were delightful, and acted with so much nature and simplicity, that they appeared the very things they represented. Lady Sarah was more beautiful than you can conceive, and her very awkwardness gave an air of truth to the shame of the part and the antiquity of the time, which was kept up by her dress, taken out of Montfaucon. Lady Susan was dressed from Jane Seymour; and all the parts were clothed in ancient habits, and with the most minute propriety. When Lady Sarah was in white, with her hair about her ears, and on the ground, no Magdalen by Corregio was half so lovely and expressive. You would have been charmed, too, with seeing Mr. Fox's little boy of six years old, who is beautiful, and acted the Bishop of Ely, dressed in lawn sleeves and with a square cap. They inserted two lines for him, which he could hardly speak plainly." (This little boy died a general in the year eighteen hundred and eleven.) So far, so good; and Horace Walpole is enchanted with young ladies who act plays. But ladies who act plays are apt to become enchanted with actors; and three years after this performance of Jane Shore, a catastrophe occurs at Ilchester House, which makes Horace vituperate such enchantments as loudly as if he never had encouraged them. O'Brien, a veritable actor at the public theatres, runs away with the noble friend of Jane Shore, the charming Lady Susan; and the Foxes, and the Walpoles, and all other admirers of amateur performances, are in despair; not excepting, of course, the runner away with the Duke's daughter. Horace, forgetting what he said of Sir Stephen, or perhaps calling it desperately to mind, declares that it would have been better had the man been a footman, because an actor is so well known, that there is no smuggling him in among gentlefolk. "Il ne sera pas milord tout comme un autre." The worst of it was, that Horace had not only been loud in praise of the young lady's theatricals, but had eulogised this very O'Brien as a better representative of men of fashion than Garrick himself. Perhaps it was his eulogy that made the lady fall in love. And O'Brien was really a distinguished actor, and probably as much of a gentleman off the stage as on it. Nay, to say nothing of the doubt which has been thrown upon the legitimacy of Horace himself (who is suspected to have been the son of Carr, Lord Hervey), the player may even have come of a better house than a Walpole; for the Walpoles, though of an ancient, were but of a country-gentleman stock; whereas the name of O'Brien is held to be a voucher for 8 man's coming of race royal. We do not mean by these remarks to advocate intermarriages between different ranks. There is well-founded objection to them in the difference of education and manners, and the discord which is likely to ensue on all sides. But their general unadvisedness must not render us unjust to exceptions. An Earl of Derby some time afterwards, was thought to have married good breeding itself in the person of Miss Farren the actress; and though Mr. O'Brien, instead of being smuggled in among the gentlefolk whom he so well represented, was got off with his wife to America, their after-lives are recorded as having been equally happy and respectable. So Lady Susan, after all, |