“Oh, pray, Madam,” cried I, “don’t say to him⸺”
“Oh, but I will. If my influence can do you any mischief you may depend upon having it.”
She then repeated what she had said to my father, and he instantly said:
“Your ladyship may be sure of my interest.”
I whispered afterwards to know who she was, and heard she was Lady Lucan.[1]
It is amusing to see how conceited Fanny Burney always must turn every incident to herself. When she did work for Mrs. Siddons, the play was received with roars of laughter, and acted but one night.
We find a clue in the above description to Mrs. Siddons’s unpopularity. Little Burney, with the frizzled head, and Mrs. Thrale, who “skipped about like a young kid, all vivacity and sprightliness,” could not understand the “steadiness in her manner,” and her dignified way of checking intrusive admirers. No one appreciated admiration and love from her intimate friends more than Mrs. Siddons, but to the adoration of general society she was icy cold.
Sir Joshua Reynolds frequently went to see her act, and she was a welcome guest at the house in Leicester Fields.
“He approved,” she writes, “very much of my costumes, and of my hair without powder, which at that time was used in great profusion, with a reddish brown tint, and a great quantity of pomatum, which, well kneaded together, modelled the fair ladies’ tresses into large curls like demi-cannon. My locks were generally braided into a small compass, so as to ascertain the size and shape of my head, which to a painter’s eye was, of course, an agreeable departure from the mode. My short waist, too, was to him a pleasing contrast to the long stiff stays and hoop petticoats which were then the fashion, even on the stage, and it obtained his unqualified approbation. He always sat in the orchestra; and in that place were to be seen—O glorious constellation!—Burke, Gibbon, Sheridan, and Windham.”
It was at Reynolds’s she first met Edmund Burke. The story goes that she was reading Milton for the benefit of the company, when she heard the great orator’s deep melodious tones repeat, as she closed the book, the lines beginning with “The angel ceased.” That wonderful face, full of fiery power, was to be seen amongst those surrounding her. He was afterwards frequently present while she sat to Reynolds for her portrait. She ever counted mercurial Sheridan as a friend, in spite of the way in which he treated her. She loved his beautiful, gentle wife, and some of her happiest hours were spent in their society. She there put off all her stateliness, and became the joyous-hearted young girl of the old Bath days.