Mrs. Siddons met Katherine Galindo, author of the libel, at the theatre in Dublin. She was a subordinate actress, and her husband a fencing-master. It is difficult to understand how she can have become so intimate, except that her own perfect sincerity and openness led her to bestow confidence on a variety of persons, many of them not in any way worthy of it. Her daughter, Cecilia, who later wrote _Recollections_ of her mother, says that, instead of being hard and calculating, as the outside public imagined, her mother was, on the contrary, too easy—too much disposed to be ruled by people inferior in every way to herself, credulous to an extraordinary extent, always trusting to appearances, and never willing to suspect anyone. Perhaps, also, the great actress’s weakness was a wish to “make use” of people, and a love of flattery—both dangerous qualities for a woman in her position, laying her open, as they did, to the machinations of adventurers. Be it as it may, we are astounded at the girlish sentimentality of the letters she wrote to the Galindos. Allowing even for the Laura Matilda style of expression of the period, they show the substratum of romanticism that underlies her character. The Galindos accompanied her to Cork, and then to Killarney. Mrs. Siddons used all her influence to induce Harris, of Covent Garden, to give Mrs. Galindo an engagement; but Kemble, when he arrived from abroad, refused to ratify it. A letter from Mrs. Inchbald says:— “When Kemble returned from Spain in 1803, he came to me like a madman, said Mrs. Siddons had been imposed upon by persons whom it was a disgrace to her to _know_, and he begged me to explain it so to her. He requested Harris to withdraw his promise of his engaging Mrs. G. at Mrs. Siddons’s request. Yet such was his tenderness to his sister’s sensibility, that he would not undeceive her himself. Mr. Kemble blamed me, and I blamed him for his reserve, and I have never been so cordial since. Nor,” ends Mrs. Inchbald, with the prim self-sufficiency quite consistent with what we know of the “dear Muse,” “have I ever admired Mrs. Siddons so much since; for, though I can pity a dupe, I must also despise one. Even to be familiar with such people was a lack of virtue, though not of chastity.” We read later in Rogers’s _Table Talk_ that, not long before Mrs. Inchbald’s death he met her walking near Charing Cross, and we are not astonished to be told that she had been calling on several old friends, but had seen none of them—some being really not at home, and others denying themselves to her. “I called,” she said, “on Mrs. Siddons. I knew _she_ was at home, yet I was not admitted.”