Meanwhile, she kept a position on the stage, in the very front rank, disputing pre-eminence with the best there, and achieving it in some things; for this perilous charmer was unequalled in her day for the expression of unbounded and rapturous love. Her looks glowing with the passion to which she gave expression, doubled the effect; and whether she gazed at a lover or rested her head on the bosom of her lord, nothing more tender or subduing was ever seen, save in Mrs. Cibber. She was so beautiful, had eyes of such soft and loving blue, was so extraordinarily fair, and was altogether so irresistible a sorceress, that Mrs. Bellamy was universally loved as a charming creature, and admired as an excellent actress; and when she played some poor lady distraught through affection, the stoutest hearts under embroidered or broad-cloth waistcoats, crumbled away, often into inconceivable mountains of gold-dust. She laughed, and scattered as fast as they piled it, and in the gorgeous extravagance of her life began to lose her powers as an actress. She had once almost shared the throne assumed by Mrs. Cibber, but she wanted the sustained zeal and anxious study of that lady, and cared not, as Mrs. Cibber did, for one quiet abiding home, by whomsoever shared, but sighed for change, had it, and suffered for it. When her powers began to decay, her admirers of all schools deplored the fact. In tragedy, natural as she was in feeling, she belonged to the old days of intoned cadences; and the old and the rising school mourned over her, yet both were compelled to avow that only in the ecstasy of love was Mrs. Bellamy equal to the Cibber, and in that Mrs. Cibber, when acting with Barry, in the younger days of both, was often George Anne's superior.