sible,
in Othello's circumstances. The charming passage in the same tragedy,
where he tells the manner of winning the affection of his mistress, was
urged with so moving and graceful an energy, that while I walked in the
cloisters, I thought of him with the same concern as if I waited for the
remains of a person who had in real life done all that I had seen him
represent. The gloom of the place, and faint lights before the ceremony
appeared, contributed to the melancholy disposition I was in; and I
began to be extremely afflicted, that Brutus and Cassius had any
difference; that Hotspur's gallantry was so unfortunate; and that the
mirth and good humour of Falstaff could not exempt him from the grave.
Nay, this occasion in me, who look upon the distinctions amongst men to
be merely scenical, raised reflections upon the emptiness of all human
perfection and greatness in general; and I could not but regret, that
the sacred heads which lie buried in the neighbourhood of this little
portion of earth in which my poor old friend is deposited, are returned
to dust as well as he, and that there is no difference in the grave
between the imaginary and the real monarch. This made me say of human
life itself with Macbeth:

"_To-morrow, to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in a stealing pace from day to day,
To the last moment of recorded time!
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
To their eternal night! Out, out short candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more._"[252]

The mention I have here made of Mr. Betterton, for whom I had, as long
as I have known anything, a very great esteem and gratitude for the
pleasure he gave me, can do him no good; but it may possibly be of
service to the unhappy woman he has left behind him,[253] to have it
known, that this great tragedian was never in a scene half so moving as
the circumstances of his affairs created at his departure. His wife,
after the cohabitation of forty years in the strictest amity, has long
pined away with a sense of his decay, as well in his person as his
little fortune; and in proportion to that, she has herself decayed both
in her health and her reason. Her husband's death, added to her age and
infirmities, would certainly have determined her life, but that the
greatness of her distress has been her relief, by a present deprivation
of her senses. This absenc