Mrs. Clive has the reputation of being the authoress of two or three insignificant farces, produced at her benefits, to exhibit some peculiar talent of her own. They had no other merit. Such was her theatrical, let us now accompany her to her private, career. The last editor of Walpole's Letters states, that to a youth of folly succeeded an old age of cards. This statement is mostly gratuitous. Isaac Reed says: "Notwithstanding the temptations to which a theatre is sometimes apt to expose young persons of the female sex, and the too great readiness of the public to give way to unkind suppositions in regard to them, calumny itself has never seemed to aim the slightest arrow at her fame."
She was quick of temper, especially if David attempted to fine her for absence from rehearsals; and no wonder, since for one hundred and eighty nights' performance this charming actress received but £300! but, as she said, "I have always had good health, and have ever been above subterfuge." When about to retire she wrote to Garrick, with some obliviousness as to dates:—"What signifies 52? They had rather see the Garrick and the Clive at 104 than any of the moderns. The ancients, you know, have always been admired. I do assure you I am at present in such health and spirits that, when I recollect I am an old woman, I am astonished."
In her retirement Mrs. Clive passed many happy years in the house which Walpole gave up as a home for herself and brother, next to his own at Strawberry, and which he playfully called "Clive-den." A green lane, which he cut for her use between the house and the common, he proposed to call Drury Lane. Here, at Cliveden, the ex-actress gave exquisite little suppers after pleasant little card parties, at which, in Walpole's phrase, she made miraculous draughts of fishes. Men and women of "quality" and good character, married and unmarried—actors, authors, artists, and clergymen—met here; where the brother of the hostess, a poor ex-actor, ill-favoured and awkward, told capital stories, and found the company in laughter and Walpole in flattery.
Of an evening, in summer-time, trim Horace and portly Clive might be seen walking in the meadows together; or Walpole and a brilliant company, gossiping, laughing, flirting, philandering, might be noted on their way across the grass to Strawberry, after a gay time of it at "Little Strawberry Hill." Not always without mishap, as Walpole himself has recorded in his narrative of his perilous passing of the stile with Miss Rich; and not invariably in the very sunniest of humours, for Miss Pope had seen Horace "gloomy of temper and dryly sarcastic of speech." The place was, perhaps, at its pleasantest, when Walpole, Mrs. Clive, and her brother, sat together in the garden, and conversed playfully of old dramatic glories. She was so joyous, that Lady Townshend said—her face rose on Strawberry and made it sultry. And Walpole himself remarked, in 1766, "Strawberry is in perfection; the verdure has all the bloom of spring; the orange trees are loaded with blossoms; the gallery is all sun and gold; and Mrs. Clive all sun and vermillion." When Hounslow powder mills blew up, Walpole described the terrific power of the explosion, by remarking, that it "almost shook Mrs. Clive!" Only the death of the last Earl of Radnor, of the Robartes line, made her almost look sad. The earl left her £50 as a memorial of his respect; and what with the heat of the summer of 1757, the unexpected legacy, and her assumption of respectful grief, she made up one of the drollest faces imaginable. One of her dear delights was to play quadrille with George Montagu, from dinner to supper, and then to sing Purcell, from supper to breakfast time. She left the place, even for short intervals, with reluctance; but her brilliant face was seen for a whole day in Palace Yard, where she sat to see the coronation procession of George III., with her great friends around her—Lady Hertford, Lady Anne Conway, Lady Hervey, Lady Townshend, Miss Hotham, Mr. Chute, and also her brother. Her only trials were when the tax-gatherer ran off, and she was compelled to pay her rates twice; or when the parish refused to mend her ways, as she said; or her house was broken into by burglars; or when she was robbed in her own lane by footpads. "Have you not heard," she wrote to Garrick, in June 1776, "of your poor Pivy? I have been rob'd and murder'd coming from Kingston. Jimey" (her brother) "and I in a post chey, at half-past nine, just by Teddington church, was stopt. I only lost a little silver and my senses; for one of them came into the carriage with a great horse pistol, to search for my watch, but I had it not with me." And then Garrick and other actors, with Governor Johnstone and his wife, met at Little Strawberry at dinner, and laughed over past perils.
