CHAPTER XVIII.

SARAH SIDDONS.

On the 13th of June, 1755, when Garrick and Mrs. Cibber, Yates and Mrs. Pritchard, Woodward and Mrs. Clive, were the leaders in the Drury Lane company,-while Barry and Mrs. Bellamy, Ryan and Mrs. Woffington, were among the "chiefs" of Covent Garden, Sarah Kemble was born, the first of twelve children, at a public-house in Brecon, in which town, exactly a score of years later, was born her youngest brother, Charles.

By both parents she belonged to the stage. Her mother's maiden name was Ward. This lady's father had been a respectable actor under Betterton, and was a strolling manager when the hairdresser of the company, a handsome fellow, poor of course, and a Roman Catholic, eloped with and married the manager's daughter. His name was Roger Kemble. He was an actor too; love, at first, had helped to make him a very bad one. Fanny Furnaval, of the Canterbury company, drilled him into the worst Captain Plume that ever danced over the stage; but Mrs. Roger Kemble, a woman who illustrated the truth that beauty is of every age, used in her later days to look at the grand old man, and assert that he was the only gentleman-like Falstaff she had ever seen.

Mr. and Mrs. Kemble were "itinerants" when the first child of their marriage was born,—a child who made her début on the London stage long before her father;—the latter playing, and playing very well, the Miller of Mansfield, at the Haymarket, in 1788, for the benefit of the wife of his second son, Stephen. When Roger carried off Miss Ward, her father with difficulty forgave her, -and only on the ground that she had, at all events, obeyed his injunction, not to marry an actor. "He will never be that," said

the old player, of the Betterton era. content was exhausted.

With which remark, his dis

Her grandsire acted under Betterton, and Booth; her parents VOL. II.-11

had played with Quin;-she herself fulfilling a professional career which commenced with Garrick, and ended with her performing Lady Randolph to Mr. Macready's Glenalvon ;-when I add to this record that she saw the brilliant but checkered course of Edmund Kean to nearly its close, and witnessed the début of Miss Fanny Kemble, the whole history of the stage since the Restoration seems resumed therein.

Roger Kemble's itinerant company, as his children were born, received them as members. They played,-Sarah, John, Stephen, Elizabeth,-almost as soon as they could speak. Sarah's first audience compassionately hissed her, as too young to be listened to; but she won their applause by reciting a fable. At thirteen, she played in the great room of the King's Head, Worcester,-among other parts, Ariel, in the "Tempest," her father, mother, sister Elizabeth, and brother John, acting in the same piece. For the next four or five years, there was much of itinerant life, till we find her at Wolverhampton, in 1773, acting in a wide range of characters, from Lee's heroines to Rosetta, in "Love in a Village." In the latter case, the young Meadows was a Mr. Siddons, who had acted Hippolito in Dryden's "Tempest," when she played Ariel. In her father's company she was always the first and greatest. She played all that the accomplished daughter of a manager chose to play, among her father's strollers,-and she attracted admirers both before and behind the curtain. The Earl of Coventry and sundry squires were among the former. Among the latter was that poor player, an ex-apprentice from Birmingham, named Siddons, between whom and Sarah Kemble, there was true love, for which, however, there was lacking parental sanction. The country audiences sympathized with the young people, and applauded the lover, who introduced his sad story into a comic song, on his benefit night. As he left the stage, the stately manageress received him at the wing, and there greeted him with a ringing box of the ears.

This led to the secession of both actors from the company. Mr. Siddons went, the world before him where to choose; Sarah Kemble, to the family of Mr. Greathead, of Guy's Cliff, Warwickshire. "She hired herself," says the Secret History of the Green Room, published in the very zenith of her fame,-" as lady's maid to Mrs. Greathead, at £10 per annum." "Her station," says Camp

bell," was humble, but not servile, and her principal employment was to read to the elder Mr. Greathead." She probably fulfilled the double duty,-no disparagement at a time when the maids of ladies were often decayed ladies themselves.

Old Roger Kemble is said to have been very unwilling that any of his children should follow that profession, in exercising which he had wandered far, suffered much, and profited sparingly. The unwillingness was natural, but he seems to have put it in practice when too late;-after he had allowed his attractive young people to enjoy some of the perilous delights of the stage. There are bills extant which show that some of them, at least, were playing in his company, when they were of tender years. When Sarah Kemble went to Guy's Cliff, it was with no idea of permanently leaving the stage; and if it be true, as alleged in the series of dramatic biographies, published by Symonds at the beginning of the present century, that Roger Kemble apprenticed his daughter Elizabeth to a mantua-maker in Leominster, and Frances to a milliner in Worcester, he narrowly missed marring their good fortunes. A similar vocation could not keep Anne Oldfield from the stage, and though Elizabeth and Frances Kemble were not actresses of extraordinary merit, they had not to regret that they abandoned the vocations chosen for them by their parents, for that which was followed by their parents, themselves.

