"For physic and farces, his equal there scarce is; His farces are physic, his physic a farce is!" So wrote Garrick of Hill, who was a clever man, but one who lacked tact and judgment, and got buffeted by men who had not a tithe of his zeal and industry. His chief defect lay in his intolerable conceit. [Illustration: (Mrs. Yates)] Dodsley's "Cleone," rejected by Garrick, became the distinction of the Covent Garden season of 1758-59. Ross played Sifroy, and Mrs. Bellamy the heroine. As a counter-attraction, Garrick essayed Marplot, in vain. "Cleone" is a romantic tragedy. The time is that of the Saracenic invasion of the south of France, and the story bears close resemblance to the legend of St. Genevieve, where a faithful young wife and mother suffers under unmerited charges of treason to her absent husband and her home. The author extended his drama from three acts to five, at the suggestion of Pope. Dr. Johnson subsequently looked upon it as the noblest effort made since the time of Otway! and Lord Chesterfield contributed advice which shows that stage-French was not of the best quality in those days. "You should instruct the actors," he said, "not to mouth out the _oy_ in the name of Sifroy as though they were crying _oysters_." "People," writes Gray to Mason, "who depised 'Cleone' in manuscript, went to see it, and confess '_they cried so!_'" Dodsley, after some flatness, "piled the agony" skilfully, and Mrs. Bellamy made hearts ache and eyes weep, for many successive glorious and melancholy nights. The stage lost Mrs. Macklin this year, such an "old woman" as it was not to see again till the period of Mrs. Davenport. In October 1759,[83] too, Theophilus Cibber satisfied people that he was not born to be hanged. With Lord Drogheda and his son, Harlequin Mattocks,[84] Miss Wilkinson the wire-dancer, and a shipload of frippery, he was crossing the Irish Sea from Parkgate to Dublin, when the vessel was caught in a gale, and went down with all on board. Such was the end of a fair player and a sad rogue. Somewhere off the Scottish coast, whither the ship had been blown, perished Ancient Pistol, and the original George Barnwell. His sire, wife, and sister bore the calamity which had fallen upon him with philosophical equanimity. On the retirement of Barry from London, Garrick travelled abroad, for a year, to recruit his health.[85] All the intervening time, till Barry returned, has the appearance of a season of truce. No great tragic actor arose to seize the wreath of either of the absent tragedians, though the town was seduced from its respective allegiances, for a moment, by the advent and bright promise of young Powell; and Walpole was eager to recognise a greater than Garrick in the aspiring city clerk.