generosity in supplying “properties” from her own wardrobe. There were some, however, that even the Honourable Miss Boyle did not possess. For the male habiliments of the Widow Brady, the young actress found on the night of the performance that no provision had been made. The story goes that a gentleman politely left the box where he was seated, lent her his coat, and stood in the side-scenes with a petticoat over his shoulders until his property was restored to him. Whether this courteous individual was Lord Aylesbury we are not told, but we know that he was one of Miss Boyle’s party. The particular fascination of Mrs. Siddons’s acting in those early days was its simplicity and pathos, which, united with remarkable beauty and power of expression, gained the hearts of all rustic audiences. Her talent, however, seems to have been singularly immature, considering the continual practice she had enjoyed, almost from her cradle, in stage affairs. Rachel reached the summit of her power at seventeen, Mrs. Siddons not until she was thirty. She herself confesses later, in the account she gives of her first reading of _Macbeth_: “Being then only twenty years of age, I believed, as many others do believe, that little more was necessary than to get the words into my head; for the necessity of discrimination, and the development of character, at that time of my life, had scarcely entered into my imagination.” The power of drawing tears, however, was already hers, and rumours of the charm and beauty of the young actress had been wafted to London, reaching even the ears of the great Garrick himself. Mrs. Siddons tells us, in her Autograph Recollections: “Mr. King, by order of Mr. Garrick, who had heard some account of me from the Aylesbury family, came to Cheltenham to see me in the _Fair Penitent_. I knew neither Mr. King nor his purpose at the time.” Neither did she know of the second emissary whom Garrick sent, the Rev. Henry Bate, who in 1781 took the name of Dudley, and was afterwards made a canon and a baronet; a bruising, muscular clergyman of the old school, who fought duels one moment and wrote “slashing” articles on every subject, “human and divine,” the next. He was well known as a theatrical censor and critic of considerable acumen. We know him by Gainsborough’s portrait, standing in a garden with his dog. It is said that a political opponent remarked that the man wanted “execution” and the dog “hanging.” We find Garrick continually sending him on theatrical errands. We give the letters he wrote about Mrs. Siddons very nearly in their entirety, on account of their characteristic quaint humour and shrewd power of observation; and also because they to a certain degree exonerate Garrick from some of the charges brought against him by Mrs. Siddons:— MY DEAR FRIEND,