BARBARA S.

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ON the noon of the 14th of November, all; and in the zenith of her after reputation 1743 or 4, I forget which it was, just as the clock had struck one, Barbara S, with her accustomed punctuality, ascended the long rambling staircase, with awkward interposed landing-places, which led to the office, or rather a sort of box with a desk in it, whereat sat the then Treasurer of (what few of our readers may remember) the Old Bath Theatre. All over the island it was the custom, and remains so I believe to this day, for the players to receive their weekly stipend on the Saturday. It was not much that Barbara had to claim.

This little maid had just entered her eleventh year; but her important station at the theatre, as it seemed to her, with the benefits which she felt to accrue from her pious application of her small earnings, had given an air of womanhood to her steps and to her behaviour. You would have taken her to have been at least five years older.

Till latterly she had merely been employed in choruses, or where children were wanted to fill up the scene. But the manager, observing a diligence and adroitness in her above her age, had for some few months past intrusted to her the performance of whole parts. You may guess the self-consequence of the promoted Barbara. She had already drawn tears in young Arthur; had rallied Richard with infantine petulance in the Duke of York; and in her turn had rebuked that petulance when she was Prince of Wales. She would have done the elder child in Morton's pathetic afterpiece to the life; but as yet the "Children in the Wood" was

not.

Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, I have seen some of these small parts, each making two or three pages at most, copied out in the rudest hand of the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed a little more carefully and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies of the establishment. But such as they were, blotted and scrawled, as for a child's use, she kept them

it was a delightful sight to behold them bound up in costliest morocco, each single — each small part making a book with fine clasps, gilt-splashed, &c. She had conscientiously kept them as they had been delivered to her; not a blot had been effaced or tampered with. They were precious to her for their affecting remembrancings. They were her principia, her rudiments; the elementary atoms; the little steps by which she pressed forward to perfection. "What," she would say, "could India-rubber, or a pumice-stone, have done for these darlings?" I am in no hurry to begin my storyindeed I have little or none to tell - so I will just mention an observation of hers connected with that interesting time.

Not long before she died I had been discoursing with her on the quantity of real present emotion which a great tragic performer experiences during acting. I ventured to think, that though in the first instance such players must have possessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up in others, yet by frequent repetition those feelings must become deadened in great measure, and the performer trust to the memory of past emotion, rather than express a present one. She indignantly repelled the notion, that with a truly great tragedian the operation, by which such effects were produced upon an audience, could ever degrade itself into what was purely mechanical. much delicacy, avoiding to instance in her self-experience, she told me, that so long ago as when she used to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. Porter's Isabella, (I think it was,) when that impressive actress bas been bending over her in some heart-rending colloquy, she has felt real hot tears come trickling from her, which, (to use her powerful expression) have perfectly scalded her back.

I am

With

not quite so sure that it was but it was some great actress The name is indifferent; but

Mrs. Porter;
of that day.

A year or two's unrepining application to her profession brightened up the feet, and the prospects, of her little sisters, set the whole family upon their legs again, and released her from the difficulty of discussing moral dogmas upon a landing-place.

old treasurer, and explain to him his blunder. | her own agency, as it seemed (for she never He was already so confused with age, besides felt her feet to move), she found herself a natural want of punctuality, that she transported back to the individual desk she would have had some difficulty in making had just quitted, and her hand in the old him understand it. She saw that in an hand of Ravenscroft, who in silence took instant. And then it was such a bit of back the refunded treasure, and who had money! and then the image of a larger been sitting (good man) insensible to the allowance of butcher's-meat on their table lapse of minutes, which to her were anxious next day came across her, till her little eyes ages; and from that moment a deep peace glistened, and her mouth moistened. But fell upon her heart, and she knew the quality then Mr. Ravenscroft had always been so of honesty. good-natured, had stood her friend behind the scenes, and even recommended her promotion to some of her little parts. But again the old man was reputed to be worth a world of money. He was supposed to have fifty pounds a-year clear of the theatre. And then came staring upon her the figures of her little stockingless and shoeless sisters. And when she looked at her own neat white cotton stockings, which her situation at the theatre had made it indispensable for her mother to provide for her, with hard straining and pinching from the family stock, and thought how glad she should be to cover their poor feet with the same-and how then they could accompany her to rehearsals, which they had hitherto been precluded from doing, by reason of their unfashionable attire, in these thoughts she reached the second landing-place-the second, I mean, from the top-for there was still

