This nettled the young gentleman,
he fired up, his handsome countenance glowed, he turned Demosthenes for
her he loved. One advantage he had over both Cibber and Pomander, a fair
stock of classical learning; on this he now drew.

"Other actors and actresses," said he, "are monotonous in voice,
monotonous in action, but Mrs. Woffington's delivery has the compass and
variety of nature, and her movements are free from the stale uniformity
that distinguishes artifice from art. The others seem to me to have but
two dreams of grace, a sort of crawling on stilts is their motion,
and an angular stiffness their repose." He then cited the most famous
statues of antiquity, and quoted situations in plays where, by her
fine dramatic instinct, Mrs. Woffington, he said, threw her person into
postures similar to these, and of equal beauty; not that she strikes
attitudes like the rest, but she melts from one beautiful statue into
another; and, if sculptors could gather from her immortal graces,
painters, too, might take from her face the beauties that belong of
right to passion and thought, and orators might revive their withered
art, and learn from those golden lips the music of old Athens, that
quelled tempestuous mobs, and princes drunk with victory.

Much as this was, he was going to say more, ever so much more, but he
became conscious of a singular sort of grin upon every face; this grin
made him turn rapidly round to look for its cause. It explained itself
at once; at his very elbow was a lady, whom his heart recognized, though
her back was turned to him. She was dressed in a rich silk gown, pearl
white, with flowers and sprigs embroidered; her beautiful white neck and
arms were bare. She was sweeping up the room with the epilogue in her
hand, learning it off by heart; at the other end of the room she turned,
and now she shone full upon him.

It certainly was a dazzling creature. She had a head of beautiful form,
perched like a bird upon a throat massive yet shapely and smooth as a
column of alabaster, a symmetrical brow, black eyes full of fire and
tenderness, a delicious mouth, with a hundred varying expressions, and
that marvelous faculty of giving beauty alike to love or scorn, a
sneer or a smile. But she had one feature more remarkable than all, her
eyebrows--the actor's feature; they were jet black, strongly marked,
and in repose were arched like a rainbow; but it was their extraordinary
flexibility which made other faces