In 1791 Mrs. Inchbald published her "Simple Story." Her other tale,
"Nature and Art," followed in 1794, when Mrs. Inchbald's age was forty-
one. She had retired from the stage five years before, with an income of
fifty-eight pounds a year, all she called her own out of the independence
secured by her savings. She lived in cheap lodgings, and had sometimes
to wait altogether on herself; at one lodging "fetching up her own water
three pair of stairs, and dropping a few tears into the heedless stream,
as any other wounded deer might do." Later in life, she wrote to a
friend from a room in which she cooked, and ate, and also her saucepans
were cleaned:--"Thank God, I can say No. I say No to all the vanities of
the world, and perhaps soon shall have to say that I allow my poor infirm
sister a hundred a year. I have raised my allowance to eighty; but in
the rapid stride of her wants, and my obligation as a Christian to make
no selfish refusal to the poor, a few months, I foresee, must make the
sum a hundred." In 1816, when that sister died, and Mrs. Inchbald buried
the last of her immediate home relations--though she had still nephews to
find money for--she said it had been a consolation to her when sometimes
she cried with cold to think that her sister, who was less able to bear
privation, had her fire lighted for her before she rose, and her food
brought to her ready cooked.

Even at fifty Mrs. Inchbald's beauty of face inspired admiration. The
beauty of the inner life increased with years. Lively and quick of
temper, impulsive, sensitive, she took into her heart all that was best
in the sentiments associated with the teaching of Rousseau and the dreams
of the French Revolution. Mrs. Inchbald spoke her mind most fully in
this little story, which is told with a dramatic sense of construction
that swiftly carries on the action to its close. She was no weak
sentimentalist, who hung out her feelings to view as an idle form of self-
indulgence. Most unselfishly she wrought her own life to the pattern in
her mind; even the little faults she could not conquer, she well knew.

Mrs. Inchbald died at the age of sixty-eight, on the 1st of August, 1821,
a devout Roman Catholic, her thoughts in her last years looking
habitually through all disguises of convention up to Nature's God.

H. M.

CHAPTER I.

At a time when the nobility of Britain were said, by the poet laureate,
to be the admirers and protectors of the