To which excelling height she bore a mind
Humble as osiers, bending to the wind.
* * * *
I mourn Pastora dead; let Albion mourn,
And sable clouds her chalkie cliffs adorn.'
This play was dedicated to Lord Halifax, of whom we have spoken, and who continued to be Congreve's patron.
The fame of the young man was now made; but in the following year it was destined to shine out more brilliantly still. Old Betterton—one of the best Hamlets that ever trod the stage, and of whom Booth declared that when he was playing the Ghost to his Hamlet, his look of surprise and horror was so natural, that Booth could not for some minutes recover himself—was now a veteran in his sixtieth year. For forty years he had walked the boards, and made a fortune for the patentees of Drury. It was very shabby of them, therefore, to give some of his best parts to younger actors. Betterton was disgusted, and determined to set up for himself, to which end he managed to procure another patent, turned the Queen's Court in Portugal Row, Lincoln's Inn, into a theatre, and opened it on the 30th of April, 1695. The building had been before used as a theatre in the days of the Merry Monarch, and Tom Killegrew had acted here some twenty years before; but it had again become a 'tennis-quatre of the lesser sort,' says Cibber, and the new theatre was not very grand in fabric. But Betterton drew to it all the best actors and actresses of his former company; and Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Bracegirdle remained true to the old man. Congreve, to his honour, espoused the same cause, and the theatre opened with his play of 'Love for Love,' which was more successful than either of the former. The veteran himself spoke the prologue, and fair Bracegirdle the epilogue, in which the poet thus alluded to their change of stage:
'And thus our audience, which did once resort
To shining theatres to see our sport,
Now find us tost into a tennis-court.