after
for Hermione; and was extremely puzzled to think what would become of
Pyrrhus.

"When Sir Roger saw Andromache's obstinate refusal to her lovers
importunities, he whispered me in the ear, that he was sure she
would never have him; to which he added, with a more than ordinary
vehemence, 'You can't imagine, sir, what it is to have to do with a
widow.' Upon Pyrrhus's threatening afterwards to leave her, the knight
shook his head, and muttered to himself, 'Ay, do if you can.' This
part dwelt so much upon my friend's imagination, that at the close of
the third act, as I was thinking of something else, he whispered me
in my ear, 'These widows, sir, are the most perverse creatures in
the world. But pray,' says he, 'you that are a critic, is the play
according to your dramatic rules, as you call them? Should your people
in tragedy always talk to be understood? Why, there is not a single
sentence in this play that I do not know the meaning of.'

"The fourth act very luckily began before I had time to give the old
gentleman an answer. 'Well,' says the knight, sitting down with great
satisfaction, 'I suppose we are now to see Hector's ghost,' He then
renewed his attention, and, from time to time, fell a praising the
widow. He made, indeed, a little mistake as to one of her pages, whom
at his first entering he took for Astyanax; but quickly set himself
right in that particular, though, at the same time he owned he should
have been very glad to have seen the little boy, who, says he, must
needs be a very fine child by the account that is given of him. Upon
Hermione's going off with a menace to Pyrrhus, the audience gave a
loud clap, to which Sir Roger added, 'On my word, a notable young
baggage!'"

We can imagine Sir Roger going, a year later, to see Mrs. Oldfield
carry all before her as Jane Shore in Nicholas Rowe's play of that
name. The author had once been an ardent admirer of the glacierlike
but lovely Bracegirdle, at whose haughty shrine he long worshipped in
the hopes that the ice of her reserve might some day melt; and the
wits of the coffee-house were wont to say, not without a grain of
truth, that when the poet wrote dramas to fit Bracegirdle as the
heroine, the lovers therein always pleaded his own passion[A]. Now
that the charmer had left the stage, Rowe was forced to entrust the
title character of Jane Shore to Nance, who vowed, no doubt, she was
thoroughly bored at having to walk once again through a vale of