Tom Brown taxed her with mercenary feelings; but against that and the humour of writers who affected intimate acquaintance with her affairs of the heart and purse, and as intimate a knowledge of the amount which Sir George Etherege and Lord Rochester bequeathed to their respective daughters, of whom Mrs. Barry was the mother, she was armed. Neither of these children survived the "famous actress." She herself hardly survived Betterton--at least on the stage. The day after the great tragedian's final appearance, Mrs. Barry trod the stage for the last time. The place was the old Haymarket, the play the "Spanish Friar," in which she enacted the Queen. And I can picture to myself the effect of the famous passage, when the Queen impetuously betrays her overwhelming love. "Haste, my Teresa, haste; and call him back!" "Prince Bertram?" asks the confidant; and then came the full burst, breaking through all restraint, and revealing a woman who seemed bathed in love. "_Torrismond!_ There is no other HE!" Mrs. Barry took no formal leave of the stage, but quietly withdrew from St. Mary-le-Savoy, in the Strand, to the pleasant village of Acton. Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Rogers, Mrs. Knight, and Mrs. Bradshaw, succeeded to her theatrical dominion, by partition of her characters. If tragedy lost its queen, Acton gained a wealthy lady. Her professional salary had not been large, but her "benefits" were very productive; they who admired the actress or who loved the woman, alike pouring out gold and jewels in her lap. It was especially for her that performers' benefits were first devised. Authors alone had hitherto profited by such occasions, but, in recognition of her merit, King James commanded one to be given on her behalf, and what was commenced as a compliment soon passed into a custom. In a little more than three years from the date when the curtain fell before her for the last time, Elizabeth Barry died. Brief resting season after such years of toil; but, perhaps, sufficient for better ends after a career, too, of unbridled pleasure! "This great actress," says Cibber, "dy'd of a fever, towards the latter years of Queen Anne; the year I have forgot, but perhaps you will recollect it, by an expression that fell from her in blank verse, in her last hours, when she was delirious, viz.-- "Ha! ha! and so they make us lords, by dozens!" This, however, does not settle the year so easily as Colley thought. In December 1711, Queen Anne, by an unprecedented act, created twelve new peers, to enable the measures of her Tory ministers to be carried in the Upper House. Mrs. Barry died two years later, on the 7th of November 1713, and the utterance of the words quoted above only indicates that her wandering memory was then dealing with incidents full two years old. [Illustration: (Elizabeth Barry.)]