Baretti is in the next box with Angelica Kauffman, Dr. Burney and little Miss Fanny Burney, destined in a year or two to become for a time the most notable woman in England. On the other side of the house Lord Clare occupies a box with his charming tom-boy daughter, who is convulsed with laughter as she hears reference made in the dialogue to the trick which she once played upon the wig of her dear friend the author. General Oglethorpe, who is beside her, holds up his finger in mock reproof, and Lord Camden, standing behind his chair, looks as if he regretted having lost the opportunity of continuing his acquaintance with an author whom every one is so highly honouring at the moment.
Cumberland and his friends are in a lower box, “looking glum,” as one witness asserts, though a good many years later Cumberland boasted of having contributed in so marked a way to the applause as to call forth the resentment of the pit.
In the next box Hugh Kelly, whose most noted success at Drury Lane a few years previously eclipsed Goldsmith's “Good-Natured Man” at “the other house,” sits by the side of Macpherson, the rhapsodist who invented “Ossian.” He glares at Dr. Johnson, who had no hesitation in calling him an impostor.
The Burkes, Edmund and Richard, are in a box with Mrs. Horneck and her younger daughter, who follows breathlessly the words with which she has for long been familiar, and at every shout of laughter that comes from the pit she is moved almost to tears. She is quite unaware of the fact that Colonel Gwyn, sitting alone in another part of the house, has his eyes fixed upon her—earnestly, affectionately. Her brother and his fiancée are in a box with the Bunburys; and in the most important box in the house Mrs. Thrale sits well forward, so that all eyes may be gratified by beholding her. It does not so much matter about her husband, who once thought that the fact of his being the proprietor of a concern whose operations represented the potentialities of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice entitled him to play upon the mother of the Gunnings when she first came to London the most contemptible hoax ever recorded to the eternal discredit of a man. The Duchess of Argyll, mindful of that trick which the cleverness of her mother turned to so good account, does not condescend to notice from her box, where she sits with Lady Betty Hamilton, either the brewer or his pushing wife, though she is acquainted with old General Paoli, whom the latter is patronising between the acts.
What a play! What spectators!
We listen to the one year by year with the same delight that it brought to those who heard it this night for the first time; and we look with delight at the faces of the notable spectators which the brush of the little man with the ear-trumpet in Johnson's box has made immortal.
Those two men in that box were the means of conferring immortality upon their century. Incomparable Johnson, who chose Boswell to be his biographer! Incomparable Reynolds, who, on innumerable canvases, handed down to the next century all the grace and distinction of his own!
And all this time Oliver Goldsmith is pacing with bent head and hands nervously clasped behind him, backward and forward, the broad walk in St. James's Park.
Steevens came upon him there after spending nearly two hours searching for him.
“Don't speak, man, for God's sake,” cried Oliver. “'Tis not so dark but that I can see disaster imprinted on your face. You come to tell me that the comedy is ended—that the curtain was obliged to be rung down in the middle of an act. You come to tell me that my comedy of life is ended.”