CHAP, is.] THE ABEEST AND WHAT PRECEDED IT.
dividing Ms laurels; and till Powell could double Richard
and Sir John Brute, till O'Brien could alternate Ranger with
Macbeth, and till Weston could exhibit Lear by the side
of Abel Drngger, Garrick had no call to be seriously
alarmed.
Be that as it might, however, Powell's success was a great
thing for the authors. He came to occupy for them, oppor-
tunely, a field which the other had avowedly abandoned; and
Goldsmith, always earnest for the claims of writers, sympa-
thised strongly in his success. Another incident of the
theatrical season made hardly less noise. O'Brien's charms
in Ranger and Lovemore proved too much for lady Susan
Fox,* and she ran away with him. It cured Walpole for a
time of his theatre-going. He had a few days before been
protesting to Lord Hertford, that he had the republican spirit
of an old Roman, and that his name was thoroughly Hora-
tius; t but a homely-looking earl's-daughter running away
with a handsome young player, ran away with all his philo-
sophy. He thought a footman would have been preferable; |
choose from among the living English actors, before he can establish the fact of his
having had equals or superiors in the art. So when Johnson talked of the old
.actors during the tour to the Hebrides (Boswdl, iv. 132:) "you compare them with
" Garrick, and see the deficiency. Gfarrick's great distinction is his universality."
* "A very pleasing girl, though not handsome. . . . Lord Ilchester doated on
" her." Letters to Mann, i. 195. " The king," writes her uncle Lord Holland
to Mr. Grenville, asking him for a place in the New York Customs to banish
O'Brien to, "has shown so much compassion on this unhappy occasion, that, &c."
GrenmUe Correspondence, ii. 447. "O'Brien and Lady Susan," says Walpole to
Lord Hertford "are to be transported to the Ohio and have a grant of 40,000
" acres." Coll. Lett. iv. 404. t Ibid, iv. 336.
J Coll. Lett. iv. 405. Within a very few months his preference was gratified
by another of his lady friends, Lord Eockingham's youngest sister, actually
marrying her Irish footman, Mr. William Sturgeon. Coll.Lett.N. 460. ("Asensible,
" well-educated woman," says Gray. " 27 years old indeed, and homely enough."
Correspondence with Mason, 335.) Yet, such are the strange inconsistencies of
character, this same Horace Walpole could thus write to Mann eight years later.
" We have an instance in our family of real dignity of mind, and I set it down