ON the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or 4, I fet which it was, just as the clock had strue, Barbara S-----, with her aced punctuality asded the long rambling staircase, with awkward interposed landing-places, which led to the office, or rather a sort of box with a desk in it, whereat sat the then Treasurer of (what few of our readers may remember) the Old Bath Theatre. All over the island it was the , and remains so I believe to this day, for the players to receive their weekly stipend ourday. It was not much that Barbara had to claim.
This little maid had just entered her eleventh year; but her important station at the theatre, as it seemed to her, with the bes which she felt to accrue from her pious application of her small earnings, had given an air of womanhood to her steps and to her behaviour. You would have takeo have been at least five years older.
Till latterly she had merely been employed in choruses, or where children were wao fill up the se. But the manager, a diligend adroitness in her above her age, had for some few months past intrusted to her the performance of whole parts. You may guess the self-sequence of the promoted Barbara. She had already drawn tears in young Arthur; had rallied Richard with infaulan the Duke of York and iurn had rebuked that petulance when she rince of Wales. She would have dohe elder child in Mortons pathetic alter-piece to the life; but as yet the " Children in the Wood" was not.
Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, I have seen some of these small parts, each making two or three pages at most, copied out in the rudest hand of the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed a little more carefully and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies of the establishment. But such as they were, blotted and scrawled, as for a childs use, she kept them all; and in the zenith of her after reputation it was a delightful sight to behold them bound up in costliest Morocco, each single -- each small part making a book -- with fine clasps, gilt-splashed, &c. She had stiously kept them as they had been delivered to her; not a blot had been effaced or tampered with. They were precious to her for their affeg remembrangs. They were her principia, her rudiments; the elementary atoms; the little steps by which she pressed forward to perfe. "What," she would say, "could Indian rubber, or a pumice stone, have done for these darlings?"
I am in no hurry to begin my story -- indeed I have little or o tell -- so I will just mention an observation of hers ected with that iing time.
Not long before she died I had been disc with her on the quantity of real preseion which a great tragic performer experiences during ag. I veo think, that though in the first instance such players must have possessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up in others, yet by frequeition those feelings must bee deadened i measure, and the performer trust to the memory of past emotion, rather than express a Present one. She indignantly repelled the notion, that with a truly great tragedian the operation, by which such effects were produced upon an audience, could ever degrade itself into what urely meical. With much delicacy, avoiding to instan her self-experience, she told me, that so long ago as when she used to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. Porters IsabelIa, (I think it was) when that impressive actress has been bending over her in some heart-rending colloquy, she has felt real h