Although in the receipt of fifty guineas a week, she was arrested for debt long before the termination of her engagement. Upon her return to London this was a frequent occurrence. At length, to evade the writs, she engaged herself as housekeeper to Count Haslang, who, being an embassador, secured to all his household immunity from arrest. Her downward course was now fast and furious; one after another went diamonds, clothes, all she possessed; then she borrowed small sums of money from every person who would lend to her, lived within the rules of the King's Bench, and was only deterred one night from casting herself off Westminster Bridge by overhearing the plaints of a creature even more miserable than herself. In 1785 a benefit was organized for her at Covent Garden. Reynolds, the dramatist, thus describes the sad scene: "Idwell for a moment on a last appearance which I witnessed, namely, that of Mrs. Bellamy, who took her leave of the stage May 24, 1785. On this occasion Miss Farren, the present Countess of Derby, spoke an address which concluded with the following couplet: "But see, oppressed with gratitude and tears, The curtain then ascended; and Mrs. Bellamy being discovered, the whole house immediately arose to mark their favorable inclinations toward her, and from anxiety to obtain a view of this once celebrated actress, and, in consequence of the publication of her life, then celebrated authoress. She was seated in an arm-chair, from which she in vain attempted to rise, so completely was she subdued by her feelings. She, however, succeeded in muttering a few words expressive of her gratitude, and then, sinking into her seat, the curtain dropped before her— forever!" She died in 1788. CHAPTER VI. JOHN KEMBLE AND SARAH SIDDONS. A Theatrical Family.-Mrs. Siddons's Failure at her First London Début. She storms the Town in "Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage.”—John Kemble's Experiences as Actor and Marriage.-Judgment on their Merits by their Contemporaries.-Their Respective Farewells to the Stage.-Hazlitt's Recollections of the Great Brother and Sister. FROM Ward, who was Roger Kemble's father-in-law, and an actor under Betterton, to Mrs. Scott Siddons, who still graces the stage, we have five successive generations of a family some member of which has been attached to the theatrical profession. This is an astonishing sequence, embracing as it does a period of quite two hundred years, and has probably no parallel. Ward was a strolling manager when Roger Kemble, who united hair-dressing with acting, eloped with his daughter. The young couple started in management upon their own account, and strolled from town to town and village to village after the manner and under the difficulties and disadvantages of the time; at some places received with gracious favor, at others treated like lepers and threatened with the stocks and whipping at the cart's tail, according as the great people were liberalminded or puritanical. Their first child, born June 13, 1755, at Brecon, was christened Sarah; their second, a boy, christened John Philip, was born at Prescot in Lancashire, in 1757. The old farm-house in which the latter event took place is, it is said, still standing. There· came a Stephen in the following year; and other sons and daughters with whom we have nothing to do followed in due succession. All these were put upon the stage as soon as they were old enough to speak a few lines; and as the years advanced Mr. Roger Kemble's company, like that of Mr. Vincent Crummles, was almost entirely included under one patronymic. At thirteen we find Sarah playing Ariel in the great room of the King's Head at Worcester, which boasted no other theatre, and four years later sustaining all the principal parts at Wolverhampton. She had now grown to be a very beautiful girl, and made great havoc among the hearts of susceptible squires, and even included an earl among the list of her adorers. But in her father's company there was a handsome young fellow from Birmingham, named Henry Siddons, whom she preferred to all her rich admirers. As Mr. and Mrs. Kemble had married against parental consent, it followed as a matter of course that they would not allow their daughter to choose for herself; besides, they had their pride and their ambition, and strongly objected to an alliance with a poor player. So Henry Siddons was told the manager's daughter was not for him. But on his benefit night he revenged himself by reciting a poem of his own composition, in which he detailed to the audience the story of his hapless love, and thereby greatly won their sympathies and a box on the ear from his inamorata's mother, who was listening at the sidescene in a very great passion. Siddons left the This brought about a disturbance. company, and Sarah went away in a huff, and hired herself as lady's maid to Mrs. Greathead, of Guy's Cliff, Warwickshire. There she did not remain long, for Roger and his wife, finding her determined, and probably moved by the solicitations of their patrons, gave a reluctant consent to the marriage, and on the 6th of November, 1773, Sarah Kemble became Mrs. Siddons, and from that time so appeared in the playbills. Soon afterward she and her husband joined the company of Crump and Chamberlain, well-known strolling managers in their day, at Cheltenham; and there for the first time we hear of her being accredited with superior powers as an actress. As Belvidera, in Otway's "Venice Preserved," she achieved a great success, and became a protégée of all the fashionable play-goers, especially of the Honorable Miss Boyle, who assisted her scanty wardrobe by the loan of dresses, and helped her with her own hands to make new ones. Her fame reached London, and Garrick sent his stage manager, King, down to the Gloucestershire watering-place to take stock of her abilities. He reported very favorably, and soon afterward Parson Bates, of the Morning Post, pugilist, duelist, and critic, a well-known man of the day, took the same journey for a similar purpose, and brought back a warm eulogy upon her acting as Rosalind. Thereupon Roscius engaged her for Drury Lane at five pounds a week. Her first appearance was on the 29th of December, 1775. The début was a failure, absolute and unmitigated, and only Mrs. Abington, one of the leading actresses in Garrick's company, discovered the hidden genius. The latter called all the rest fools in their judgment. Mrs. Siddons opened in Portia, and during the five nights preceding Garrick's departure from the stage, she appeared in Mrs. Strickland in "The Suspicious Husband," and Lady Anne to Garrick's "Richard." So her first London season ended. over "It was a stunning and cruel blow," she says, 66 whelming all my ambitions, and involving peril even to the subsistence of my helpless babes. It was very near destroying me. My blighted prospects, indeed, produced a state of mind that preyed upon my health, and for a year and a half I was supposed to be hastening to a decline." Her next engagement was at Manchester, and thence she went to York to Tate Wilkinson. There "all lifted up their eyes in astonishment that such a voice and such a judgment should have been neglected by a London audience." In 1778 John Palmer, on the recommendation of Henderson, engaged her for Bath, then the first English theatre out of London, at three pounds a week. In her first parts, Lady Townley and Mrs. Candour-the latter appears a strange character for a young lady-she was only coldly received, and seemed to be on the threshold of new disappointments and mortifications. But we must now go back to detail the fortunes of another member of the Kemble family. John Philip acted as a child, like all the rest of his brothers and sisters, but by-and-by his father resolved to make a priest of him. Roger was a Catholic and brought up the boys to that faith, the girls following the Protestant religion of their mother. So at ten years old the boy was sent away to Sedgely Park College, Wolverhampton. There he remained four years, and in 1771 proceeded to Douai, where he was famous as a declaimer and for a prodigious memory. He once undertook to get two books of Homer by heart, and actually repeated fifteen hundred lines. But the theatrical blood within him rebelled against the cassock and burned for the sock and buskin. So he left the college in 1775, landed at Bristol, and proceeded to Brecknock, where his parents were then performing. Bitterly disappointed in his ambition, Roger refused to receive his disobedient son; a subscription of a few shillings was raised among the company, to which the irate |