In the plaintive and tender, this light comedian excelled even Booth, who used to say that Wilks lacked ear and not voice to make a great tragedian.[12] Wilks's greatest successes were in his friend Farquhar's heroes,—Sir Harry Wildair, Mirabel, Captain Plume, and Archer. He played equally well, but with less opportunity for distinction, the light gentlemen of Cibber's comedies. In Don Felix, in Mrs. Centlivre's "Wonder," he almost excelled the reputation he had gained in Sir Harry. "When Wilks dies," Farquhar once remarked, "Sir Harry may go to the Jubilee." Of the above characters he was the original representative, as he was of some fourscore others of less note,—among them Dumont, in "Jane Shore," for which he may be said to have been cast by Mrs. Oldfield. "Nay!" she cried to him, in her pretty way; "if you will not be my husband, I will act Alicia, I protest." And accordingly, the two most brilliant and gleesome actors of their day, enacted married tribulation, and kept their wreathed smiles for the crowd which clustered round them at the wings.
Few men ever loved acting for acting's sake more than Wilks. At the same time, no one ever warned others against it with more serious urgency. He had a nephew, who was in fair prospect of such good fortune as could be built up in an attorney's office. How little the young fellow merited the fortune, and how ill he understood the duties and advantages of attorneyship he manifested fully, by a madness for appearing on the stage. No counsel availed against his resolution; and, in 1714, Wilks despatched him to Dublin, with a letter to Ashbury, the manager. "He was bred an attorney," wrote the uncle, despondingly, "but is unhappily fallen in love with that fickle mistress, the stage; and no arguments can dissuade him from it. I have refused to give him any countenance, in hopes that time and experience might cure him; but since I find him determined to make an attempt somewhere, no one, I am sure, is able to give him so just a notion of the business as yourself. If you find my nephew wants either genius or any other necessary qualification, I beg you will freely tell him his disabilities; and then it is possible he may be more easily persuaded to return to his friends and business, which I am informed he understands perfectly well."
Young Wilks proved as poor an actor as he probably was an attorney; but his uncle received him at Drury Lane, after a year's novitiate in Dublin, where he played, at first, better "business" than Quin himself. But he never advanced a step, and died at the age of thirty, having never obtained above that number of shillings a week. And for that, he deserted his vocation as an attorney, in the practice of which he might have gained, if not earned, at a low estimate, twice that amount in a single morning.
There was a pious young Duke of Orleans, who, to keep a fair character, was obliged to assume the fashionable vices of his day. Wilks, with all his love of home, was a fine gentleman among the fine gentlemen. His appreciation of matrimony was shown by the haste with which he espoused the widow Fell, daughter of Charles II.'s great gun-founder, Browne, in April 1715, after losing his first wife in the previous year. During the first union, he must have trod the stage with many a heart-ache, while he was exciting hilarity, for eleven of his children died early, and the airy player was for ever in mourning. His stepson, Fell, married the granddaughter of William Penn, and brought his bride to the altar of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, not to be married, but christened. Wilks and his wife were the gossips to the pretty quakeress; and the former, probably, never looked more imposing than when he pronounced the names of the fair episcopalian,—Gulielma Maria.
Betterton used to rusticate in Berkshire; Booth, at Cowley; Cibber, at Twickenham; his son, at Brook Green. Wilks, too, had his villa at Isleworth. He is said to have kept a well-regulated and extremely cheerful home. He had there seen so much of death that we are told he was always prepared to meet it with decency. His generosity amounted almost to prodigality. "Few Irish gentlemen," says his biographer, "are without indigent relatives." Wilks had many, and they never appealed to him in vain. He died, after a short illness and four doctors, in September 1732,[13] leaving his share in the Drury Lane Patent, and what other property he possessed, to his wife. Throughout his life, I can only find one symptom of regret at having abandoned the Irish Secretary's office for the stage. "My successor in Ireland," he once said to Cibber, "made by his post £50,000."
Exceeding benevolence is finely exhibited in an incident connected with Farquhar. When the latter was near the end of his gay yet chequered career in 1707,—death, the glory of his last success, and the thought of his children pressing hard upon him, he wrote this laconic, but perfectly intelligible, note to Wilks:—"Dear Bob,—I have not anything to leave thee, to perpetuate my memory, but two helpless girls; look upon them, sometimes; and think of him that was, to the last moment of his life, thine,—George Farquhar." Farquhar's confidence in his friend was like that of La Fontaine, who, having lost a home, was met in the street by a friend who invited him to his. "I was going there!" said the simple-minded poet. Wilks did not disappoint Farquhar's expectations.
Wilks could be as modest as he was generous. After playing, for the first time, the Ghost to Booth's Hamlet,[14] the latter remarked, "Why, Bob, I thought you were going to knock me down. When I played the Ghost to Mr. Betterton's Hamlet, awe-stricken as he seemed, I was still more so of him."
"Mr. Betterton and Mr. Booth," said Wilks, "noble actors, could always play as they pleased. I can only play to the best of my ability."[15] Once only do I find Wilks in close connection with royalty,—namely, when he took, by command, the manuscript of "George Barnwell" to St. James's, and read that lively tragedy to Queen Anne.[16] On some like occasion, King William once presented Booth with five pounds for his reward, but history does not note the guerdon with which Wilks retired from the presence of "Great Anna!"[17]
Mr. Clarke as Antonio.