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I have heard her say that it was a surprise, not much short of mortification to her, to see the coolness with which the old man pocketed the difference, which had caused her such mortal throes.

This anecdote of herself I had in the year 1800, from the mouth of the late Mrs. Crawford,* then sixty-seven years of age (she died soon after); and to her struggles upon this childish occasion I have sometimes ventured to think her indebted for that power of rending the heart in the representation of conflicting emotions, for which in after years she was considered as little inferior (if at all so in the part of Lady Randolph) even to Mrs. Siddons.

The maiden name of this lady was Street, which

she changed by successive marriages, for those of Dancer, Barry, and Crawford. She was Mrs. Crawford, a third time a widow, when I knew her.

THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY,

IN A LETTER TO R-8

ESQ.

THOUGH in some points of doctrine, and perhaps of discipline, I am diffident of lending a perfect assent to that church which you have so worthily historified, yet may the ill time never come to me, when with a chilled heart or a portion of irreverent sentiment, I shall enter her beautiful and time-hallowed Edifices. Judge, then, of my

mortification when, after attending the choral anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous of renewing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, with the tombs and antiquities there, I found myself excluded; turned out, like a dog, or some profane person, into the common street, with feelings not very congenial to the place, or

to the solemn service which I had been listening to. It was a jar after that music.

silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it? In no part of our beloved Abbey now You had your education at Westminster; can a person find entrance (out of service and doubtless among those dim aisles and time) under the sum of two shillings. The cloisters, you must have gathered much of rich and the great will smile at the antithat devotional feeling in those young years, climax, presumed to lie in these two short on which your purest mind feeds still- and words. But you can tell them, sir, how may it feed! The antiquarian spirit, strong much quiet worth, how much capacity for in you, and gracefully blending ever with enlarged feeling, how much taste and genius, the religious, may have been sown in you may coexist, especially in youth, with a among those wrecks of splendid mortality. purse 'incompetent to this demand. A You owe it to the place of your education; respected friend of ours, during his late visit you owe it to your learned fondness for the to the metropolis, presented himself for architecture of your ancestors; you owe it admission to St. Paul's. At the same time a to the venerableness of your ecclesiastical decently clothed man, with as decent a wife establishment, which is daily lessened and and child, were bargaining for the same called in question through these practices- indulgence. The price was only two-pence to speak aloud your sense of them; never to each person. The poor but decent man desist raising your voice against them, till hesitated, desirous to go in; but there were they be totally done away with and abolished; three of them, and he turned away reluctill the doors of Westminster Abbey be no tantly. Perhaps he wished to have seen the longer closed against the decent, though tomb of Nelson. Perhaps the Interior of low-in-purse, enthusiast, or blameless devotee, who must commit an injury against his family economy, if he would be indulged with a bare admission within its walls. You owe it to the decencies, which you wish to see maintained, in its impressive services, that our Cathedral be no longer an object of inspection to the poor at those times only, in which they must rob from their attendance on the worship every minute which they can bestow upon the fabric. In vain the public prints have taken up this subject,-in vain such poor, nameless writers as myself express their indignation. A word from you, sir,-a hint in your journal would be sufficient to fling open the doors of the Beautiful Temple again, as we can remember them when we were boys. At that time of life, what would the imaginative faculty (such as it is) in both of us, have suffered, if the entrance to so much reflection had been obstructed by the demand of so much silver! If we had scraped it up to gain an occasional admission For forty years that I have known the (as we certainly should have done) would Fabric, the only well-attested charge of the sight of those old tombs have been as violation adduced, has been a ridiculous impressive to us (while we have been dismemberment committed upon the effigy weighing anxiously prudence against senti- of that amiable spy, Major André. And is ment) as when the gates stood open as those it for this- the wanton mischief of some of the adjacent Park; when we could walk school-boy, fired perhaps with raw notions in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a of Transatlantic Freedom - or the remote shorter or longer time, as that lasted? Is possibility of such a mischief occurring again, the being shown over a place the same as so easily to be prevented by stationing a

