X.-Kitty Clive, Woodward, Shuter Supplemental Catalogue of New Plays from the retirement of Garrick to the end of the Eighteenth Century . XII.—Of Authors, and particularly of condemned Authors XIII.-The Audiences of the last half of the Eighteenth Century DORAN'S ANNALS OF THE STAGE. CHAPTER I. MARGARET WOFFINGTON. THAT good-tempered woman who is looking with admiration. at the pretty and delicate child who is drawing water from the Liffey, is Madame Violante. She is mistress of a booth, for ropedancing and other exhibitions in Dame Street. As the young girl turns homeward, with the bowl of water on her head, the lady follows, still admiring. The object of her admiration is as bright and as steady as a sunbeam. If she be ill-clad, she is exquisitely shaped, and she will live to lend her dresses to the two Miss Gunnings, to enable them to attend a drawing-room at the Castle; their first steps towards reaching the coronets of countess and duchess that were in store. for them. This child, meanwhile, enters a shabby huckster's shop, kept by her widowed mother, on Ormond Quay. The father was a working bricklayer, and married the mother when she was as hard-working a laundress. There is another child in this poor household, a sister of the water-bearer, fair, but less fair than she. When Madame Violante first saw Mary and Margaret Woffington, she little dreamed that the latter would be the darling of London society, and the former the bride of a son of one of the proudest of English earls. Margaret Woffington, born in 1720, was very young when Madame Violante induced her mother to let her have the pretty child as a pupil. The foreign lady was of good repute, and Margaret became an apt pupil, performed little tricks while her mistress was on the rope, learned French thoroughly, and acquired graces of person, style, and carriage, by which she gained fortune, and reaped ruin. 66 As a child, she played Macheath, in Madame's booth, when the Beggars' Opera" was acted there by children. From the age of seventeen to twenty, she was on the more regular Dublin stage, charming all eyes and hearts by her beauty, grace, and ability in a range of characters from Ophelia to Sir Harry Wildair. Rich at once engaged her, at a moderate salary, and, in 1740, brought her out, at Covent Garden, as Sylvia to Ryan's Plume and the younger Cibber's Brazen. A successful coup d'éssai emboldened her to try Sir Harry. She played it night after night, for weeks, and Wilks was forgotten. It is said she so enraptured one susceptible damsel, that the young lady, believing Sir Harry to be a man, made him an offer of marriage. Walpole was among the last to be pleased. "There is much in vogue, a Mrs. Woffington," he writes, in 1741; "a bad actress, but she has life." Walpole's friend, Conway, confesses that "all the town was in love with her;" but to Conway's eyes, she was only "an impudent Irish-faced girl." Even these fastidious gentlemen became converted, and, at a later period, Walpole records her excellent acting in Moore's "Foundling," with Garrick, Barry, and Mrs. Cibber. Her Lothario was not so successful as her Sir Harry; but her high-born ladies, her women of dash, spirit, and elegance, her homely, humorous females, in all these she triumphed; and triumphed in spite of a voice that was almost unmanageable for its harshness. Margaret and Garrick were very soon on very intimate terms. In the summer of 1742, they were together in Dublin, and on their return, according to a tradition of the stage, Garrick and Mrs. Woffington, living together, alternately supplied the expenses of the household, each being at the head of the latter during a month. In Garrick's term the table is said to have been but moderately furnished; whereas during the beautiful Margaret's month, there was a banquet and brilliant company daily; all the |