“Will she, indeed?” said Burney. “David Garrick, you are the greatest actor that has ever lived in England—probably in the world—but you are a poor comedian compared with such as are at work upon our daily life: we call them Circumstance, and Accident, and Coincidence. You know the couplet, I doubt not:
‘Men are the sport of circumstances when
The circumstances seem the sport of men.’
You have sounded the depths of human impulses, so far as your plummet allows you, and womankind seems to you an open book—”
“An illuminated missal, with the prayers done in gold and the Lessons for the day in the most roseate tint, Doctor.”
“And the Responses all of a kind—the same in one book as another? But I make bold to believe, my friend, that every woman is a separate volume, of which only one copy has been printed; and, moreover, that every separate volume of woman is sealed, so that anyone who fancies he knows all that is bound up between the covers, when he has only glanced at the binding, makes a mistake.”
“Admirably put, sir, and, I vow, with fine philosophy,” said Garrick. “But what imports this nomination of a woman at the present moment, Doctor?”
“Its import is that you are over sanguine in your assurance that Mrs. Nash, widow, will reject Mr. Kendal, bachelor, when he offers her his hand after a dusty journey; and so good day to you, David Garrick, and I pray you to spend the rest of the day in the study of the history of those women who have opened the leaves of their lives a little way before the eyes of mankind.”
He had left the room and was within the waiting carriage and driving away before his son remarked:
“Mr. Garrick, it seems to me that my good father has spoken the wisest words that you or I have heard to-day or for many a day.”