Sir Thomas Lawrence cherished all his life a feeling that was almost akin to adoration for Mrs. Siddons’s genius and beauty. He painted her and John Kemble in every dress and every pose. He was engaged subsequently to two of her daughters, first one and then the other. He proposed to the eldest daughter, Sarah; was accepted; but, before long, became miserable and dejected, and at last confessed to Mrs. Siddons that he had mistaken his feelings—that her younger daughter, and not the elder, was the object of his affection. Fanny Kemble says:—
Sarah gave up her lover, and he became engaged to the second, Maria. Both, however, died of consumption. Maria, the youngest, an exceedingly beautiful girl, died first, and on her death-bed made her sister promise that she would never marry Lawrence. The death of her daughters broke off all connection between Sir Thomas Lawrence and my aunt, and from that time they never saw or had any intercourse with one another. Yet not long after this Mrs. Siddons, dining with us one day, asked my mother how the sketch Lawrence was making of me was getting on. After my mother’s reply, my aunt remained silent for some time, and then, laying her hand on my father’s arm, said: “Charles, when I die, I wish to be carried to my grave by you and Lawrence.”
Lawrence reached his grave when she was yet tottering on the brink of hers.
On my twentieth birthday, which occurred soon after my first appearance, Lawrence sent me a magnificent proof plate of my aunt as the “Tragic Muse,” beautifully framed, and with this inscription: “This portrait, by England’s greatest painter, of the noblest subject of his pencil, is presented to her niece and worthy successor by her most faithful humble friend and servant, Lawrence.” When my mother saw this, she exclaimed at it, and said: “I am surprised he ever brought himself to write those words ‘worthy successor.’”
A few days after, Lawrence begged me to let him have the print again, as he was not satisfied with the finish of the frame. It was sent to him, and when it came back he had effaced the words in which he had admitted any worthy successor to his “Tragic Muse”; and Mr. H⸺, who was at that time his secretary, told me that Lawrence had the print lying with that inscription in his drawing-room for several days before sending it to me, and had said to him, “I cannot bear to look at it.”
Among these artists, poets, statesmen, who were continually present at her representations and attended afterwards at her dressing-room door to pay their respects, in later years Byron might frequently be seen. He declared her to be the “beau ideal of acting,” and said, “Miss O’Neill I would not see for fear of weakening the impression made by the queen of tragedians. When I read Lady Macbeth’s part I have Mrs. Siddons before me, and imagination even supplies her voice, whose tones were superhuman and power over the heart supernatural.” On another occasion, he is reported to have said that of actors Cook was the most natural, Kemble the most supernatural, and Kean the medium between the two, but that Mrs. Siddons was worth them all put together.
The first year she acted, “the gentlemen of the bar adorned her brows with laurel,” as she says herself. The “laurel” took the substantial form of a hundred guineas and a wreath presented by two barristers. She declared it to be the most shining circumstance of her life, and alluded modestly to her “poor abilities” and insufficient claims. The gentlemen of Brookes’s Club also made up a handsome present.
“Mrs. Siddons continues to be the mode,” Horace Walpole writes, “and to be modest and sensible. She declines great dinners, and says the business and cares of her family take her whole time. When Lord Carlisle carried her the tribute money from Brookes’s, he said she was not maniérée enough. ‘I suppose she was grateful?’ said my niece, Lady Maria.”
It is easy to imagine the difficulty she experienced in keeping her fame untarnished amidst that hotbed of vice, Covent Garden, and amidst all the adulation lavished on her. It is impossible, indeed, to say how many enemies she made by rejecting inopportune advances, and by exciting jealousies and envy; but the worst they could ever allege was that she was hard and haughty. She was continually on her guard. “One would as soon think of making love to the Archbishop of Canterbury” was said of her later; but in the early days of her first appearance at Drury Lane she was obliged often to have recourse to an outspoken rebuff to aspirants to her favour.
As a curious instance of the insidious manner in which attacks were sometimes made to win her regard, John Taylor relates that one morning, on calling on her, he found her in the act of burning some letters that had been returned to her by the executors of the individual to whom they were addressed. He sat down to help her, and, in doing so, a printed copy of some scandalous verses on her that had appeared in the St. James’s Gazette dropped out. Some lines in the handwriting of the deceased poet that were written on the top of the page proved the author, and proved that attacker and defender had been one and the same person. In talking the matter over afterwards, Mrs. Siddons recalled to mind that the same person had once endeavoured to undermine her affection for her husband by telling her tales of his infidelity.