fellow!' said Incledon blandly, '_that_ has satisfied thousands--let it _satisfy_ you;' and, putting out his hand, it was as generously taken as it was offered. Some accounts give Incledon three wives, others two; but those who are at all acquainted with the history of the stage, seventy or eighty years ago, will admit that this is a point upon which Incledon himself might possibly not have been very clear. There was one 'Mrs. Incledon,' however, who, like the songster himself, was very fond of good living; and there is a story that once, when Incledon was entertaining at dinner, at his house, No. 13, Brompton Crescent, his friend and medical adviser, Dr. Moseley of Chelsea Hospital, and two or three others, the dish of fish was artfully so arranged that a fine dory (to which the host and hostess were both very partial) was completely overlaid by herrings; and it was not until the guests had all been helped to the humbler fish, that the gourmands' favourite was--as if by accident--discovered. On this memorable occasion we hear that 'pink _and_ white champagne' were handed round; that on its production, the trio 'Beviamo tutte tre' was sung by Shield, Parkes, and Incledon, with appropriate action; and that, when the conversation turned upon the sort of deaths which the Chelsea veterans died, Incledon, delighted with Dr. Moseley's satisfactory account of them, got up and persuaded all who were present to join in singing Dr. Callcott's noble glee, 'Peace to the Souls of the Heroes!' Incledon, though he made plenty of money, was often pecuniarily embarrassed, owing no doubt to that 'lax and sailor-like twist of mind' which, as Leigh Hunt says, always hung about him. An instance of this occurs in a letter preserved among the Egerton MSS., in which Incledon, writing to the magniloquent George Robins, from Ipswich, in February, 1816, tells how he had been arrested a few days before, at Colchester, for £19, by a Mr. Marriot of Fleet Street, for the balance of a bill of over £100. The singer had recently taken a house, and had been put to great expense in furnishing it; and his object in writing to Robins was to get him to contradict, in London, the report that 'Incledon was about to fly from the kingdom.' He adds that he was then going on to Norwich, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Dublin, and finishes by saying that his wife was with him, and that his being 'arrested has given my Poor Little Woman so great a Shock that she will not soon get over. She is now very Ill, and continually in Tears.' He nevertheless was supposed[50] to have been worth £8,000 when he died, leaving this third wife a widow with three children. He was buried in Hampstead churchyard, on the 20th February, 1826, aged sixty-four, by the side of his first and second wives, and five of their children. So lived and so died Charley Incledon--'generous as a prince,' as Charles Mathews wrote of him, 'never ashamed of his antecedents;' and as Dowton says,