ompany of
actors, as devoted to his family of eight children as to his art. When
Louisa made her entry into the world she was the sixth of the clamorous
flock who roamed the country in the wake of their strolling father; and
it would have been odd indeed if she had not acquired a love of the
theatre to stimulate the acting strain in her blood.

Such were the charms and talent that the child developed that, by the
time she came to her eighteenth birthday she was carried off to London
to appear at Covent Garden Theatre as Lady Townley in _The Provoked
Husband_; and the general verdict was that no such clever acting had
been seen since Miss Farren was lured from the stage by a coronet. And
not only did she create an immediate sensation by her acting; her
beauty, which a contemporary writer tells us, "combined the stateliness
of Juno with the gentler and beauty of a Venus," made her a Queen of
Hearts as of actresses. So seductive a prize was not likely to be long
left to adorn the stage; and although Miss Brunton consistently turned a
blind eye to many a seductive offer, she had to succumb when his
Lordship of Craven joined the queue of her courtiers. Four years of
stage sovereignty and then the coronet of a Countess; such was the
record of this daughter of a strolling player, whose greatest ambition
had been to provide food enough for his hungry family. Lady Craven lived
nearly sixty years to enjoy her dignities and splendours, surviving long
enough to see her grandson take his place as third Earl of his line.

[Illustration: HARRIET, DUCHESS OF ST ALBANS]

For twenty years the English stage had no star to compare in brilliancy
with Harriet Mellon, whose life-story is one of the most romantic in
theatrical annals. From the January day in 1795 when she made her bow on
the Drury Lane stage as Lydia in _The Rivals_, to her farewell
appearance in February 1815, a month after she had become a wife, her
career was one unbroken sequence of triumphs. To quote the words of a
chronicler,

She shone supreme, splendid, unapproachable, not only by
her brilliant genius, but by her beauty and social
fascinations.

That she revelled in her conquests is certain; for to not one of her
army of wooers, many of them men of high rank, would she deign more than
a smile, until old Thomas Coutts came, with all the impetus of his
money-bags behind him, and literally swept her off her feet The lady who
had spurned coronets could