One of the oddest, most attractive, and most original women of the last century was Elizabeth Simpson, a Suffolk girl, who ran away from her home, where she was never taught anything, at the age of sixteen, to make her fortune, and to win fame. In both cases she succeeded, though not so soon as she could have wished. Failing to touch the hard heart of the manager of the Norwich Theatre, a Welshman of the name of Griffiths, she packed up her things in a bandbox, and, good-looking and audacious, landed herself on the Holborn pavement. ‘By the time you receive this,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘I shall leave Standingfield perhaps for ever. You are surprised, but be not uneasy; believe the step I have undertaken is indiscreet, but by no means criminal, unless I sin by not acquainting you with it. I now endure every pang, am not lost to every feeling, on thus quitting the tenderest and best of parents, I would say most beloved, too, but cannot prove my affection, yet time may. To that I must submit my hope of retaining your regard. The censures of the world I despise, as the most worthy incur the reproaches of that. Should I ever think you will wish to hear from me I will write.’ A pretty, unprotected, unknown girl of sixteen, in London, had, we can well believe, no easy time of it. Strangers followed her in the street, people insulted her in the theatre, suspicious landladies looked her up. Happily, a brother-in-law met her in a penniless state and took her home. Unhappily, at his house she met Inchbald, an indifferent and badly-paid actor. They were immediately married, and the girl rejoiced to think that she was an actress, and about to realize the ambition of her youth. It was no small part which the Suffolk girl felt herself qualified to fill. On the 4th of September, 1772, she made her début as Cordelia to her husband’s Lear. In 1821 Mrs. Inchbald, famed for her ‘simple story,’ which took the town by storm, was buried in Kensington Churchyard. But before she got there she had to endure much. At that time theatrical performers were much worse paid than they are now, when, as Mr. Irving tells us, any decent-looking young man, with a good suit of clothes, can command his five or six pounds a week. Mrs. Inchbald and her husband had to drink of the cup of poverty, and its consequent degradation, to the dregs. On one occasion they took it into their heads to go to France, believing that they could make money—he by painting, she by writing. The scheme, as was to be expected, did not answer, and they were landed on their return somewhere near Brighton, in the September of 1776, literally without a crust of bread. On one occasion it was stated that they dined off raw turnips, stolen from a field as they wandered past. Next year, however, the world began to mend so far as they were concerned.