down this child of airy humor to the verge of his ninetieth year, with all the enjoyment of strong animal spirits, and all that innocent egotism which became frequently a source of his own raillery."

In 1728 he completed and produced Vanbrugh's posthumous and unfinished comedy of "The Provoked Husband." A hostile audience assembled on the first night to hiss Cibber's portion of the work, and applaud Sir John's: they never doubted their ability to detect which was which. But what was intended to be a bitter mortification to the Laureate proved an immense triumph. He printed Vanbrugh's fragment, and showed his enemies that the scenes they had loudly applauded were his, notably the fine one in the last act, the reconciliation between Lord and Lady Townley, while those of the Wronghead family, which they had so violently condemned, were the work of his collaborateur. "The Provoked Husband" is an admirable work, which kept the stage until within the last thirty years, and some of its best portions are Cibber's.

To the end he continued to be the old beau, the man about town, airy, gay, sarcastic as ever. The actors of his youth continued to be his ideals of histrionic excellence; next to those in his esteem were the performers of his maturity; but he could see no talent in the rising men and women of his old age. It was with difficulty that he could be brought to acknowledge that Garrick clever."

was

He died in 1757 at his house in Berkeley Square, at the age of eighty-six, and was buried in the Abbey.

Cibber's powers as an actor lay entirely in comio characters. In these he was surpassingly fine. "When he represented a ridiculous humor," says a writer in the

Gentleman's Magazine, “he had a mouth in every nerve, and became eloquent without speaking; his attitudes were pointed and exquisite; his expression was stronger than painting; he was beautifully absorbed by the character, and demanded and monopolized attention; his very extravagances were colored by propriety." Dibdin, in his "History of the Stage," says: "To him obstacles were incentives. Nature even, according to his own account, had denied him almost every theatrical requisite, yet he found a substitute for all, and made study, perfectness, and judgment arrest as much the attention of the public as others did truth, elegance, and nature."

One of his most famous performances was Justice Shallow, of which Davies says: "His manner was so perfectly simple, his look so vacant when he questioned his cousin Silence about the price of ewes, and lamented in the same breath, with silly surprise, the death of Old Double, that it will be impossible for any surviving spectator not to smile at the remembrance of it. The want of ideas occasions Shallow to repeat almost everything he says. Cibber's transition from asking the price of bullocks to trite but grave reflections on mortality was so natural and attended with such an unmeaning roll of his small pig's-eyes, accompanied with such an important utterance of ‘tick, tick, tick,' not much louder than the balance of a watch or a pendulum, that I question if any actor was ever superior in the conception and expressing of solemn misgiving."

His principal plays have been already referred to in these pages, but one merit has yet to be mentioned: they were among the first that, profiting by the censures of Jeremy Collier, returned to the path of decorousness and

decency, and commenced the reaction against the licentious comedies of the Restoration.

His " Apology,"

written soon after his retirement, is the finest theatrical book in the language; it is a complete history of the English stage for forty years, and its pictures of the great actors of that by-gone age are so vivid that we can almost see them before us in their great impersonations. It is also full of shrewd and clever remarks upon the dramatic art, applicable to any period, and might be as truly a text-book to the actor of the present day as it was to those of his own.

Theophilus Cibber is a name almost as familiar to us as Colley. At eighteen he made the stage his profession, and, thanks to his father's position, was quickly thrust into public notice. As a man he was in every respect contemptible and vile, a spendthrift, a cheat, and a miserable panderer. Upon the death of his first wife, in 1773, he began to pay court to the charming Susanna Maria Arne, then little over twenty, the sister of the celebrated composer. She had already appeared as a singer at the Opera House, and her beautiful voice and sweet face had secured her success.

Whatever possessed so delicate a creature to listen to the addresses of such an ugly ruffian as Theophilus Cibber, our Titania was married to this Bottom, and had bitter cause to repent it. It was now arranged that she should quit the lyric for the dramatic stage, and Colley gave her lessons. In 1736 she made her entrée at Drury Lane as Zara, in Aaron Hill's tragedy of that name, and leaped at once to the highest position of her art.

"Her great excellence," says Davies, "consisted in that simplicity which needed no ornament, in that sen

sibility which despised all art-the harmony of her voice was as powerful as the animation of her look-in grief and tenderness, her eyes looked as if they swam in tears-in rage and despair they seemed to dart flashes of fire-in spite of the unimportance of her figure, she maintained a dignity in her action and a grace in her step." Another writer says: "She was charming in every part she undertook, but she appeared to be identified with Ophelia." Indeed, she may be regarded as the creator of the feminine ideal of the part. Its principal interpreters before her had been Mrs. Betterton and Mrs. Booth, who had received, through Davenant, the traditions of the boy-actresses of the pre-Restoration period. Garrick had doubted her ability to play Constance ("King John "). "Don't tell me, Mr. Garrick,” said Quin; "that woman has a heart, and can do anything where passion is required." The elder actor was right. Davies says she had no successor in the part; even Mrs. Yates fell below her. "It was her most perfect character. When going off the stage she uttered the words, 'O Lord, my boy!' with such an emphatical scream of agony as will never be forgotten by those who heard her."

Another critic, describing her Juliet, says: "He who has seen Mrs. Cibber from the first suspicion of the draught not working as intended, rise to the terror of her waking before her time, finding herself encompassed with 'reeking shanks and yellow chapless skulls,' become distracted with the horror of the place, 'plucking the mangied Tybalt from his shroud,' till at length she shall 'with some great kinsman's bone madly dash out her desperate brains,' has seen all that is possible to be conveyed, this way, of terror, and has had an exam

ple of that gradation by which fire and spirit may be raised from the most slight step to the most exalted height."

Not content with squandering his wife's salary and neglecting her, Mr. Cibber, junior, played the part of Sir Pandarus, and introduced into his house a young gentleman of fortune, gave him every opportunity of forming a close intimacy with her, and then took a short journey to France. When he returned he began to rave about his injured honor, which could only be healed by five thousand pounds damages. But the court saw through the infamous business, and awarded him ten guineas, while his wife accepted the protection of the man to whom she had been betrayed, and passed with him the remainder of her life, unblamed by a sympathizing public.

Mrs. Cibber survived her wretched husband eight years. In January, 1766, she was carried from her house in Scotland Yard to the cloisters of the Abbey, where Mrs. Bracegirdle and Betterton had gone before her. "Then tragedy died with her," said Garrick upon hearing the sad news of her death. "And yet she was the greatest female plague belonging to my house. I could easily parry the artless thrusts and despise the coarse language of some of my other heroines; but whatever was Cibber's object, a new part or a new dress, she was always sure to carry her point by the acuteness of her invective and the steadiness of her perseverance."

Everybody conversant with theatrical history has heard of Charlotte Charke, Cibber's youngest child. From her childhood she gave indications of that strange disposition that was to render her whole life so notorious. Her favorite resort was the stable, and although she could