As Sir Thomas Overbury remarked of a great player, his voice was never lower than the prompter's nor higher than the foil and target. But let us be silent, here comes the gentle Ophelia. The audience generally took an interest in this lady, and the royal Dane, for there was not one in the house who was ignorant of the love-passages there had been between them, or of the coming marriage by which they were to receive additional warrant. Mistress Saunderson was a lady worthy of all the homage here implied. There was mind in her acting; and she not only possessed personal beauty, but also the richer beauty of a virtuous life. They were a well-matched couple on and off the stage; and their mutual affection was based on a mutual respect and esteem. People thought of them together, as inseparable, and young ladies wondered how Mr. Betterton could play Mercutio, and leave Mistress Saunderson as Juliet, to be adored by the not ineffective Mr. Harris as Romeo! The whole house, as long as the incomparable pair were on the stage, were in a dream of delight. Their grace, perfection, good looks, the love they had so cunningly simulated, and that which they were known to mutually entertain, formed the theme of all tongues. In its discussion, the retiring audience forgot the disinterring of the regicides, and the number of men killed the other day on Tower Hill, servants of the French and Spanish ambassadors, in a bloody struggle for precedency, which was ultimately won by the Don! Fifty years after these early triumphs, an aged couple resided in one of the best houses in Russell Street, Covent Garden,--the walls of which were covered with pictures, prints, and drawings, selected with taste and judgment. They were still a handsome pair. The venerable lady, indeed, looks pale and somewhat saddened. The gleam of April sunshine which penetrates the apartment cannot win her from the fire. She is Mrs. Betterton, and ever and anon she looks with a sort of proud sorrow on her aged husband. His fortune, nobly earned, has been diminished by "speculation," but the means whereby he achieved it are his still, and Thomas Betterton, in the latter years of Queen Anne, is the chief glory of the stage, even as he was in the first year of King Charles. The lofty column, however, is a little shaken. It is not a ruin, but is beautiful in its decay. Yet that it should decay at all is a source of so much tender anxiety to the actor's wife, that her senses suffer disturbance, and there may be seen in her features something of the distraught Ophelia of half a century ago.