be and I envy him no part of his good fortune. But then, though I am free to acknowledge he was made for the stage, I cannot be brought to think the stage was made only for him; or that the fate of every dramatic writer ought either to be at his mercy, or that of any other manager whatever; and the single consideration that there is no alternative but to fly from him, in case of any neglect or contempt, to Mr. Rich, is enough to deter any man in his senses from embarking a second time on such a hopeless voyage.―RALPH, J., 1758, Case of Authors by Profession.

The favor I meet with from y° Greatest men, has made me far from repenting of my choice. I am very intimate with Mr. Glover, who will bring out a Tragedy next winter upon my acc'. Twice I have sup'd wth ye Great Mr. Murray, Consell', and shall wth Mr. Pope, by his Introduction. I sup'd with ye Mr. Littleton y Prince's Favourite, last Thursday night, and that with ye highest Civility and complaisance. He told me he never knew what Acting was till I appeared, and said I was only born to act w Shakespear writ. These things daily occurring give me Great Pleasure. I din'd with La Hallifax and La Sandwich, two very ingenious Noblemen, yesterday, and am to dine at Ld Hallifax's next Sunday with Ld Chesterfield. I have the Pleasure of being very intimate, too, with Mr. Hawkins Browne of Burton. In short, I believe nobody (as an Actor) was ever more caress'd, and my Character as a private Man makes 'em more desirous of my Company. (All this entre nous, as one Broth to another). I am not fix'd for next year, but shall certainly be at y Other End of y Town. I am offered 500 guineas and a Clear Benefit, or part of y Management.-GARRICK, DAVID, 1759, Letter to Peter Garrick, Apr. 19.

I have known one little man support the theatrical world like David Atlas upon his shoulders, but Préville can't do half as much here, though Mad. Clairon Clairon stands by him and sets her back to his. . . . You are much talked of here, and much expected, as soon as the peace will let you. These two last days you have happened to engross the whole conversation at the great houses where I was at dinner. 'Tis the greatest problem in nature in

this meridian that one and the same man should possess such tragic and comic powers, and in such an equilibrio as to divide the world from which of the two Nature intended him.-STERNE, LAURENCE, 1762, Letter to David Garrick from Paris.

If manly sense; if Nature link'd with Art;
If thorough knowledge of the human heart;
If powers of acting vast and unconfin'd;
If fewest faults with greatest beauties join'd;
If strong expression, and strange powers
which lie

Within the magic circle of the eye;

If feelings which few hearts like his can know,

And which no face so well as his can show, Deserve the preference: Garrick! take the chair;

Nor quit it till thou place an equal there. -CHURCHILL, CHARLES, 1763, The Rosciad, v, 1081-1090.

WILKES.-"Garrick would have made the small-beer still smaller. He is now leaving the stage; but he will play Scrub all his life." I knew that Johnson would let nobody attack Garrick but himself, as Garrick once said to me, and I had heard him praise his liberality; so to bring out his commendation of his celebrated pupil, I said, loudly, "I have heard Garrick is liberal." JOHNSON.-"Yes, Sir, I know that Garrick has given away more money than any man in England that I am acquainted with, and that not from ostentatious views. Garrick was very poor when he began life; so when he came to have money, he probably was very unskilful in giving away, and saved when he should not. But Garrick began to be liberal as soon as he could; and I am of opinion, the reputation of avarice which he has had, has been very lucky for him, and prevented his having many enemies. You despise a man for avarice but do not hate him. Garrick might have been much better attacked for living with more splendour than is suitable to a player: if they had had the wit to have assaulted him in that quarter, they might have galled him more. But they have kept clamouring about his avarice, which has rescued him from much obloquy and envy."-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1776, Life by Boswell, ed. Hill, vol. III, p. 80.

Here lies David Garrick, describe me who

can,

An abridgment of all that was pleasant in

man;

As an actor, confess'd without rival to shine: As a wit, if not first, in the very first line: Yet, with talents like these, and an excellent heart,

The man had his failings, a dupe to his art. Like an ill-judging beauty, his colours he spread,

And beplaster'd with rouge his own natural red.

On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;

'Twas only that when he was off he was acting.

With no reason on earth to go out of his way, He turn'd and he varied full ten times a day: Though secure of our hearts, yet confound

edly sick,

If they were not his own by finessing and trick:

He cast off his friends, as a huntsman his pack,

For he knew when he pleas'd he could whistle them back

Of praise a mere glutton, he swallow'd what came,

And the puff of a dunce, he mistook it for fame;

Till his relish grown callous, almost to disease,

Who pepper'd the highest was surest to please.

