Again, if he were vain, he could put on a charming appearance of humility. Lord Lyttleton had suggested to him that, as a member of Parliament, he might turn his powers of eloquence to patriotic account. Such a suggestion would have fired many a man's ambition--it only stirred Garrick to write the following lines: "More than content with what my labours gain; Of public favour tho' a little vain; Yet not so vain my mind, so madly bent, To wish to play the fool in Parliament; In each dramatic unity to err, Mistaking TIME, and PLACE, and CHARACTER! Were it my fate to quit the mimic art, I'd 'strut and fret' no more, in _any_ part; No more in public scenes would I engage, Or wear the cap and mask, on any stage." Burke said of Garrick, that he was the first of actors, because he was the most acute observer of nature that Burke ever knew. Garrick disliked characters in which there was a "lofty disregard of nature;" yet he resembled Mrs. Siddons in believing that if a part seemed at all _within_ nature, it was not to be doubted but that a great actor could make something out of it. Garrick's repertory extended to less than one hundred characters, of which he was the original representative of thirty-six. Compared with the half century of labour of Betterton, and the number of his original characters, Garrick's toil seems but mere pastime. In his first season, on that little but steep stage at Goodman's Fields, so steep, it is said, that a ghost in real armour, ascending on a trap, once lost his balance and rolled down to the orchestra, Garrick seems to have been uncertain whether his vocation lay more with tragedy or with comedy. In that season he repeated his comic characters eighty-four times; he appeared but fifty nights in a repetition of half-a-dozen tragic parts.[113] In the sum of the years of his acting, the increase of number is slightly on the side of the latter, while, of his original characters, twenty belong to tragedy, and sixteen to comedy. After he had been two-and-twenty years on the stage, Garrick undertook no new study. Of his original characters, the best remembered in stage traditions are, Sharp, in the "Lying Valet," Tancred, Fribble, Ranger, Beverley, Achmet ("Barbarossa"), Oroonoko (in the altered play), Lovemore ("Way to Keep Him"), and Oakley, in the "Jealous Wife." Of these, only Beverley and Oakley can be said to still survive. Of Garrick and his labours I have now said enough; let us follow him thither where he found repose from the latter, in company with one whom many of us, who are not yet old, may remember to have seen in our early youth, the Mrs. Garrick who is said to have told Edmund Kean that he could not play Abel Drugger, and to have been answered by Edmund, "Dear madam, I know it!"