ble for Mrs. Inchbald
to succeed greatly as an actress. She was unable to realise her own
conceptions. At times she and her husband prospered so little that on
one day their dinner was of turnips, pulled and eaten in a field, and
sometimes there was no dinner at all. But better days presently
followed; first acquaintance of Mrs. Inchbald with Mrs. Siddons grew to a
strong friendship, and this extended to the other members of the Kemble
family.

After seven years of happy but childless marriage, Mrs. Inchbald was left
a widow at the age of twenty-six. In after years, when devoting herself
to the baby of one of her landladies, she wrote to a friend,--"I shall
never again have patience with a mother who complains of anything but the
loss of her children; so no complaints when you see me again. Remember,
you have had two children, and I never had one." After her husband's
death, Mrs. Inchbald's beauty surrounded her with admirers, some of them
rich, but she did not marry again. To one of those who offered marriage,
she replied that her temper was so uncertain that nothing but blind
affection in a husband could bear with it. Yet she was patiently living
and fighting the world on a weekly salary of about thirty shillings, out
of which she helped her poorer sisters. When acting at Edinburgh she
spent on herself only eight shillings a week in board and lodging. It
was after her husband's death that Mrs. Inchbald finished a little novel,
called "A Simple Story," but it was not until twelve years afterwards
that she could get it published. She came to London again, and wrote
farces, which she could not get accepted; but she obtained an increase of
salary to three pounds a week by unwillingly consenting not only to act
in plays, but also to walk in pantomime. At last, in July, 1784, her
first farce, "The Mogul Tale," was acted. It brought her a hundred
guineas. Three years later her success as a writer had risen so far that
she obtained nine hundred pounds by a little piece called "Such Things
Are." She still lived sparingly, invested savings, and was liberal only
to the poor, and chiefly to her sisters and the poor members of her
family. She finished a sketch of her life in 1786, for which a
publisher, without seeing it, offered a thousand pounds. But there was
more satirical comment in it than she liked, and she resolved to do at
once what she would wish done at the point of death. She destroyed the
record.