Such was the lady who marched into the middle of the room, with a "How do, Colley?" and, looking over the company's heads as if she did not see them, regarded the four walls with some interest. Like a cat, she seemed to think more of places than of folk. The page obsequiously offered her a chair.
"Not so clean as it used to be," said Mrs. Bracegirdle.
Unfortunately, in making this remark, the old lady graciously patted the page's head for offering her the chair; and this action gave, with some of the ill-constituted minds that are ever on the titter, a ridiculous direction to a remark intended, I believe, for the paint and wanscots, etc.
"Nothing is as it used to be," remarked Mr. Cibber.
"All the better for everything," said Mrs. Clive.
"We were laughing at this mighty little David, first actor of this mighty little age."
Now if Mr. Cibber thought to find in the newcomer an ally of the past in its indiscriminate attack upon the present, he was much mistaken; for the old actress made onslaught on this nonsense at once.
"Ay, ay," said she, "and not the first time by many hundreds. 'Tis a disease you have. Cure yourself, Colley. Davy Garrick pleases the public; and in trifles like acting, that take nobody to heaven, to please all the world, is to be great. Some pretend to higher aims, but none have 'em.
You may hide this from young fools, mayhap, but not from an old 'oman like me. He! he! he! No, no, no--not from an old 'oman like me."
She then turned round in her chair, and with that sudden, unaccountable snappishness of tone to which the brisk old are subject, she snarled:
"Gie me a pinch of snuff, some of ye, do!"
Tobacco dust was instantly at her disposal. She took it with the points of her fingers delicately, and divested the crime of half its uncleanness and vulgarity-- more an angel couldn't.
"Monstrous sensible woman, though!" whispered Quin to Clive.
"Hey, sir! what do you say, sir? for I'm a little deaf." (Not very to praise, it seems.)
"That your judgment, madam, is equal to the reputation of your talent."
The words were hardly spoken before the old lady rose upright as a tower.
She then made an oblique preliminary sweep, and came down with such a courtesy as the young had never seen.
James Quin, not to disgrace his generation, attempted a corresponding bow, for which his figure and apoplectic tendency rendered him unfit; and while he was transacting it, the graceful Cibber stepped gravely up, and looked down and up the process with his glass, like a naturalist inspecting some strange capriccio of an orang-outang. The gymnastics of courtesy ended without back-falls--Cibber lowered his tone.
"You are right, Bracy. It is nonsense denying the young fellow's talent; but his Othello, now, Bracy! be just--his Othello!"
"Oh, dear! oh, dear!" cried she; "I thought it was Desdemona's little black boy come in without the tea-kettle."
Quin laughed uproariously.
"It made me laugh a deal more than Mr. Quin's Falstaff. Oh, dear! oh, dear!"
"Falstaff, indeed! Snuff!" In the tone of a trumpet.
Quin secretly revoked his good opinion of this woman's sense.
"Madam," said the page, timidly, "if you would but favor us with a specimen of the old style "Well, child, why not? Only what makes you mumble like that? but they all do it now, I see. Bless my soul! our words used to come out like brandy-cherries; but now a sentence is like raspberry-jam, on the stage and off."
Cibber chuckled.
"And why don't you men carry yourself like Cibber here?"
"Don't press that question," said Colley dryly."
"A monstrous poor actor, though," said the merciless old woman, in a mock aside to the others; "only twenty shillings a week for half his life;" and her shoulders went up to her ears--then she fell into a half reverie.
"Yes, we were distinct," said she; "but I must own, children, we were slow. Once, in the midst of a beautiful tirade, my lover went to sleep, and fell against me. A mighty pretty epigram, twenty lines, was writ on't by one of my gallants. Have ye as many of them as we used?"
"In that respect," said the page, "we are not behind our great-grandmothers."
"I call that pert," said Mrs. Bracegirdle, with the air of one drawing scientific distinctions. "Now, is that a boy or a lady that spoke to me last?"
"By its dress, I should say a boy," said Cibber, with his glass; "by its assurance, a lady!"
"There's one clever woman among ye; Peg something, plays Lothario, Lady Betty Modish, and what not?"
"What! admire Woffington?" screamed Mrs. Clive; "why, she is the greatest gabbler on the stage."
"I don't care," was the reply, "there's nature about the jade. Don't contradict me," added she, with sudden fury; "a parcel of children."
"No, madam," said Clive humbly. "Mr. Cibber, will you try and prevail on Mrs. Bracegirdle to favor us with a recitation?"
Cibber handed his cane with pomp to a small actor. Bracegirdle did the same; and, striking the attitudes that had passed for heroic in their day, they declaimed out of the "Rival Queens" two or three tirades, which I graciously spare the reader of this tale. Their elocution was neat and silvery; but not one bit like the way people speak in streets, palaces, fields, roads and rooms. They had not made the grand discovery, which Mr. A. Wigan on the stage, and every man of sense off it, has made in our day and nation; namely, that the stage is a representation, not of stage, but of life; and that an actor ought to speak and act in imitation of human beings, not of speaking machines that have run and creaked in a stage groove, with their eyes shut upon the world at large, upon nature, upon truth, upon man, upon woman and upon child.
"This is slow," cried Cibber; "let us show these young people how ladies and gentlemen moved fifty years ago, _dansons."_
A fiddler was caught, a beautiful slow minuet played, and a bit of "solemn dancing" done. Certainly it was not gay, but it must be owned it was beautiful; it was the dance of kings, the poetry of the courtly saloon.
