Devonshire Characters and Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Devonshire Characters and Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Devon (England) -- Biography; Devon (England) -- History
What is your fortune, my pretty maid?
My face is my fortune, sir, she said,
a burst of acclamation was sent forth, almost equal to that which
greeted her entrance. The two lines which succeeded were, if possible,
still more applicable to recent events, which have occupied so much of
the attention of the Bar and of the public.
Then I’ll not marry you, my pretty maid.
There’s nobody asking you, sir, she said.
The good-humoured approval that followed these lines, which was in no
degree abated by the arch air with which Miss Foote gave them, cannot
be conveyed by verbal description. At the expression of the sentence,
‘This moment is worth a whole existence,’ Miss Foote bowed to the
audience in grateful acknowledgment of the reception she had met with.
Altogether Miss Foote’s reappearance has been most gratifying. She has
been hailed as a favourite of the public, who has been basely lured
from virtue, but who is not on that account treated as an alien from
its path.”
The total receipts that evening amounted to £900. 16s. At the latter
end of 1830, Madame Vestris took the Olympic Theatre, and opened it, on
3 January of the following year, with a drama on the subject of Mary
Queen of Scots, in which Miss Foote, who appears for a time to have
been in partnership with her, played the heroine. But she soon after
quitted the stage, and on 7 April, 1831, was married to the eccentric
Charles Stanhope, eighth Earl of Harrington and Viscount Petersham. He
was aged fifty-one and she aged thirty-three. They had one daughter; he
died in 1851, and she, as Dowager Countess of Harrington, lived until
27 December, 1867.
Mrs. Bancroft, in _On and Off the Stage_ (London, 1888), gives us a
pleasant recollection of Maria Foote in her old age as Dowager Countess
of Harrington.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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