His readings were attended frequently by Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble; his voice was so flexible that his tones conveyed every phase of meaning. Even his way of reading the words, "They order this matter," said I, "better in France," had a world of significance in it, not to be found when uttered by others; and the letter of Mrs. Ford to Falstaff, when he read it on the stage, shook the house with such laughter as was seldom heard, save indeed when he imitated Garrick and Dr. Johnson, the former reciting his ode, and the latter interrupting him by critical objections. I do not wonder that both Munden and John Kemble who, all their lives, had a longing to play Falstaff, abandoned the idea when they remembered Henderson's excellence. At the period of Henderson's death, his early prophecy had been fulfilled with regard to Mrs. Siddons;--to whose career we will now direct our notice. FOOTNOTES: [46] Should be 20th. [47] Ireland, Henderson's biographer, states that he was born in February 1747. He is said to have been baptized on 8th March. [48] "Walpole availed himself of Henderson's triumph to say something malicious of Garrick: 'Garrick is dying of yellow jaundice on the success of Henderson, a young actor from Bath,' which was not true" (2d edition). [49] I think this Garrick-worshipper was Tom Davies. [Illustration: MRS. SIDDONS AS MRS. HALLER.] CHAPTER VII. SARAH SIDDONS. On the 13th of June 1755,[50] when Garrick and Mrs. Cibber, Yates and Mrs. Pritchard, Woodward and Mrs. Clive, were the leaders in the Drury Lane Company,--while Barry and Mrs. Bellamy, Ryan and Mrs. Woffington, were among the "chiefs" of Covent Garden, Sarah Kemble was born, the first of twelve children, at a public-house, in Brecon, in which town, exactly a score of years later, was born her youngest brother, Charles. By both parents she belonged to the stage. Her mother's maiden name was Ward. This lady's father had been a respectable actor[51] under Betterton, and was a strolling manager, when the hairdresser of the company, a handsome fellow, poor, of course, and a Roman Catholic, eloped with and married the manager's daughter. His name was Roger Kemble. He was an actor too; love, at first, had helped to make him a very bad one. Fanny Furnival, of the Canterbury company, drilled him into the worst Captain Plume[52] that ever danced over the stage; but Mrs. Roger Kemble, a woman who illustrated the truth that beauty is of every age, used in her latter days to look at the grand old man, and assert that he was the only gentleman-like Falstaff she had ever seen.