But let us be candid, and speak out our mind, If dunces applauded, he paid them in kind. Ye Kenricks, ye Kellys, and Woodfalls so grave,

What a commerce was yours, while you got and you gave!

How did Grub-street re-echo the shouts that you rais'd,

While he was be-Roscius'd, and you were be-prais'd!

But peace to his spirit, wherever it flies,

To act as an angel, and mix with the skies: Those poets, who owe their best fame to his skill,

Shall still be his flatterers, go where he will, Old Shakespeare, receive him, with praise and with love,

And Beaumonts and Bens be his Kellys above!

-GOLDSMITH, OLIVER, 1774, The Retaliation.

Splitt me if I'd not a hundred times rather be spoken to by Garrick in public than His majesty, G-d bless him!BURNEY, CHARLOTTE ANN, 1777, Journal, ed. Ellis, p. 277.

Nature had done so much for him, that he could not help being an actor; she gave him a frame of so manageable a proportion, and from its flexibility so perfectly under command, that, by its aptitude and

elasticity, he could draw it out to fit any sizes of character that tragedy could offer to him, and contract it to any scale of ridiculous diminution, that his Able Drugger, Scrubb, or Fribble, could require of him to sink it to. His eye, in the meantime, was so penetrating, so speaking; his brow so moveable, and all his features so plastic, and so accommodating, that wherever his mind impelled them, they would go; and before his tongue could give the text, his countenance would express the spirit and the passion of the part he was encharged with.-CUMBERLAND, RICHARD, 1806, Memoirs, Written by Himself, p. 245.

Garrick's appearance forms an epoch in the history of the English theatre, as he chiefly dedicated his talents to the great characters of Shakspeare, and built his own fame on the growing admiration of the poet. Before his time, Shakspeare had only been brought on the stage in mutilated and disfigured alterations. Garrick returned on the whole to the true originals, though he still allowed himself to make some very unfortunate changes. It appears to me that the only excusable alteration of Shakspeare is, to leave out a few things not in conformity to the taste of the time. Garrick was undoubtedly a great actor. Whether he always conceived the parts of Shakspeare in the sense of the poet, I from the very circumstances stated in the eulogies on his acting should be inclined to doubt. He excited, however, a noble emulation to represent worthily the great national poet; this has ever since been the highest aim of actors, and even at present the stage can boast of men whose histrionic talents are deservedly famous.-SCHLEGEL, AUGUSTUS WILLIAM, 1809, Dramatic Art and Literature, ch. xiii.

Goldsmith, who played to please the boy, whereas Garrick always seemed playing to please himself, as he did in a theatre. He diverted and dazzled me, but never made me love him; and I had always this feeling for him, though I was too young to define it.-COLMAN, GEORGE, 1830, Random Records, vol. 1, pp. 117, 118.

Garrick, too, was a frequent visitor in Poland Street and St. Martin's Lane. That wonderful actor loved the society of children, partly from good nature, and partly from vanity. The ecstasies of

mirth and terror which his gestures and play of countenance never failed to produce in a nursery, flattered him quite as much as the applause of mature critics. He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching, as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in St. Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney sweeper, or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ran down their cheeks. MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1842, Madame D'Arblay, Edinburgh Review; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

He was a sprightly dramatist, a man of wit, and no doubt a generous man, though the endless matters of business in which he was concerned, and the refusals of all kinds which he must have been often forced into, got him, with many, a character for the reverse. Johnson, who did not spare him, pronounced him generous. Fine as his tragedy must have been, we suspect his comedy must have been finer; because his own nature was one of greater sprightliness than sentiment. We hear nothing serious of him throughout his life; and his face, with a great deal of acuteness, has nothing in it profound or romantic. HUNT, LEIGH, 1848, The Town, p. 294.

But David-I fear me-was a sad little sneak. He was grossly penurious, and consequently left behind him a hundred thousand pounds. He was an autocrat in the theatre; jealous of the applause that even the women obtained, when he Iwas on the stage with them; submissive in the presence of a peer, a poet, or a news-writer; equally fearing to elbow the position of the one or to cross the power or caprice of the other. I have seen MS. letters of Garrick's manoeuvring for puffs and laudatory notices that have given me the lowest opinion of his mental dignity.

CLARKE, CHARLES COWDEN, 1872, On the Comic Writers of England, Gentleman's Magazine, N. S. vol. 8, p. 317.

