She was above
criticism, out of its scope, as is the blue sky; men went not to judge
her, they drank her, and gazed at her, and were warmed at her, and
refreshed by her. The fops were awed into silence, and with their
humbler betters thanked Heaven for her, if they thanked it for anything.

"In all the crowded theater, care and pain and poverty were banished
from the memory, while Oldfield's face spoke, and her tongue flashed
melodies; the lawyer forgot his quillets; the polemic, the mote in his
brother's eye; the old maid, her grudge against the two sexes; the old
man, his gray hairs and his lost hours. And can it be, that all this
which should have been immortal, is quite--quite lost, is as though it
had never been?" he sighed. "Can it be that its fame is now sustained by
me; who twang with my poor lute, cracked and old, these feeble praises
of a broken lyre:

'Whose wires were golden and its heavenly air
More tunable than lark to shepherd's ear,
When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.'"

He paused, and his eye looked back over many years. Then, with a very
different tone, he added:

"And that Jack Falstaff there must have seen her, now I think on't."

"Only once, sir," said Quin, "and I was but ten years old."

"He saw her once, and he was ten years old; yet he calls Woffington
a great comedian, and my son The's wife, with her hatchet face, the
greatest tragedian he ever saw! Jemmy, what an ass you must be!"

"Mrs. Cibber always makes me cry, and t'other always makes me laugh,"
said Quin, stoutly, "that's why."

_Ce beau raisonnement_ met no answer, but a look of sovereign contempt.

A very trifling incident saved the ladies of the British stage from
further criticism. There were two candles in this room, one on each
side; the call-boy had entered, and, poking about for something, knocked
down and broke one of these.

"Awkward imp!" cried a velvet page.

"I'll go _to the Treasury_ for another, ma'am," said the boy pertly, and
vanished with the fractured wax.

I take advantage of the interruption to open Mr. Vane's mind to the
reader. First he had been astonished at the freedom of sarcasm these
people indulged in without quarreling; next at the non-respect of sex.

"So sex is not recognized in this community," thought he. Then the
glibness and merit of some of their answers surprised and amused him.
He, like me, had seldom met an imaginative repartee, except in a play or
a book