friends we
have lost, who once lived in the buildings
behind us. Topham Beauclerk, and Garrick."

"Ay, sir," said the great man, tenderly, "and
two such friends as can never be supplied."

It is hard, almost impossible, to decide now
whether Garrick was the greatest actor that
had appeared up to his own time. Quin was too
heavy and deliberate to be compared with him.
But Betterton must have been a great genius
to have so fascinated Steele, and to have won
the highest eulogies of a clever and sagacious
observer of such experience as Cibber. His
agony as Othello, his graceful energy in the
speech to the senate, the reverential love
with which as Hamlet he addressed the Ghost,
seem to have almost transcended any effort of
Garrick's; but then Betterton was probably as
much too oratorical and conventional as Kemble
seemed to be beside Edmund Kean, or as Quin
himself beside Garrick. The man, too, who used
to play Macbeth in a brown velvet court-dress
must have had a different ideal to our own
more naturalistic school, or he would have felt
the outrageousness of such a convention.

Perhaps, after all, it is by a résumé of
Garrick anecdotes that we get the best idea of
the great actor. One of his most extraordinary
powers seemed to have been the instantaneous
quickness with which he could assume any
character, or pass from tears to laughter. Betterton,
when dressed for Lear, remained Lear, and
took his wine at the side-scenes with the
gravity of a monarch. Garrick would rise from
the side of dead Cordelia, skip into the greenroom,
and gobble like a turkey-cock to amuse
Peg Woffington or Mrs. Clive. He played the
dagger-scene in ordinary dress to please Grimm,
and the room, full of German critics, burst
into involuntary shouts of applause. The next
moment he was giving them a pastrycook's boy
who has let a tray of tartlets fall in the gutter,
and is at first stupified, then noisy in his
blubbering. We all know the story of the
Garrick fever, a fresh epidemic that he caused
by his crowded houses. The proverb still
extant, of "clever as Garrick," speaks loudly,
too, for his genius and his fame. He astonished
Hogarth by assuming the face of Fielding, of
whom no portrait existed. In Paris once, he
nearly frightened the driver of a fiacre into fits
by getting in at one door in the dusk, getting
out at the other, and returning to get in
each time with a new face and walk. When he
and Preville, the French actor, both competed
which could feign drunkenness the better while
riding, Garrick carried off the bell, in the
opinion of every one, by showing that Preville
was fairly drunk everywhere except his legs,
but that they remained stolidly sober. When he
sat to Carmontelle for the picture of the comic
Garrick watching the tragic Garrick, he kept
up an incessant facial change from wild joy to
sadness, terror, rage, anguish, and despair. Like
his friend Hogarth, he was a great student of
street faces. One night during a fierce parliamentary
debate in the year 1777, an angry member,
catching sight of Garrick's droll watchful
face, moved that the gallery should be cleared.
Burke instantly sprang up like a rocket, and
pleaded for the great master of eloquence, from
whom he himself had derived many of the graces
of oratory. Black-browed Fox and dexterous
Townshend followed, and also claimed Garrick
as their preceptor. He was instantly excepted
from the general order, and remained in the
gallery, pleased and triumphant, to the infinite
vexation of the honourable gentleman who had
moved his expulsion. These stories, and such
as these, prove how deep an impression
Garrick's genius made in the minds of even the
greatest men of his era.

II. MRS. SIDDONS.

That great tragic actress, Mrs. Siddons, the
daughter of a strolling manager who had originally
been hairdresser to the company, made
her first appearance on the stage almost as soon
as she could speak. Lord Ailesbury and Lady
Boyle patronised her at Cheltenham soon after
her marriage, and mentioned her to Garrick,
who gave her an engagement at five pounds per
week. She was young, fragile, and timid then,
and Garrick never cared much about her. He
told her her arms moved awkwardly, and she
declared "that he was afraid she would
overshadow his nose." Mrs. Abington, however,
asserted her genius, and she soon afterwards went
to Bath. Henderson praised her there, and her
triumph began. In 1782 she came to London,
and astonished the town as Isabella in
Southern's play. From that moment her fame
began. When she played Jane Shore, the ladies
sobbed and shrieked; the men wept, and fainting
fits were of momentary occurrence in the
boxes. Her Calista and Belvidera touched every
heart. When she played Mrs. Beverley, in the
Gamester, the pit used to curse and threaten
and yell at the wicked Stukeley, and people,
afraid of the excitement, have been known to
stay in the lobby and look in at the square
glasses of the box doors, so as not to hear
the words, but only see the wonderful face.
Once, when she played Agnes in the Fatal
Curiosity, a gentleman in the pit went into
hysterics. In the fainting scene in Tamerlane,
she was once so deeply moved that she
really swooned. Whether as Lady Macbeth,
Cordelia, Volumnia, or Queen Katharine, she
was always classical, majestic, graceful,
sublime, inspired.

In 1812 this great actress took her farewell