These are remarkably scanty. Of the life of the fascinating woman much remains in mystery. Of the achievements of the actress there is what is called, in stilted language, ‘a consensus of opinion,’ but singularly little of definite chronicle. Certain passages in the _Spectator_ discuss the appropriateness of her delivery of a comic epilogue to a tragic play--for it was the fate of Mrs. Oldfield to act Tragedy sometimes, though she preferred, upon the whole, that the management should ‘give such things to Porter’--and a few other contemporary allusions to her were printed in her day; but her day was before the era of very penetrating criticism, either professional or not professional: no Lamb, no Hazlitt, had the chance of making her a peg for whimsicality or pungent brilliance; and the appreciative amateur who, a generation before her, had, in the diary that the world cherishes, chronicled his sense of the delightfulness of Mrs. Knipp and of Nell Gwynne--‘all unready, pretty, prettier than I thought’--was deprived by Fate of the occasion of waxing cordial over the personal grace of Mrs. Oldfield. Accordingly, we receive from an industrious American a volume written ‘round’ Mrs. Oldfield, rather than actually about her. We cannot altogether blame him for it. We do blame him for once or twice slinking away, as it were, from the evidence of his own, perhaps unavoidable, ignorance, under cover of propriety and a regard for the conventionalities. Of this nature is his exceedingly slight treatment of the possible existence of a daughter of the actress; but he had already brought himself to chronicle some particulars of two sons--and this was perhaps as much as we could expect. Mrs. Oldfield was never married. Her time looked leniently upon such freedom as she took in love affairs; and the transference of her affection was neither frequent nor brutal. She was a woman of impulse and of sensibility and of magnetic charm. Men who ‘dined with Walpole’ passed on without a trace of consciousness of inferiority in her companionship to the agreeable converse of Oldfield. She was as kind as she was pleasant. She relieved Savage, who rose to excellence in the verses penned by him on her demise. She was endowed with common sense, which is frequently possessed, though not invariably exercised, by people of genius. She was nice to the humblest, and she walked with Royalty on the slopes of Windsor. Brought up in a third-rate street in Westminster and in a tavern in St. James’s Market, she died at her house in Grosvenor Street, in only middle age, and left a comfortable fortune to the two youths born of her connection with distinguished and superior men. Such, briefly, was the woman--mercurial, gay, and charming; bringing tears, bringing laughter, never bringing regret. Would that it were possible to write even as definitely as that of the actress and of the method of her art!