ro of her "Simple Story," Doriforth, is supposed to have been intended
by her as a portrait of him. On one occasion, when she was sitting by
the fireplace in the green-room, waiting to be called upon the stage,
she and Miss Mellon (afterward Mrs. Coutts and Duchess of St Albans)
were laughingly discussing their male friends and acquaintances from the
matrimonial point of view. My uncle John, who was standing near,
excessively amused, at length jestingly said to Mrs. Inchbald, who had
been comically energetic in her declarations of who she could or would,
or never could or would, have married, "Well, Mrs. Inchbald, would you
have had me?" "Dear heart!" said the stammering beauty, turning her
sweet sunny face up to him, "I'd have j-j-j-jumped at you!"

One day Lawrence took us, from the room where I generally sat to him,
into a long gallery where were a number of his pictures, and, leading me
by the hand, desired me not to raise my eyes till he told me. On the
word of command I looked up, and found myself standing close to and
immediately underneath, as it were, a colossal figure of Satan. The
sudden shock of finding myself in such proximity to this terrible image
made me burst into nervous tears. Lawrence was greatly distressed at the
result of his experiment, which had been simply to obtain a verdict from
my unprepared impression of the power of his picture. A conversation we
had been having upon the subject of Milton and the character of Satan
had made him think of showing this picture to me. I was too much
agitated to form any judgment of it, but I thought I perceived through
its fierce and tragical expression some trace of my uncle's face and
features, a sort of "more so" of the bitter pride and scornful
melancholy of the banished Roman in the Volscian Hall. Lawrence's
imagination was so filled with the poetical and dramatic suggestions
which he derived from the Kemble brother and sister, that I thought a
likeness of them lurked in this portrait of the Prince of Darkness; and
perhaps he could scarcely have found a better model for his archfiend
than my uncle, to whom his mother occasionally addressed the
characteristic reproof, "Sir, you are as proud as Lucifer!" (He and that
remarkable mother of his must really have been a good deal like
Coriolanus and Volumnia.) To console me for the fright he had given me,
Lawrence took me into his drawing-room--that beautiful apartment filled
with beautiful things, including his m