her with funds, with which she opened a tavern in Drury Lane, where, after a brief career of success, she again became bankrupt. To the regular stage she once more returned, under her brother, Theophilus, at the Haymarket: but the Lord Chamberlain closed the house, and Charlotte Charke took to working the wires of Russell's famous puppets in the Great Room, still existing in Brewer Street. There was a gleam of good fortune for her, but it soon faded away; and then for nine wretched years this clever but most wretched of women struggled frantically for bare existence, amongst the most wretched of strollers, with whom she endured unmitigated misery. And yet, Cibber's erring and hapless daughter contrived to reach London, where, in 1755, she published her remarkable autobiography, the details of which make the heart ache, in spite of the small sympathy of the reader for this half-mad creature. On the profits of this book, she was enabled to open, as _landlord_, a tavern at Islington; but of course, ruin ensued; and in a hut, amid the cinder-heaps and worse refuse, in the desolate fields, she found a refuge, and even wrote a novel on a pair of bellows in her lap, by way of desk. Here she lived with a squalid hand-maiden, a cat, dog, magpie, and monkey. Humbled, disconsolate, abandoned, she readily accepted from a publisher who visited her 10_l._ for her manuscript. This was at the close of the year 1755, and I do not meet with her again till 1759, two years after her father's death, when she played Marplot in _The Busy Body_, for her own benefit at the Haymarket, with this advertisement: 'As I am entirely dependent on chance for a subsistence, and desirous of getting into business, I humbly hope the town will favour me on the occasion, which, added to the rest of their indulgences, will be ever gratefully acknowledged by their truly obliged and obedient servant, Charlotte Charke.' She died on the 6th of April, 1760." [Illustration: Charlotte Charke. After Boitard.] She "is said to have once given imitations of her father on the stage; to have presented a pistol at, and robbed him on the highway, and to have smeared his face with a pair of soles out of her own basket." An Eccentric Love-Passage.