"I wish poor Dick Steele were in health to applaud your play, Mr. Durnford," said the manager. "He was ever generous to a young rival. He would have made the reputation of Savage, had that wild youth been of a less difficult temper. But, alas, Sir Richard is but a wreck, wheeled about in a Bath-chair at his retreat in Shropshire, and with Death walking at his elbow." The play was a success. Mrs. Oldfield, the brilliant, the elegant Nancy Oldfield, the most admired and indulged of her sex, who could violate all the laws of decorum, and yet be received and courted in the politest society, the finest comedy actress in that age of fine acting, condescended to appear in Mr. Durnford's piece, and her performance of a character of the Lady Betty Modish type, with Wilks as her lover, ravished the town. She had more grace, more distinction, than any woman of quality in London; she was the very quintessence of a fine lady, concentrating in her own person all the airs and graces, caprices and _minauderies_, of half a dozen fashionable coquettes, adopting a shrug from one, a wave of the fan from another, a twirl of her hoop from a third--bewitching and enchanting her audience, albeit her beauty had long been on the wane, and she was well over forty. It was the last comedy part she ever studied; and she would scarce have undertaken it but for Mr. Durnford's reputation as a man of some slight fashion, and the bosom friend of Lavendale. Nor was Wilks, the famous Sir Harry Wildair, less admirable as a fine gentleman than Mrs. Oldfield as a fine lady. A young man of good family and liberal education, he had made his _début_ in Dublin the year after the Revolution, and coming thence to London, he had quickly caught the grace and dash of the bucks and bloods of that statelier period. As the periwig shortened and manners relaxed, he had cultivated the more careless style of the Hanoverian era, with all its butterfly graces and audacious swagger. There was an insolent self-assurance in his love-making which delighted the fine ladies of the period, with whom modesty and reverence for womanhood were at a discount. Durnford knew Wilks intimately as a boon companion and as an actor. He had taken the exact measure of the veteran comedian's talents and capacities; and in the middle-aged fop of quality had produced a character which promised to become as popular as Wildair or Lord Townley.