As a man, the detraction of his age has branded him with defects, of which it is sufficient to say that they are now known to have been greatly exaggerated. It is possible that he was not exempt from vanity; and it would have been strange if, in the almost unique eminence he enjoyed, he had wholly escaped it. If, as alleged,

early poverty had left him over mindful of small things, let it also be remembered that he was capable of the most splendid generosity, and that, too, in cases where his kindness must have been coals of fire. As to his reported jealousy and envy, as many tales are told on one side as on the other. But if the worst be admitted, it can hardly be denied that he brought to the uneasy throne of theatrical management administrative talents of the rarest kind. He gathered round him a magnificent constellation of dramatic talent, to which he himself was sun and centre. When Pope said of him at Goodman's Fields that "he never had an equal, and would never have a rival," the epigram was a prophecy; and Quin uttered a truer thing than he knew when he named him the "Whitfield of the stage."-DOBSON, AUSTIN, 1886, Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States, ed. Matthews and Hutton, vol. I, p. 66.

He had no enduring hostility, however, his temper generally being devoid of gall. He carried caution to an excess. Davies says that he acquired through this a hesitation in speech which did not originally characterise him. As a rule he was fairly accessible to authors, and if he produced few masterpieces, the fault was in the writers. In dramatists generally he displayed genuine interest, and after his retirement he took great pains to advance the fortunes of Hannah More. In his disputes the impression conveyed is generally that he was in the right. He generally treated the ebullitions of mortified vanity on the part of authors with tenderness. He kept the masculine portion of his company in fair order, though the feminine portion was generally mutinous. He made many important reforms, some of them learned during his journeys abroad, in discipline, in stage arrangement, and in matters of costume, in which he effected some improvement, pleading as a not very convincing reason for going no further that the public would not stand it. In many cases of difficulty he showed magnanimity, which his enemies sought vainly to stamp as prudence. Fortune fluctuated during his managerial career, but the result was that the property he conducted increased steadily in value during his management, that he retired with a larger fortune than any English actor except

Alleyn had made in a similar enterprise, and with the respect and friendship of all the best men of his epoch.-KNIGHT, JOSEPH, 1890, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XXI, p. 25.

GENERAL

Garrick's portentous "Ode," as you truly call it, has but one line of truth in it, which is where he calls Shakespeare the God of our Idolatry: for sense I will not allow it; for that which is so highly satirical, he makes the topic of his hero's encomium. The "Ode" itself is below any of Cibber's. Cibber's nonsense was something like sense; but this man's sense, whenever he deviates into it, is much more like nonsense.-WARBURTON, WILLIAM, 1769, Letter to Hurd, Sept. 23

As a writer, we can hardly tell what to say of his powers: we do not know, touching either character, thought, or expression, how much was really in his the plays of others. The two-act comedy, at least, was his own. Prologue was his chief province, and his fertility in such compositions, was inexhaustible. Epigram he made vigorous court to; and epitaph, in some instances, owned no superior. In the light measures of Prior he frolics like that poet himself, or Voltaire, or Gresset

in the enchanting Ver-Vert.- BOADEN, JAMES, 1831, Private Correspondence of David Garrick, Memoir, p. lxiv.

It is as an actor that Garrick appeals to us, and not as a dramatist. A list of the plays, which were assigned him, or the authorship of which he claimed, may be seen in the "Biographia Dramatica" of Baker, Reed and Jones, to which list of 39 pieces must be added an alteration of "Mahomet" and some similar experiments. A few of Garrick's plays have, as has been said, ingenuity of construction and vivacity. On the whole, like that of Christian in the "Pilgrim's Progress," his march towards immortality will be the speedier and the more comfortable when the burden of his general dramas falls from him. His occasional verses are sometimes happy. What Johnson said of his talk is almost true of his verses-"Garrick's conversation is gay and grotesque. It is a dish of all sorts, but all good things. There is no solid. meat in it: there is a want of sentiment in it." A curiously complex, interesting, and diversified character is that of Garrick. Fully to bring it before the world might have taxed his own powers of exposition. -KNIGHT, JOSEPH, 1894, David Garrick, p. 335.

PERSONAL

With him was sometimes joined in silent walk

(Profoundly silent, for they never spoke),
One shyer still, who quite detested talk:
Oft stung by spleen, at once away he broke,
To groves of pine and broad o'ershadowing

oak;

There, inly thrilled, he wandered all alone,
And on himself his pensive fury wroke;
He ever uttered word, save, when first
shone

The glittering star of eve-"Thank Heaven! the day is done.'

-THOMSON, JAMES, 1744, The Castle of Indolence.

Armstrong, another poet and physician and not unworthy of either class, for genius and goodness of heart, though he had the weakness of affecting a bluntness of manners, and of swearing, drew his last breath in this street. He is well known as the author of the most elegant didactic