o until the fragile creature ran off
with a craven fellow named Minshull. This Minshull made away with over
L3000, the sum of Susan's savings,[A] and the erring woman, alike
false to her virtue and the destroyer of that virtue, ended her
darkening days amid the clouds of insanity.

[Footnote A: In the year 1714, they (Booth and Susan) bought several
tickets in the State Lottery, and agreed to share equally whatever
fortune might ensue. Booth gained nothing; the lady won a prize of
5000 pounds, and kept it. His friends counselled him to claim half the
sum, but he laughingly remarked that there had never been any but
a verbal agreement on the matter; and since the result had been
fortunate for his friend, she should enjoy it all.--Dr. DORAN.]

The picture is far prettier with Hester Santlow leaping into the
affections of the actor, and finally marrying him according to the law
of the land. She loved the great man tenderly, ministered to his wants
with a wifely devotion which would hardly suit the "New Woman," and
when he was wont to eat too much (for he had given up the flowing
bowl[A] and must cultivate some other species of gluttony), the
ex-dancer would have the dinner-table removed.

[Footnote A: Booth told Cibber that he "had been for sometime too
frank a lover of the bottle; but having had the happiness to observe
into what contempt and distress Powel had plung'd himself by the same
vice, he was so struck with the terror of his example, that he fix'd
a resolution (which from that time to the end of his days he strictly
observed) of utterly reforming it." And Colley adds; "An uncommon act
of philosophy in a young man!"]

Strange, is it not, that the wife who could be so full of constancy,
and all the other virtues, previously lived a notoriously loose
existence? For it had been the fate of Santlow to stand continually in
the glare of that fierce light which beats upon the stage, and
never, perhaps, did she give the town more to talk about than by her
celebrated _rencontre_ with Captain Montague. The story affords a
glimpse of the free-and-easy manners which sometimes prevailed in
theatres, and will bear the telling, ere we bid farewell to its fair
heroine.

"About the year 1717," writes Cibber, "a young actress of a desirable
person (Santlow), sitting in an upper box at the Opera, a military
gentleman (Montague) thought this a proper opportunity to secure a
little conversation with her, the particulars of which