any portion of your good opinion.'”
“What a couple of stiff old things,” said Mrs. Clive.
“Nay, madam, say not so,” cried Vane, warmly; “surely, this was the lofty courtesy of two great minds not to be overbalanced by strife, defeat, or victory.”
“What were their names, sir?”
“Statira was the great Mrs. Oldfield. Roxana you will see here to-night.”
This caused a sensation.
Colley's reminiscences were interrupted by loud applause from the theater; the present seldom gives the past a long hearing.
The old war-horse cocked his ears.
“It is Woffington speaking the epilogue,” said Quin.
“Oh, she has got the length of their foot, somehow,” said a small actress.
“And the breadth of their hands, too,” said Pomander, waking from a nap.
“It is the depth of their hearts she has sounded,” said Vane.
In those days, if a metaphor started up, the poor thing was coursed up hill and down dale, and torn limb from jacket; even in Parliament, a trope was sometimes hunted from one session into another.
“You were asking me about Mrs. Oldfield, sir,” resumed Cibber, rather peevishly. “I will own to you, I lack words to convey a just idea of her double and complete supremacy. But the comedians of this day are weak-strained farceurs compared with her, and her tragic tone was thunder set to music.
“I saw a brigadier-general cry like a child at her Indiana; I have seen her crying with pain herself at the wing (for she was always a great sufferer), I have seen her then spring upon the stage as Lady Townley, and in a moment sorrow brightened into joy: the air seemed to fill with singing-birds, that chirped the pleasures of fashion, love and youth in notes sparkling like diamonds and stars and prisms. She was above criticism, out of its scope, as is the blue sky; men went not to judge her, they drank her, and gazed at her, and were warmed at her, and refreshed by her. The fops were awed into silence, and with their humbler betters thanked Heaven for her, if they thanked it for anything.
“In all the crowded theater, care and pain and poverty were banished from the memory, while Oldfield's face spoke, and her tongue flashed melodies; the lawyer forgot his quillets; the polemic, the mote in his brother's eye; the old maid, her grudge against the two sexes; the old man, his gray hairs and his lost hours. And can it be, that all this which should have been immortal, is quite—quite lost, is as though it had never been?” he sighed. “Can it be that its fame is now sustained by me; who twang with my poor lute, cracked and old, these feeble praises of a broken lyre:
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