To return, however, to the Galindos. The wretched woman was stung to the quick by the withdrawal of her engagement at Covent Garden, and although Mrs. Siddons advanced a thousand pounds to the husband to buy a share in a provincial theatre, and showed them much kindness, the jealous and infuriated wife published in pamphlet form a wild and libellous attack on the great actress, to which she added the letters that had passed between them in their days of intimacy. By artfully turning and suppressing sentences here and there, she succeeded in giving a significance never intended in the originals. Although she said she had advanced nothing but what she could substantiate by the most certain evidence, if called upon to do so, she gave no proof whatever except of her own wild jealousy and unreasoning disappointment at being refused an engagement at Covent Garden. It seems incredible that a woman of Mrs. Siddons’s social knowledge can have been so imprudent as to enter into such an intimacy, and to write in such a strain of deep affection to people she had known only so short a time. The following is a specimen:— “Holyhead, Sunday, 12 o’clock. “For some hours we had scarce a breath of wind, and the vessel seemed to leave your coast as unwillingly as your poor friend. About six o’clock this morning the snowy tops of the mountains appeared; they chilled my heart, for I felt that they were emblematic of the cold and dreary prospect before me. Mr. ⸺ has been very obliging; he has just left us, but it is probable we shall meet again upon the road. I thought you would be glad to know we were safely landed. I will hope, my beloved friends, for a renewal of the days we have known, and in the meantime endeavour to amuse and cheer my melancholy with the recollection of _past joys_, though they be ‘sweet and mournful to the soul.’ “God bless you all, and do not forget “Your faithful, affectionate, “S. SIDDONS.” A little later she writes:— “Pray ask Mr. G⸺ to send me those sweet lines ‘To Hope’—that which he gave me is almost effaced by my tears—and let it be written by the same hand. I could never describe what I have lost in you, my beloved friends, and the sweet angel that is gone for ever! Good God! what a deprivation in a few days. Adieu! Adieu!”