At this the auditors tittered; and Mr. Cibber had recourse to his spy-glass. This gentleman was satirical or insolent, as the case might demand, in three degrees, of which the snuff-box was the comparative, and the spy-glass the superlative. He had learned this on the stage; in annihilating Quin he had just used the snuff weapon, and now he drew his spy-glass upon poor Peggy. “Whom have we here?” said he. Then he looked with his spy-glass to see. “Oh, the little Irish orange-girl!” “Whose basket outweighed Colley Cibber's salary for the first twenty years of his dramatic career,” was the delicate reply to the above delicate remark. It staggered him for a moment; however, he affected a most puzzled air, then gradually allowed a light to steal into his features. “Eh! ah! oh! how stupid I am; I understand; you sold something besides oranges!” “Oh!” said Mr. Vane, and colored up to the temples, and cast a look on Cibber, as much as to say, “If you were not seventy-three!” His ejaculation was something so different from any tone any other person there present could have uttered that the actress's eye dwelt on him for a single moment, and in that moment he felt himself looked through and through. “I sold the young fops a bargain, you mean,” was her calm reply; “and now I am come down to the old ones. A truce, Mr. Cibber, what do you understand by an actor? Tell me; for I am foolish enough to respect your opinion on these matters!” “An actor, young lady,” said he, gravely, “is an artist who has gone deep enough in his art to make dunces, critics and greenhorns take it for nature; moreover, he really personates; which your mere _man of the stage_ never does. He has learned the true art of self-multiplication. He drops Betterton, Booth, Wilkes, or, ahem--” “Cibber,” inserted Sir Charles Pomander. Cibber bowed. “In his dressing-room, and comes out young or old, a fop, a valet, a lover, or a hero, with voice, mien, and every gesture to match. A grain less than this may be good speaking, fine preaching, deep grunting, high ranting, eloquent reciting; but I'll be hanged if it is acting!” “Then Colley Cibber never acted,” whispered Quin to Mrs. Clive. “Then Margaret Woffington is an actress,” said M. W.; “the fine ladies take my Lady Betty for their sister. In Mrs. Day, I pass for a woman of seventy; and in Sir Harry Wildair I have been taken for a man. I would have told you that before, but I didn't know it was to my credit,” said she, slyly, “till Mr. Cibber laid down the law.” “Proof!” said Cibber. “A warm letter from one lady, diamond buckles from another, and an offer of her hand and fortune from a third; _rien que cela.”_ Mr. Cibber conveyed behind her back a look of absolute incredulity; she divined it.