In 1784 she came up to London to see Mrs. Siddons act. Mrs. Clive was born in the lifetime of Elizabeth Barry, who had acted before Charles II.; she had seen Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Oldfield, Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Yates, and Anne Barry; and finally, she saw Mrs. Siddons. Mrs. Clive listened to the new actress with profound attention; and on being asked, at the conclusion of the performance, what she thought of it: "Think!" said the vivacious old lady, in her ready way; "I think it's all truth and daylight!"
In the December of the following year, the long career of this erst comic muse came to a close. Walpole tells it briefly, unaffectedly and well. "It did not much surprise me," he says; "and the manner comforts me. I had played at cards with her, at Mrs. Gostling's, three nights before I came to town, and found her extremely confused, and not knowing what she did; indeed I had seen something of this sort before, and had found her much broken this autumn. It seems, that the day after I saw her, she went to General Lister's burial, and had got cold, and had been ill for two or three days. On the Wednesday morning she rose to have her bed made; and while sitting on the bed, with her maid by her, sank down at once, and died without a pang or a groan." So departed the actress, of whom Johnson said, that she had more true humour than any other he had ever seen. She originated nearly fourscore characters; among others, Nell, in the latter "Devil to Pay;" Lappet ("Miser"); Edging[122] ("Careless Husband"); half a dozen Kittys; but chief of all, the Kitty of "High Life Below Stairs;" Muslin ("Way to Keep Him"); and Mrs. Heidelberg, in the "Clandestine Marriage."
Harry Woodward: to think of him, is to think of Captain Bobadil,—in which he never had equal,—and of Harlequin, in which he was second only to Rich. To remember Harry Woodward, is to remember the original French Cook, in Dodsley's "Sir John Cockle," wherein Woodward turned to good account the French he had learned at Merchant Tailors' school. He was also the first Beau in "Lethe;" and his Flash in "Miss in her Teens," his Jack Meggot in the "Suspicious Husband," his Dick in the "Apprentice," his Block in the "Reprisal," his Lofty in the "Good Natured Man," his Captain Ironsides in the "Brothers," and his Captain Absolute in the "Rivals," were all original and brilliant creations, in acting which, the best of his many brightly-endowed successors lacked something possessed by him, whose Slender and Petruchio are described as being perfect pictures of simplicity and manliness.
Look at him, in his boyhood;—he is a tallow chandler's son, rien que ça! living close by the Anchor brewery, in Southwark;—Mr. Child's brewery, whose daughter married with his clerk, Halsey; and then it was Halsey's brewery; and Halsey's only daughter married Lord Cobham; and from this pair, the brewery was bought by Halsey's manager and nephew, Ralph Thrale, on the death of whose son, Henry, it passed by purchase to his chief clerks, Barclay and Perkins. The brewery, now, is no more like what it was in Woodward's days than Drury Lane theatre is like the Curtain, the Fortune, or the Globe. As Woodward played beneath the Anchor gateway, there was probably little uneasiness in his mind at the idea of his helping and succeeding his sire in candle making; but when Woodward became a pupil at Merchant Tailors', I think it may have been otherwise. How young Woodward was ever sent thither, I cannot guess; but I conclude that his father, "the tallow chandler," was not aware, that among the statutes of the institution there was one which said that, "in the schoole at noe time of the yere, they shall use tallow candle in noe wise, but wax candles onely." Perhaps old Woodward supplied them to order.
I think if Woodward had never gone to Merchant Tailors', he never would have added lustre to the British stage. He was born about the last year of Queen Anne's reign,[123] and was in Lawrence Pountney when he was some ten years old. The quick lad became a very good classical scholar, and in after years, he used to astonish and gratify the society which he most loved, by the aptness and beauty of his quotations; not for effect, for Harry Woodward, look you, was as modest as he was clever.