In the evening we had Mrs. Lambart, who brought us a tale called _Edwy and Edilda_, by the sentimental Mr. Whalley, and unreadably soft and tender and senseless is it. He was of the soft and tender school; Miss Seward’s heart “vibrates to every sentence of his last charming letter”; they indulge in the “communication of responsive ideas”; and on leaving Bath she thus addresses him:— Edwy, farewell! To Lichfield’s darkened grove, With aching heart and rising sighs, I go. Yet bear a grateful spirit as I rove, For all of thine which balm’d a cureless woe. We cannot tell whether the “communication of responsive ideas” with so many fair ladies aroused Mrs. Whalley’s jealousy ultimately, or whether incompatibility of temper was the cause, but in 1819 Mrs. Piozzi writes:— I hear wondrous tales of Doctor and Mrs. Whalley; half the town saying he is the party aggrieved, and the other half lamenting the lady’s fate. Two wiseacres sure, old acquaintances of forty years’ standing, and both past seventy years old! When Mrs. Siddons first knew them at Bath, there was evidently nothing of that sort. She writes to him from Bristol:— “I cannot express how much I am honoured by your friendship; therefore you must not expect words, but as much gratitude as can inhabit the bosom of a human being. I hope, with a fervency unusual upon such occasions, that you will not be disappointed in your expectations of me to-night; but sorry am I to say I have often observed that I have performed worst when I most ardently wished to do better than ever. Strange perverseness! And this leads me to observe—as I believe I may have done before—that those who act mechanically are sure to be in some sort right; while we who trust to nature—if we do not happen to be in the humour (which, however, Heaven be praised! seldom happens)—are dull as anything can be imagined, because we cannot feign. But I hope Mrs. Whalley will remember that it was your commendations which she heard, and judge of your praises by the benevolent heart from which they proceed, more than as standards of my deserving. Luckily I have been able to procure places in the front row, next to the stage-box, on the left-hand of you as you go in. These, I hope, will please you.” Meantime, Henderson, who had before so strongly recommended her to the Bath manager, came down for one or two nights and acted Benedict to her Beatrice; returned to London so full of her praises that the managers of Drury Lane made her the offer of an engagement in the summer of 1782. “After my former dismissal from thence,” she says later in her _Memoranda_, “it may be imagined that this was to me a triumphant moment.”