One day, at the end of my sitting, Lawrence showed me a lovely portrait of Mrs. Inchbald, of whom my mother, as we drove home, told me a number of amusing anecdotes. She was very beautiful, and gifted with original genius, as her plays and farces and novels (above all, the "Simple Story") testify; she was not an actress of any special merit, but of respectable mediocrity. She stuttered habitually, but her delivery was never impeded by this defect on the stage; a curious circumstance, not uncommon to persons who have that infirmity, and who can read and recite without suffering from it, though quite unable to speak fluently. Mrs. Inchbald was a person of a very remarkable character, lovely, poor, with unusual mental powers and of irreproachable conduct. Her life was devoted to the care of some dependent relation, who from sickness was incapable of self-support. Mrs. Inchbald had a singular uprightness and unworldliness, and a childlike directness and simplicity of manner, which, combined with her personal loveliness and halting, broken utterance, gave to her conversation, which was both humorous and witty, a most peculiar and comical charm. Once, after traveling all day in a pouring rain, on alighting at her inn, the coachman, dripping all over with wet, offered his arm to help her out of the coach, when she exclaimed, to the great amusement of her fellow-travelers, "Oh, no, no! y-y-y-you will give me m-m-m-my death of c-c-c-cold; do bring me a-a-a-a _dry_ man." An aristocratic neighbor of hers, with whom she was slightly acquainted, driving with his daughter in the vicinity of her very humble suburban residence, overtook her walking along the road one very hot day, and, stopping his carriage, asked her to let him have the pleasure of taking her home; when she instantly declined, with the characteristic excuse that she had just come from the market gardener's: "And, my lord, I-I-I have my pocket f-f-full of onions,"--an unsophisticated statement of facts which made them laugh extremely. At the first reading of one of her pieces, a certain young lady, with rather a lean, lanky figure, being proposed to her for the part of the heroine, she indignantly exclaimed, "No, no, no; I-I-I-I won't have that s-s-s-stick of a girl! D-d-d-do give me a-a-a girl with _bumps!_" Coming off the stage one evening, she was about to sit down by Mrs. Siddons in the green-room, when suddenly, looking at her magnificent neighbor, she said, "No, I won't s-s-s-sit by you; you're t-t-t-too handsome!"--in which respect she certainly need have feared no competition, and less with my aunt than any one, their style of beauty being so absolutely dissimilar. Somebody speaking of having oysters for supper, much surprise was excited by Mrs. Inchbald's saying that she had never eaten one. Questions and remonstrances, exclamations of astonishment, and earnest advice to enlarge her experience in that respect, assailed her from the