ick could never
reach, coxcombs, and men of fashion. Mrs. Clive is at least as perfect
in low comedy--and yet to me, Ranger was the part that suited Garrick
the best of all he ever performed. He was a poor Lothario, a ridiculous
Othello, inferior to Quin in Sir John Brute and Macbeth, and to Cibber
in Bayes, and a woful Lord Hastings and Lord Townley. Indeed, his Bayes
was original, but not the true part: Cibber was the burlesque of a great
poet, as the part was designed, but Garrick made it a Garretteer. The
town did not like him in Hotspur, and yet I don't know whether he did
not succeed in it beyond all the rest. Sir Charles Williams and Lord
Holland thought so too, and they were no bad judges. I am impatient to
see the Clairon, and certainly will, as I have promised, though I have
not fixed my day. But do you know you alarm me! There was a time when I
was a match for Madame de Mirepoix at pharaoh, to any hour of the night,
and I believe did play with her five nights in a week till three and
four in the morning--but till eleven o'clock to-morrow morning--Oh! that
is a little too much, even at loo. Besides, I shall not go to Paris for
pharaoh--if I play all night, how shall I see everything all day?

[Footnote 1: Schouvaloff was notorious as a favourite of the Empress
Catharine.]

[Footnote 2: Mdlle. Clairon had been for some years the most admired
tragic actress in France. In that age actors and actresses in France
were exposed to singular insults. M. Lacroix, in his "France in the
Eighteenth Century," tells us: "They were considered as inferior beings
in the social scale; excommunicated by the Church, and banished from
society, they were compelled to endure all the humiliations and affronts
which the public chose to inflict on them in the theatre; and, if any of
them had the courage to make head against the storm, and to resist the
violence and cruelty of the pit, they were sent to prison, and not
released but on condition of apologising to the tyrants who had so
cruelly insulted them. Many had a sufficient sense of their own dignity
to withdraw themselves from this odious despotism after having been in
prison in Fort l'Evecque, their ordinary place of confinement, by the
order of the gentlemen of the chamber or the lieutenant of police; and
it was in this way that Mdlle. Clairon bade farewell to the Comedie
Francaise and gave up acting in 1765, when at the very height of her
talent, and in the middle of her greate