“In all the crowded theater, care and pain and poverty were banished from the memory, while Oldfield's face spoke, and her tongue flashed melodies; the lawyer forgot his quillets; the polemic, the mote in his brother's eye; the old maid, her grudge against the two sexes; the old man, his gray hairs and his lost hours. And can it be, that all this which should have been immortal, is quite--quite lost, is as though it had never been?” he sighed. “Can it be that its fame is now sustained by me; who twang with my poor lute, cracked and old, these feeble praises of a broken lyre: 'Whose wires were golden and its heavenly air More tunable than lark to shepherd's ear, When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.'” He paused, and his eye looked back over many years. Then, with a very different tone, he added: “And that Jack Falstaff there must have seen her, now I think on't.” “Only once, sir,” said Quin, “and I was but ten years old.” “He saw her once, and he was ten years old; yet he calls Woffington a great comedian, and my son The's wife, with her hatchet face, the greatest tragedian he ever saw! Jemmy, what an ass you must be!” “Mrs. Cibber always makes me cry, and t'other always makes me laugh,” said Quin, stoutly, “that's why.” _Ce beau raisonnement_ met no answer, but a look of sovereign contempt. A very trifling incident saved the ladies of the British stage from further criticism. There were two candles in this room, one on each side; the call-boy had entered, and, poking about for something, knocked down and broke one of these. “Awkward imp!” cried a velvet page. “I'll go _to the Treasury_ for another, ma'am,” said the boy pertly, and vanished with the fractured wax. I take advantage of the interruption to open Mr. Vane's mind to the reader. First he had been astonished at the freedom of sarcasm these people indulged in without quarreling; next at the non-respect of sex. “So sex is not recognized in this community,” thought he. Then the glibness and merit of some of their answers surprised and amused him. He, like me, had seldom met an imaginative repartee, except in a play or a book. “Society's” repartees were then, as they are now, the good old tree in various dresses and veils: _Tu quoque, tu mentiris, vos damnemini;_ but he was sick and dispirited on the whole; such very bright illusions had been dimmed in these few minutes. She was brilliant; but her manners, if not masculine, were very daring; and yet when she spoke to him, a stranger, how sweet and gentle her voice was! Then it was clear nothing but his ignorance could have placed her at the summit of her art. Still he clung to his enthusiasm for her. He drew Pomander aside. “What a simplicity there is in Mrs. Woffington!” said he; “the rest, male and female, are all so affected; she is so fresh and natural. They are all hot-house plants; she is a cowslip with the May dew on it.”