the Cathedral was his object. But in the state of his finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem too much. Tell the Aristocracy of the country (no man can do it more impressively); instruct them of what value these insignificant pieces of money, these minims to their sight, may be to their humbler brethren. Shame these Sellers out of the Temple. Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature with the pretext, that an indiscriminate admission would expose the Tombs to violation. Remember your boydays. Did you ever see, or hear, of a mob in the Abbey, while it was free to all? Do the rabble come there, or trouble their heads about such speculations? It is all that you can do to drive them into your churches; they do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, alas! no passion for antiquities; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet, If they had, they would be no longer the rabble.

constable within the walls, if the vergers are themselves with contemplating the ragged incompetent to the duty-is it upon such Exterior of their Cathedral? The mischief wretched pretences that the people of was done about the time that you were a England are made to pay a new Peter's scholar there. Do you know anything about Pence, so long abrogated; or must content the unfortunate relic?—

AMICUS REDIVIVUS.

Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep

Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?

I Do not know when I have experienced a | on,- shall I confess?-in this emergency it stranger sensation, than on seeing my old was to me as if an Angel had spoken. Great friend, G. D., who had been paying me a previous exertions —and mine had not been morning visit, a few Sundays back, at my inconsiderable are commonly followed by a cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, debility of purpose. This was a moment of instead of turning down the right-hand path irresolution. by which he had entered-with staff in hand, and at noonday, deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear.

A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling enough; but in the broad, open daylight, to witness such an unreserved motion towards self-destruction in a valued friend, took from me all power of speculation. How I found my feet I know not. Consciousness was quite gone. Some spirit, not my own, whirled me to the spot. I remember nothing but the silvery apparition of a good white head emerging; nigh which a staff (the hand unseen that wielded it) pointed upwards, as feeling for the skies. In a moment (if time was in that time) he was on my shoulders; and I-freighted with a load more precious than his who bore Anchises.

MONOCULUS for so, in default of catching his true name, I choose to designate the medical gentleman who now appeared — is a grave, middle-aged person, who, without having studied at the college, or truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath employed a great portion of his valuable time in experimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct and lost for ever. He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of common surfeit suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too-wilful application of the plant cannabis outwardly. But though he declineth not altogether these drier extinctions, his occupation tendeth, for the most part, to waterpractice: for the convenience of which, he hath judiciously fixed his quarters near the And here I cannot but do justice to the grand repository of the stream mentioned, officious zeal of sundry passers by, who, where day and night, from his little watchalbeit arriving a little too late to participate tower, at the Middleton's Head, he listeneth in the honours of the rescue, in philanthropic to detect the wrecks of drowned mortality— shoals came thronging to communicate their partly, as he saith, to be upon the spot - and advice as to the recovery; prescribing partly, because the liquids which he useth to variously the application, or non-application, prescribe to himself and his patients, on of salt, &c., to the person of the patient. these distressing occasions, are ordinarily Life, meantime, was ebbing fast away, more conveniently to be found at these comamidst the stifle of conflicting judgments, mon hostelries than in the shops and phials when one, more sagacious than the rest, by of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived a bright thought, proposed sending for the to such finesse by practice, that it is reported Doctor. Trite as the counsel was, and he can distinguish a plunge, at half a furlong impossible, as one should think, to be missed distance; and can tell if it be casual or