From Guy's Cliff, Sarah Kemble was ultimately taken by her persevering wooer, to whom her father reluctantly gave her, at Trinity Church Coventry, on the 6th of November, 1773. The bride was in her nineteenth year. The married couple continued but for a brief period in the Kemble company. A month after the marriage, the name of "Mrs. Siddons" was, for the first time, in the playbill, at Worcester, to Charlotte Rusport, in the "West Indian," and Leonora, in the "Padlock." Shortly after, Roger Kemble saw Mr. and Mrs. Siddons depart for Chamberlain and Crump's company, in Cheltenham. Here Mrs. Siddons at once took her place. Her Belvidera excited universal admiration. Lord Ailesbury, the cousin of the Pretender's wife, the Countess of Albany, mentioned her to Garrick; and Lord Dungarvon's daughter, Miss Boyle, directed her wardrobe, lent her many of her own dresses, and helped to make others for her with her own hands.

The Cheltenham "propertys" were of the poorest; but there were some that even the Honorable Miss Boyle could not supply. Thus, for the male disguise of the Widow Brady, Mrs. Siddons found, on the night of performance, that no provision had been made; but we are told that a gentleman in the boxes lent her his coat, while he stood at the side-scenes, with a petticoat over his shoulders, and ready to receive his property when done with!

Garrick, on Lord Ailesbury's report, sent King down to see this actress of promise, and on King's warrant, engaged her for Drury Lane, at £5 per week. Others say that it was on the warrant of Parson Bates, of the Morning Post, who greatly praised her Rosalind.

Her first appearance was on the 29th of December, 1775, as Portia, "by a young lady," to King's Shylock. On January 2d, 1776, she repeated Portia, "by Mrs. Siddons." On the 18th, she played Epicone, but the part was subsequently assigned to another. On the 2d of February, she acted Julia, in a new and poor farce, the "Blackamoor washed White," and on the 15th, Emily, in Mrs. Cowley's new comedy, the "Runaway," which part she had to surrender to Mrs. King. She was not more fortunate in Maria, her third original character, in "Love's Metamorphoses;" nor in a subsequent part, that of Mrs. Strictland to Garrick's Ranger, did she excite any further remark save that it was played in a pathetic manner. Her second appearance with Garrick was as Lady Anne to his Richard, which she repeated twice, the last time on June 5, in presence of the royal family. Five nights later, Garrick took his farewell of the stage, and Mrs. Siddons's engagement was at an end.

In Belvidera, for which she had been praised by King, she was not permitted to appear. Bate had commended her Rosalind, but she had to see it played by Miss Younge. Even Miss Hopkins, who became her sister-in-law, had better parts than she; and there was Mrs. Yates keeping Calista and Isabella, and Mrs. King playing Lady Macbeth, and Mrs. Canning (mother of the future statesman) allowed on the benefit of Reddish, whom she married, to play Monimia. Mrs. Siddons concluded that the other actresses who plagued Garrick's life out, hated her, because Garrick was

polite and even kind to her. Sheridan alleged, as a reason for not re-engaging her, that Garrick did not recognize in her a first-rate actress (which she was far from being at that time). Woodfall thought her sensible, but too weak for London. "You are all fools!" said buxom Mrs. Abington.

The fragile, timid, faltering actress acquired strength in the country. Henderson, himself rising to excellence, acted with, and spoke well of, her. York pronounced her perfect, and Bath took her with the warrant, and retained her, its most cherished tragic actress, object of public applause and private esteem, till the year 1782. It was here, in truth, that the great actress was perfected, and that amid as many matronly as professional duties. On leaving the Bath stage, she pointed to her children as so many reasons for the step; and therewith went up, with no faint heart, this time, to the metropolis. "She is an actress," said Henderson, "who has never had an equal, and will never have a superior." "My good reception in London," writes Mrs. Siddons, "I cannot but partly attribute to the enthusiastic accounts of me which the amiable Duchess of Devonshire had brought thither, and spread before my arrival." Poor Henderson!

With broken voice, the old nervousness, and a world of fears, she rehearsed Isabella, in Southerne's tragedy. When the night of the 10th of October, 1782, arrived, she dressed with a desperate tranquillity, and many sighs, and then faced the public, her son Henry, then eight years of age, holding her by the hand, and her father, Roger, looking on with a dismay that was soon converted into delight. Smith played Biron, and Palmer, Villeroy,—but Siddons alone was heeded on that night, in which she gave herself up so thoroughly to the requirements of the part, that her young son, who had often rehearsed with her, was so overcome by the reality of the dying scene, that he burst into tears. "I never heard," she writes, "such peals of applause in all my life. I thought they would not have suffered Mr. Packer to end the play."

With the echoes of the shouting audience ringing in her ears, she went home solemnly and silently. "My father, my husband, and myself," she says, "sat down to a frugal, neat supper, in a silence uninterrupted, except by exclamations of gladness from